Into the unknown

The late Michael Heiser, author of The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible, opened the eyes of Christians, particularly evangelicals, to the cosmic struggle that rages behind the Biblical narrative. By collecting, synthesizing, and originally interpreting the scholarly work of theologians, linguists, and textual critics, Heiser reconstructed for modern Christians the two-tiered paradigm held by Jews at the time of Jesus, helping believers put aside their (mostly unconscious) enlightenment prejudices and take seriously Scriptural claims concerning spiritual activity in the Bible.

While Heiser’s work teems with implications for believers living today, his focus remained on clarifying and defending those parts of the Bible modern critics find hard to accept or understand. Not so Lee Strobel, whose goal in his latest book is to ask tough questions about the role, and the reality, of the supernatural in the modern world.

Strobel, a former investigative journalist for the Chicago Tribune, is the bestselling author of The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith, and The Case for a Creator. Though Strobel is as exacting in his research as Heiser, his preferred method of tracking down the truth about his chosen topic is to interview experts in the field. This method has made all his “Case” books as challenging to ponder as they are entertaining to read. Seeing the Supernatural: Investigating Angels, Demons, Mystical Dreams, Near-Death Encounters, and Other Mysteries of the Unseen World (Zondervan, 320 pp.) is no exception to that rule. It is as breezy as it is convicting, a bracing journey into the unknown.

In the introduction, Strobel asks the overarching question that guides the book: “Is it truly possible in our scientific and technological age to be a rational person and still have faith in the existence of a realm we can’t see, touch, or analyze in a test tube?” Strobel answers with a definite yes, a yes that relies not only on faith in the Bible but on hard, objective, quantifiable evidence that shatters modern presuppositions against the supernatural.

Strobel begins by arguing that we possess a unique human consciousness that is immaterial, a mind distinct from our physical brain, and a will that makes moral agency possible. “If we’re dealing with a closed system of nonconscious neurons,” explains Sharon Dirckx, senior tutor at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics, “how did these come to generate conscious minds?... If all that’s needed is a physical brain to create the mind, why aren’t animals conscious to the same degree as we are? The discontinuity between primates and people isn’t one of degree; it's one of kind. Complexity, all by itself, wouldn't be enough to get us across that chasm.

The philosophical and neurological debates surrounding the origin of consciousness are compelling, but Strobel quickly moves past these somewhat esoteric realms to document cases of the supernatural. His discussion with Craig Keener, author of the two-volume, 620,000-word Miracles, catalogs miraculous healings from around the world that simply cannot be explained by “scientific” means. Critics of such miracles, Keener argues, “have to strain at the bounds of plausibility in order to keep their anti-supernatural thesis intact.”

The same goes for “life-changing spiritual encounters” that provoke a radical transformation in people’s lives that cannot be accounted for by “rational” causes. Here and throughout, Strobel and his interlocutors caution readers against dismissing first-person encounters with the supernatural. Douglas Groothuis, author of the 848-page Christian Apologetics, argues that veridical experiences “can be part of a cumulative case for God” and then defines a veridical experience as one that “conveys truth and is not deceptive.” If the eyewitness is reliable, the encounter is unexpected, there is no profit motive involved, and the incident can be corroborated, a fair-minded critic should be willing to consider the experience as evidence that there are realities within and beyond us that transcend the physical, natural, material world.

Such is particularly the case with the growing number of Muslims around the world who have visions or vivid dreams of Christ. More Muslims, Strobel writes, “have become Christians in the last couple of decades than the previous fourteen hundred years since Muhammad, and it’s estimated that a quarter to a third of them experienced a dream or vision of Jesus before their salvation experience.” Needless to say, Strobel adds, a “devout Muslim would have no incentive to imagine such an encounter with the Jesus of Christianity, who might lure them into Islamic apostasy and possibly even a death sentence in certain countries”

Tom Doyle, author of Dreams and Visions: Is Jesus Awakening the Muslim World?, shares numerous stories with Strobel of lives radically changed, not just by the vision, but by the tangible, transformative emotions that accompany it: “They feel love, grace, safety, protection, affirmation, joy, peace—all those emotions they don’t receive from Islam. It rocks their world.” While making it clear that Muslims are ultimately converted by hearing the good news shared with them from the Bible by a believer, Doyle emphasizes God’s loving willingness to take extreme measures, sending dreams to “plow the hard soil of Muslim hearts so they’re receptive to the seed of the gospel.”

Strobel’s book is quite wide-ranging, taking in what we can know from the Bible and personal experience about the nature of angels and demons, heaven and hell. In his coverage of the afterlife, he includes a fascinating chapter on the growing number of people who have reported a near-death experience (NDE) during which their souls left their bodies, traveled to the other side, and returned to tell the tale.

John Burke, author of Imagine Heaven, reports to Strobel how remarkably similar and Biblically compatible NDEs are, including those experienced by Hindus. “In all my research, I’ve never read of people describing anything like Krishna, who has blue skin, or Shiva, who has three eyes, or descriptions of the dissolving of the individual self and the impersonal Supreme Brahma, which is the ultimate Hindu reality.” Indeed, “several basic Hindu ideas of the afterlife were never portrayed in the visions of the Indian patients. No reincarnation.”

Along with his chapter on NDEs, Strobel includes an additional chapter on an end-of-life phenomenon of which I was not aware: deathbed visions of deceased relatives or angels or God or Jesus. According to J. Steve Miller, author of Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, one study “found that 88 percent of the patients reported such deathbed visions. They were so realistic that patients reported them as the most awake, alert, and present that they had ever felt.” These visions bring peace, joy, and clarity at a moment that should be filled with fear and despair.

Lest readers of Seeing the Supernatural should suspect that Strobel is too credulous, he ends the book with a chapter that exposes spiritualism and the occult as incompatible with Christianity. Though Strobel admits that mediums and ghost hunters appeal to subjective experience as evidence of the supernatural, he clearly distinguishes such experiences from the testimonies that he covers in the rest of his book. Unlike the former, the latter “feature external corroboration or multiple and credible eyewitnesses and are consistent with the teachings of the Bible, which itself has been shown to be reliable.” Though it is a good thing to be open to the spiritual dimensions of God’s cosmos, we must be ever vigilant to test the spirits (1 John 4:1). 

Louis Markos, Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Christian University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; his 26 books include Apologetics for the 21st Century, Atheism on Trial, The Myth Made Fact, Lewis Agonistes, and From Plato to Christ.