Statement of Hindu Position on Christianity

We are willing to accept Jesus as a noble human being.  However, we reject the idea that Jesus or Moses or anyone else had had exclusive access to God or to truth.  Every human being has the same potential to achieve what any other human being has achieved.

We see bible as it is - work of many men with some good and some truth in it.  We reject all beliefs which claim exclusive access or relationship for some, such as Jesus, to God and which limit human nature and potential.  In particular, we reject the belief that all human beings are born sinners.  We Hindus think that such limiting beliefs are part of human ignorance that need to be shed to achieve liberation; key is shedding such ignorance and recognizing at least that we all have equal access to the divine without the need for prophets as intermediaries.  A further liberating Hindu ideal is the core belief that, in fact, we are all ultimately inseparable from the divine, thus our true self is devoid of limitations and sins.  Thus, we do not need Jesus or anyone else to liberate us from sins.

We reject the belief that sins of Adam are passed on by inheritance.  Such beliefs are counter to principles of accountability and responsibility that is core to institutions of law and justice.  We also reject the idea of vicarious redemption - that all human beings are relieved of the original sin of Adam by the sacrifice of life of Jesus.  One cannot be punished for wrong actions of another.  One cannot pay for wrong actions of another.  Such beliefs are counter to principles of responsibility and justice.


Accordingly, we reject the dogma of Nicene Creed in its entirety.  

Who died and saved you?

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics. You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded. Because the elements, the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars. And the only way they could get into your body is if the stars were kind enough to explode. So forget Jesus. The stars died so you could be here today.”  

                                           - Lawrence M. Krauss

Miracles play a critical role in the bible - in both the Old Testament of the Jews and the New Testament of the Christians.  Bible mentions many miracles explicitly.  Other miracles are implied. 

Miracles are central to Christian belief.  The most important miracle for Christians is the miracle of resurrection: that Jesus died on the cross and then came back to life days later.  Without this central belief, the entire edifice of Christianity will collapse like a pack of cards.  

But why is the miracle of resurrection so important to Christians?

Supports claim that Jesus is Son of God:
Christians say that rising from the dead is impossible for humans, that bringing someone dead back to life is only possible for God.  Thus, Christians claim, resurrection of Jesus after his death on the crucifix proves that Jesus is himself God or that God has special reasons to resurrect Jesus after Jesus died on the crucifix.  

Supports claim that Bible is truth:
Christians argue that, since Jesus is either God himself or is so special to God, what Jesus said must be true.  Christians believe that  bible is an accurate depiction of what happened and what Jesus said.  Christians argue that, if the bible and Jesus has special status.

Non-Christians do not find such descriptions satisfactory. 


There are three ways in which non-Christains argue against Christian-belief centered on miracles.

One, miracles are a violation of natural order.  To believe in miracles, we should demand evidence commensurate with what we are asked to believe.  Since a miracle is an out-of-the-ordinary experience, evidence has to be that much stronger, rooted in facts.  In fact, the only reason that a miracle can be accepted is that non-acceptance of the miracle forces us to accept an even bigger violation of natural order. 

Suppose that we saw a completely collapsed 100+ story building reassemble itself from the rubble in a second right in front of our eyes. Let us say that we are rational humans with a strong penchant for truth. Let us also accept as fact that no engineering or technology marvel can accomplish such a fast reassembly.  We cannot simply ignore the stupendous event that we just witnessed and walk-away as if nothing happened.  We are left with only two choices for explaining the event: (a) say that the event was an extraordinary act of magic that fooled our eyes, or (b) call the event a miracle.  Without any further evidence, we cannot really say anything more specific.  We have to admit, however, that calling what we witnessed a magical event or a miracle is not really an explanation of the event but merely labeling the event.  Labeling events does not make us any wiser.

Two, even if one grants the possibility of miracles, there is no way of ever establishing that a miracle actually occurred to raise Jesus from dead.  The famous magician David Copperfield made the statue of liberty "disappear" right in front of hundreds of spectators.  Would we believe that he truly made the statue disappear?

