Exploring the Miraculous

A Conversation with Lee Strobel

When he was 12 years old, Lee Strobel dreamed that he was making a sandwich in his kitchen when a luminous angel suddenly appeared to him. The angel explained how wonderful and glorious heaven would be. Strobel was still a few years away from becoming the hard-core atheist who would deny God’s existence altogether, and he assured the angel that he was going there.

“How do you know?” asked the angel.

“I’ve tried to be a good kid. I’ve tried to do what my parents say. I’ve tried to behave. I’ve been to church.”

“Those things don’t matter,” the angel replied.

Strobel was flummoxed. He didn’t know how to respond. The angel let him suffer for a few minutes before assuring him, “Someday you’ll understand.”

Sixteen years later, sitting in a Chicago-area movie theater, Strobel heard the Gospel message of grace for the first time. His mind flashed back to the memory of the dream and the angel whose words he hadn’t understood. “Someday” had arrived.

In his book, The Case for Miracles: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural (now made into a movie), Strobel asks if his experience would qualify as a miracle. He leaves the answer to the reader. Our conversation took us beyond the question of whether miracles really happen and into the anti-miraculous mindset our culture has inculcated into all of us.

Americans seem to be embarrassed by the idea of the supernatural in general and of miracles in particular. Why do you think that is?

I think a lot of American Christians want to be respected. So, it’s okay if my neighbor knows I’m a Christian. It’s okay if he knows I go to church. But I’m not into any of that weird stuff like miracles or demons or angels or crazy stuff like that. We’re a little embarrassed by it. We think it’s a little wacky. It’s a little—what’s the word?—“mystical.” We get a little uncomfortable with that. We’re Americans, doggone it. We want facts, we want data, we want evidence.

I was talking to one well-known theologian about this, and he said, “I could drive down a road, look at the cars in the parking lot of a church, and tell you whether they believe in the miraculous.”

I said, “Really?”

He said, “Yes, there is a socioeconomic component to this. The poorer people seem more dependent on God, more open to supernatural intervention in their lives. A lot of successful people think, ‘No. I’ve got the Mercedes. I got the Porsche. So, yes, I need God, but I don’t need any miracles in my life.’”

You see that in the movie, because my companion is a guy who grew up in a Pentecostal home where there was an anticipation of miracles. And I grew up as an atheist who didn’t believe in miracles. So as we go through the movie, we come to the topic from two completely different perspectives on miracles.

You talked about Dr. Roger E. Olson and the fact that, whether they recognize it or not, many American Evangelicals have relegated the supernatural and miraculous to the past (biblical times) or to other places (mission fields), rather than see them as ever-present possibilities in their lives. He said that when African and Asian students see Western evangelicalism for the first time, their assessment is “total dismay.”

Yes, I guess it’s along the same lines as the idea that we don’t feel like we need miracles, whereas people like that do. We’ve got hospitals. We’ve got doctors. Why do we need miracles? We have medical care. They don’t. They’re thinking, “We need miracles because if we get sick, we could die.”

My buddy, Mani Sandoval, who was in the movie with me, grew up in poverty in South Central L.A. He said, “We needed miracles to survive. We needed God’s hand in our lives just to get by.” I didn’t need that. I came from an upper middle-class upbringing. We were comfortable, so the supernatural became a backburner kind of topic for us.

Do you think the difference could also be related to what Christian Smith called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) in American Christianity—the idea that God is just a psychological helper we use to make us feel good but that he is effectively absent from us? Could our views on the miraculous stem from that?

Yes, I think that could be part of it. You see some churches that really push that therapeutic perspective, and the Bible is about helping us feel better and helping us be happier. But there’s a lot more to it than that. I think that might lead to kind of back-shelving some of these beliefs in supernatural things. I wrote a book recently called Seeing the Supernatural, where I documented a lot of supernatural things that I think are unmistakable, and I think a lot of people have the same reaction just to that.

In the film, you mention both the skeptic Michael Shermer and the Christian philosopher Doug Groothuis. Both experienced significant tragedies. Shermer’s girlfriend was paralyzed in a car accident, and Groothuis’s wife Becky suffered with aphasia for years and eventually died. Both men prayed for miracles of healing. Neither one got the miracle they prayed for, but they had completely different responses. They’re both thoughtful, smart guys. What do you think the difference there is?

