Full Strength Christianity: Miracles
Western cultures live within a miracle-less world. The materialist philosophy which ideologically reigns over us implies that anything outside of the physical realm is not real. And anything which is supernatural, or ‘above Nature’, is an illusion.
So in this framework, if miracles are supernatural incidents, then they can’t be real and there must always be a natural and non-spiritual explanation for them.
I find this worldview bamboozling and frustrating. It is clear there is more to life than atoms and chemical reactions. The physical is only part of the full experience of reality.
Skeptics always offer alternative explanations for miracles, not just to Biblical ones, but even those found in the modern day.
They explain away the ‘Feeding of the Five Thousand’ by suggesting that those who had brought food, decided to share it with 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 skepticism 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.
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 comes alive 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, we ultimately have to deny the works of Christ and His Gospel.
However, if we want to live out a Full Strength Christianity, we must recognise 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.
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 ‘Age 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 modern Western mindset. We quickly grasp for material explanations, and then if that fails, we just ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen.
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 day to day lives. We need to be expectant for them, because God’s providence can move in strange and peculiar ways.
Behind the paywall, I talk about my own personal experience of miracles, discuss how Dr Who can help us break out of this mindset, and even with our modern scientific brains we still find time to create ‘religious’ movements like Scientology, Raelism, and contemporary New Age practices.
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