Why is a firm conviction in the ongoing reality, power, and love of God necessary for biblical Christianity? In this book, J. P. Moreland successfully presents principles, arguments, and evidence to convict readers on the essential role of the supernatural in Christianity and Christian living. Moreland, a philosopher, theologian, and apologist, utilizes the tools of his multi-disciplinary vocation to present not just a compelling treatise but also an instructive guidebook for a fuller Christian life. Essentially, he posits that miracles, defined as God’s divine intervention in human affairs (page 96), are part and parcel of the relational religion God offers to humanity. Christians, he says, are to expect miracles, live a naturally supernatural life, and stand firm in their conviction that God, whose kingdom is inbreaking, continues to demonstrate his reality today.

Moreland progressively unpacks the book’s core idea by first establishing foundational principles and arguments for miracles and the supernatural in the book’s first two chapters. He then builds on the views presented in the first two chapters by extrapolating five types of supernatural experiences within the loci of prayer (chapter 3-4), miraculous healing (chapter 5-6), divine communication (chapter 5), angelic and demonic manifestations (chapter 8) and near-death experiences (chapter 9). He ends the book with practical guidance on the way forward (chapter 10) and a selected annotated bibliography for further reading (pages 249-259). Moreland unpacks progressively and logically, uses philosophical argumentation and theological support, and thoroughly investigates evidence.

He presents his case not in the usual “Christianese,” instead he used a principle that investigators use—the Intelligent Agent Principle (IAP) (pages 31-33). The use of the IAP as a method of evaluating the veracity of miraculous claims is refreshing and efficacious for a wider audience; that is, it not just convinces Christians but can also potentially evangelize and respond to agnostics and atheists. The use of an extrabiblical principle is novel yet relevant in today’s world, where people require rational proofs presented in a common-sense manner.

Moreover, Moreland presents his arguments with investigative clarity. He knows that truth claims should be backed by credibility and evidence, so he exerts effort to present verifiable data and credible eyewitness testimony. There is no doubt that the experiences mentioned are not fabricated and are not the product of a creative imagination. Hence, Moreland can convince readers not just emotionally but also cognitively.

That said, the discussion on angelic and demonic manifestations, as well as near-death experiences (NDEs), probably needed more theological explication. Although discourse on these themes relies heavily on eyewitness testimony and biblical support is limited, a constructive theological presentation might be more helpful in presenting these themes convincingly. Nevertheless, the chapter on NDEs was encouraging. The use of well-documented incidences provides verifiable data on the reality of life after death, which can be used to minister to those with debilitating fears.

Overall, the book partially explained the Christian supernatural worldview and presented compelling arguments for the continuation of miracles and supernatural manifestations. It convinces readers of the necessity of living a naturally supernatural life, provides practical guidelines for a supernatural ministry, and defends Christianity’s authenticity, which relationally connects us to the one true God. The book can convince readers that God is powerfully real, actively present even in mundane affairs, loving in his interaction, and purpose-filled in his interventions. Furthermore, Moreland was able to hold on to the polar tensions of skepticism and sensationalism; he is able to present a balanced view of an “already-not-yet” eschatology without falling into an over-realized supernaturalism. He was academic, apologetic and also pastoral.

I highly recommend this book as a supplementary guide for training Spirit empowered ministers in academic institutions, as well as for Church-based trainings. Although certain traditions may have different theological stances on the themes presented, the book nevertheless presents a well-thought out explanation and defense of the continuation of miracles and the practice of a biblically grounded supernatural ministry.

Reviewed by Lora Angeline E. Timenia

Publisher’s page: https://zondervanacademic.com/products/a-simple-guide-to-experience-miracles

The mission of the Foundation is “to lead Pentecostal/charismatic believers to a greater understanding of God’s Word and assist church leaders in equipping the saints for the work of the ministry. We also long for greater dialogue between Evangelicals about doctrine, and by way of an open forum, to promote Biblically-centered theological discussion on the gifts of the Spirit.” We appreciate how the Lord is using you to carry out a similar mission and we are encouraged by your efforts.

Thank you for taking this opportunity to have an informal interview with us to explore some of these thoughts in greater depth. Kingdom Triangle is a particularly challenging book. Those of us on the editorial committee that have been reading it know we need to finish it if we have not already. Your book has already sparked many conversations for us, and we would be delighted to work with you in the future as your schedule permits.

The Pneuma Review: Why did you write Kingdom Triangle?

