If without miracles the world was turned to Christianity, that is

So great a miracle that all the rest are not its hundredth part…

-Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXIV

Have you believed because you have seen me?

Blessed are those who have not seen yet have come to believe.

Jesus, John 20: 29

Consider for a moment the foundations of faith. Do we believe because of what God has done or can do for us? Do we cling to some variation of the gospel of prosperity? Are we attending church, living seemingly “Christian” lives because we expect something from God? It occurs to me that this is the approach vector of a great many people to their relationship with God. It resonates through much of our “religious” culture: “live a Godly life and God will bless you.” The problem with this approach is that it falls apart when life’s catastrophes strike. When a marriage disintegrates, when a disease is diagnosed, when a child dies too young, when the horror of life becomes too great a fair weather God won’t cut the mustard. When our religion tells us that suffering is the consequence of sin and we don’t know the difference between a consequence and a punishment.

Jesus performed miracles as an accommodation of human unbelief. The miracles themselves were not intended to be the object of our faith. Jesus was intended to be the object of our faith. The minds of honest churchgoing folk are too often turned to contemplation of miracles to bolster the faith that should be placed only in Christ. Stories of prosperity and success litter the life of the church. These stories are inspirational, they are encouraging but they can be twisted to serve the purposes of the enemy because faith that is built on them can too easily be flummoxed by the lack of such occurrences. If you base your entire faith on the experience of say, the experience of healing, then in circumstances where healing is not God’s will you will end up denying the power of God. The power and sovereignty of God is not only illustrated in the form of blessings, but also in the form of suffering, which He understands because of the suffering of Christ.

I was reading a published installation address by one of my seminary professors, Susan Nelson. The paper, Deliver Us From Evil: Through the Eyes of Marian Kolodziej, specifically examines the experience of a holocaust survivor and the artwork that was produced from his memories of the Auschwitz death camp. The evil of the Nazi madness is one of the prime examples that Dr. Nelson uses to illustrate profound evil; it’s difficult to argue with the example. Her work reminded me of something that I often forget in the day to day shuffle of life in the church: very few of us experience such profound evil. For most of us evil is cancer, or car accidents or troubled relationships, decidedly unpleasant experiences no doubt but ultimately they cannot kill the soul. Evil in the form of victimization so brutal that it can destroy faith can only be confronted by what Van Morrison calls a “Rough God.”