Three, even if miracles actually occurred, and even if Jesus died on the cross and then resurrected, it does not follow that Jesus is God or son of God, or that he was born of a virgin, or that words ascribed to him in the Bible are true.  Strength of the challenge is that it does not concern itself with the question of whether miracles are possible.  Instead, the argument grants the possibility of miracles and focuses on the essential claim: Is Jesus God or son of God?  

No historical evidence can ever be offered to justify this claim.  Thus, in the final analysis, Jesus is son of God is merely a belief with no justification outside the Bible (in terms of history).  

Does the Bible offer justification for this critical dogma?

Does the Bible support the belief that Jesus is the son of God?

Looking closely at the Bible, we will not see a single statement by Jesus that only he is son of God.  In fact, we will find specific evidence to the contrary:

John 10:34
Jesus answered, "It is written in your law that God said, "I said you are gods."

Jesus is referring here to Psalm 82:6
God Most High, say, "You are gods, my own sons."

Concept of soul according to Catholic Church

Concept of soul existed even before the Christian theological account of human body was developed by Thomas Aquinas.  

The Greeks and early Christian thinkers looked down upon human body as inferior to the soul.  Christian thinkers before Aquinas such as Clement of Alexandria, and Origen saw the soul as the image of God whereas the human body is the source of human imperfect actions.  Thomas Aquinas disagreed with this view.  He asserted that evil actions originate from free will and thus from the entire being.  Notwithstanding these differences, Origen and Aquinas saw resurrection as of the entire being: body and soul.

Thomas Aquinas believed the human body as an essential aspect of the human person. You cannot say a human being “has” a body when it’s the nature of a human being to consist of both soul and body. To be clear, Aquinas saw soul as incorporeal and subsistent as an entity.  Since human functions such as intellect are not of the body, Aquinas saw soul as separate from the body. However, Aquinas asserted, that soul should also constitute the essence of human form in order for the soul to experience via the senses.  If a man were just a mind, essentially unrelated to the body, he would not directly experience things that happen to the body, as he clearly does when he senses. Therefore, the human soul is in essence the substantial form of a human body, and body and soul together make up one substance.  Soul does not have an existence independent of the body.

When Jesus reappeared after death, he did have a tangible, physical body that ate and drank, with familiar wounds that were explored by the hands of followers.  Jesus resurrected as a full being: body and soul.  Christians believe that Jesus did not come to just save the soul but the human being - body and soul resurrected on the Judgment day.

According to the Catholic church, and its interpretation of the bible, human body is not something that the soul can trade in for another when it wears out.  The body is integral to who humans are.  Catholic church believes the immortality via resurrection of the soul and the body, not in the immortal soul separable from the body.  One thing is evident in the catholic view of soul: soul is not something that can have an existence independent of human body.  Soul and human body are not two natures united but form a single nature.  


Thus, the word soul is not to be used as a translation of the Sanskrit word Atman.

Following extract is from the official catechism of the catholic church.  

BODY AND SOUL BUT TRULY ONE

362 The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that "then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."  Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God.

363 In Sacred Scripture the term "soul" often refers to human life or the entire human person. But "soul" also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God's image: "soul" signifies the spiritual principle in man.

364 The human body shares in the dignity of "the image of God": it is a human body precisely because it is animated by a spiritual soul, and it is the whole human person that is intended to become, in the body of Christ, a temple of the Spirit:

Man, though made of body and soul, is a unity. Through his very bodily condition he sums up in himself the elements of the material world. Through him they are thus brought to their highest perfection and can raise their voice in praise freely given to the Creator. For this reason man may not despise his bodily life. Rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and to hold it in honor since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.

365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body:i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.

366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.

367 Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit: St. Paul for instance prays that God may sanctify his people "wholly", with "spirit and soul and body" kept sound and blameless at the Lord's coming. The Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul. "Spirit" signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God.

368 The spiritual tradition of the Church also emphasizes the heart, in the biblical sense of the depths of one's being, where the person decides for or against God.

