In Response to: "An Easter re-think on miracles"

Australia's ABC News website recently published a column titled, "An Easter re-think on miracles." In it, Phil Dye provides a view that is all too common in our day. He outlines what he sees as the need for the church to let go of their claim that Jesus was raised from the dead and relegate it to a made up bit of fun like the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. He claims that church leaders should lighten up, and that "only the Quakers have the vulnerability to view the resurrection as a matter of interpretation. It's a vulnerability the rest could well learn from." In this statement, Dye fails to realise how crucial the bodily resurrection of Jesus is to true Christianity...because the point of Jesus death and resurrection was not just so we could be forgiven of our sins, but so that Death, the enemy that has existed since the garden of Eden, was finally defeated. The New Testament tells us that Jesus resurrection was just the beginning of the process (1 Cor 15), meaning that God is actively beginning to restore his creation and Jesus' resurrection was a stake-in-the-ground moment that will eventually end up with the total annihilation of death. If you take away the real bodily resurrection of Jesus, you take away any defeat of death, and with it, the great Christian hope, that God is dealing with the evil that invaded this world so early on, and that it will one day be defeated. Without this hope, there doesn't seem to be much point to existence, let alone belief in God.

Dye also says, "The contradiction between our contemporary focus on logical world understanding, and the Christian insistence that not only did Jesus rise from the dead, but was a virgin birth, divided loaves and changed water to wine is surely too much for the rational human mind to seriously contemplate." In this, Dye also greatly misses the point. To believe in miracles is not to believe that science is a waste of time, or to say that we don't understand that dead bodies don't usually get back up again...but it is to acknowledge that something amazing and 'out of the ordinary' happened, because if it wasn't a miracle then it was nothing! And if it was nothing, then the faith may as well be flushed down the toilet, and we still have no answer to death.
The rationalism that invaded our world with the enlightenment and modernity has brought a great many wonderful discoveries and scientific endeavour, however it has also lead us right back to what was the original sin in the garden of Eden...that we would be gods (Gen 3). Claiming that rationalist thought means that we can do away with miracles is to claim that we can know everything...and who knows everything? God! But in a culture where rationalism is viewed so highly, have we simply stopped believing in the God of creation and started believing that we ourselves are gods?

Another of Dye's thoughts is that "In 2009, as the number of practicing Christians in the western world declines, surely our relationship with God need no longer hinge on the 'in for a penny, in for a pound' acceptance of miracles?" My only response to this is who wants to believe in a God who cannot do anything more than we can? What is the point of believing in a God if he has no power to act on our behalf? We obviously can't make things better ourselves, no matter how much the politicians would like us to believe they could.

"In our society that is controlled more by its access to wealth than lack of it, we are more likely to be persuaded by feet on the ground logic than legendary miracles" Jesus himself warned us that this view would always sit alongside wealth. He told us that it is harder for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle! (Luke 18:25) Why? Because you can only have one god..and if money is it then there is no room for the real one! In poorer countries, they understand their need for God a whole lot more simply because they aren't wealthy, but this doesn't mean that their logic is invalid, but simply that they don't have their money getting in the way and fooling them into believing that wealth is the answer to all of life's problems. The richest countries in the world still have enormous issues that just seem to be getting worse!

I don't blame Phil for having these views...they are simply a product of our time in the western world. But perhaps the core issue is not that miracles are illogical, but that believing in miracles, believing in Jesus and who he said he was, and believing that he really did die and raise to life demands much more than simply choosing to believe a different sort of logic. It demands an entire worldview shift that takes us out of the centre of the meaning of life, and that is not a place that most westerners are happy to go. It requires a worldview that is support by, but not controlled by money. And it demands a worldview that admits we are not God, that we cannot know everything, and that we cannot get ourselves out of our own mess, but that God has chosen to act on our behalf.

So no, Phil, it is not that we will not stop believing in miracles...it is that we cannot! Without them we are forced into being gods ourselves...and frankly, I don't have enough faith to think that I can save myself from anything - but God can, and he has...through his death and literal resurrection...and I pray you will come to understand that you were also in his thoughts when he came and hammered the first nail in death's coffin.