What if Christian miracles don't come from God?

In a recent podcast, Stand To Reason addressed the following question:

"All supposed revelation of religions involves a subjective experience of receiving that revelation, so how do we know the biblical authors (Moses, the prophets, etc.) were interpreting their experiences correctly as opposed to Mohammed or Joseph Smith?"

I don't know how much the questioner was thinking of something like a scenario in which Christianity is a demonic deception. But that objection comes up occasionally and doesn't get addressed much, so I want to take this opportunity to address it again. Go here for a couple of comments I wrote on the topic a few years ago, then read this one that I wrote shortly afterward. The second thread just linked also has some comments from Hawk on the subject. For a response to the notion that Christian miracles are just manifestations of human paranormal capacities, see here.

I've given a couple of examples above, namely demons and human paranormal abilities. But the same principles are applicable to other non-Divine sources (e.g., an alien trying to deceive us). A Christian just has to argue that God is the best explanation, not that no other explanation is possible.

The Gravest Question Before The Church

"A.W. Tozer wisely wrote, 'What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us….For this reason, the gravest question before the Church is always God Himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at any given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.' And that's why the most important thing about us is not our self-image, but our God-image. The gospel transforms us by transforming our vision of God….A Christian should never feel threatened by the world. Circling the wagons is not what people do when they have a great vision of God, an Isaianic vision of God, alive in their hearts….Father, we do ask that you would so release us from our emotional attachment to the things of this world, and you would so grip us and compel us with the triumph of Christ, that we no longer look like typical Americans." (Ray Ortlund, 6:03, 14:14, 38:36 in the audio of his October 27, 2002 sermon here)

Who Martin Luther Was Above All Else

"The first endeavor must be to understand the man. One will not move far in this direction unless one recognizes at the outset that Luther was above all else a man of religion. The great outward crises of his life which bedazzle the eyes of dramatic biographers were to Luther himself trivial in comparison with the inner upheavals of his questing after God." (Roland Bainton, Here I Stand [Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 1978], 6)

That's something to keep in mind as so many Christians in our day keep going after the false lead of the media, whatever is prominent in the news at the moment, and giving so much attention to gender issues, the family, politics, and such while doing so little in religious contexts.

Christians Raking Leaves

"The best things have to be dug for. If you rake, you get leaves. If you dig, you get diamonds. And if you've got a raking mind, you'll settle for leaves. If you've got a digging mind, you'll get diamonds." (John Piper, 14:13 in the audio here)

The Abuse Of Water-Related Language In The Bible To Support Baptismal Regeneration

I've written before about the many Biblical passages that refer to water, cleansing, and such in relevant contexts without having baptism in mind. But advocates of baptismal regeneration take certain passages out of context to make them seem supportive of baptismal regeneration because of the water-related terminology that's used. Even where the context goes in the opposite direction, they appeal to phrases that can be made to appear supportive of baptismal regeneration if taken in isolation (e.g., citing the reference to water in John 3:5, even though Jesus goes on to refer to the Old Testament background of his comments and keeps referring to people being justified apart from baptism elsewhere in the gospels; citing the reference to washing in Titus 3:5, even though it's accompanied by an exclusion of works). I want to expand on my previous post, linked above, with a discussion of some other relevant passages.

"Simply Literal" Scripture Interpretation Long Before The Reformation

Critics of Protestantism often make much of the large amount of allegorizing in the church fathers' interpretations of scripture. But there was a lot of diversity in how scripture was interpreted, including interpretive approaches of a more literal nature, long before the Reformation. Though Jerome allegorized a lot, he acknowledged that other people in his day didn't:

"In the Scriptures, the words are not simply literal, as some think." (in Thomas Scheck, trans., St. Jerome: Commentary On Isaiah [Mahwah, New Jersey: The Newman Press, 2015], p. 938, Letter 18A:12)

You often come across comments like those in pre-Reformation sources. Whether they name who they have in mind or not, they refer to a diversity of interpretive methods and interpretations. Even among those who allegorized a lot, there was a lot of variation in terms of how they did so, the extent to which they did it, etc. There's diversity among those who interpret scripture more literally as well.

How Jesus Identified Himself By His Actions

Here's something I recently posted on the subject in a YouTube thread:

Claims About What "All Of The Apostolic Churches" And "The Protestant Reformers" Believed

When it's shown that there are significant historical problems with something like the perpetual virginity of Mary, her assumption, or praying to saints (e.g., the early absence of the belief, early sources contradicting it, sources being agnostic about it as late as the medieval era), a common response is to say that all apostolic churches accept the belief in question. Or we'll be told that some or all of the foremost leaders of the Reformation accepted it, that early Protestants in general did, or something else along those lines. We'll be told about how all of the apostolic churches practice prayer to the saints, how high of a Mariology the leaders of the Reformation had, and so on.

