Miracles and Supernatural Religion Part 1

Miracles and Supernatural Religion.

by James Morris Whiton.

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 cla.s.s 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.

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 att.i.tude 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 A once famous anti-Christian book, _Supernatural Religion_, regarded as formidable thirty years ago, is now as much out of date for relevancy to present theological conditions as is the old smooth-bore cannon for naval warfare.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 pa.s.sage 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 cla.s.sified 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 att.i.tude 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. G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 ma.s.sacre idolaters has been quite discarded. It is no longer the mode to say that deeds seemingly atrocious were not atrocious, because G.o.d commanded them.

Writers of orthodox repute now say that the _Thus saith the Lord_, with which Samuel prefaced his order to exterminate the Amalekites, must be understood subjectively, as an expression of the prophet's belief, not objectively, as a divine command communicated to him. This great change is a quite recent change. If a personal reference may be indulged, it is not twenty years since the present writer's published protest against "The Anti-Christian Use of the Bible in the Sunday School,"[4] the exhibition to children of some vestiges of heathen superst.i.tion embedded in the Old Testament narratives as true ill.u.s.trations of G.o.d's ways toward men, drew forth from a religious journal a bitter editorial on "The Old Testament and its New Enemies." But a great light has since dawned in that quarter. It is no longer deemed subversive of faith in a divine Revelation to hold that the prophet Gad was not infallible in regarding the plague which scourged Jerusalem as sent to punish David's pride in his census of the nation.

A significant fact is presented in the comparison of these two aspects of the theological change that has come to pa.s.s,--the growing importance of the ethical, and the dwindling importance of the miraculous in the religious thought of to-day. This may rea.s.sure those who fear whereto such change may grow. The inner significance of such a change is most auspicious. It portends the displacement of a false by the true conception of supernatural Religion, and the removal thereby of a serious antagonism between Science and Christian Theology, as well as of a serious hindrance of many thoughtful minds from an intelligent embrace of Christianity.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Professor W. T. Adeney in the _Hibbert Journal_, January, 1903, p.

302.

[2] See the recent new edition of _Supernatural Religion_, "carefully revised."

[3] For an earlier statement of this by the present writer, see a discourse on "Miracle and Life," in _New Points to Old Texts_. London: James Clarke & Co., 1889. New York: Thomas Whittaker.

[4] _The New Englander_, September, 1884.

MIRACLES AND SUPERNATURAL RELIGION

I

I

SYNOPSIS.--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.

It is barely forty years since that beloved and fearless Christian scholar, Dean Stanley, spoke thus of the miracles recorded of the prophet Elisha: "His works stand alone in the Bible in their likeness to the acts of mediaeval saints. There alone in the Sacred History the gulf between Biblical and Ecclesiastical miracles almost disappears."[5] It required some courage to say as much as this then, while the storm of persecution was raging against Bishop Colenso for his critical work on the Pentateuch. The evangelical clergymen in England and the United States then prepared to confess as much as this, with all that it obviously implies, could have been seated in a small room. But time has moved on, and the Church, at least the scholars of the Church, have moved with it. No scholar of more than narrowly local repute now hesitates to acknowledge the presence of a legendary element both in the Old Testament and in the New. While the extent of it is still undetermined, many specimens of it are recognized. It is agreed that the early narratives in Genesis are of this character, and that it is marked in such stories as those of Samson, Elijah, and Elisha. Even the conservative revisers of the Authorized Version have eliminated from the Fourth Gospel the story of the angel at the pool of Bethesda, and in their marginal notes on the Third Gospel have admitted a doubt concerning the historicity of the angel and the b.l.o.o.d.y sweat in Gethsemane.

Furthermore, some events, recognized as historical, have been divested of the miraculous character once attributed to them,--the crossing of the Red Sea, for instance, by the Hebrew host. A landslip in the thirteenth century A.D. has been noted as giving historical character to the story of the Hebrew host under Joshua's command crossing the Jordan "on dry ground," but in a perfectly natural way. Other cla.s.ses of phenomena once regarded as miraculous have been transferred to the domain of natural processes by the investigations and discoveries that have been made in the field of psychical research. The forewarning which G.o.d is said to have given the prophet Ahijah of the visit that the queen was about to pay him in disguise[6] is now recognized as one of many cases of the mysterious natural function that we label as "telepathy." The transformations of unruly, vicious, and mentally disordered characters by hypnotic influence that have been effected at the Salpetriere in Paris, and elsewhere, by physicians expert in psychical therapeutics are closely a.n.a.logous to the cures wrought by Jesus on some victims of "demoniac possession."[7] The cases of apparition,[8] also, which have been investigated and verified by the Society for Psychical Research have laid a solid basis of fact for the Biblical stories of angels, as at least, a cla.s.s of phenomena to be regarded as by no means altogether legendary, but having their place among natural though mysterious occurrences.

