Theology and Religion

Eben Alexander and the face of near-death experiences

For most of his life and career, Eben Alexander was skeptical about any world there might exist beyond the reach of a materialist science. His professional credentials are outstanding. He graduated from Duke University Medical School, trained at Massachusetts General Hospital, completed a fellowship in cerebrovascular neurosurgery in England, and spent fifteen years on the faculty of Harvard Medical School before returning south to Virginia with his wife and two sons. Alexander helped develop and refine leading-edge surgical procedures, including stereotactic radio surgery (surgery using radiation beams) and MRI-guided neurosurgery. He has contributed to more than 150 scientific publications and made presentations at more than 200 medical conferences around the world.[1]

This was a man confident in his knowledge. And one of the things he knew for many years was that stories of near-death experiences were nothing but fantasy. When the brain stops working during a medical emergency or as death approaches, consciousness stops. With no brain function to process thoughts or remember them, there could be no near-death experience (NDE). As Alexander put it, “Pull the plug and the TV goes dead.”[2]

A quick survey of the medical literature confirms that Alexander’s colleagues agreed with him. The consensus was that near-death experiences have normal, organic explanations. A 2011 paper in Trends in Cognitive Science gives away its viewpoint in the title: “There is nothing paranormal about near-death experiences: how neuroscience can explain seeing bright lights, meeting the dead, or being convinced you are one of them” (yes, that’s the title). Noting that three percent of Americans claim to have had a near-death experience, the authors conclude, “Taken together, the scientific evidence suggests that all aspects of the near-death experience have a neurophysiological or psychological basis.”[3] [Read more…] about The Faces of Miracles — Chapter 4

Thurman Scrivner and the face of Bible extremism

Miracles are God’s reward for faithful, sinless living. If you have faith and turn from your sins, you’ll have miracles in your life. If you don’t, you won’t. Simple as that, according to preacher and healer Thurman Scrivner.

“Faith is what makes miraculous healing work,” Scrivner explains with quiet conviction. “If you’ve been praying and believing for more than two years and you haven’t gotten your answer yet, then you need to go ask God what’s wrong in your life. Because there’s some kind of a sin that’s blocking his miracle for you.”[1]

Many would argue that there’s no way to predict who will receive a miracle and who will ask in vain. The decision is God’s alone and God’s plans and reasons are beyond our ability to understand. Thurman Scrivner disagrees. He has no doubt that the Bible teaches us exactly what to do in order to bring a miracle into our lives. If we do it, we’ll receive that miracle without fail.

Scrivner says that miracles are a matter of faith, not of need. “If you don’t believe, you’re not going to get anything from a faith God,” he says. Faith, not need, moves God’s hand. “If need moved his hand, he would be following along behind the devil all the time trying mop up what the devil’s done. But God doesn’t follow along behind nothing or nobody.”

As founder and director of The Living Savior Ministries, Scrivner holds healing services around the country. He also teaches a monthly healing school and preaches weekly at his church near Dallas. Far from the image of the polished TV personality shouting to packed auditoriums about miracles and money, Thurman Scrivner is an unassuming grandfatherly type with silver hair combed straight back and a preference for dark shirts and light neckties. He has a folksy delivery that complements his soft Southern accent and a tendency to go his own way when it comes to grammar. Though he doesn’t get wound up in the pulpit like his more famous contemporaries, his quiet intensity and confidence in his interpretation of the Bible are unshakable. [Read more…] about The Faces of Miracles — Chapter 3

Benny Hinn and the face of high-octane faith healers

Love him or leave him, you’re likely to have heard of Benny Hinn. Benny’s TV program, This is Your Day, is syndicated in 200 countries around the world according to the ministry’s website, which is more countries than there actually are in the world (the U.S. Department of State counts 195). At the time of this writing, upcoming healing events are scheduled in Nigeria, Ghana, Brazil, Ukraine, and the United States. Hinn claims to have preached to more than 1.5 billion people around the world. An event in Kenya attracted a crowd of 1.2 million. A service in Mumbai, India, drew more than 2 million. A three-day event in Bangalore hosted a total of 7.4 million.[1]

To his devoted followers, Benny has been ordained by God to heal in God’s name. Benny affirms that God has healed untold thousands through him, curing every disease imaginable — arthritis, depression, blindness, AIDS, cancer, heart conditions, and infections head a long list of maladies. He claims no power of his own, but says he has a special gift that makes him an instrument of God’s miraculous abilities.

