From the Twelve Theses drawn from the book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. Do miracles happen? Are the laws which govern the world set aside periodically to enable a supernatural event to occur? Was there once an age of miracles that came to a close? Or was it only that ancient people interpreted as miraculous anything they did not otherwise understand? Do miracles represent the ignorance of the past that has disappeared with the advance of knowledge? Is the defense of the miraculous necessary to the defense of Christianity? These are the questions that I now seek to address. When the great 17th century English physicist, Isaac Newton, charted the mathematical laws that seem to govern the physical universe, he explained the workings of our world with absolutely no appeal to the God hypothesis. So it was that thunder, lightning, hurricanes and tornados came to be understood apart from God's judgment or the divine need to punish and frighten fearful people. With adequate non-theistic explanations for natural phenomena, the liturgical practices of offering sacrifices to change the shape of reality or to quell the anger of the deity ceased. Meteorologists appear today on television stations around the world to give weather reports never mentioning the God who was once thought to be directly in control of weather. These natural phenomena have been secularized. The only vestigial remains of the assumptions of our religious past are found in the language of insurance companies which continue to refer to events which have no human cause as "acts of God." The same revolution has occurred in the area of health care. In 1886, Louis Pasteur of France discovered germs. Viruses would come later and slowly but surely medicine began its march away from supernatural interpretations. In the New Testament, epilepsy and mental illness were both assumed to result from demon possession. Since germs, viruses, and the causes of tumors, leukemia, strokes and heart attacks were totally unknown in the ancient world, the theory grew that sickness was divine punishment, a visitation from God based upon human deserving. So sicknesses were treated with prayers, vigils, offerings, vows, bleeding to remove the evil spirits and many other "cures" which were credible only if the source of sickness was assumed to be a supernatural or demonic agent. As health and sicknesses have been secularized, the realm in which miracles were thought to occur has once more shrunk dramatically. Yet people cling to the comforting hope that a supernatural Deity, dwelling beyond the sky, looks down upon us protectively and periodically will come to our aid. Given our knowledge of the vastness of the universe, that faith has become shaky and, as it fades, a sense of radical aloneness and deep vulnerability grows. Yet our need for this supernatural protector is such that elaborate arguments are developed to explain those times when miracles do not occur, when loved ones die, when tragedy strikes, when our prayers are not answered. We seek to keep alive our comfortable illusions of a divine, powerful protector. As the world journeyed beyond Newton's insights, religious voices welcomed with enthusiasm the "new physics" of quantum weirdness that seems to suggest a limitation on determinism. On subatomic and astrophysical levels a doorway appeared to open to allow the impact of the observer on that which is observed. For a moment God seemed to have been reinstated in the process of cause and effect. It did not last. Though we still talk of divine intervention, the fact is that the life of our society is increasingly organized as if miracles are nothing more than the faulty explanations of our uninformed ancestors who did not know what we know. Those who depend on miracles today are few and far between. The word is used anecdotally in very conservative religious traditions to demonstrate in a facile way that God is taking personal care of the one speaking. Inevitably, that person is usually revealed as an immature, passive-dependent person whose need for a divine parent figure overwhelms his or her sense of rationality. As this religious security system of yesterday slips from our grasp, many frightened religious people cling to the New Testament as tangible proof that miracles can and do occur and that God is still proactive in an invasive way in human life. So people recite these biblical stories of miraculous events as if they are the last bastions in a godless world that must be defended at all costs. But are they? Did the Jewish writers of the scriptures understand God as a miracle worker? Is the Jesus story dependent on miracles to enable the divine claims we make for our Christ to have credibility? I do not think so. Indeed, I think that the authors of the Gospels were seeking to capture the essence of a God-experience they found present in Jesus and were using the only language they knew to talk about that experience, the language of their first century religious tradition. Looking at Israel's history, Jewish writers told the story of God's provident care for their ancestors in the wilderness when Moses prayed and God sent bread from heaven to feed them. That same God we have met in Jesus, later Gospel writers proclaimed, and so they told the story about how Jesus could also feed a multitude in the wilderness. That narrative, told in miraculous terms, was rather designed to say that the God our forebears met in Moses we believe we have met in Jesus. The God of Israel was portrayed as having mighty power over water. He could split the Red Sea to enable the Hebrew people, God's elect, to cross over on dry land. Later in their history they extolled this God who could make a path in the deep, whose footprints could be seen on the water. Later we read about Jesus walking on the water. Is that a miracle? I don't think so. Rather, I see it as reflecting an early Christian sermon designed to say that we have met the God of anti-quity in the person of Jesus and so we attribute to him every power we once attributed to God. In the same manner we say that he can still the storm and quiet the sea. He had God power, for we met God in him. But what about those healing stories where the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the dead are raised? If one searches the Hebrew scriptures, one discovers that these are exactly the signs that the prophet Isaiah wrote would accompany the inbreaking kingdom of God. They were also said to have marked the lives of Jewish heroes like Elijah and Elisha. Jesus was clearly believed by his disciples to be a sign that the Kingdom of God was drawing near. He announced that the Kingdom of God was breaking into history in his life. The signs were the wholeness occurring all around him; and so it was said that he caused the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk and the dead to rise. Were these miracles. I don't think so. They were rather the only way that the early Christians could interpret who he was. Look, for example, at the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, perhaps the most dramatic story in the New Testament. Is there no literal truth behind that story? Yes, of course there is truth, but it is clearly not a literal story. It appears only in the last Gospel to be written (John, circa AD. 100). Surely an event that startling would not have escaped the attention of the other Gospel writers if it had been a literal story. I believe the clue to a proper reading of the account of the raising of Lazarus in the 4th Gospel is found in a parable in Luke about another figure named Lazarus. This Lazarus is a poor man who, when he dies, goes to Abraham's bosom only to have the rich man who abused him in life ask from the abode of pain that Lazarus be sent back from the dead to warn his brothers "lest they too come to this place of torment." But in that parable Abraham responds to that request by saying, "They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them." The rich man then says, "But, Father Abraham, if one returns from the dead, they will listen," to which Abraham replies, "If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not believe even if one rises from the dead." In John's story of the raising of Lazarus, that is exactly what happened. Lazarus came back from the dead; and far from changing behavior and creating faith, those who were said to have observed that wonder moved quickly to crucify Jesus in whom God was so powerfully at work. Those who did not listen to Moses and the prophets did not believe even if one rose from the dead. The raising of Lazarus was not a miracle. It was a parable being told as history. A careful study of the New Testament does not preserve our claim to live under the potentially miraculous care of a supernatural deity. But if we have never thought of God in any other way, we begin to feel, that when these things are taken from us, we are bereft of God. A deity who cannot act in history on our behalf appears to be impotent, hardly worthy of worship. A sense of the loss of God encompasses us. However, before we despair, we need to recognize that a God who can act in history and does not is the other side of that coin, and this God seems so malevolent and even sadistic that we might actually wish to rid ourselves of this deity. A God who can prevent the holocaust and does not, or cure the cancers that affect little children and does not, would hardly be a God for whom our devotion would be elicited. However, no one can sustain the first claim without inviting the devastating second charge. Are we then reduced to the place where atheism is the only alternative to theism once again? I do not think so. For me the problem lies in the inadequacy of the theistic God language that the Church historically has always used. As one who is convinced of the reality of God, I seek a different language, a different understanding, a different image of the Holy One that enables me to believe and to worship with integrity. I will attempt to speak of that God in this column next month, for it is this God that I meet in Jesus of Nazareth.   --Return to Contents |
