Miracles and Supernatural Religion, James Morris Whiton [new reading .txt] 📗

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M. B. W.


PREFATORY NOTE

While the present subject of discussion tempts to many an excursion into particulars, its treatment is restricted to general outlines, with an aim simply to clarify current ideas of miracle and the supernatural, so as to find firm holding ground for tenable positions in the present "drift period" of theology. The chief exception made to this general treatment is the discussion given to a class of miracles regarded with as much incredulity as any, yet as capable as any of being accredited as probably historical events--the raisings of the "dead." The insistence of some writers on the virgin birth and corporeal resurrection of Jesus as essential to Christianity has required brief discussion of these also, mainly with reference to the reasonableness of that demand. As to the latter miracle, it must be observed that in the Biblical narratives taken as a whole, whichever of their discordant features one be disposed to emphasize, the psychical element clearly preponderates over the physical and material.

J. M. W. NEW YORK, April 11, 1903.


CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY

THE ARGUMENT

I

The gradual narrowing of the miraculous element in the Bible by recent discovery and discussion.--The alarm thereby excited in the Church.--The fallacy which generates the fear.--The atheistic conception of nature which generates the fallacy.--The present outgrowing of this conception.

II

The present net results of the discussion of the miraculous element in the Bible.--Evaporation of the former evidential value of miracles.--Further insistence on this value a logical blunder.--The transfer of miracles from the artillery to the baggage of the Church.--Probability of a further reduction of the list of miracles.--Also of a further transfer of events reputed miraculous to the domain of history.

III

Arbitrary criticism of the Biblical narratives of the raising of the "dead."--Facts which it ignores.--The subject related to the phenomena of trance, and records of premature burial.--The resuscitation in Elisha's tomb probably historical.--Jesus' raising of the ruler's daughter plainly such a case.--His raising of the widow's son probably such.--The hypothesis that his raising of Lazarus may also have been such critically examined.--The record allows this supposition.--Further considerations favoring it: 1. The supposition threatens no real interest of Christianity.--2. Enhances the character of the act as a work of mercy.--3. Is independent of the belief of the witnesses of the act.--4. Is coherent with the general conception of the healing works of Jesus as wrought by a peculiar psychical power.--Other cases.--The resurrection of Jesus an event in a wholly different order of things.--The practical result of regarding these resuscitations as in the order of nature.

IV

A clearer conception of miracle approached.--Works of Jesus once reputed miraculous not so reputed now, since not now transcending as once the existing range of knowledge and power.--This transfer of the miraculous to the natural likely to continue.--No hard and fast line between the miraculous and the non-miraculous.--Miracle a provisional word, its application narrowing in the enlarging mastery of the secrets of Nature and of life.

V

Biblical miracles the effluence of extraordinary lives.--Life the world's magician and miracle-worker; its miracles now termed _prodigies_.--Miracle the natural product of an extraordinary endowment of life.--Life the ultimate reality.--What any man can achieve is conditioned by the psychical quality of his life.--Nothing more natural, more supernatural, than life.--The derived life of the world filial to the self-existent life of God; "begotten, not made."--Miracle as the product of life, the work of God.

VI

The question, old and new, now confronting theologians.--Their recent retreat upon the minimum of miracle.--The present conflict of opinion in the Church.--Its turning-point reached in the antipodal turn-about in the treatment of miracles from the old to the new apologetics.--Revision of the traditional idea of the supernatural required for theological readjustment.

VII

Account to be made of the law of atrophy through disuse.--The virgin birth and the corporeal resurrection of Jesus, the two miracles still insisted on as the irreducible minimum, affected by this law.--The vital truths of the incarnation and immortality independent of these miracles.--These truths now placed on higher ground in a truer conception of the supernatural.--The true supernatural is the spiritual, not the miraculous.--Scepticism bred from the contrary view.--The miracle-narratives, while less evidential for religion, not unimportant for history.--Psychical research a needed auxiliary for the scientific critic of these.