Christianity and the Problem of Evil

Problem of evil is a troubling area for Christian theology.  While some Christians choose to let faith get around the problems of evil, others simply cannot get past them.  Theodicy is a Christian theological construct developed to vindicate Christian God, developed as the defense of Christian God's goodness and omnipotence in the presence of evil.  

Let us look into the problem of evil and why Christian answers are inadequate.

Christian God is characterized in Christian theology as Omnipotent (all-powerful), Omniscient (all-knowing), and Perfectly Good (morally perfect).

The argument of the problem of evil facing Christianity is as follows: 

1. Christian God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
2. If Christian God is omnipotent, then Christian God has the power to eliminate all evil
3. If Christian God is omniscient, then Christian God knows when evil exists.
4. If Christian God is morally perfect, then Christian God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and Christian God exists, then either Christian God doesn't have the power to eliminate all evil or doesn't know that evil exists or doesn't want to remove evil.
7. Therefore, Christian God does not exist.

Perhaps the thorniest issue in Christian apologetics is the problem of evil.  Thomas Aquinas, and Augustine before him, in his early thought, held that evil is not an entity but a deprivation or absence of good. But to this the opponent of Christianity may reply, “Well, granted all the suffering involved in those deprivations, an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God wouldn’t have allowed the deprivation any more than He’d have allowed a positive existent that was evil.” 

If there is no Christian God then humans are to blame for what is "evil and nasty," and not god; it is humans that are evil and nasty because they CHOOSE to be evil and nasty--not because they were born that way. Having a god therefore, allows them to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. However, this is exactly what needs to be avoided--humans NEED to take responsibility for what they do. If humans were taught to take responsibility for their own actions, they would have more of a tendency to do right.  There would no longer be the problem of evil.

Free will argument:  

A favorite Christian apologetic response is the free will.  C.S. Lewis argued that, if God intervened and corrected every evil, then human action is no longer determined by free will.  Taken to a logical extreme, even evil thoughts should be impossible.  Free will is no longer free because even cerebral matter refuses to cooperate the process of free will.

Failure of free will argument:  

The most common solution we hear for the problem of evil is a simple reference to man's free will.  We hear such statements as, “Evil came into the world by man's free will.  Man is the author of sin, not Christian God.”

Christians use that argument because that statement squares with the biblical account of the origin of sin.  Christian God created man with free will and that man freely chose to sin.  It was not the Christian God who committed sin but the man.  But where did man ever gain the slightest inclination to sin?  

Christians have no disagreement that man is basically of a sinful nature.  Nothwithstanding their sinful nature, they are all qualified to achieve salvation by the grace of Jesus.

Romans 3:23-24

 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

If man was created with a desire for and ability to sin, then a shadow is cast on the integrity of the Christian God, the creator.  If he was created with no desire for sin, then we must ask where that desire came from. The Bible tells us that we sin because we are sinners.  We were born with sinful nature.  We are fallen creatures.  

Perhaps the single biggest weakness of the "we are helpless sinners" argument is that it completely denounces all accountability to harm caused to others, it shows no concern for the victim.  If a rapist exercises his free will, does the free will of the victim to not be raped matter, even be more paramount?  

The argument of free will conflates the desire arising from free will with the action that follows.  In opposing the free will argument, we are not becoming proponents of thought police.  Where is tye rational thought that calls for restraint and ethical behavior?

There are five reasons why the defense of free will is inadequate:

