Testimony:Testimony:Reliability of Miracles Reliability of Miracles

and Religious Experiencesand Religious Experiences

Questions

What is your reaction to this story?

If you were to tell that story to the people you know outside of the church, what would be their reaction?

“I would love to sit down with you and ask your honest, unfiltered reaction to this story. Your response would tell me a lot about you – specifically, whether you believe the naturalist, the post-modernist, or the Christian story.”  

J.P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle

Symptoms of Scientism in Christianity• Purely scientific approaches to truth • Downplay the validity/value of experience/testimony• Think of the “Word” as only written• We boil the gospel down to propositions to be believed

rather than a relationship to be enjoyed• Tend to think of program/formula as the solution • The goal is the more important than the means • Tend to think of medicine and doctors before God• We trust in our own power and strength and limit

God’s communication with us• Comfortable with our own sinfulness (to a shallow

extent), but not the Spirit’s power within us

Reliability of TestimonyScientific Method:

•Ask a question

•Formulate a Hypothesis

•Perform an Experiment

•Collect Data

•Draw Conclusions

Question

Does it make sense that we need to accept the testimony of others?

What difficulties might lie in trusting testimony?

Possibility of Miracles• Baker's Dictionary of the Bible defines a miracle as

"an event in the external world brought about by the immediate agency or the simple volition of God." 

• C.S. Lewis – “an interference with Nature by supernatural power”

Roadblocks to Miracles• Those who practice miracles are often weird• Many “conservative” churches, schools and

seminaries teach that miracles are “not for today.”• A view of Jesus as a divine contrast to humans• We may have a wrong view of God and what He is

up to in the world• We believe our spiritual depravity negates any

possibility of God’s power working in us• We will be rejected if we even pursue it (be thought

of as weird, or even Satanic)• We don’t have any experience with it…

Case for MiraclesIn 1970, there were around 71,000,000 born-again Christians with a vision to reach the world for Christ. By 2000, there were 707,000,000 (11% of the earth’s population) Up until 1960, Western Evangelicals outnumbered non-Western Evangelicals by two to one, but by 2000 non-Western (mostly Latinos, Africans, and Asians) lead by four to one, and the figure will be seven to one by 2010. Today missionaries are sent from non-Western than Western nations. At a church planting congress in 1998, representatives from Latin American countries set a staggering goal of planting 500,000 new churches by 2010 and – get this – progress up to 2005 indicates that the target will be reached! In fact, five nations have already reached their target goals and have set new ones!”

Miracles• 1 Corinthians 4:20 - For the kingdom of God

does not consist in talk but in power.•  • “Greater works than these he (those who

follow Jesus) will do, because I go to the Father.” – John 14:12

Craig Keener“Miracle claims, especially regarding healings, are by Western standards surprisingly common (though by no means universal) in regions of the world where such events are expected. These claims include, as in the Gospels and Acts, the healing of the blind, those unable to walk, and raising the dead, among many others….

Craig Keener“The Western intellectual tendency is to regard most cultures in history and in today’s world as precritical, without so much as undertaking a critical analysis of any of their claims. Yet it seems to me that such disdain for vast numbers of claims from other cultures, purely on the basis of unproved presuppositions inherited from the radical wing of the Enlightenment, risks the charge of ethnocentric elitism…

Craig Keener“Most of the claims I have cited are from sources claiming to represent eyewitnesses or voices at most one remove from eyewitnesses. There therefore seems no reason, based on the principle of historical analogy, to deny that first-century eyewitnesses could have believed that they saw Jesus heal blind eyes, make paralytics walk, or raise the dead, all of which cures eyewitnesses claim today…

Craig Keener“Scientific endeavor by virtue of its nature must work with the concept of an orderly and predictable universe, but it is both reductionistic and reflects a logical fallacy to leap from a normally effective method applied to purely natural phenomena to the epistemological and ontological conclusion that no intelligence exists, whether human or nonhuman, that cannot be addressed solely on the basis of known physical laws.” (Keener, p. 761-2)

“In the state of Bihar, India, there is a notoriously anti-Christian tribe called the Malto.  When a crew with the Campus Crusade’s Jesus film attempted to schedule a showing there in 1998, they were strongly rebuffed.  A few days later, a 16-year-old Malto girl died.  But that evening, just as her parents were about to bury her, she came back to life.  As an awed crowd gathered around her, she told them that the God of the film crew had sent her back for several days ‘to tell as many people as I can that He is real.’  The girl and her mother went searching, and the next day, they found the crew in a nearby village and invited them back for a showing.  For seven days she told her story in every village they could get to, drawing large crowds for the film.  Hundreds of people became Christians and started churches.  After seven days the girl still looked fine, but she collapsed and died once again.” – See Rutz, Megashift, 46 n. 20.

Approaches to Miracles• Cessationist – no miracles are present today

• Open, but Cautious – miracles are possible today, but are to be questioned and not important for discipleship and evangelism

• Third Wave – miracles exist and are important for the church today, but are not essential acts for “baptism of the Holy Spirit”

• Pentecostal/Charismatic – miracles are important today and in order to access them, one must be baptized by the Holy Spirit subsequent to salvation (usually evidenced by tongues)

David Hume

Changing Your Worldview…1. Humble Your heart

2. Open Yourself Intellectually

3. Read the Scriptures with the assumption this can happen today (Gospels and Acts)

4. Read books and stories with a prayerful yet discerning heart

5. Reexamine prior doctrinal understandings to Scripture regarding miracles

6. Expose yourself to experiences and observational opportunities

Changing Your Worldview…7. Ask questions and interview those who have

experience with miracles

8. Give God permission to do anything he wants to do through you, even to the point of completely embarrassing you in front of others

9. Try it out

10.Don’t let a sense of spiritual inadequacy or doubts hinder you from trying (but take the time to examine your heart)

11.Be patient with yourself and with God

12.Find a person in your life with whom you can pray, process and practice trusting God for miracles

“(the) features of spiritual life in Christ are imprecise – cannot be put into strictly quantitative terms – but they are real and can be verified…. As such they can be verified to the satisfaction of any fair-minded person willing to consider the facts of the case.  ‘Real effects have real causes,’ as Williams James points out.  The quality of life in Christ is available for all who will know, and it clearly falls in the domain of the miraculous.” (Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today, p. 163). 

Religious Experience

Testimony of Your Life

More often than not, it is what you are rather than what you say that will bring an unbeliever to Christ. This, then, is the ultimate apologetic. For the ultimate apologetic is: your life. - William Lane Craig

Testimony of Your LifeWe accept human testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son. 10 Whoever believes in the Son of God accepts this testimony. Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. 11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.  13 I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life. 14 This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. 

Questions• What are some of the “experiences” of

OTHERS you can point to as evidence?

• What are your own experiences you can point to as evidence (does not need to be miraculous)?

• What are the advantages and disadvantages to this evidence?