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I Believe in Miracles - Syncretism in the Western Church, Part 1

In my previous post I said that the Western church exhibits:

'A certain cynicism about miracles, so healing is thought not to be real, but in someone's imagination. This is a result of secularism, and what Paul Hiebert called 'the flaw of the excluded middle' in his article on the subject, which shows that Westerners don't believe in the middle realm between supernatural and natural. The Bible, however, constantly mentions dreams, angels, unclean spirits, and so on, which are very much to do with this middle realm.'

This shows itself in two, rather extreme ways. The first is to deny that miracles happen. This is the secular approach to miracles. They don't happen now, they didn't happen then i.e. in biblical times and therefore somebody must have made them up, we think. It is possible to find a whole host of literature in theological libraries that is written from this position. Miracles are something outside our experience, which is much more real and concrete, therefore we would like proof that miracles happen before we assent to some kind of belief in them. So, for example, Jesus didn't multiply the fish and bread, it is thought, rather everyone brought their sandwiches and shared them with each other. Wouldn't it be nice if we did the same today? Now,  you might say that this belief isn't part of our churches, but I would argue it is very much part of certain kinds of churches, and that it does creep into evangelical churches too, at least in the realm of what we might label 'doubts'.

The second extreme is to say that a miracle has to be i.e. it is defined as something that can't be explained by science, though at the same time (rather paradoxically) we would rather like to have scientific proof that it has occurred. So, for example, if someone is healed, it would be really good to have an X-ray or scan or something to show that the problem was actually there originally, and that it disappeared as an answer to prayer.

Probably it would be better to see the miraculous as something that happens all the time, often without our realising it because of our world view, which has been influenced by securalism, whether we recognise it or not. A miracle doesn't have to be inexplicable by science, rather it is the spiritual view of something that has occurred, albeit supernaturally. For instance, one miracle I experienced was being saved from a plane crash. I myself had re-booked my ticket to come back from South Asia a few days earlier than originally planned, but only God knew that plane was going to crash, and it was his purpose that I was kept alive. There is both a natural and a supernatural, or spiritual, explanation for what happened.

So, we need to avoid the two extremes above, and spend more time relying on God and believing that he can intervene in our lives. I believe in miracles!
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