J.P. Moreland: I have been burdened by the low quality of spiritual competence in the American church and the small impact we are having compared to our numbers. I believe a focus on cultivating the three legs of the Kingdom Triangle lies at the heart of the way forward.

PR: What are some practical things church leaders can do to encourage a restoration of the Christian mind?

JP: I lay out a strategy in Kingdom Triangle in this area, but two things stand out: 1. We need occasions where more serious intellectual teaching, preaching and discussion takes place in the church calendar. This needs to be a stated goal of the church. 2. Book reviews, reading groups, CD discussion groups, all need to be more visible in the church’s life and values.

PR: Why is academic learning not enough to develop a Christian mind?

JP: Because of two factors. First, a Christian mind is interested in wisdom and not simply knowledge, though the latter is important for the former. Today, academic learning is completely removed from the task of forming wise, virtuous people who know how to live well. Second, the Christian mind is interested in cultivating the habit of focusing on God more and more throughout each day and that is not an academic matter.

PR: What difficulties are there for teachers in the church if they adopt a postmodern worldview?

JP: It will be difficult to get people to internalize important differences between the Way of discipleship and the values and lifestyles of the culture. Postmodernism tends to be an accomodationist approach at its heart. Further, postmodernism is weak on truth, knowledge and appropriate authority in one’s life. These are all central to the Christian life.

PR: In your chapter “Renovation of the Soul,” you say that “the Sunday morning service was never intended to be the staple for growing world-changing communities or for producing radically different people under the shelter of God’s wings” (143). What can church leaders do to better equip the whole body for ministry, especially if they are finding it difficult to move away from centralized leadership?

JP: Two things. First, leaders should concentrate more time on fewer people—intensify the training and discipleship of a core group in the church who will themselves carry out the work of the church. Second, there should be times for intense spiritual formation—entire days of prayer and worship, emphasis on home groups that can intensify personal relationships and spiritual formation in a more accountable, relational context.

PR: What is lost when the good news of the Kingdom is shared unaccompanied by the Spirit’s power?

JP: We lose the ministry of Jesus. He taught, proclaimed and demonstrated the Kingdom’s power and we should, too. We also lose the distinctively supernatural aspects of our religion. Finally, we lose intimacy with God because the power and presence of God are often two sides of the same coin in scripture.

PR: In Kingdom Triangle, you give some advice about how churches can encourage growth in the miraculous. Have you seen these ideas work out in churches newly open to the contemporary ministry of the Spirit?

JP: I have seen this. What is important is for each church to locate where they currently reside regarding these issues and be who they are, yet with an eye on growing a bit in this area. Then each church must be willing to take some risks and step out in faith such that God may not show up but if He does it will be obvious. Finally, each church must learn from its failures and continue to go forward.

For further reading, visit the Kingdom Triangle Discussion Forum: www.kingdomtriangle.blogspot.com

Be sure to read the review by W. Simpson of Kingdom Triangle in this issue.

J. P. Moreland, Kingdom Triangle: Recover the Christian Mind, Renovate the Soul, Restore the Spirit’s Power (Zondervan, 2007), 237 pages, ISBN 9780310274322.

I want to foment a revolution in Evangelical life… My purpose is to mobilize, inspire, envision, and instruct an army of men and women for a revolution on behalf of the cause of Christ.

If I could pick out for you a few of the most formative books in my own intellectual development, as a believing Christian, J.P. Moreland’s Love Your God with All Your Mind would be jostling at the top. I wish I could thrust a copy of it into the hands of every Christian student, pastor and teacher. I can at least commend it to you as essential reading—after C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, of course. But before you read either, I believe you should read Kingdom Triangle. And I think if you do read it carefully, cover to cover, you might just forgive me for putting J.P before Jack.[1]

Kingdom Triangle is a biblically grounded vision of Christian discipleship, uniting J.P Moreland’s concern for the Christian mind with his pursuit of the spiritual disciplines, and calling for the whole Church to rediscover the power of the Holy Spirit. Taking the parts in isolation, it doesn’t appear to be saying anything radically ‘new’. As Moreland himself admits, the first point of the triangle will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his writings; J.P is well-known among evangelicals as a philosopher and apologist, and Love Your God with All Your Mind was but one incarnation of his characteristic emphasis on a more tough-minded Christianity. It is a concern shared by many writers besides J.P. The ‘spiritual disciplines’ also have a well-established literary corpus and a number of contemporary advocates. And the charismatic stress on the manifest power of the Spirit is something many of the readers of this article probably share. What is rather unusual—and exciting—is to see all three of these emphases united together, without one being played off against the other.[2]

