In answering this missional and practical question, after a sampling of supernatural experiences, I would propose the following two main explanations. This list is based on my own missionary experience, observations, and research. A Sampling of Experiences of Supernatural Power This section showcases empirical supernatural experiences in the non-Western world. Historical records attest that in…

A number of years ago at a conference in Hamburg, Germany, a European theologian asked me a question after my presentation on African Pentecostalism and World Christianity: “Why do your people [Africans] spend so much time praying about everything?” My answer was simple: “unlike you, when we pray ‘give us this day our daily bread,’…

Christians understand God to work in various ways. God created and sustains the universe, an ordered universe. The fact that gravity works in consistent, rather than capricious, ways is God’s good gift. As with sunshine and rain (Mt. 5:45), gravity is given through providence both to the just and unjust. When, through science, we study…

The accounts and experiences of miracles are pervasive among Christians in Africa. Millions of people claim this experience. It is incontrovertible that the miraculous is a significant part of the Christian experience in Africa. As Craig Keener says in his two-volume work Miracles, this phenomenon cannot be easily dismissed. The experience of miracles in Africa…

The topic to be discussed in the present Areopagite is quite intriguing: why do Christians outside the West experience God’s miraculous activities more than Western Christians? This question can be crucial to understanding the quintessence of Christian faith. Before trying to answer it, I would like to define the popular word “miracle” first in light…

Anyone who has talked to missionaries or has heard Christians from majority world cultures give their testimonies knows the experience. Such believers often have remarkable stories to share, supernatural encounters with God and with other spiritual entities: speaking in tongues, miraculous healings, exorcisms, witchcraft, you name it. Meanwhile, here you are, trained at a Western…

I am very grateful to our panelists for their insightful and stimulating contributions. Communicating complex and sophisticated notions from fields as varied as psychology, neuroscience, genetics, and physics in ways that a theologian can understand is no easy task! Our panelists have done excellent work, and I am indebted to them. Their work shows us…

I teach theology at a Christian liberal arts college. My students often hear me long for those halcyon days when theology reigned as Queen of the Sciences. To have colleagues from non-theological disciplines bowing down and kissing my ring—ay, there’s tenure worth having! I crash-landed in reality, however, as I worked through these insightful essays…

If everything that happens is governed by the laws of nature, then in some sense things have to occur just as they do. And since people are situated within nature, that applies as much to us as billiard balls and comets. So while it might seem like your actions are to some degree “free,” from…

The use of inheritance, and then later the use of genetics, to argue for determinism, has waxed and waned over the history of biology. Reviewing some of this background is important for understanding where we are today. Some Historical Background Overall it was the philosophers of earlier centuries who established powerful arguments in support of…

Twenty years out from what has been dubbed the “Decade of the Brain” (1990-99), two central areas of neuroscientific study have emerged with direct implications concerning whether we have free will, and, if so, what kind. One stems from a method of study first developed by Benjamin Libet, which has been widely thought to indicate…

An emergent tension at the interface between science and religion is how to deal with determinism because science often involves deterministic causal laws and religion involves agentic human experiences. Psychology would seem to be a discipline that can offer some insight into this tension because, as I show below, it deals with the same tension….