Several things need to be kept in mind when that sort of response comes up:

Limits On Our Knowledge Of Pre-Reformation History

It's common for critics of Protestantism to claim that various Protestant beliefs are absent in the historical record prior to the Reformation, were only held by a small number of people during that timeframe, etc. For documentation that those Protestant beliefs were more widespread than critics suggest, see here. But another point that should be made is that we sometimes have significantly little record of individuals and groups who plausibly, sometimes probably, held the views in question.

For example, I've written a lot over the years about the beliefs of pre-Reformation groups like the Waldensians and Lollards. Yet, it's often the case that what we know about them comes from their opponents. We're going by trial records, for instance. Think of Norman Tanner's Heresy Trials In The Diocese Of Norwich, 1428-31 (London, England: Royal Historical Society, 1977). In their trial records, the Lollards Tanner wrote about were frequently asked about certain issues: who we should pray to, purgatory, issues pertaining to the sacraments, etc. But there were other issues that were never brought up, at least in the English portions of the trial records Tanner cites. I've documented widespread opposition to and agnosticism about the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary among mainstream patristic and medieval sources, for example, even into the second millennium of church history. How likely is it that Lollards who opposed praying to Mary, opposed venerating images of her, and so on never opposed the idea that she was immaculately conceived or the idea that she was bodily assumed to heaven? But if the church officials who conducted the trials didn't ask them about those issues, and we have no or inadequate records of the beliefs of those Lollards elsewhere, then we don't have any explicit testimony from them on those subjects. We should keep in mind how incomplete our records sometimes are and how plausible it is that the beliefs in question were more widespread than we can document with explicit testimony.

Resources For Evaluating The Enfield Levitations

The BBC recently reaired a television program about the Enfield Poltergeist that came out a couple of years ago. So, there's been another round of media coverage of the Enfield case (e.g., here and here). One of the issues that's come up, as usual, is levitation, including discussion of the levitation photos.

I've said a lot about the evidence for the Enfield levitations in other posts. For an overview, see here. And here's a lengthy discussion of the evidence for the famous December 15, 1977 levitations. Janet Hodgson produced some paranormal results in a scientific experiment conducted in 1982 that was related to levitation. Here's a discussion of that experiment, and here's a lengthy discussion I had with David Robertson (one of the researchers involved) about the experiment and other scientific testing that was done on Janet. You can watch Maurice Grosse discussing the experiment I'm focused on in a 1998 television program here. And there's some photographic evidence for some of the levitations. The post linked above that provides an overview of the levitation issue discusses some of the photographic evidence. Below is a photographic sequence that wasn't mentioned in that post, one that I got from Apple TV's Enfield documentary that came out last year. As Graham Morris explains starting a little after the 30:12 mark in the second part of the documentary, there was one-sixth of a second between the two photos in this sequence:

That's not as good as video evidence, but it's close. (For a discussion of the segment of the documentary featuring Morris' comments, go here and do a Ctrl F search for "30:12". For a discussion of the video evidence for some other Enfield phenomena, see this post. Regarding the common skeptical objection that there isn't more video evidence, start listening here in a 1978 documentary on the Enfield case. The relevant segment is less than three minutes long. You'll hear two professional camera operators, Ron Denney of Pye Business Communications and Graham Morris of the Daily Mirror, commenting on how their camera equipment malfunctioned in extremely unusual ways while they were in the Hodgsons' house and attempting to film the poltergeist's activities. They use the phrases "impossible", "absolutely impossible", and "one chance in a million" to describe the likelihood that these malfunctions would occur by normal means. Their testimony is important for multiple reasons. They're professionals whose jobs involved working with that camera equipment. So, that addresses their competence to assess what's involved and skeptical claims about a need to have professional analysis of such events. Furthermore, the events in question not only provide evidence that something paranormal was going on, but also provide evidence that the entity involved sometimes didn't want to be filmed. The researchers did attempt to film it, though, and were occasionally successful.) For a discussion of the evidential value of some of Morris' other levitation photos, see my overview post mentioned above.

The post here discusses some other levitations. Do a Ctrl F search for "One doctor's" to read about a levitation that occurred while Janet was incapacitated with Valium and, therefore, not in a condition to fake the event. During the course of the Enfield case, a double-digit number of witnesses reported seeing one or more levitations. Do a Ctrl F search for "Edwards" in the post just linked. Read on for a while, and you'll get to a transcript of a discussion between Maurice Grosse and another individual who witnessed some paranormal events, including some levitations. Another subject that comes up in that post and others is audio evidence for these levitations (how tapes of the events corroborate the testimony of the witnesses, a lack of creaking noises from beds and floorboards in circumstances in which those sounds are relevant to fraud, throwing incidents that involved landing with a louder noise than jumping produces, etc.).

I'm just giving several examples here. There's a lot more in the posts linked above and elsewhere. Keep these things in mind when you see skeptics making their typical claims about Enfield and the levitation photos.

What's the significance of the extrabiblical sources?

