The Limiting of God’s Work in the West

In comparison to other societies, Americans and other North Atlantic peoples are naturalistic. Non-Western peoples are frequently concerned about the activities of supernatural beings . . . The wide-ranging supernaturalism of most of the societies of the world is absent for most of our people . . .

Our focus is squarely on the natural world, with little or no attention paid to the supernatural world…In the present day, however, Evangelicals tend to believe that God has stopped talking and doing the incredible things we read about in Scripture.

Now we see God limiting himself to working through the Bible . . . plus an occasional contemporary “interference” in the natural course of events. What we usually call a miracle—the power God used to manifest in healing—has been largely replaced by secular medicine. The speaking he used to do now comes indirectly through rationalistic reasoning in books, lectures, and sermons—similar to the process used by the secular sciences.