But this progressive paring down of the miraculous element in the Bible has caused outcries of unfeigned alarm. Christian scholars who have taken part in it are reproached as deserters to the camp of unbelief.

They are accused of banishing G.o.d from his world, and of reducing the course of events to an order of agencies quite undivine. "Miracle,"

writes one of these brethren,[9] "is the personal intervention of G.o.d into the chain of cause and effect." But what does this mean, except that, when no miracles occur, G.o.d is not personally, _i.e._ actively, in the chain of natural causes and effects? As Professor Drummond says, "If G.o.d appears periodically, he disappears periodically." It is precisely this view of the subject that really banishes G.o.d from his world. Those who thus define miracle regard miracles as having ceased at the end of the Apostolic age in the first century. Except, therefore, for the narrow range of human history that the Bible covers in time and place, G.o.d has not been personally in the chain of natural causes and effects.

Thus close to an atheistic conception of nature does zeal for traditional orthodoxy unwittingly but really come.

The first pages of the Bible correct this error. "While the earth remaineth," so G.o.d is represented as a.s.suring Noah, "seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease." The presence of G.o.d in his world was thus to be evinced by his regular sustentation of its natural order, rather than by irregular occurrences, such as the deluge, in seeming contravention of it. To seek the evidence of divine activity in human affairs and to ground one's faith in a controlling Providence in sporadic and cometary phenomena, rather than in the constant and c.u.mulative signs of it to be seen in the majestic order of the starry skies, in the reign of intelligence throughout the cosmos, in the moral evolution of ancient savagery into modern philanthropy, in the historic manifestation throughout the centuries of a Power not our own that works for the increase of righteousness, is a mode of thought which in our time is being steadily and surely outgrown. It is one of those "idols of the tribe" whose power alike over civilized and uncivilized men is broken less by argument than by the ascent of man to wider horizons of knowledge.

It is for the gain of religion that it should be broken,--of the spiritual religion whose G.o.d is not a tradition, a reminiscence, but a living presence, inhabiting alike the clod and the star, the flower in the crannied wall and the life of man. So thinking of G.o.d the religious man may rightly say,[10] "If it is more difficult to believe in miracles, it is less important. If the extraordinary manifestations of G.o.d recounted in ancient history appear less credible, the ordinary manifestations of G.o.d in current life appear more real. He is seen in American history not less than in Hebrew history; in the life of to-day not less than in the life of long ago."

FOOTNOTES:

[5] _Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church_, Vol. II, p. 362, American edition.

[6] 1 Kings xiv. 1-7.

[7] It is not intended to intimate that there is no such darker reality as a "possession" that is "demoniac" indeed. It cannot be reasonably p.r.o.nounced superst.i.tious to judge that there is some probability for that view. At any rate, it is certain that the problem is not to be settled by dogmatic p.r.o.nouncement. It is certain, also, that the burden of proof rests on those who contend that there can be no such thing. On the other hand, it may be conceded that the cases recorded in the New Testament do not seem to be of an essentially devilish kind. On the general subject of "possession" see F. W. H. Myers's work on _Human Personality and Survival after Death_, Vol. I. (Longmans, Green & Co., New York and London.) Professor William James half humorously remarks: "The time-honored phenomenon of diabolical possession is on the point of being admitted by the scientist as a fact, now that he has the name of hysterodemonopathy by which to apperceive it." _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 501, note.

[8] See _Dictionary of Psychology_, art. "Psychical Research."

[9] Dr. Peloubet, _Teachers' Commentary on the Acts_, 1902.

[10] Dr. Lyman Abbott in _The Outlook_, February 14, 1903.

II

II

SYNOPSIS.--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.

The cultivation of scientific and historical studies during the last century, especially in its latter half, has deepened the conviction that