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.