1. Adam and Eve were not created fallen.  They did not have sinful nature.  They were good creatures with a free will.  Yet they chose to sin.  Why did Christian God make Adam and Eve, who were not born with a sinful nature, to have the ability for sinful thoughts and actions? As creatures with free will, it does not follow that humans should be able to sin.  Humans have limited abilities, and as the creator, Christian God had decided what he will not be able to do.  Thus, as the designer, Christian God already had made some choices on what humans would not be capable of doing.  Christian God had a choice in choosing what humans are capable of and not capable of.  Christian God has designed man with limited capabilities - so that he is incapable of doing some things.  This apparently did not restrict the human free will.  Why could not the Christian God design man to be incapable of sinning without restricting his free will?
2. If God created humans with a neutral nature, such that his nature did not guarantee a tendency towards evil, at least some humans would be sin-free.  What kind of free will is it that humans cannot choose to be sin-free but only to choose to be sinful?  It does not necessarily follow that free will should always lead to sin.  The only reason humans have sinful nature then is that God made them so.  Bible states that no human being can avoid committing sin.
3. Not all suffering comes from one's own free will choices.  Natives suffered brutally in the hands of colonialists.  Who is the perpetrator of evil?  Who suffered?  Perpetrators of evil prevailed and flourished.  Where is God's justice if his final judgment ignores and forgives the colonialists of all their free willed sinful actions just because they have faith in him at the time of their death?  
4. In the many biblical stories of God's intervention in human matters, God always took one side and punished those on the other side.  In the powerful movie God on Trial (2008), the end argument is indeed thought provoking: Yahweh in the Old Testament cannot be seen as good based on the morality instilled in our hearts.  All that one can say is that he was on the side of Jews.  How else can one see the Biblical God who calls for the death of EVERY first born child in Egypt (Exodus 11:5)?  It was not human free will that caused the indiscriminate suffering and death of all the first born in Egypt.  It was Christian God's free will.  And it was NOT good.
5. A final argument would be that Christian God did not make humans sinful.  Humans became sinful because Adam and Eve, their ancestors, did a sinful act.  Humans simply inherited the sinful nature from their ancestors.  Can Christian God be held guilty of acts of evil committed by man? The affirmative answer follows from omnipotent Christian God's choice of focusing on the transmission mechanism of the effects of the sinful choice of Adam and Eve.  Does that make any reasonable sense that humans are sinners even before they are born simply because their ancestors did something sinful?  Does this decision of Christian God to make all humans inherit the sin not impinge on the human free will?  

Ayn Rand says it best in her book For the New Intellectual. (1961, pages 136-137):

"A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code. Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free." 

Argument of Christian God's Inscrutable Nature:    

In order to challenge the argument for the problem of evil (stated above), the only recourse is to dispute one of the 6 premises.  One could argue that premise 4 is false, namely that a morally perfect Christian God has the desire to eliminate all evil.  Bible tells us that it is simply not so.  For example, Genesis 50:20, Acts 2:22-23.

The Christian defense says, in essence, that Christian God's actions, no matter what they are, cannot be questioned.  Why?  Because, Christian God’s actions are inscrutable to humans.  The Christian defense is that Christian God plans lawlessness, to use the language we find in Acts, he plans evil in order to accomplish his good-and-perfect-ends and that he does so in a way that leaves him without any guilt or blame.  The Christian God's choicy means for his actions can be justified simply by pointing to Christian God's inscrutable nature - we humans cannot figure out all things that Christian God does and hence we cannot judge him.

The argument in the defense of Christian God's "inscrutable nature" goes as follows: 

It is not simply evil but pointless and irredeemable evil, which would be incompatible with the character of God as Christians conceive him.  Hence the critic who claims to demonstrate an inconsistency in theism has to show that there would be no way of justifying the evil in the world.  It is important to notice that in this dispute the onus of proof is upon the critic of theism; for he has undertaken the stringent task of demonstrating an inconsistency in the theist's case.  It is, therefore, not enough for him to cast some doubt on the ways in which theists have sought to deal with this problem; he has to show that it is logically impossible that Christian God should have a morally-sufficient reason to allow evil of the sort we encounter in the world.

Failure of the argument of Christian God's inscrutable nature:

Sure.  We can take this challenge.  But to decide whether an act of Christian God is irredeemably evil or not, we have to use neutral ethical reasoning.  If all that a Christian has to know about God's actions is the Bible, then we have to look for justification within the scope of Bible.  If the justification is not explicitly found within the scope of the Bible, then the best explanation has to follow reasoning.

Firstly, the one adducing the theology should explain rationally based on theological foundations.  Trying to say that God's actions cannot be explained is simply saying that one does not have an answer.  In that case, there is no further argument.

