Christmas and Competing Worldviews
(MCCC)
Charles Kraft is an anthropologist who taught at Michigan State University and now teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. Years ago Kraft wrote a book called Christianity With Power: Your Worldview and Your Experience of the Supernatural. Kraft’s book, which I read in 1989, influenced me a lot. Here’s how.
While believing in God, my life experiences in church settings rarely exposed me to supernatural activity. Most of the things I saw in church could be attributed to human expertise and human fallibility. The church as I saw it was, largely, human, all too human. Yet when I read the Christian Scriptures I was exposed to realities that could not be attributed to mere human abilities. Did the things I read, e.g., in the New Testament, actually happen? Did they still happen today? If they happened in the past, why aren’t they happening now? And if they happen now, why aren’t I seeing them?
My academic training did not prepare me for the supernatural. My dad was an engineer, and when I entered college I declared metallurgical engineering to be my major. When I chose to follow Jesus at age 21, I changed my major to philosophy because, to me, that’s where the big questions of life were being asked and talked about. My studies were in areas of empirical and analytic philosophy, not exactly areas affirming of supernatural things. I was trained in being a reductionist, which means I learned how to reduce any candidates for miracles to the language of sense experience. In other words, I thought that if you can’t see it, smell it, touch it, taste it, or hear it, then it can’t be real.
Charles Kraft thought the same way I did. Until he began to encounter things that could not be explained within the narrow worldview of empiricism. Kraft actually saw some people he knew healed, which challenged his naturalistic worldview. He writes of these things in his book, and brilliantly explains the notion of “worldview” and the explanatory power of worldviews.
I was fascinated as I read Kraft on all of this, and found that some of my experiences paralleled his. Now, almost 20 years later, I can say that I have seen many miraculous things like, e.g., people being healed of diseases, that I easily conclude my naturalistic worldview was wrong.
This makes all the difference for me as I approach Christmas. I now believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, omnitemporal being called God. I believe this omni-God came to earth in human form to communicate his love for us. To me, among the world’s religions, this remains the most sensible idea; viz., that instead of humans trying to figure out God, God has reached down to us.
I have a very high expectation level in these days in terms of God-with-us (also called “Emmanuel”). God is with us. God is with you. You were made by God and for God. God loves you. Embrace him. And discover that your existence and experience need not be any longer confined to a narrow empiricist worldview.
[One more philosophical thing. It simply cannot logically be true that the only things that are true are things you can see, smell, taste, touch, or hear. Here's why. Consider this statement: The only things that are true are things that you can see, smell, taste, touch and hear. Now, is that statement true? You can't see, smell, taste, touch, or hear the truth of that statement? Therefore it cannot be true, logically, because it's self-refuting. This kind of narrow empiricism, called Logical Positivism, was refuted early in the 20th century.]