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One of the most difficult things for Western Christians to grasp is the reality of the miraculous, which infuses the whole of the New Testament. We labor, more than we know, under the assumptions of a world that is a closed, empirical system from which God is absent. Rudolf Bultmann, the great 20th-century biblical scholar, stated it clearly: “We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.”

Claims like this are believed widely today, even by Catholics, but it raises serious issues—primarily, what ought we to do with all the miracles in the New Testament? And if the miraculous is excised from the New Testament, what do we affirm as Christians?

Ben F. Meyer raised a different point in his book The Aims of Jesus (1979), asking whether “persons testifying to miracles are by that very fact shown to be incompetent or dishonest or self-deceived, and this without reference to their credentials or to the particulars of the case but by ineluctable a priori law.” This is an important point, for the first Christians who experienced and professed Jesus’ resurrection, who were observers and performers of miracles, did not bear witness to these events as everyday occurrences but precisely as something out of the ordinary. These acts were understood as signs of God’s divine act of salvation through Jesus Christ, not as party tricks. “If the salvific context is overlooked, the concrete possibility of miracle evaporates,” wrote Meyer. But when we keep in mind the salvific context in which God acted through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have the context in which normal boundaries of human life were shattered on behalf of all humanity. The divine world is opened to us and the miraculous makes a claim on us.

Bultmann’s claim is false, not just because today many people have made their peace with light bulbs and miracles, robotic surgery and Peter’s shadow healing the sick, but because it is false even in the ancient context.

The apostle Thomas’s technology, oil lamps and papyrus, was superior to that which came before, but less advanced than what Bultmann knew and what we have today. It was not Thomas’s technology, better than that of the Bronze Age, that kept him from believing Jesus had been raised from the dead; it was his unwillingness to believe that God would act in such a way to bring about salvation. Technology is a red herring for a world closed off from the divine presence. Even in the first century, Thomas wanted empirical proof: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Jesus appeared to him and to the others, passing through locked doors and otherwise breaking down the barriers between spirit and matter, saying to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”

Thomas did not touch the risen Lord; but upon seeing him a light bulb, or oil lamp, went off in his head and he said, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus had not broken through the technology of his day, but through the boundaries Thomas had placed on God’s saving actions.

The very point of the Incarnation is that something new has broken in on humanity, that a world we are tempted to see as closed, with God absent or indifferent, has been shocked open by God’s love for us. Miracles are not intended to titillate or amuse us; they are signs to demonstrate God’s care for us. Those who witnessed them passed them on so that we might believe, even though, or especially because, we have not seen the empirical proofs.

This article appears in April 1 2013.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.