Miracles

I'd apologize for talking so much about C. S. Lewis, except that I'm not sorry. His work and the work of his contemporaries is some of the most real and penetrating I have ever read, and his masterpiece Miracles is no exception.

These days, when it is fashionable even in Christian circles to deny or at least diminish the supernatural nature of the Gospel, the issue of miracles deserves all the more attention.

The naturalists desire to recast Jesus as merely a "good teacher" who went around doing "charitable things." When you read the Gospels, it is very clear that Jesus was a highly controversial, subversive figure who went around doing miraculous things. His whole life was one unbroken miracle - from immaculate conception to transfiguration to resurrection - which miracle we collectively call the incarnation. Lewis appropriately devotes an entire chapter to this incredible truth (Chapter 14: The Grand Miracle).

As might be expected, most of the opposition to miracles comes from the naturalist camp, where modern science - the greedy bastard child of true Science - has repudiated any compunctions about reverent inquiry and attempted to claim the supreme throne of the universe. (1 Tim. 6:20)

Faith does not aim to obstruct Science. However, just as a mother ought not to be forever pandering to every petty whim of her enthusiastic but often errant child, Faith must not be going out of her way to accommodate Science. Doing so always proves ruinous to Her sovereign and serene position in the world.

(Of course, this serenity, when maintained even and unruffled, annoys modern science to no end, seeing how it desires to corrupt us from anything that is absolute, and especially anything that remotely resembles morality.)

The Christian response must be the same as it has always been: namely, to believe God, and to act on that belief. God does not have the last word because He is incompatible with Science, but rather because He invented it. The builder knows much more about the building than we tenants could ever know - for all we can do is observe it and take hesitating notes. The best way to understand the building is to ask the builder, just as the best way to understand a story is to ask the author. Granted, we may get "inside" the building or "inside" the story, but this is precisely the reason our understanding is so inadequate, for we cannot properly get "outside" or "before" either of them. (Of course, all of this presupposes Divine Creation, which is in itself a miracle of no mean proportion. But I will leave this question to more able apologists than I.)

I'm almost through the 6-volume Signature Classics series - just The Problem of Pain left. After that, it's on to Narnia, or perhaps God in the Dock. I'll still be a long ways from completing the entire bibliography, but I'll be doing quite well as far as what's on my shelf, and for now that's my main concern.

"Speak about beauty, truth and goodness, or about a God who is simply the indwelling principle of these three, speak about a great spiritual force pervading all thigns, a common mind of which we are all parts, a pool of generalised spirituality to which we can all flow, and you will command friendly interest. But the temperature drops as soon as you mention a God who has purposes and performs particular actions, who does on thing and not another, a concrete, choosing, commanding, prohibiting God with a determinate character. People become embarrassed or angry. Such a conception seems to them primitive and crude and even irreverent. The popular 'religion' excludes miracles because it excludes the 'living God' of Christianity and believes instead in a kind of God who obviously would not do miracles, or indeed anything else." - Ch. 11, Christianity And 'Religion'

Image courtesy of booksamillion.com