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…

The Hebraic intellectual world on display in the Bible, unlike the rest of the ancient Near East, creates the epistemological condition for a logic of signs and wonders against chance. Conversely, in a Near Eastern conceptual world that understands every doorway, cat’s path, moonrise, etc., ad infinitum to be discrete nonverbal signals from the gods,…

God acts in the world. Christians believe that the world is not some mechanical device that God wound up at creation and has since left unattended. God upholds and sustains the world in being, and absent his sustaining activity the world would simply cease to exist. While these beliefs are vital to the Christian faith,…

We sometimes speak as if it would be enough just to see a miracle, longing to be astounded. We wonder why God heals one person but permits another to suffer and die. In this sixth week of Easter, we recall that God himself suffered and died, and that the miracles described in the gospels have…