Secondly, evils in the Bible have to be evaluated per ethical standards that we use in all matters.  Using Yahweh's own morals in the Bible to justify evil actions of Yahweh is far from satisfactory - it is committing the fallacy of authority.  For a rational person raising the argument, assumption that the bible is divine and hence cannot be questioned is not only unnecessary but is the very assumption that is being challenged. 

Third, saying that "we limited humans do not know" is not a defense for Yahweh's evil actions in the Bible.  It is a failure to defend.

The last straw...

Christian apologists resort to the moral argument for existence of Christian God by arguing that evil and good exist only if Christian God does.  Otherwise, they become arbitrary.

Ravi Zacharias and William Lane Craig argue for the existence of God as a necessity for morality (evil vs. good dichotomy) to exist.  Without God, the moral law giver, there cannot be objective or absolute morals they argue.  Since they also define God as perfection of goodness, therefore, there is no question of attributing any evil to him.  By definition, evil stays outside God.  Of course, they are silent whether this abstract notion of God that they argue for can ever be the Biblical God.  Can that abstract omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect God be the same Biblical God who took sides, called for the killing of ALL innocent first-born, and women in a genocidal rage against Canaanites?

Don't hold your breath for clarity.  They will never distinguish between the abstract notion of God with no-attributes and Yahweh, the Biblical God.  It serves their argument, but therein lays the real and complete failure of all their arguments.

Is Jesus son of God?

Benjamin Franklin does not fit the membership criteria for any Christian denomination, given his views of Bible, Jesus, and God.  He was born a Christian, with a Christian upbringing and never explicitly disavowed Christianity.  However, as a critical thinker, Benjamin Franklin wrote on Jesus of Nazararth:

... and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity;

At the core of Christian dogma is the need to accept divinity of Jesus. From early days of Christianity, there was a recognition that this dogma is non-negotiable and hence was incorporated into the Nicene creed.  As demonstrated through the Nicene creed, Christians have pushed hard to provide a historical basis for its believers to accept this dogma.  The logic of the tie between dogma and history is in the form of miracles performed by Jesus, including the miracle of dying and coming back to life. Rest of the miracles merely set a back drop to this ultimate miracle of coming back to life.  Why is this miracle so crucial for Christians?  The core logic of the tie between dogma and history goes as follows:

No human can come back to life after death.  Jesus died on the cross and came back to life. He had to be God's son as he called himself.

However, the issue is not settled. Tie between history and dogma is not a foregone conclusion.

Non-traditionalist and distinguished Jesus researcher E.P. Sanders explains:

“A lot of Christians, and possibly even more non-Christians, think that central to Christianity is the view that Jesus could perform miracles because he was more than a mere human being…. Like other ancient people, Jews believed in miracles but did not think that the ability to perform them proved exalted status…. Historically, it is an error to think that Christians must believe that Jesus was superhuman, and also an error to think that in Jesus’ own day his miracles were taken as proving partial or full divinity.” 

Indeed, Jewish religious authorities never doubted that Jesus did miracles; rather, they accused him of doing them in the power of Satan (Matthew 12.22-24, Mark 3.22).

Jesus was a healer.  Jesus supposedly healed not as a practitioner of medical science but rather as a miracle worker. The Gospels are full of reports about his miraculous activities. Indeed, almost one third of Mark’s Gospel is devoted to Jesus’ miracles. The first half of John’s Gospel contains seven miracles known as “signs” that range from Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana to raising his friend Lazarus from the dead. According to one estimate (counting repeated passages only once), the four Gospels include 17 healings, six exorcisms, and eight nature miracles.

Miracles are not seen as proof but to boost one's faith.

Says John in the bible (John 20:30-31):

Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God.

But do they really help thinking minds boost their faith?

1. Everyone has seen all sorts of "faith healers" who can "heal" the sick. And we all know that this sort of "healing" is quackery. If it were true, then we would not need doctors, hospitals or prescription medicines.
2. Turning water into wine... Doesn't that sound like something that any worthwhile magician could do? There is no reason why a normal person would accept a magic trick as proof that someone is God. 
3. None of the  miracles performed by Jesus left behind any evidence. Nothing that we can see, nor anything that can be scientifically tested today. Not one of Jesus' miracles left any tangible evidence for scientists to study.

