Christianity: Between Belief and Lived Experience

"Religious history has often tended to exaggerate the question of belief  at the expense of the question
of lived social experience. Orthodox Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, maintained a belief in the hypostatic union (the doctrine that Jesus Christ was both true man and true God). Surely few ideas are more theoretical or coolly intellectual. Yet commitment to a belief in the hypostatic union had been arrived at in the early Church only at the considerable cost of bitter and sometimes bloody debates, schisms, persecutions, and the shaking of the foundation of the civil society. Nobody could say the hypostatic union was not important. Still, it is difficult to conceive that the felt experience of Old World Christians had much or anything to do with their shared 'belief' in a theological conundrum. The essence of their experience was in shared liturgy and shared sacraments, and yet more perhaps in those deeply social pleasures of shared human community that one would instinctively label 'secular' did they not happen to take place in or around a church building or at a 'religious' festival or pilgrimage."

John V. Fleming

The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, 2013, p. 141.

Miracles and Wonders, Faith and Diaspora: On Tope Folarin's Miracle

Source: humboldt-foundation.de

(Aaron Bady)--Read Tope Folarin’s “Miracle,” in its entirety here.

That “miracles” are not real is, I think, a secular assumption that many of Tope Folarin’s readers will share. Some of us might say that we believe in miracles, and we might enjoy indulging in the fantasy of divine intervention, or biblical stories that describe Jesus’ ability to turn water into wine, or a few loaves and fishes into many loaves and fishes. But to turn one thing into another thing is the provenance of medieval alchemy, and we are moderns. We might say we believe in angels, but we tend to put the lives of our loved ones in the hands of doctors, instead of prayer. We believe in science.