“On that day, Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him. And they questioned Him, saying, Teacher, Moses said, If any should die not having children, his brother shall marry his wife, and shall raise up seed to his brother. And seven brothers were with us. And having married, the first expired, and not having seed left his wife to his brother. In the same way also the second, and the third, until the seven. And last of all, the woman also died. Then in the resurrection, of which of the seven will she be wife? For all had her. And answering, Jesus said to them, You err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they are as the angels of God in Heaven. But concerning the resurrection of the dead, have you not read that spoken to you by God, saying: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not God of the dead, but of the living. And hearing, the crowds were astonished at His doctrine” (Matthew 22:23-33; underlining mine).
The resurrection-denying Sadducees employ what appears to be a reductio ad absurdum. That is, granting the fact of a resurrection they attempted to draw, conclude, or rather FORCE an absurd conclusion: a tangled and complicated situation of “well, whose wife is she anyway?” Jesus proceeds to correct the Sadducees’ fallacious reasoning and then further informs them concerning their failure to appreciate the significance of a verb tense — I AM the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob; NOT, I WAS the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.
Is this not an impatient, imperious, and doctrinally-perfectionistic demand for A Full-Orbed Understanding of a verb tense? Or would this type of objection be yet another customary canard read from the hackneyed pages of the Tolerant Calvinist Handbook?
I wonder if any Common Pebble Calvinists could hold out the”mature and balanced” hope that these stupefied Sadducees are really not unbelievers at all, but simply their “dear muddled brethren” who have been blanketed by many layers and years of theological tradition, culture, and philosophical folly. Perhaps the jolly tolerant Chestertonian Calvinist pundit Douglas Wilson would say that these poor blinkered Sadducees are “better Christians than logicians.”
What saith the Scripture?
Agrammatos 