Benny Hinn believes that his ministry fulfills Jesus’s promises in the Bible. As he explains, “Deliverance from sickness is provided for in the atonement [Christ’s reconciling death on the cross] and is the privilege of all believers.”[2] He quotes Matthew 8:16-17: “That evening they brought to him [Jesus] many who were oppressed by demons, and he cast out the spirits with a word and healed all who were sick. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet Isaiah: ‘He took our illnesses and bore our diseases.’”

Benny has numerous followers around the world who believe in his ministry and support him generously with their financial giving. (Though as a nonprofit his ministry income is unreported, estimates run as high as $200 million per year.[3]) On the other side are detractors who dismiss Hinn’s ministry as a sham, his healing claims as bogus, and his motivation as nothing more than maintaining the flood of contributions that supports his luxurious lifestyle. [Read more…] about Faces of Miracles — Chapter 2

Christopher Gunderson and the face of documented medical miracles

This year tens of thousands of people across America will claim they were miraculously healed. In many cases, somebody will be standing close by to take the credit. As an energized and expectant crowd looks on, the sick will rise out of their wheelchairs and walk across the stage, testify that their pain has disappeared, their sight or hearing is restored, their headaches are stopped, their arthritis, asthma, depression, or insomnia cured in an instant. Faith healers will broadcast their miraculous results as proof that God is working through them and they therefore deserve not only everybody’s prayers and support but also their financial contributions.

The same thing happened last year and it will happen again next year. Since the time of Aimee Semple McPherson in the 1920s, eager crowds have flocked to healing services where confident healers promise them that they can be restored to health. And for just as long, critics have questioned whether people who attend these services and seem to be healed have actually experienced a miraculous cure.

High-profile healings under the TV lights are often for medical problems that eventually resolve themselves anyway: for conditions like arthritis or asthma that are cyclical and naturally improve from time to time; stomach trouble or headaches that often have a psychological component; or chronic pain that can be subjective and alleviated temporarily by placebos.

Even if some of these healings are miraculous, it’s far more likely that the overwhelming majority happened without special supernatural intervention, instead boosted by the power of suggestion and the excitement of the moment. Faith healers can rarely point to cases of healing where the medical evidence is startling, inexplicable, and incontrovertible. They never seem to cure broken bones or gall stones, or do away with documented organic sickness.

Except when they do.

Rarely, a case emerges that can’t be even remotely explained by medical science or any logical, natural means. Something happens that seems completely unexplainable according to physical law, and where a divine or supernatural hand seems impossible to discount. That is a miracle. And that is the story of Christopher Gunderson. [Read more…] about The Faces of Miracles — Chapter 1

Note from author: The Bible’s teaching on hell often gets twisted so that many people dismiss both hell and the Judeo-Christian faith. Indeed, it’s common to see Christian college students struggle with the doctrine of hell almost as soon as they begin college and are confronted with non-Christian worldviews. Fundamentalism is often the problem here, promoting a doctrine of hell so extreme that no one deep down can believe it. This is not to say hell doesn’t exist. It does. But hell is also grossly abused by religious people intent on asserting religious control. Overhyped views of hell bring unnecessary scorn and embarrassment on Christianity.

 

1 Consigning People to Heaven and Hell

Actress Jessica Alba, in a 2015 Vanity Fair article, describes the loss of her faith at age seventeen when she “fell crazy in love with a cross-dressing ballet dancer who had a baby and was bisexual. I was like, ‘There’s just no way he’s going to hell!’” Alba, it seems, reasoned that Christianity consigns a lot of good people to hell, so Christianity must be false.

To Alba’s rejection of Christianity, the conventional Christian response is, “No one is really good. We’ve all sinned. It’s only by God’s grace that we can be saved. Given our present sinful state, hell is our natural destination. It doesn’t matter whether the cross-dressing ballet dancer is a really sweet guy. Without faith in Christ, he and all others are on their way to hell.”

Was Alba familiar with this explanation of hell? Growing up as a “devout born-again Christian,” she surely was. Did she previously accept this explanation? Probably so, since her cross-dressing friend confronted her with an impossible choice: either reject Christianity or think that her friend was on his way to hell?

But what does it even mean to say “someone is going to hell”? For years I’ve watched Christians and non-Christians discuss the topic of hell, and the one lesson I’ve drawn is that we are tempted to think we know far more about people’s ultimate destinies than we actually do, and that includes confidently consigning people to hell, heaven, or none of the above. [Read more…] about The Paradoxes of Hell

My friend Granville Sewell published Christianity for Doubters in 2016. It remains available with Amazon here.

Granville’s publisher, Wipf and Stock, is now permitting him to make the book available online for download on his website:

www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/articles/doubt.html