Raised?: Finding Jesus by Doubting the Resurrection Four-Part Documentary: A Story of a Faith Journey with Benjamin and Jessica
This post includes a four-part documentary, Raised?, produced by Moving Works | A Non-Profit Filmmaking Company featuring the story of Benjamin and Jessica Roberts. This short series takes an unflinching look at a decade-long journey of critiquing and considering with newfound curiosity the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Whether you are critical, cautious, or curious about Jesus, or follow another faith or spiritual direction, I think you will find something in the Roberts' honest portrayal of their life as a couple that captures your attention. Below are links to the first two parts – Part 1 | Doubt and Part 2 | Cycle – including quotes from the videos along with a few quotes from the book, Raised?.
Raised? Finding Jesus by Doubting the Resurrection Video Part 1 of 4 | Doubt
(8:28 minutes)
I felt like feelings (about God) were feelings we were trained to have, like dogs, like the way you would train a dog. ... Even though the pastor talked about the risen Christ, I really didn't see that demonstrated in the lives of the people in the church community for the most part. ... As I got older, it almost felt claustrophobic. If there were any questions that a person had, they just got redirected to other things. And I started to have more questions ... I started looking for answers outside of the Church. Questions like, 'Why is there so much suffering in the world?' So I started reading writers like Neitzche and Kierkegaard and felt like they had more answers than many of the Christians I knew. ...
One of the girls said to me something that I'll never forget. She said, 'You can shut up about that Bible stuff because it doesn't make any sense here. The only reason you believe in Jesus is because you're white and you're wealthy and you're safe. If that was me, I'd say, 'Praise Jesus!' too, but that's not the way it is here. My brother is shot and dead. And my dad is gone and my mom is on drugs and my cousin is trying to rape me. And your god doesn't come down here and your Jesus doesn't love me. So you can just shut up about it.' That really shook me to the core. I wanted to have a faith that was true for every circumstance and every situation in every culture. ...
As more and more questions evolved, I started to doubt more and more things about the gospel. Looking at the Scripture, I would say, 'I'll believe in God when I see fire come down from heavens ... I'll believe in the resurrection when I see it with my own eyes,' like Thomas. I thought that there was perhaps someone who was named Jesus, and he was a Jewish person who was executed by the Roman Empire and then he died. And then followers of him just started making about stories about him that he came back from the dead. It was just so much nonsense. It was their own way of explaining away their own concerns about an encroaching political authority. Once I started doubting the resurrection, Scripture itself has its answers. Paul says, 'If Christ isn't risen, then your faith is futile.' ...
It became walking away from it altogether. If I couldn't believe some of it, then I couldn't believe all of it. ... There's no empirical evidence in our lives that anything could ever resurrect. ... Not only is it physically impossible, it seems to fly in the face of everything we see going on in the world around us. All of our best efforts as human beings have been used in war or in oppressing other people. And to say at the end of the day that we could possibly come back to life? It's almost like, number one, why would you want to ever come back here? And number two, how does that even work? ...
It was equally unthinkable for Jews and Greeks to change their views regarding the resurrection. To shift from thinking the body is bad and worthy of escape to believing that the body is good and worthy of resurrection was inconceivable to Greeks. To conceive of a resurrection in the middle of history, limited to one man, was preposterous for the Jews. ... (But) If you met and conversed with someone you knew had died, wouldn't your beliefs and views change? ... What if this person also claimed to be God, possessing the power to forgive your sins and grant you eternal life? You know that there will be consequences to going public with your beliefs. Friends will avoid you. Family members will no longer invite you to holiday parties, or worse, they will reject and disown you. Neighbors will scorn you. If you are living in the first century, the Roman government will oppose you and Emperor Nero will burn you to death. So why run the risk of social marginalization and personal sacrifice if Jesus did not rise from the dead? + pg. 29, Raised?
Raised? Finding Jesus by Doubting the Resurrection Video Part 2 of 4 | Cycle
(8:41 minutes)
We tried to numb the pain of emptiness because emptiness hurts. It doesn't make a lot of sense. ... The god that I rejected was a vindictive god. He was a god that has a whole bunch of rules, but he's invisible. He never shows himself. For me, what I put in the place of that god was the affection I felt for Jessica. Well, that's love. In the Bible it says, 'God is love,' and I have this intense love now for her. So, whatever I feel for her, that's what I believe in. ... Beneath all of my feelings of love for Jessica, there was an intense fear. There was a fear that someday she would die and leave me alone. Or I would die and leave her alone. Or the love would just go away and leave me without anything to believe in. And so the first thing I turned to was drugs like psychedelic drugs. ...
We were trying to just enjoy life as much as possible, but it ended up being a lot harder than we thought. We were drowning ourselves with alcohol and drugs. And for Ben, especially, with his brilliant mind, it didn't work to numb his brain in that way. So there was still a lot of pain and emptiness. ... If these things aren't going to help and the love is going to someday go away, what hope is there really? Why even try? ... Both of us were very depressed and very anxious, the weight of the world on our shoulders with no ability to pray and with no ability to receive grace or hope for a better outcome. It was at that point that I found out I was pregnant. ...
It seemed like to us, knowing what we knew about the world, and all the difficulties that we'd seen in our own lives, this seemed like no place to bring a kid. And Jessica had already told me that she was thinking about having an abortion. And that seemed right to me, too. I told her I would support her in that decision. ... I didn't think that Ben and I would survive the pregnancy. I thought that was just too much for us. So I didn't feel strong enough to carry the baby. ... In some way, it seemed like some kind of distorted view of mercy. It seemed like we were doing what was best for the baby because we didn't want to bring the baby into the suffering of this world. ...
It seemed like to us, knowing what we knew about the world, and all the difficulties that we'd seen in our own lives, this seemed like no place to bring a kid. And Jessica had already told me that she was thinking about having an abortion. And that seemed right to me, too. I told her I would support her in that decision. ... I didn't think that Ben and I would survive the pregnancy. I thought that was just too much for us. So I didn't feel strong enough to carry the baby. ... In some way, it seemed like some kind of distorted view of mercy. It seemed like we were doing what was best for the baby because we didn't want to bring the baby into the suffering of this world. ...
It made even more impossible to think about receiving grace or new life. It just didn't seem plausible in our case. ... We loaded up the truck and moved out to Utah, but what I found at the end of the day was that the same person was meeting me in the mirror out West. Eventually, we met a lot of beautiful hippie friends. We were in this marijuana soaked life where we were just trying to escape life and escape everything. ... We'd go out in the desert for weeks at a time and just do drugs and camp out every night. I felt like at least my wife was honest. Maybe the world was burning and there all sorts of people suffering. But at least someone was having a good time. So maybe that made it all OK somehow. ... I really wanted to help people and change the world, but I was becoming more and more broken up and ineffective at that as the time went by. So it gave me more of a sense of hopelessness and despair because I wasn't in a place to do anything. ...
There is an unbreakable link between Jesus' death and His resurrection. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then He cannot exercise victory over sin, death, or evil. He cannot maintain our innocence before God, impart us new life through the Spirit, or return to make the world new – all things that Jesus said He would do. Without the resurrection, Jesus' teachings are a sham, half-baked ideas from a wandering Jew with a messiah complex. But with the resurrection, His teachings and actions have power to overturn sin, death, and evil and create a whole new humanity. + pgs. 64-65, Raised?
Christ is all,
Rev. Mike "Sully" Sullivan
Rev. Mike "Sully" Sullivan
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