VIII

The cardinal point in the present discussion the reality not of miracles, but of the supernatural.--Fallacy of pointing to physical events as essential characteristics of supernatural Revelation.--The character of a revelation determined not by its circumstances, but by its contents.--Moral nature supernatural to physical.--Nature a hierarchy of natures.--Supernatural Religion historically attested by the moral development it generates.--Transfer of its distinctive note from moral ideals to physical marvels a costly error.--Jesus' miracles _a_ revelation, of a type common with others before and after.--The unique Revelation of Jesus was in the higher realm of divine ideas and ideals.--These, while unrealized in human life, still exhibit the fact of a supernatural Revelation.--The distinction of natural and supernatural belongs to the period of moral progress up to the spiritual maturity of man in the image of God.--The divine possibilities of humanity, imaged in Jesus, revealed as our inheritance and our prize.


INTRODUCTORY

In a historical retrospect greater and more revolutionary changes are seen to have occurred during the nineteenth century than in any century preceding. In these changes no department of thought and activity has failed to share, and theological thought has been quite as much affected as scientific or ethical. Especially remarkable is the changed front of Christian theologians toward miracles, their distinctly lowered estimate of the significance of miracle, their antipodal reverse of the long established treatment of miracles. Referring to this a British evangelical writer[1] observes that "the intelligent believer of our own day, ... instead of accepting Christianity on the ground of the miracles, accepts it in spite of the miracles. Whether he admits these miracles, or rejects them, his attitude toward them is toward difficulties, not helps."

By this diametrical change of Christian thought a great amount of scepticism has already been antiquated. A once famous anti-Christian book, _Supernatural Religion_, regarded as formidable thirty years ago, is now as much out of date for relevancy to present theological conditions as is the old smooth-bore cannon for naval warfare. That many, indeed, are still unaware of the change that has been experienced by the leaders of Christian thought, no one acquainted with current discussions will deny; the fact is indubitable. It is reviewed in the following pages with the constructive purpose of redeeming the idea of supernatural Religion from pernicious perversion, and of exhibiting it in its true spiritual significance. The once highly reputed calculations made to show how the earth's diurnal revolution could be imperceptibly stopped for Joshua's convenience, and the contention that the Mediterranean produced fish with gullets capable of giving passage to Jonah, are now as dead as the chemical controversy about phlogiston. Yet some sceptical controversialists are still so far from cultivating the acquaintance with recent thought which they recommend to Christian theologians, as to persist in affirmations of amazing ignorance, _e.g._ "It is admitted that miracles alone can attest the reality of divine revelation."[2] Sponsors for this statement must now be sought among unlearned Christians, or among a few scholars who survive as cultivators of the old-fashioned argument from the "evidences." Even among these latter the tendency to minimize miracle is undeniably apparent in a reduction of the list classified as such, and still more in the brevity of the list insisted on for the attestation of Christianity.

A transitional state of mind is clearly evidenced by the present division and perplexity of Christian thought concerning the Christian miracles. Many seem to regard further discussion as profitless, and are ready to shelve the subject. But this attitude of weariness is also transitional. There must be some thoroughfare to firm ground and clear vision. It must be found in agreement, first of all, on the real meaning of a term so variously and vaguely used as _miracle_. In the present imperfect state of knowledge it may be impossible to enucleate miracle, however defined, of all mystery. But even so will much be gained for clear thinking, if miracle can be reasonably related to the greater mystery which all accept, though none understand,--the mystery of _life_. This view of the dynamic relation of life to miracle[3] is here suggested for what it may prove to be worth.

The great and general change that transfigured theology during the nineteenth century was characteristically ethical. This, indeed, is the distinctive feature of the so-called new theology, in contrast with that which the Protestant Reformers inherited from St. Augustine. God and Man, Faith, Salvation and Inspiration, Redemption and Atonement, Judgment and Retribution,--all these themes are now presented in orthodox pulpits far more conformably to ethical principles, though in degrees varying with educated intelligence, than was customary in the sermons of half a century ago. "One great source and spring of theological progress," says Professor Bowne, in his recent work on _Theism_, "has been the need of finding a conception of God which the moral nature could accept. The necessity of moralizing theology has produced vast changes in that field; and the end is not yet."

The ethical character of the theological change will perhaps be most obvious in the field of Biblical study, to which the present subject belongs. The traditional solution of such moral difficulties in the Old Testament as commands, ostensibly divine, to massacre idolaters has been quite discarded. It is no longer the mode to say