03.03. LECTURE 03 - MIRACLES.

LECTURE III

MIRACLES.

These are supernatural events implying a special and exceptional mode of God’s providential action.

I. The first thing we have to do in discussing the nature and attributes of a particular class of phenomena is to settle between ourselves very distinctly a common understanding as to what particular class of phenomena we are talking about. The word " miracle" has been so vaguely and promiscuously used that, unless we come to an understanding as to the kind of events to which we agree to restrict its application in this discussion, we should only talk at cross-purposes.

It should be remembered that there are two kinds of definitions:

(1) nominal or verbal, and

(2) real. The former defines the thing by the etymology or the general usage of its name. The latter defines it by its own nature or relations. In the present case it is essential to recognize the fact that a verbal definition of miracles, or a definition formed upon a study of the etymology or usage of the word " miracle," would be of not the least value. The word itself simply means a wonder; that is, it defines the events called " miracles " not by any essential characteristic of the events themselves, but simply by the effect they happen to produce upon the minds of some classes of beholders. That this is absurd is easily shown by an illustration. A missionary in the use of a chemical apparatus turned water into solid ice in the presence of the king of Siam. To the missionary it was a common effect of a combination of natural causes; to the king of Siam and his courtiers it was an unparalleled wonder. The like had never been a matter of previous experience in all the land or in all its history. Yet it was not a miracle to them. If they had regarded it as one, they would have been miserably deceived, and would soon have been brought to discredit all that had been associated with it in its assumed character.

These events are designated in Scripture by various descriptive titles which severally connote their various aspects and relations. Their true nature is represented adequately by no one of these names separately, but all collectively should be understood as describing rather than as defining the class. These names are in Hebrew , signum, portentum; , something separated, singular ; , power, some extraordinary manifestation of divine power. Also, the Greek τέρατα, wonders; δυνάμας, powerful works, manifesting divine power; σημιία, signs. All these words signify real properties or qualities of the "miracle," and especially the last. The "miracle" was distinctively God’s "sign" to man.

Having thus dismissed, as profitless, the attempt to form a verbal definition of the " miracle," how shall we proceed to designate sharply the class of events to which, by common consent, the name should be restricted ?

We take the first step, then, when we point out the fact that the terms " miracle " and " the supernatural" are not coextensive. Every miracle is supernatural, but every supernatural event is by no means a miracle. " The supernatural" is the genus, while "the miracle " is a subordinate species of that genus. The first thing, therefore, is to attempt to reach a clear, distinct conception of " the supernatural." Supernatural events are of infinitely various kinds, yet they all have a common quality which renders them supernatural, and which distinguishes them from all kinds of events simply natural. What, then, is the common quality of all supernatural events?

" Nature " is from nascor, to be brought to the birth, to be produced, to become. The external world is the common type of pure nature. It is always becoming. Its process is genesis. In unbroken continuity the events of this moment proceed from the events of the last moment, and give birth to the events of the next moment. Viewed as a fecund cause, the whole external universe is the natura naturans—nature bringing forth ; and viewed as a manifold effect, the same universe is every moment the natura naturata—nature just brought forth. The supernatural is, therefore, that which is above nature, which springs from, and therefore manifests, a higher cause. But scholars, philosophers and theologians greatly differ as to where they draw the line between the natural and the supernatural.

1. Many draw it between matter and spirit, and hence just¹ between the body and the soul of man. The body and the whole material world obey the law of necessity, while the soul moves spontaneously and is self-determined in the light of reason and conscience. Hence Coleridge, Bushnell and other high authorities class the body and material world as natural, and the soul of man and the entire world of spirits as supernatural. Whatever reason there may be for this distinction, it is evident that it will not help us in this discussion. Men—their souls as well as their bodies—have their genesis, inherit natures, and their action and entire history are determined by their nature. Hence by general consent all that is human is natural.

