by Lee Strobel
But I was wrestling with how much I should tell about the rest of my story. For example, should I mention the influential dream that I described in the chapter on dreams and visions, in which an angel appeared to me when I was a youngster and gave me a prophecy that came true sixteen years later? How would they react if I described something supernatural like that, a seemingly bizarre event that went beyond normal reason and evidence?
Of course, everyone in the room believed in a miracle-working God. Each one of them would affirm that God is sovereign and can intervene at any time to make his presence known and achieve his purposes.
Still, would they think less of me if I began chattering about dreams and angels and personal prophecies? Would that be a step too far? Would mouths fall open if I made the claim that my dream was an actual encounter with a messenger from the Almighty? Where is the line between sheer irrationality and a reasonable belief that God has intervened miraculously in my life?
In the end, I did tell them about the dream with the angel—and they weren’t shocked or disturbed by it. My ordination was conferred without controversy. Nevertheless, I have always remembered the discomfort I felt in deciding whether to share that part of my story. In fact, to this day I almost never refer to the dream in public settings.
That’s why my interest was piqued by a theologian’s blog post titled “Embarrassed by the Supernatural.” Without even reading it, I could relate to the sense that in twenty-first-century America, even Christians like myself often hesitate to talk openly about divine interventions in our lives.
We don’t want to be seen as being weird or outside the mainstream. We don’t want to be lumped with televangelists and flamboyant faith healers. We want to be respectable and accepted by people in our secular culture. The result? In our churches and even in our prayers, sometimes we subconsciously hold back from fully embracing the God who still performs the miraculous.
I noticed that the author of the blog was a professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, just a few hours from my home. A phone call yielded an appointment, and in quick order I was once again hitting the road.
The Interview with Roger E. Olson, PhD
Roger E. Olson grew up in the strict but loving home of a Pentecostal pastor, where there was no television, no movies, and no dancing. He enjoyed going to church services (“They were never boring”), and he even toted his Bible to class when he was in high school. “The kids would laugh at me, but that didn’t matter,” he said. “My friends weren’t at school; they were at church.”
While earning his master’s degree at Rice University in Houston, where he later received his doctorate in religious studies, Olson shifted to a more mainline church culture, serving as a youth minister at a Presbyterian church.
Today, Olson is the Foy Valentine Professor of Christian Theology of Ethics at George W. Truett Theological Seminary of Baylor University. He describes himself as being “passionately evangelical,” which he defines with a smile as “a God-fearing, Bible-believing, Jesus-loving Christian.”
In scholarly circles, he’s known as an ardent Arminian1 who spars frequently (and effectively) with Calvinists over their theological distinctives; in fact, one of his books, Against Calvinism, is paired with the counterpoint For Calvinism by Reformed theologian Michael Horton.
However, Olson doesn’t fit neatly on the conservative-liberal theological spectrum. I like to call him “theologically feisty,” since he has authored such books as How to Be Evangelical without Being Conservative, Reclaiming Pietism, Reformed and Always Reforming, and Counterfeit Christianity.
His scholarly works, several of which have won significant awards, include 20th-Century Theology (coauthored with the late Stanley J. Grenz), The Story of Christian Theology, The Westminster Handbook to Evangelical Theology, Arminian Theology: Myths and Realities, The Essentials of Christian Thought, and The Mosaic of Christian Belief.
On a popular level, Olson has long been a contributing editor for Christianity Today, and he authors a popular Patheos blog on his “evangelical Arminian theological musings,” where he weaves thoughtful and sometimes quite personal observations about faith and life.
Olson and I met in the hotel where I was staying in Waco, a city of 135,000 along the Brazos River halfway between Dallas and Austin. Waco (named for an Indian tribe) is a vibrant university community that’s still trying to live down its reputation for the “Waco siege,” in which seventy-four members of the Branch Davidian cult perished in a fire after a fifty-day standoff with federal agents in 1993.
The bespectacled Olson is short (five foot four), an enthusiastic jogger (four days a week) and a weight lifter. He wears his salt-and-pepper hair combed back and sports a trim mustache that’s also graying.
Coincidentally, we were born just a few days apart in 1952. He and Becky, married for almost forty-five years, have two daughters, a grandson, and a granddaughter. Olson is active in Calvary Baptist Church, a congregation of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
I was drawn to the fact that Olson has experience in different Christian circles that have varying degrees of openness to God’s supernatural activity in today’s world. He was a Pentecostal until the age of twenty-five, even teaching for a while at Oral Roberts University. His brief foray into a Presbyterian church gave him a mainline perspective. Later he became a Baptist, serving on the faculty of the mainstream evangelical Bethel College (now Bethel University) in Minnesota, before joining Baylor in 1999.
I figured he would be a good source of wisdom from a variety of relevant perspectives—and I wasn’t disappointed.
“As If God Were Not Here”
More than thirty years ago, two respected Christian thinkers—Stanley Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at the Duke University Divinity School, and William H. Willimon, professor of Christian ministry at Duke—wrote a bracing indictment of mainline Protestant churches in America.
