Excellent text. To mature in faith and set aside certain errors, we sometimes need to sincerely question what we believe, no matter how frightening that may be. Now, regarding the example comparing Muhammad and the resurrected Jesus: I don't believe that for Christianity to be true, all other religious experiences must necessarily be false (the Islamic prophet may have received a vision from a fallen angel; or he might have been delusional). However, Christianity has vast and well-documented accounts of miracles that - until proven otherwise - no other religion possesses. Father Oscar Quevedo has some very interesting studies on this matter.
Thanks for your comment, Gabriel! First, I think that is an absolutely fair point regarding non-Christian religious experiences; in fact, I would go a step further: As intelligence is intelligence everywhere, and as intelligence is a participation in the eternal light of the Logos, and g8ven that God desires that all human beings be saved, I would not be surprised if plenty of non-Christians have religious experiences in the mode proper to them. All of that being said—and second—I am highly skeptical of miracle claims: we find lots of such claims by Christians through the centuries, and I've heard (second-hand) reports of such things from people I consider sober-minded; but, as in Medieval Europe, there was stuff going on—such as the consumption of henbane and other herbs with psychoactive properties—that could plausibly explain, e.g., wondrous visions and people apparently flying. Ultimately, I am the only one who can come to a judgment about all that for me, and I can only judge in light of the data I have and what strikes me as the best interpretations of that data available to me—which includes the reliability of different witnesses, authority, etc.; the more I go on, the less reliable I find committed religious witnesses to purported miracles that they or their fellow believers have experienced: their prejudgments and the total hermeneutic framework they occupy already conditions them to understand things as miracles that might not actually be such.
I understand your point, but if a miracle constitutes a divine intervention intended to confirm revealed truth, it can logically only occur within a religious context. Were God to intervene miraculously while I'm sitting at a bar with friends, we wouldn't comprehend the message. However, individuals aren't always receptive to such intervention: I personally met a man who was healed of a brain tumor during a Catholic Charismatic gathering. At the time, he was agnostic and attended only at his mother's insistence. After the healing prayer, medical scans days later showed the tumor had completely disappeared. When I met him, he had become a missionary. While we don't fully understand all of nature's operations, we do recognize its limitations - hence the rational basis for believing in miracles.
Oh sure: whatever is meaningful for us is meaningful within a particular context and interpreted within a particular framework; if one does not have or inhabit that context, and one does not have or understand through that framework, then it won't be meaningful to him; and grace builds on and works with nature—as it must if it is to be meaningful and recognized as such. A question, though, is: how does one verify that this or that is _in fact_ a miracle and NOT simply a natural, mundane (if rare or misunderstood) occurrence? And can one reasonably trust the witness or interpretive work of those who _want_ there to be such miracles, even *need* miracles to occur to validate the direction of their own trust?
Excellent text. To mature in faith and set aside certain errors, we sometimes need to sincerely question what we believe, no matter how frightening that may be. Now, regarding the example comparing Muhammad and the resurrected Jesus: I don't believe that for Christianity to be true, all other religious experiences must necessarily be false (the Islamic prophet may have received a vision from a fallen angel; or he might have been delusional). However, Christianity has vast and well-documented accounts of miracles that - until proven otherwise - no other religion possesses. Father Oscar Quevedo has some very interesting studies on this matter.
Thanks for your comment, Gabriel! First, I think that is an absolutely fair point regarding non-Christian religious experiences; in fact, I would go a step further: As intelligence is intelligence everywhere, and as intelligence is a participation in the eternal light of the Logos, and g8ven that God desires that all human beings be saved, I would not be surprised if plenty of non-Christians have religious experiences in the mode proper to them. All of that being said—and second—I am highly skeptical of miracle claims: we find lots of such claims by Christians through the centuries, and I've heard (second-hand) reports of such things from people I consider sober-minded; but, as in Medieval Europe, there was stuff going on—such as the consumption of henbane and other herbs with psychoactive properties—that could plausibly explain, e.g., wondrous visions and people apparently flying. Ultimately, I am the only one who can come to a judgment about all that for me, and I can only judge in light of the data I have and what strikes me as the best interpretations of that data available to me—which includes the reliability of different witnesses, authority, etc.; the more I go on, the less reliable I find committed religious witnesses to purported miracles that they or their fellow believers have experienced: their prejudgments and the total hermeneutic framework they occupy already conditions them to understand things as miracles that might not actually be such.
I understand your point, but if a miracle constitutes a divine intervention intended to confirm revealed truth, it can logically only occur within a religious context. Were God to intervene miraculously while I'm sitting at a bar with friends, we wouldn't comprehend the message. However, individuals aren't always receptive to such intervention: I personally met a man who was healed of a brain tumor during a Catholic Charismatic gathering. At the time, he was agnostic and attended only at his mother's insistence. After the healing prayer, medical scans days later showed the tumor had completely disappeared. When I met him, he had become a missionary. While we don't fully understand all of nature's operations, we do recognize its limitations - hence the rational basis for believing in miracles.
Oh sure: whatever is meaningful for us is meaningful within a particular context and interpreted within a particular framework; if one does not have or inhabit that context, and one does not have or understand through that framework, then it won't be meaningful to him; and grace builds on and works with nature—as it must if it is to be meaningful and recognized as such. A question, though, is: how does one verify that this or that is _in fact_ a miracle and NOT simply a natural, mundane (if rare or misunderstood) occurrence? And can one reasonably trust the witness or interpretive work of those who _want_ there to be such miracles, even *need* miracles to occur to validate the direction of their own trust?