2. Others draw the line between the natural and the supernatural just above men and between man and the angelic world. The supernatural is thus equivalent to the superhuman. This is a very common conception, and determines much of our current language. All that belongs to ghosts or disembodied spirits of dead men, and all that belongs to angels or devils, are called " supernatural." This is a legitimate use of the word. But it is not accurate or stable enough to suit our purpose. Evidently, no action of angels or devils could be classed as supernatural in the same sense that a miracle, in the Bible sense of that word, is. All created spirits, as well as all created worlds, have their genesis, all have their God-given natures, all are under law. Therefore every adequate sense of the word " nature" must take in the universe as a whole. It is one system, and cannot be divided into two separate parts, the one called " nature," and the other set apart as independent and styled "the supernatural." We consequently draw the line between the natural and the supernatural in this discussion, between God and the universe, between the Creator and the creature, between the absolute and the relative and contingent. The " supernatural," therefore, is a peculiar kind or mode of God’s action on and through his creatures. As far as we know, this supernatural action of God in nature is exercised in the modes of (1) special intervention in behalf of persons in the interest of a moral system;

(2) gracious operation in the souls of Christ’s people;

(3) revelation of new truth, and inspiration controlling the communication of truth in the case of prophets, etc;

(4) " miracles’ in the special and technical sense of that word.

It is common to regard creation as the type of the supernatural and of the miracle. But the distinction is obvious and important. Creation, or the bringing of the thing into existence, must differ from every mode of divine action on it or through it after it is existent.

Creation is God’s bringing his creatures into existence.

Ordinary providence is God’s sustaining and governing all his creatures and all their actions after they are created. This ordinary providence always works through natural causes and according to the uniformities of natural law. The supernatural working of God embraces all of his various modes of acting upon or through his creatures, which produce effects beyond their natural powers to produce, and different from the uniform method of natural law. This includes special interventions, gracious operations, revelations, and, specifically, miracles.

" Miracle," as a technical word connoting a special matter in controversy, therefore refers only to a class of supernatural events alleged to have occurred in connection with the origin of the Jewish and of the Christian religions, which are recorded in the Old and New Testament Scriptures as a mode of divine attestation to the divine origin of these religions.

We exclude, therefore, from this discussion—

1.All spiritualistic phenomena—ghost-flitting, spirit-rapping, demoniac possession or other manifestation of merely superhuman power.

2.Extraordinary providences, as the draught of fishes and the flight of quails mentioned in Scripture.

3.All possible special intervention and modification of the ordinary course of providence in the spiritual education of souls.

4.All the gracious acts of God in the spiritual sphere regenerating and sanctifying the souls of his people.

5.His supernatural operations in the minds of his prophets, revealing truth, disclosing future events and inspiring them as public teachers. The " miracle," therefore, in the sense in which we now discuss it, should be defined thus:

(1) An event (2) occurring in the material world, (3) obvious to the senses, (4) of such a nature that it can be rationally referred only to the immediate act of God as its direct cause, (5) accompanying a teacher of religion sent from God, (6) and designed to authenticate his divine commission. When it is here said that a miracle is an event of such a nature that it can be rationally referred only to an immediate act of God as its direct cause, it is not meant that God is the only cause which operates in producing it. What is meant is that the direct intentional agency of God is always discerned to be one of its active causes, and that one which gives it its differentiating characteristics as a miracle. It is well known that the physical cause of any event in the physical world is never single; it is always dual, if not manifold. All the necessary conditions upon which the event depends are its con-causes. The effect consists of these same conditions modified. If we kindle a fire, the con-causes are the fuel, the atmosphere, the flue, the match and the agency of the person combining all these conditions. The effect is the change brought about in the person, the match, the flue, the air and the fuel. In every miracle all surrounding and implicated natural bodies remain and act throughout the miracle in a manner perfectly true to nature under the peculiar conditions in which they are placed. But God, acting invisibly and from within, interpolates a new force, his own direct energy, into the plexus of con-causes naturally in operation, and the result is the miracle. It is God acting from without and down upon and in nature. When the iron was made to float in the water (2 Kings 6:5), earth, air, water and iron all remained acting according to the law of their nature under the circumstances. But God did invisibly and from within what human agency in this case might have accomplished visibly and from without; i. e. he simply interpolated a force acting in a direction contrary to gravity, and equal in intensity to the difference of the weight of the iron and of the weight of an equal bulk of water which it displaced.

