miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.
The thesis of this paper is that the reality of and encounter with occult and magic power brings to
sharper focus the superiority of the power of Christ and the accessibility of this power for the
Christian in every day life (Eph 1:17-21; 1 Cor 12:7-11). The growth of occult and magic power
in the West through New Age and pagan religion has helped bring about a greater understanding
of the practical reality of a spiritual realm, the understanding of which has suffered greatly due to
a deeply embedded Enlightenment worldview. However, I feel we still have far to go in
recapturing a proper biblical/supernatural worldview. In contrast to the West, in much of the
Third World, where the Enlightenment view of reality does not hold sway in public culture,
supernatural experience is and has been a very normal part of its worldview.
This paper intends to show 1) how the Enlightenment has weakened certain aspects of
evangelical Christianity; 2) how case studies from the evangelical church in the third world draw
attention to the abiding effects of the Enlightenment on the evangelical church in the West; 3)
how an exegesis of Deut18 provides an example of the kind of biblical worldview that
evangelical Christianity must recover; 4) the benefits of encounter with occult and magic.
Renaissance gave birth, can be characterized by the watchword then current, ad fontes, or "back