It is as simple as that. If someone claimed to be God today, you would never believe it if the evidence consisted of faith healing and magic tricks. Never. Yet billions of people claim that Jesus' faith healing and magic tricks prove that he is God. 

Let's imagine that Jesus truly is God. What might he have done to prove it? He could have started by taking one of his most famous quotes from the Bible and acting on it. In Matthew 17:20 Jesus says quite clearly:

For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.

To prove that he is God, Jesus would have moved a mountain. Especially since it is so easy. And Jesus would have written something down to explain himself. Here's what the first page of Jesus' book might have looked like:

But there are parts of the bible that strongly suggest that Jesus was not a deity.

Jesus’ miracles merely attest to God empowering him. The Apostle Peter preached his first sermon to thousands of Jews gathered at Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. He said, “Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst, just as you yourselves know …” (Acts 2.22). And Peter later preached to the house of Cornelius, saying, “You know of Jesus of Nazareth, how God anointed Him, with the Holy Spirit and with power, and how He went about doing good, and healing all who were oppressed by the devil; for God was with Him”

These are some of the strongest statements in the Bible indicating that Jesus was not God but that he was empowered by God. And notice in these two statements how Peter clearly distinguishes Jesus and God, which further signifies Jesus is not God.

Jesus could not heal indiscriminately, which also indicates he was not God. Instead, his power to heal depended to some degree on the faith of the beneficiary, which in turn was undoubtedly determined by whether God would heal or not through Jesus.

For instance, one Sabbath day Jesus taught in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth. Mark says, “He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands upon a few sick people and healed them. And He wondered at their unbelief” (Mark 6.5-6).

Sometimes, Jesus healed people and told them that “your faith has made you well” (Matthew 9.22/Mark 5.34/Luke 8.48; Mark 10.52/Luke 18.42).

If Jesus was God, he could have healed anytime he wanted. But he always depended on God’s Spirit to heal through him (Acts 2.22; 10.38). So, Jesus’ power to heal was not intrinsic to himself but derived from God, which indicates he was not God.

Once, Jesus taught in an overcrowded house. Four friends of a paralytic man carried him on his bed and let him down through the thatched, sod roof of a house. Luke says of Jesus, “the power of the Lord was present for Him to perform healing” on this man (Luke 5.17). It was due to Jesus “seeing their faith” (v. 20), that is, the faith of the man and his friends. So, this account suggests that the power to heal was not always present in Jesus.

Matthew’s account of this incident relates that Jesus’ authority to heal was not intrinsic to him, but derived from God (the Father). He says that “when the multitudes saw this, they were filled with awe, and glorified God, who had given such authority to men” (Matthew 9.8). So, Matthew reveals that they did not believe Jesus was God on account of this healing, but that God had given him the authority to heal. These people glorified God because they rightly perceived he ultimately had caused it to happen.

A similar situation arose when Jesus cast a legion of demons out of a man. Jesus then commanded him, “Return to your house and describe what great things God has done for you” (Luke 8.39). But Luke says he “went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city what great things Jesus had done for him.” Does this mean Jesus was God? Euthymius Zigabenus is surely right in explaining, “Christ modestly attributed the work to the Father; but the healed man continued gratefully to attribute it to Christ.”

You do not need to go back 2000 years for miracles.  You can get an opportunity to witness miracles in our times too!  Hoa and where, you ask?  Watch followers nodding in amazement with tears rolling down their faces in faith-healing crusades.

Can we take claims of miracles as literal truths?  Do Jesus’ miracles signify his divinity? Can we reason from miracle-worker to divine Son?   These are all important questions but the last two are far more important.

Let us look at the first question anyway.  Can we take claims of miracles as literal truths? 

In times of the bible, people needed a way to distinguish true prophets from false ones. This was the purpose of miracles. If men could do works that could be performed only by the power of God, people would know God was working in those men and they would believe the message preached.  But are miracles a reliable test for knowing a true prophet, a messiah, or the one son of God?