It is obvious that upon the assumptions of the deist, the pantheist or the atheist or materialist, a miracle would be absolutely impossible. In this discussion, therefore, we necessarily assume as granted (1) that there is a God;

(2) that he has access to the physical world, and can act upon it at will;

(3) that he is a moral Governor;

(4) that men are the subjects of his moral government, and also that they are lost sinners in need of a redemption;

(5) that he has discovered a purpose of intervening redemptively in man’s behalf.

II. It is objected by skeptics that a miracle in the sense just defined is an impossible event.

1. The first ground upon which this impossibility is argued is that such an event would involve a violation of natural law. But the only three natural laws that science has established as absolutely invariable are—

(1) All substance possesses power: every substance is an active cause, and acts as such invariably in the same way under the same conditions;

(2) all causes act uniformly under uniform conditions, and their actions always change as their conditions change;

(3) there is throughout all nature and during all known time an absolutely unbroken continuity of causation: there is and can be no broken link.

Either in the material or spiritual world, or in both together, the causes of every event are to be found, and all the con-causes immediately co-operate in producing each event. If by law of nature be meant the ordinary sequence of natural events occurring under ordinary conditions, then it is admitted that a miracle does necessarily violate such a law; but it is denied that natural law in this sense is necessarily uniform and immutable. The successions of day and night and of the seasons have changed, and will always continue to change, as the inclination of the earth’s axis to the ecliptic and other elements of the problem vary. But in every other sense of the phrase " law of nature " it is denied that the miracle violates it. It does not change the properties or powers of any natural substance. It does not annihilate or otherwise change any natural force. An act of God modifying the action of natural causes no more interrupts the law of physical continuity than an act of man doing the same thing. He only changes the conditions under which the entire plexus of natural con-causes acts. In all man’s action in this world he uses his intelligence to bring the forces of nature into artificial combinations, and the result always is at the same time

(a) natural, (b) yet a modified nature, and (c) an unquestionable evidence of man’s direct agency. The electric current carrying messages through the ocean cable is as much an exhibition of natural law as an original stroke of forked lightning from the sky. But, in addition to this, it is moreover an immediate and intentional revelation of man. The same is true of the behavior of all the natural forces implicated in a miracle, while at the same time the resultant action is an immediate and intentional revelation of God. This is fully admitted by John Stuart Mill, the clearest-minded of the agnostic thinkers of this century, in the fourth part of his Essay on Theism, published since his death by his step-daughter, Helen Taylor: " The interference of the human will with the course of nature is only not an exception to law when we include among laws the relation of motive to volition: by the same rule interference by the divine will would not be an exception either, since we cannot but suppose Deity, in every one of its acts, to be determined by motives." . . . "It is true that human volition exercises power over objects in general indirectly through the direct power it possesses over human muscles. God, however, has direct power, not merely over one thing, but overall the objects he has made." . . · "Divine interference with nature could be proved if we had the same sort of evidence for it that we have for human interferences."

