Awhile back on his Beliefnet blog, Tony Jones posted a short essay called: “Why it Matters that Jesus REALLY Rose”. Contrasting his self to Marcus Borg who denies the reality of Jesus’ physical, historic resurrection, Jones affirms his “belief in the actual, physical, historic resurrection of Jesus [bold in the original].” Thus, in an important sense, Jones is positioning his argument neatly within the liberal-conservative debate. It is a debate that hinges on the rather arbitrary idea that some words have literal meanings that point to real things and some words have metaphorical meanings that are more ambiguous and don’t correspond to real things. I wonder: which words are which? And how does one determine the difference between the two kinds of words—literal and metaphorical?

Over the past several decades, with the aid of media technologies, some Christian pastors have attained a celebrity status. We see this not only with the televangelists of the 1970s and 1980s, but even more recently we see that some Christian pastors have gained followers and advocates, especially through the publication of books and through their use of the Internet. The celebrity pastors and their advocates form quarreling factions of self-declared believers in Jesus the Christ.