For starters, Jesus was not the only one in his day with a reputation for doing strange and powerful things, as we see from the NT itself (Mt 12:27; Lk 10:17; Acts 19:13) and from elsewhere.1 And though some traced Jesus’ powers to God, others pointed to Satan (Mk 3:22; Mt 9:34; 12:24 and pars.). To complicate things further, a standard critique of Christianity, at least since the 2nd century, maybe earlier, is that Jesus was a magician.2 What was perfectly clear to the crowds was that Jesus could do things others could not. What was less clear was the source of his power and, correspondingly, the significance of his acts. But do the crowds in modern-day faith-healing sessions not know perfectly clearly that the person on stage is doing what others could not?

No one disputes the fundamentally historical agenda of Plutarch even though his biography of Alexander the Great includes legendary material. . . about flocks of ravens guiding Alexander day and night across the desert (§ 27). Likewise, Suetonius’ account of Augustus includes the part about his mother being impregnated by a serpent in Apollo’s Temple (§ 95).

How can we know that the raising of Lazarus or the stilling of the storm wasn’t simply made up, or substantially expanded from a less-miraculous original? Could a Gospel tapestry be woven mostly of historical threads but also include strands of fiction, myth, and poetic license? If one were to allow embellishment to stand alongside historical fact, can one still speak of the Gospels’ reliability in literally describing miracles by Jesus? 

Christians often argue that miracles of Jesus are evidence of his divinity.  If miracles of Jesus confirm his deity, why is not this argument ever advanced in the New Testament?  And why does Peter, in his Pentecost sermon, point to Jesus’ miracles as signs of God’s attestation and approval (Acts 2:22ff.), as if to distinguish Jesus from God, rather than identify him with God?

Some Christians argue that it isn’t so much the miracles which make Jesus God, but the divine claims of Jesus which the miracles serve to validate. Jesus made certain statements that no other true prophet before him ever did, and then performed supernatural miracles to back up the truthfulness and validity of those claims.  These Christians are not saying: Jesus performd miracles, therefore he must be divine.  They are saying: Jesus is divine, therefore he is able to perform miracles.  Unfortunately, this argument simply begs the question by asking you to believe in the bible as truth in order to validate claims drawn from it.

Risen from dead - Christian Miracles

Christianity stands on a foundation of miracles - miracles which you are asked to believe are factual, true history.  The greatest of the biblical miracles is the raising of Jesus after he was crucified and he died on the cross.  This supposed extraordinary miracle happened 2000 years ago witnessed by a handful of people.  After 2000 years, you are asked to believe this historical, factual event based on the same evidence.  And millions of Christians readily do.

Why is this miracle of miracles so important to Christianity?

 After reading the story in the bible, many people innocently ask the following question:

What did Jesus really accomplish?  There are many good - very nice - people who were killed mindlessly in the last two thousand years.  Look at Mahatma Gandhi.  He fought for a well-defined cause, made great strides towards that cause, using only peaceful means, and finally died in the end but only after leaving behind a success story.  In contrast, Jesus achieved no improvement to the society of his times and died in vain. Gandhi successfully used civil-disobedience to bring justice to millions of his people.  Perhaps, Jesus could have had the same effectiveness if he had used civil-disobedience.

For instance, Jesus did not rescue, even resist, the land from the control of the Romans.  Jesus did not attempt to help the laborers of Rome who were resisting the injustice.  Jesus did not redeem the Jews from their social evils, or restore justice to their nation. In a word, Jesus failed to do the social or political reforming work that was expected of him.

This is not a new thought.


Although Jesus was surrounded by poverty, slavery, oppression, and mental degradation, he made no effort to rid society of these curses to humanity. As John Stuart Mill observes, in his work upon Liberty (pages 28, 29), in referring to Christian morality: 

"I do not scruple to say of it (the Bible) that it is, in many important points, incomplete and one-sided, and that, unless ideas and feelings, not sanctioned by it, had contributed to the formation of European life and character, human affairs would have been in a worse condition than they now are."

The Reverend James Cranbrook of Edinburgh, in the preface of his book The Founders of Christianity (page 5), observed: 

Our own idealizations have invested him (Jesus) with a halo of spiritual glory, that by the intensity of its brightness conceals from us the real figure presented in the Gospels. We see him, not as he is described, but as the ideally perfect man our own fancies have conceived. 