The title of the piece in the Christian Century was convicting enough: “Embarrassed by God’s Presence.”2 After nearly three pages of largely gentlemanly prose, they were blunt in their bottom-line assessment: “The central problem for our church, its theology, and its ethics is that it is simply atheistic.”3
Yes, you read that quote correctly. They were accusing mainline churches of conducting their business as if God didn’t really matter. “We endow pensions for our clergy and devise strategies for church growth,” they wrote, “as if God were not here.”4
How does this godless presupposition affect the church? “Our Sunday worship is immoral and indifferent (if not rather silly) unless we really believe that God is present in our gathering and in the world, and that our listening to the story, our service to others and our breaking of bread are dangerous attempts to let God be God.”5
I referenced the article to Olson as he settled into a green couch. “Granted, they were being hyperbolic to make a point,” he said. “But the grain of truth in their argument helped raise awareness of the prevailing secularity of modern Western Christianity. I’ve seen it in some of the churches where I’ve been active through the years.”
“In what way?”
“Years ago, I noticed that churches were tending not to think biblically or theologically about the way they ran their operations. Decisions seemed secular to me, as if they were being made in the boardroom of a corporation. They’d ask, ‘Will this fit into our budget?’ regardless of any faith that more funding could come in. They wanted predictability. And fear of lawsuits meant lawyers were gaining more and more say-so in churches and Christian organizations.”
“You’d agree with Hauerwas and Willimon, then?”
“In essence, yes, though I might not put it as strongly. The situation varies from one denomination to another, but I agree that American religion in general has become secularized. That is, a lot of churches don’t really believe that God intervenes or guides, except through what we might call human wisdom and reason.”
I pointed out that American evan
gelicals like to pride themselves on resisting the secularism of our culture—but Olson wasn’t buying it.
“My point is that American evangelical Christianity has accommodated to modernity’s rationalism and naturalism,” he said. “The truth is, they don’t really expect God to do anything except in their interior spiritual lives. They pay lip service to the supernatural, whereas the Bible itself is saturated with it.”
“Can you give me an example?” I asked.
“We still hold on to the idea that God can change people, but mostly we mean God will help them turn over a new leaf rather than a radical transformation. When that kind of radical rebirth does happen, we go, ‘Wow! We didn’t really know that could still occur! I wish it would happen more often.’ But then we sink back into not really expecting it to occur again. After all, we don’t want to get too fanatical.
“You see,” he continued, “there’s a certain unpredictability with the Holy Spirit, and we mainstream evangelicals have come to love predictability. We don’t want any big surprises. We don’t want to open the door to something that will really shock us, because we can’t control it.”
“And we’re a bit afraid of it?”
“We are, absolutely. Many evangelicals are not convinced in the depth of their soul that God is still supernaturally active. They don’t make room for that kind of activity in their church or in their life.”
“Still,” I said, “balance is important.”
“True. I’ve been in churches where the opposite attitude prevailed and people thought miracles were an everyday occurrence. Everything became a miracle. That’s another danger too; it takes away the specialness. To me, the book of Acts is the best guide.”
I mentally scrolled through Acts, which unfolds the story of the early church. The apostles seemed to go around expecting that when Jesus and his resurrection were proclaimed, something supernatural might very well occur. But that’s not true today, Olson said.
“All we expect to happen these days when we proclaim Jesus and the resurrection is that people will nicely nod and say, ‘Oh, we agree with that.’ Then they go home and live as if that’s not really true, because they don’t expect miracles to happen anymore. They don’t expect God to do things that are inexplicable. It would make their life unpredictable.”
“That’s a sad perspective for a Christian,” I said.
“It should be, yes. But I think a lot of people are happier living with predictability than really expecting that God will do unusual things in their lives. They hear of supernatural activity and miracles happening in Africa, and they say, ‘Well, praise God,’ but the unsaid part is, I’m really glad it doesn’t happen here. That would be scary. That would be threatening.”
“Why Are We Whispering?”
Olson’s point was clear: whether they recognize it or not, many American evangelicals have relegated the supernatural and miraculous to the past (biblical times) and elsewhere (mission fields) rather than seeing them as an ever-present possibility in their lives.
“This is obvious from the way we react when someone gets sick,” he said. “Of course, we pray for them, but what do we ask? That God would comfort them in the midst of their suffering. That God would guide the hands of surgeons. That God would give doctors wisdom and discernment. What’s missing?”
“Asking God to supernaturally heal them.”
“Precisely,” he replied. “The Bible says to pray for their healing, lay hands on them, and anoint them with oil, but mainstream evangelicals tend to look down their noses at churches that do that. They suspect those churches are cultic or discourage ill people to seek medical treatment. What’s more, they avoid any mention of demons, and they shun exorcism as primitive and superstitious—unless Jesus did it.”
Olson’s remarks prompted me to think back to 2012, when Leslie found me unconscious on our bedroom floor. I was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where a doctor told me after I awoke, “You’re one step away from a coma, two steps away from dying.”