2. Skeptics declare miracles to be impossible because God is immutable, eternally perfect in wisdom and power, and therefore, it is argued, he can have no cause to change his plan or to modify his work. The machine invented and executed by man proves its excellence just in proportion as it is able to run on in its appointed way by itself, without any need of repair or correction at the hands of the maker. A machine that needs the direct intervention of its maker discovers thereby some defect either in his calculations or in his skill in execution. An absolutely wise and omnipotent God should have made a world which would have needed no intervention for ever. Theodore Parker said: "There is no whim in God, and therefore no miracle in nature." This objection is absurdly irrelevant. The miracle involves no change in God’s plan. Each miracle was foreseen and predetermined as an integral part of his eternal, all-comprehensive plan from the beginning. Neither does it imply any defect in his work. No miracle was ever designed to correct or regulate the action of the physical world (the machine). The physical world is controlled by forces and their interactions. The moral world is governed by ideas, reasons, motives, addressed to the will, and by discipline-forming character. A moral system involves free agency, and this independently of all theory as to its nature. The fact of personal self-determination cannot be doubted. Free agency involves liability to sin. Sin as an actual fact involves, necessitates, divine intervention either to punish or to redeem. Redemption involves the stupendous miracles of the incarnation and of the resurrection, susceptible, both of them, of demonstrative proof, and all other miracles are accompaniments of these. The physical world (the machine) is not an end in itself. It is the pedestal upon which God has erected his moral government, wherein he deals with a society of personal spirits. The physical world is the house in which the heavenly Father educates his children. He therefore uses the physical system as an instrument through which he makes " signs " to his children. The conditions of this " sign "-making is (1) the invariability of natural law;

(2) the infrequent and temporary interruption revealing his presence and purpose.

We admit that if there be no moral system of which the physical system of the world is only the foundation, there can be no miracle. But if there be a moral system, in which the moral and spiritual education of his children is the chief concern of our heavenly Father, miracles are not incredible, because not improbable.

III. It is asserted by skeptics that miracles are so violently improbable that even if they occurred, that occurrence could not be proved to non-witnesses by any amount of human testimony. This is one fallacy underlying the famous argument of David Hume against the credibility of miracles. We all would willingly agree to this principle if the physical universe be separated from that moral system in which God is educating free personal spirits. In the physical system invariable law everywhere prevails. Uniformity of sequence is the rule in the experience of all men of all ages. From their very nature miracles must be to the last degree exceptional. If they were frequent or if they could be accounted for by natural causes or analogies, they would cease to be miracles. Their frequent or sporadic occurrence would reduce the phenomenal world to chaos, would confuse the reason and paralyze the activity of man, and obscure the providence of God. But if the fact of a moral government is admitted, the facts of man’s moral and spiritual condition and of his relation to God being what they are shown to be by natural religion, then a direct intervention of our heavenly Father in behalf of his bewildered and helpless children is in the highest degree probable. If God directly intervenes to instruct and educate his children, revelations and miracles must co-operate in that work. Each prophet sent to speak for God must be authenticated. Men sent bearing supernatural messages will reasonably be expected to possess supernatural characteristics and to be accompanied with supernatural phenomena. A detached, objectless miracle would indeed be unprovable. But a system of miracles mutually supporting one another, like those recorded in the Christian Scriptures, evidently bearing a divine redemptive character, and all constituting parts of one redemptive scheme, all issuing from one source and bearing upon one end, and associated with persons bearing the aspect of celestial messengers, teaching a spiritual doctrine self-evidencing itself as the word of God,—such a system of miracles so supported becomes in the highest degree probable, and hence is to be received as true when supported by competent historical evidence.

IV. It is objected by skeptics that miracles, as above defined, even if they actually occurred, could not be certainly discriminated and recognized by us to be truly what they appear to be.

1. This is argued from the acknowledged fact that our knowledge of the powers and laws of nature are very limited, and therefore we are never competent, in view of any wonderful phenomenon transcending all past recorded experience, to say peremptorily that it transcends nature and must have been caused by the direct action of God. This is true in part, but irrelevant. The question does not relate to the possible achievements of science in the future, but to what was done through the agency of religious teachers in an obscure province of the Roman empire two thousand years ago. Besides, science secures its wonderful results by means of apparatus, by means of elaborately adjusted conditions, and never in any other way. But the miracle was always the response to a simple command in the name of God or of Christ. Besides all this, science has effectually shut some doors while it has opened many others. It is now scientifically certain that a man four days dead in a hot climate cannot be brought back to life by natural forces alone. If the events in question actually occurred, then it is scientifically certain that they reveal the "finger of God."