Speaking on Mahatma Gandhi's death, Nobel prize nominee and legendary missionary E. Stanley Jones described Mahatma Gandhi as "the greatest tragedy since the Son of God died on the cross."

How can Christianity elevate the status of Jesus above all others?  The need for dogma to elevate Jesus to the status of God was realized as a necessity by Christian thinkers from the inception of Christianity.

Theodore Beza wrote in his work the Anti-Bellius in 1554:

“There is one way that leads to God, namely, Christ; and one way that leads to Christ, namely, faith; and this faith includes all those dogmas ...  If Christ is not true God, coeternal and consubstantial with the Father, how is He our Savior? How is He our sanctifier? How is He victor over sin, death, and the devil?  Unless He is true man, save for sin, how is He our mediator?”

 

Christian miracles in our own times?

Why did we stop seeing new prophets - special individuals selected to be the mediators between man and God?  

Is it a coincidence that the very time when claims of prophets with special access to God no longer happen is the same time that humanity overall has overcome fear of God and developed a healthy suspicion of false claims? 

The same time when we have the means and methods to challenge tall claims in the light of science and careful investigation? The occurrences of these events look like tall claims and sound like tall claims. Odds are that they are tall claims.  We cannot take at as true at face value without a healthy dose of doubt and examination.

Prophets stopped happening.  But miracles occasionally show up even in our times.

Modern Christian world continues to demonstrate revival from dead.  Huge rallies or "Christian crusades" are held in the USA to convert nonbelievers to believers purely on the magic of such miracles.

Reinhard Bonnke, who now lives in Houston, Texas held such a rally in February 2015.  Reinhard Bonnke does not just narrate miracles of bible.  His specialty is that he actually performs them in our own times.

In the recent past, Reinhard Bonnke visited Nigeria and performed the miracle of raising the dead to life.  Here is the transcript of his interview of the incident:

http://www.cbn.com/700club/features/bonnke_raisedpastor.aspx

The Following question was posed to the conservative televangelist Pat Robertson from a 700 Club viewer:

"Why do amazing miracles (people raised from the dead, blind eyes open, lame people walking) happen with great frequency in places like Africa, and not here in the USA? What can we do to encourage those things to happen here? Is America too far gone for miracles like this?" — Ken.

Pat Robertson's Response to Ken:

"Those people overseas didn’t go to Ivy League schools. Well, we’re so sophisticated, we think we’ve got everything figured out, we know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn’t real, we know about all this stuff.  And if we’d be in many schools, the more advanced schools, we have been inundated with  skepticism and secularism.  Overseas they’re simple, humble. You tell them God loves them, and they say ‘ok, he loves me’. You say ‘God will do miracles’ and they say ‘okay, we believe him.’ And that’s what God’s looking for, that’s why they have miracles.”

Yeah.  Sure.

There are three possibilities for the wise to ponder on:

Possibility 1:

The reason people in Africa have been granted the power to raise the dead is because they don't have our schooling which teaches us to be skeptical of all things, even our own eyes. God hates skepticism of the educated and their critical thinking and hence He does not allow raising of the dead in the modern educated world.

Possibility 2:

People in certain African regions are mistakenly declared dead even when they are not, in fact, dead.  Unclear whether the mistake is because of incompetence or deliberate intent.

Possibility 3:

Innocent people are capable of believing many things but the skepticism that comes with critical thinking skills offers stiff resistance to accepting extraordinary claims such as raising the dead to life.  That there are such gullible and innocent people in the world is just as true today and even more likely and prevalent 2000 years ago.  

An extraordinary claim should be supported with equally extraordinary levels of evidence: If you say that you ate a dozen bananas today, I do not need to be very skeptical and may accept the claim without too much evidence.  But when someone makes extraordinary claims of reviving the dead, you bet that I will demand extraordinary evidence.  If the claimant stands to benefit in any substantive way from making such a claim, I will not even waste my time studying the evidence.