Full Strength Christianity: Miracles
Western Cultures live within a miracle-less world. The materialist philosophy which reigns over the West implies that anything outside of the physical realm is not real. Anything which is supernatural, or ‘above Nature’, is an illusion. So in this framework, if miracles are supernatural incidences, then they can’t be real and there must always be a natural, non-spiritual, explanation for them.
Sceptics always offer alternative explanations for miracles, not just to Biblical ones, but even modern day ones too.
They explain away the ‘Feeding of the Five Thousand’ by suggesting that those who had brought food, decided to share it amongst everyone else, so none went hungry. There was no miraculous multiplication of food by Jesus.
They say that ‘Jesus walking on the water’ was a mass hallucination on the part of the Disciples.
Today, this extreme scepticism has leached into some parts of the Western Church. Where miracles are denied, and the faith has been reduced to a materialistic religion.
Hence why, there is now more of a focus on the material ‘real world’ issues like climate change, racism and sexism. The issues of sin, the Final Judgement and the Life Everlasting are now out of favour.
Miracles in the Gospel
The Gospel of Jesus is rooted in miracles. The miracle of the Virgin Birth, the miracle of Christ’s Resurrection and the miracle of a saved soul.
If we adopt the Modern Western worldview then we will deny the miraculous, reducing them to mere allegories. So Jesus dying on the Cross and resurrecting means He only resurrects within the heart of the believing Christian and nothing more. There cannot be any physical resurrection in this philosophical framework. And if we follow this worldview, we ultimately have to deny Christ and His Gospel.
However, if we want to live out Full Strength Christianity, we need to receive these miracles as fact. We need to accept that sometimes, something supernatural happens, and we don’t have a natural explanation for it. We need to realise, that even with all our scientific knowledge, we don’t necessarily have sufficient explanations to exchange a miracle for a simple natural process.
Language of Miracles
I believe miracles happen all the time. By which I mean, the supernatural is working through the natural. Reality itself isn’t separated between these realms. But it is more like two strands, intrinsically woven together to form a whole Creation. Each is dependent on the other. The natural requires the supernatural to exist and the supernatural expresses itself through the natural world.
What is lacking in the West, is our ability to verbalise this. The language we had of angels, demons, fairies and dragons disappeared when the ‘Time of Reason’ came upon us. We packed away ‘superstitious’ ideas and chose not to speak of them. But then, this created a gap in our understanding of Reality and we lost the language which helped us to interpret the unknown or describe that which doesn’t fit neatly into our scientific worldview.
Miracles exist in this place. Modern Westerners become tongue-tied in the presence of a supernatural occurrence. It doesn’t fit into our Western materialistic mindset. We quickly grasp for material explanations, and then if that fails, we just ignore it.
Living a Full Strength Christianity means we can utilise this ancient language to help integrate not just the supernatural, but also accept miracles into our daily lives.
Expectant for Miracles
Full Strength Christianity asks us to be expectant for miracles.
I personally have experienced the miraculous. Incidences which seemed more than a coincidence. Moments in my life, where I had to make a ‘double take’ and thank God. I’ve even experienced miraculous healing, where I was in uncomfortable pain, and then after a prayer, the pain vanished.
In all these above, I could try and explain these miracles away with natural causes. But it is less complicated to accept, that the supernatural exists and maybe God, on occasion, wants to share the miraculous with us all.
If there is a God, ANYTHING is possible to Him: a man living 800 years as well as deep waters separating 🤔 Even when I was still an unbeliever, I never put it into doubt
Well said. Hume complains that miracles always happen long ago and far away. But this is simply false. The Marian apparition in Egypt was witnessed by like a quarter of a million people within living memory. There are standard miracles, Eucharistic miracles for instance are pretty common across history. The case of Eucharistic miracles shows why miracles are always said to be discredited. They happen, and the experts of the day test them and are baffled. But then in a few years some expert declares that he would have tested the miracle and surely debunked it with a new and better method. The miracle is judged as it were in absentia. Then another Eucharistic miracle occurs and the cycle repeats. I think you must be right that people struggle with miracles for some reason related to psychology or disposition.