2. Skeptics argue that miracles, even if they occurred, could not be certainly recognized as such, because the phenomenon, although obviously transcending natural physical law, may, for aught we can tell, be produced by some unknown superhuman agency; as, for instance, by the devil or by his angels. This might be true so far as the isolated fact as a physical event goes, although we have no evidence that finite spirits of any kind have power of life or death over men. But the objection is wholly irrelevant. The miracles were professed "signs" of divine revelation and commission. Good spirits would not conspire to counterfeit God and deceive men ; evil spirits could not, and would not be allowed to do so if they could. The prophet, his character, the doctrine and the miracle make one congruous whole, which in all its parts equally bears the unmistakable and uncounter-feitable sign-manual of God. Evil spirits could not conspire to build up the kingdom of God (Matthew 12:25).

3. It is again argued against the credibility of miracles, that of the alleged phenomena we have only popular reports, and no evidence of their having been submitted to any adequate scientific test. We acknowledge that the mass of people were then, as they are now, credulous and inaccurate observers. But in the case of the most important miracles recorded the tests to which the phenomena were subjected were all-sufficient. The whole problem as to the resurrection either of Lazarus or of Christ or of the son of the widow of Nain is embraced in two definite and easily-ascertained facts. They were really dead, and subsequently they were really alive again in the same bodies. That Christ was really dead on Friday the entire educated world, skeptical and believing, agree to be an ascertained historical fact. The fact that he was really alive again on Sunday and afterward was tested in the strictest sense scientifically, and especially by the apostle Thomas. The disciples used one sense to criticise and confirm the report of another. They saw, heard and handled him, and thrust their " hands into the print of the spear." Many different persons saw, heard and handled him in many different lights and in various situations through a space of six weeks. These persons were not deceived. They were intelligent and sober-minded men, as evidenced by all they did and wrote. They could not have conspired to deceive us. They consecrated their lives thenceforth "to preach Jesus and the resurrection." As conscious witnesses they were true, for they sealed their testimony as martyrs. As unconscious witnesses they could not deceive, for their unique experience transformed their characters and lives from being Galilean fishermen to being world-compelling apostles.

V. It is objected that the proof of which moral and spiritual truths are susceptible is their own inherent self-evidencing light that they are only worthily recognized when they are seen and felt to be truth in their own light; that miracles, consequently, even if real, are useless as evidences of divine revelation, since moral and spiritual truth cannot be established by any correlation with physical phenomena; that the truth of a truth can never be established by the effects of even an infinite physical force. But the gospel is not a disclosure of abstract moral or spiritual truths, but rather of a series of objective facts constituting the stupendous history of redemption. It is the history of God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to condemn sin in the flesh, and afterward sending his Holy Spirit to apply and complete the work. No possible quickening of our intuitive consciousness would disclose these matters of historical fact. No self-evidence establishes them as historical realities except the evidence which history renders. And among the most convincing elements of this history is the witness it bears to the events we call " miracles." The incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, are the very substance of Christianity and its saving power; the first and third of these are the central suns of the constellations of miracles recorded in the Bible. It is conceded that sporadic, inconsequent miracles could prove nothing, and would themselves be difficult to prove. But given a supernatural crisis, a supernatural teacher and a supernatural doctrine, miracles are found to be in place like jewels on the state robes of a king. All the great miracles recorded in Scripture gather around two great foci in the history of redemption: the giving of the law through Moses and the life and death of the incarnate God. Miracles in such connections are inevitable, and in the highest sense congruous. Their absence would have been unaccountable.

Besides this, the miracle, when found in this its normal relation to the character of the genuine prophet and to the nature of the genuine revelation, adds its own specific and indispensable quota of evidence. The miracle (the "sign ") is the seal of God. A seal detached or attached accidentally to a rag or fraudulently to a fiction has no legal value. Even a true document in many cases has only an incomplete value in the absence of the seal. But when the true seal is attached to the true document, the evidence is impregnable. The prophet, the message and the miracle mutually authenticate one another. Separate, neither could be believed with confidence ; together, neither can be doubted. Faith is the highest reason, and therefore the most obligatory duty, while unbelief is alike irrational and sinful.