The first part of the book is decidedly philosophical. J.P offers us a penetrating expose of the cultural milieu of the West. In the discussion that follows, Moreland identifies naturalism, postmodernism, and Christian theism as the three major worldviews vying for our allegiance, and concerns himself with expounding both naturalism and postmodernism in some detail. Both are exposed as pervasive, pernicious, false—but also dangerously ‘thin’ worldviews, lacking the resources to ground objective value, purpose and meaning, and ultimately destructive of the good life, plunging us into a shallow and sensate culture. ‘Under the influence of naturalist and postmodern ideas, many people no longer believe that there is any ultimate meaning to life that can be known. These folks—and they are legion—have given up on seeking that meaning and instead are living for happiness. Today, the good life is a life of happiness’. And the drive for happiness – construed as ‘pleasurable satisfaction’—has produced a culture of ‘empty selves’.

J.P however believes ‘we are wired for more than happiness. We are made to live for God’s honour by learning how to become spiritually competent, mature members of his Kingdom and to make that Kingdom our primary concern’. Claiming the supremacy of the Christian worldview, Moreland exhorts believers to recognise the superior spiritual and intellectual resources available to them in Christ, and to start taking their faith seriously, heart and mind. ‘We were made for greatness’, he argues, but our present culture ‘undermines both its intelligibility and achievement’. ‘The only way we are going to move from our boring lives to lives filled with the drama of the Greatest story is for those who embrace mere Christianity to set aside the shallowness of their thought and the weakness of their spiritual practices, and corporately to enter afresh into the Kingdom forms of life and thought worthy of the name of Christ’.

Garrett J. DeWeese and J.P. Moreland, Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult: A Beginner’s Guide to Life’s Big Questions (InterVarsity Press, 2005), 170 pages.

Over the last two centuries the confidence of Christians in the reasonableness and credibility of their faith has met significant challenges from a number of quarters. With the almost wholesale acceptance of a naturalistic account of the origin of our species, and a growing conviction that science can explain everything about the world without the need to invoke the “spooky” supernatural, the floodwaters of unbelief have been rising about the Church on all sides, greedily devouring the grounds for faith and certainty. All the evidence, we are told, points to the non-existence of a benevolent God, the obsolescence of religion, and the absence of any justifiable grounds for the Christian hope of the resurrection.

However, the authors of Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult are convinced that the real nature of the challenge that faces us today “is not really scientific or theological or anthropological, but philosophical.” It is how modern man thinks about science and the universe that skews his view of the Christian faith as something irrelevant and outmoded. We wrestle not against evidence from laboratories, but against materialism, against scientism, against the naturalistic worldview of the West, against doctrines and ideas that have become entrenched in the modern mind chiefly through the Church’s neglect of the intellectual life.

Moreland and DeWeese seek to redress this problem by making philosophy more accessible to laymen, and by providing the outlines of a Christian perspective on a number of important philosophical issues, including ethics, metaphysics, the mind-body problem, philosophy of science and epistemology—all that in a mere 170 pages! As one who is still very much a beginner in these things, I am, perhaps, reasonably well positioned to make some sort of judgement as to whether or not they have succeeded in opening up these areas of inquiry to non-experts.

There are, I think, at least two sorts of pits into which a project of this sort may stray. On the one hand, in its efforts to achieve accessibility it may produce something so superficial that it is basically of no help to anybody; its contents are grasped easily enough because it avoids saying anything very important. On the other hand, in its attempts to attain conciseness, clarity and simplicity may be dispensed with altogether; the writers dash from one difficult problem to the next, without ever really explaining to anybody’s satisfaction what exactly it is they are talking about.

Perhaps it is inevitable that such a project as this one should gravitate towards one or the other of these two extremes. Philosophy is a difficult subject, and a genuine grasp of even the basics is not something to be had in a weekend’s read. In my estimation, Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult attempts to bite off more than can be chewed in a single paperback of these proportions, producing an uneven volume that varies noticeably in perspicuity and in its level of difficulty across the different chapters. Whilst some sections should be quite comprehensible for the beginner (for example, the chapter on philosophy of science), other parts prove much less digestible (such as the discussion of the mind-body problem) without a prior acquaintance with the subject matter. This is rather frustrating for the beginner, who might have walked away with a better understanding of some of the issues, had the authors contented themselves with saying a little more about a little less.