Thinking Rightly About Miracles: An Introduction

I am increasingly convinced that many Christians do not think rightly about miracles. Many of the popular ways that we talk about miracles in Evangelicalism end up misrepresenting God’s relation to the world, misunderstanding the nature of miracles, and misjudging the basis of our acceptance of miracles. To counter this I want to introduce a new series on thinking rightly about miracles.

The way we approach the miraculous is important. Many Christians do not realize that they have adopted an impersonalist worldview that makes the miraculous an intrusion into the affairs of our life. They sound often more like David Hume than like the followers of Christ. Hume believed that miracles were a “violation of the laws of nature.” The way many Christians talk about the miraculous acts of God follows this same line of thought, but I intend to demonstrate in the coming weeks how unbiblical this perspective really is. That will be important both for understanding rightly God’s relationship to the world and the actual nature of miracles.

In addition it is important to consider the basis upon which Christians accept and believe in the miraculous. Obviously our religion is, at its very core, a belief in the miraculous. The resurrection is the maxime supremi of miracles. So Christianity acknowledges and accepts the miraculous. But often Christians are assumed to be gullible and unintellectual because they accept such extraordinary events. Our response to this accusation, however, can often actually affirm these assumptions. We need to affirm a proper basis for our belief in miracles. We can’t simply claim “it’s mystery” and leave it at that. There is a firm foundation for embracing mystery within the Christian faith, and so we will want to touch on this as well.

Miracles belong to the Christian faith. Christians must think rightly about these miracles. To fail to think biblically about them is to misrepresent God and his interaction with our world.