I was suffering from severe hyponatremia, a precipitous decrease in blood sodium, which was causing my brain cells to absorb water and expand within the restricted confines of my skull. The prognosis if untreated: mental confusion, hallucinations, seizures, coma, and death.
While I underwent urgent treatment for several days, a succession of friends came by to pray for me. Many of them did exactly as Olson said: they prayed for wisdom for the physicians and for my strength—both of which I greatly appreciated—but very few came out and asked God, in a direct, bold, and straightforward way, to supernaturally heal me.6
Continued Olson, “A lot of mainstream evangelicals have bought into the notion that ‘prayer doesn’t change things; it changes me.’ They don’t realize it, but they’re adopting the teachings of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern theological liberalism, who denigrated petitionary prayer as something that children do because they don’t know any better.”
Olson mentioned an encounter he had with a Baptist pastor and his wife, who is a medical doctor.
“I was telling them about my own physical healing, even though I’m often reluctant to share that story even with evangelicals because they look skeptical when I do it. Then the pastor lowered his voice and said quietly, ‘You know, my daughter was very sick, and I anointed her with oil and prayed fervently for her and she was healed—it was absolutely supernatural.’ And I thought, Why are we whispering?”
I chuckled. “Seems like he should be shouting about this.”
“Well,” said Olson, “that illustrates the problem. Then he conceded to me that his church probably wouldn’t respond favorably to his story.”
“We Are Desperate to Fit In”
I asked Olson if there’s one word that could summarize why a lot of evangelical Christians seem embarrassed by the supernatural. He gave it some thought and then said, “Respectability.”
“Why that word?” I asked.
“Evangelicals in general are trying to live down our past,” he replied. “We’re very aware of Hollywood’s version of us—the oddball preacher, the phony faith healer, the hyperemotional revivalist, the money-grubbing hypocrite. We want to run from those depictions. We want our neighbors to see us as normal people who are not very different from them. We are desperate to fit in.”
“So,” I said, “we divorce ourselves from the supernatural, since it seems odd to the world.”
“That’s right. We want to show that we’re cultured and refined, that we’re not gullible or superstitious, that we’re not like the over-the-top fanatics that our neighbors see on television. In fact,” he added, “my experience is that the richer and more educated evangelicals become, the less likely they are to really expect miracles to happen.”
“Why is that? Too sophisticated?”
“I could almost predict by the brand of cars in the parking lot what the church believes. The more prosperous and educated we are, the more likely we are to substitute our own cleverness and accomplishments for the power of prayer. That’s the seductive power of prosperity—it makes us less reliant on God. We think we’ve got everything under control.”
Then he added an observation that resonated deeply: “Many evangelicals don’t really believe in the supernatural until the doctor says, ‘You have a terminal illness.’”
I could remember lying in my hospital bed, told that I could be facing death, and suddenly feeling desperately vulnerable and much more dependent on God to rescue me. No question about it—times like that strip away our self-sufficiency and leave us frantic for God’s direct supernatural touch.
“Before a moment like that occurs,” Olson continued, “many people don’t make room in their life for God to do anything supernatural. Oh, sure, they believe in God; they love Jesus. But he’s an image much more than a living reality.”
Olson’s observations spurred me to reflect once more on the national poll that I commissioned for this book. Sure enough, the data shows that the greater a person�
��s education and income, the less likely they believe that God has supernaturally intervened in their life.
Asked if they ever had an experience only explainable as a miracle of God, 41 percent of those with a high school education said yes, compared with 29 percent of college graduates. More than 43 percent of people earning less than fifty thousand dollars a year said they’ve had such an experience, compared with 29 percent of those with incomes of a hundred thousand dollars or more.
“The richer we get, the more education we attain, the less comfortable we are with the miraculous,” Olson said. “We don’t feel we need it, really. We’re getting along just fine. After all, we’re successful.”
Trickle-Down Theology
Ever the historian of theology, Olson has a theory about how the evangelical subculture has become more secularized and less open to the supernatural. “I call it the trickle-down theory of theology,” he said. “In other words, we’re influenced by thinkers in the past who we’ve never even heard of.”
“Do you mean people like Schleiermacher, who you mentioned earlier?”
“Yes, he’s the father of liberal theology who died in 1834. He was to Christianity what Copernicus was to astronomy, Newton was to physics, Freud was to psychology, and Darwin was to biology. By that I mean he was the trailblazer, the one thinker who subsequent theologians cannot ignore.”
Olson went on. “He and Baruch Spinoza were instrumental in the growth of methodological naturalism, which says the proper way to conduct any serious inquiry is to focus on naturalistic explanations to account for a phenomenon, thereby excluding miracles.”
“This is the typical worldview of science,” I observed.
“Correct, it flourishes in the scientific academy. But Schleiermacher then introduced a naturalistic view of the whole world into the stream of Protestant theology. He said that to believe in miracles is to question God, because it’s implying that God didn’t know what he was doing when he set up the world as a closed system.”