ACT-02 Structure and Content

Can supernatural events happen in real history?

Student: Dr. Bayer, is there anything intrinsic to the idea of history that by necessity precludes the supernatural? If you admit one, are you discounting the other?

Dr. Bayer: That’s an important question to understand history as a very important access to truth. The understanding since the Enlightenment is that history and the miraculous are mutually exclusive. There is a postulate in the light of the autonomy of reason that history must always reason function within an eminent cause and effect continuum. And so, if there is some claim of a transcendent activity or causation, it must be discarded as not historical. But what that actually shows is that that is a particular philosophy of history that contradicts the philosophy of history that we derive from Scripture which says that this universe is broader than a rationalistic framework in which the causation can very much lie with God who has the authority and ability to intrude, if you want to see it that way, or reach into our time-space continuum. And if you have that kind of a philosophy of history, the miraculous as the cause, or the effect of some phenomenon that we can analyze and demonstrate or perceive with our senses is well within the confines of that understanding of history, and that is why Scripture speaks of salvation history or implies the understanding of salvation in history and through history.

Student: Dr. Bayer, if I could interject, as you’re talking about miracles and their historical reality, it makes me wonder how somebody standing outside the Christian faith might view our understanding of miracles. I think in terms of the way that we think about other religions or ancient mythology like Greco-Roman mythology, or we think about the claims of religions that we have considered to be false religions, and rightly so, I think. We look at the supernatural claims of those religions and we discount them in the same way that unbelievers look at the supernatural claims of our religion and discount our claims. How do we as Christians process all that in our minds and respond appropriately to it?