Just why don’t more people believe in Christian Mysticism? Yes, it’s a good question. And we must try to offer a clear reply. The purpose of this article, then, is to examine the question ‘If Christianity is true and “Christian evidences” really stack up, why don’t more people believe it?’
– CHECK IT OUT
Many people are strangers to the evidences for Christianity and are more familiar with opinions based on caricature or misunderstanding – ‘What educated person today believes in miracles?’ ‘Hasn’t science disproved Christianity?’ For many people, such objections, and others like them, are sincerely held, and we need to give them answers.
For a start, Christianity is not a religious philosophy; it is firmly grounded in history, in real events and invites enquiry. We have the utmost confidence in the biblical documents and in the truths they present. ‘Christian Evidences’ are not an ‘intellectual’ substitute for faith, but show that faith is not an unthinking leap into a mystical sort of excitement.
The goal of ‘evidences’ is to show that Christianity is based on credible, real-world events, even if some are awesome and surprising. Some of these look at the long history of God’s purpose revealed in Scripture and how it comes to a climax in Jesus’ life, his claims to deity, his death and resurrection and his miracles, that all confirm his claims. The living God of biblical revelation is fully entitled to suspend natural law and act in this world. After all, ‘natural law’ is merely a convenient label for the created framework and orderly operation of the material cosmos.
The West has mostly forgotten that it was Christianity that gave the world a valued and unique humanity (though ruined by the ‘Fall’), rational and accountable to God, and our place in an understandable universe. Now we are able to make meaningful discovery because it was the work of the all-wise and all-powerful Creator. The rise of early modern science, indeed the whole foundation of reasoned thinking, experiment and the process of empirical proof come from Christianity, recovered at the time of the Reformation.