The Miraculous and Modern Unbelief

There is no such thing as a Christian worldview that rejects the miraculous.
Daniel Kolenda (video 9 in his series on cessationism at 1:05:19)

Most Christians would agree with Kolenda until one gets specific about what counts as a miraculous event. There are two forms of Christian unbelief which sometimes act as polar opposites.

1. Unbelief in the Bible as history
   The events reported in Genesis 1-11—the Creation, the Fall, the genealogies, the Global Flood and the the Babel Dispersion—really happened. When you hear a Christian try to allegorize these events away because they are embarrassed by them, you are witnessing unbelief no matter how committed that Christian is to the miraculous gifts of the Spirit.
2. Unbelief in the ongoing miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit
   When you hear Christians argue that the gifts of the Spirit no longer occur today you are witnessing unbelief no matter how committed that Christian is to the events in Genesis 1-11. Such unbelief should not be confused with an appropriate discernment when testimonies are given: each reported claim of a miracle, whether a healing or a prophecy or whatever, must be tested. The unbelief that is a problem here is the total rejection, in advance, of all modern miraculous testimonies.

A Pentecostal or Catholic Charismatic can not get by with mere belief in the continuation of the miraculous gifts without also accepting Genesis 1-11 as history that really happened. A Reformed Protestant can not get by with mere belief in Genesis 1-11 without also believing in Acts and Paul’s presentation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in his letters as ongoing today.

They go together. They are both biblical. Reject any of this and the Christian who does so undermines belief for himself and for others in the New Testament.

The rejection of the miraculous, either as unbelief in Biblical history or as unbelief in the ongoing miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit, is grounded in an atheistic worldview that gullibly trusts in its own rationalized construction of the so-called natural world. Modern unbelief pits a depersonalized and dying natural world against a wondrous reality given to us through its miraculous Creation.

One way to counter this is to reject the construct of the natural world except as a convenient, useful fiction, a crude approximation to reality that allows one to build deterministic, human technology. That is its only value. Then we can look at reality with continual childlike wonder. It really is all miraculous. It is all wonderful.

At the same time we need to be wary of the serpent, that lover of death and deception, even though, thanks to the Resurrection of Jesus, it has been defeated. There are liars still desiring to manipulate or fool others as Ananias and Saphira tried to do. One of the wonderful, miraculous gifts of the Spirit that is still with us today is our ability to discern the truth as Peter did long ago should we allow the Holy Spirit to lead us.