We need to keep in mind that the significance of extrabiblical sources varies, and can vary widely, from one context to another. On a subject like eternal security, which I've been addressing a lot in recent months, we're in a context in which the Biblical sources provide us with a large amount of information. It's not as though eternal security is some minor issue that never came up or only came up on rare occasions in the Biblical record. It's not something with as little significance as what year Isaiah died or how many times Paul visited a particular city. The potential to lose justification has existed since the time of Adam and Eve, instead of being something that only came up toward the end of the Biblical era or afterward. The Bible provides us with relevant information in dozens of documents from dozens of authors over more than a thousand years. A supposed lack of clarity in one Biblical source can be resolved by consulting another passage or group of passages elsewhere in that source or by consulting one or more other Biblical sources. The nature of eternal security is such that our dependence on extrabiblical sources is much less in that context than it is on other issues.

Something like a universal or nearly universal absence of or opposition to eternal security among the extrabiblical sources would give us reason to reconsider our view on the subject, but any conclusion we'd reach would still have to interact with the large amount of Biblical data we have on the topic. But there isn't a universal or nearly universal absence of or opposition to eternal security among the extrabiblical sources, as I've demonstrated in my posts on the subject. Since eternal security is addressed so much in scripture and is neither universally nor almost universally absent or contradicted in the extrabiblical sources, we have a situation in which the extrabiblical sources are less significant accordingly.

Whether the topic is eternal security or something else, we need to remember what's involved when people refer to something like "the Bible" or "scripture". There's a sense in which only one source is involved, but there's also a sense in which there isn't. We could similarly refer to the church fathers collectively as "the church fathers" or refer to medieval sources collectively as "medieval sources", for example. But the Bible, like those other collections of documents, consists of many sources who wrote in many contexts. Extrabiblical sources have some value in assisting us in interpreting the Biblical documents, and some people underestimate the value of those extrabiblical sources (because of ignorance, laziness, dishonesty, or whatever other reason), but there's also a danger of overestimating them. And the level of significance they have varies from one context to another.

Remembering William Tyndale And Thomas Bilney

Gavin Ortlund recently produced a good video about William Tyndale. It also briefly discusses another martyr of the Reformation era, one who's discussed much less than he should be, Thomas Bilney. If you go here and here, you can watch a couple of segments on Bilney in a documentary. The first segment is about his conversion. The second is about his martyrdom.

Potential Objections To The Immediacy Of Justification

I've written before about the Biblical theme of the nearness of redemption, the concept that you can be justified at any moment through a means you always have access to. That theme is inconsistent with baptismal regeneration and every other form of justification through works.

But somebody could raise an objection along the lines that what these passages (2 Corinthians 6:2, etc.) are addressing is the nearness of starting the process of getting justified, not obtaining justification itself. There are some problems with that view.

What type of extrabiblical tradition?

Since so many Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox evaluations of Protestantism involve criticizing sola scriptura without making much of a case for an alternative, we should consider what's at stake. Not only does rejecting sola scriptura not leave you with Catholicism and Orthodoxy as the only Christian options to choose from, but it doesn't even come close to doing so.

Let's say that somebody found Papias' extrabiblical traditions about premillennialism convincing and added those to scripture as his rule of faith. Would accepting such extrabiblical traditions give you Roman Catholicism? No. Would it give you Eastern Orthodoxy? No. Would it give you the rule of faith of any of the other groups outside of Protestantism that claim apostolic succession, for example? No. Rather, it would give you something different than sola scriptura, but vastly closer to Protestantism than to those alternatives.

We need to keep in mind that there's a large gap separating sola scriptura from something like the rule of faith of Roman Catholicism or that of Eastern Orthodoxy. You can reject the former (sola scriptura) while still being much closer to the former than the latter (the rule of faith of the groups mentioned). When people refer to the importance of sola scriptura, they often have alternatives like Catholicism and Orthodoxy in mind. It doesn't follow that there's so much at stake when alternatives to sola scriptura are considered more broadly. When a Catholic or Orthodox tries to cast doubt on sola scriptura in a way that would still leave you a long distance from those two alternatives to sola scriptura, that long distance is important to note. We should also note the shortness of the distance between sola scriptura and other alternatives. In my example involving Papias and premillennialism, much less is at stake than would be involved in something like a conversion to Catholicism or a conversion to Orthodoxy. Or think of how individuals like Irenaeus (Against Heresies, 1:10:1-2) and Tertullian (The Prescription Against Heretics, 13) defined the apostolic tradition of their day. It was vastly different than what Catholics and Orthodox are advocating in our day.

Often, it seems that those who suggest that there's a narrower range of alternatives to sola scriptura have certain assumptions in mind that they haven't articulated or justified, assumptions their opponents don't accept. If the narrower range of alternatives to sola scriptura depends on those assumptions, then framing the discussion around that narrower range of alternatives is only as good as those assumptions.