I think there’s a difference between surrender and giving up. You know some people, when faced with prayers that don’t seem to be answered, surrender to God. That is to say, “God, you are supernatural; you are sovereign. You see things and know things that I don’t know. You want the best for me ultimately. And I’m going to trust you, even in the midst of not seeing an answer that I want in this situation right now.”

Other people give up—more like, “Yeah, I’m done. You didn’t come through for me. I’m not coming through for you.” It’s kind of a quid pro quo thing. That’s what happened with Michael Shermer, who’s become a friend of mine. When there was no answer to the paralysis of this wonderful young woman he had been in love with, he just sort of washed his hands of the Christian faith. Rather than surrender, he chose the giving up route. I think as we look in Scripture, we see that miracles were not automatic in the New Testament either.

Our theology tells us that God will heal all his people. The question is, “When?” I believe for many, it won’t be until heaven. When you look in the Bible, you see that Jesus didn’t do many miracles in Nazareth. We see in Matthew how the disciples are given the authority to heal, and then seven chapters later, they can’t heal an epileptic boy. We see how Paul had a buddy named Trophimus who got sick. Did Paul heal him? No, Paul went off on a missionary journey! Paul himself didn’t have his thorn in the flesh healed. So, it wasn’t automatic for him, then, either.

This struck me as something strange the other day—I thought, “What if God were to grant every prayer for immediate healing, right now, for everyone on the planet who prayed for it?” And I realized we couldn’t do science. Science is based on predictability. There’d be no predictability.

One of the other topics you talked about was that some Christians believe in the cessation of spiritual gifts and of miracles. Do you see those as separate topics?

I do. What I find is that there are a lot of people who call themselves cessationists. But when you really get into it with them, they do not deny the possibility that God continues to do miracles. They are skeptical, or don’t believe, that he continues a spiritual gift along those lines of healing or whatever. And I understand that. I can see that division, and I can see a debate on that. But I think the evidence from science, from medicine, points toward miracles that are still taking place today. I think God is still in the miracle business. Whether he continues to give a spiritual gift along those lines, that can be debated among Christians, but that’s kind of another issue.

Another thing about miracles is their apologetic value. In his Gospel, John talks about all the things Jesus did “so that [we] may believe” (John 20:31). So miracles should not only be a part of what we believe but are also an apologetic tool that God gives us for that purpose.

It’s interesting. I do not believe that miracles are distributed equally around the globe. We tend to see miracles clustering in places where the gospel is just breaking in. And often, these are places where people are illiterate. You can’t just give them a Bible. They can’t read it. And yet, they respond to the supernatural power of God. One scholar told me he believes that up to 90 percent of the growth of the church in China is based on people who have themselves been healed or who know someone who’s been supernaturally or miraculously healed.

Then we have Mozambique. It fits the four characteristics author Tim Stafford claims are shared by places where there are outbreaks of the supernatural:¹

1. Most of the people are illiterate.
2. There is no cultural framework for theological concepts like sin and salvation.
3. Medical care is limited.
4. The spirit world is very real to the people.

Candy Gunther Brown, a professor at Indiana University who earned her PhD from Harvard, did a study on prayer in remote areas of Mozambique which showed that something was going on supernaturally in response to prayer. It was then replicated in southern Brazil, another place where the gospel was just breaking in. Her study was published in the Southern Medical Journal, a leading peer-reviewed medical journal.² So, this is scientific data. It seems to suggest that something amazing is taking place. When you see that the average person who was prayed for in Mozambique had improvements of more than 50 decibels in hearing threshold and a tenfold increase in visual acuity, how else do you explain it?

Do you think it’s ironic that we claim to believe in a supernatural Christianity but that we want scientific proof for the miracles we hear about?

We do tend to be that way, you know. But many people don’t need it. My wife didn’t need it. My wife heard the gospel, and it registered in her heart. She received Christ and her life was transformed. I took two years to look at the scientific evidence for creation and fine-tuning of the universe, and so forth, and especially the evidence of the miracle of the Resurrection before I could bend my knee to Jesus.

So people are different. I think a lot of people have what I call a spiritual sticking point, an objection or a question or a doubt that holds them up in their spiritual journey. And I think a main role of apologetics is just to help people get past that sticking point so they can continue to make progress toward God.

Notes
1. This definition comes from the chapter in Lee Strobel’s book that covers this topic. Lee Strobel, The Case for Miracles (2018), Chapter 7.
2. “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Proximal Intercessory Prayer (STEPP) on Auditory and Visual Impairments in Rural Mozambique,” Southern Medical Journal (Sep. 2010).