The Age of Miracles

I recently read an article in Crosslight, the newspaper of the Uniting Church in Australia (Synod of Tasmania and Victoria), on the subject of miracles, in which one of my theology lecturers was quoted. This lead to a conversation between myself and said lecturer that has got me thinking a lot about miracles and what we might call the miraculous.

As my lecturer rightly pointed out, it is a common tendency to think of miracles in terms of something happening which is especially unexpected; unexpected because, while we may want the event to occur, we either believe that it won't occur, or expect a different outcome altogether. This is particularly when we are in moments of great distress or suffering, when we are hoping against hope of being delivered from our torment; the miraculous in this context we often regard as the unexpected or unlooked for arrival of that very deliverance (or, at least, avoidance of that which we dread).

The other context which we often think of as miraculous concerns what we imagine to be God's operation in the world, especially in the working of "miracles" such as when Christ is said to have turned water into wine, or various prophets or saints suspended or overrode the operations of nature. These are the "miracle" stories, the narration of events which are inexplicable, or contrary to, the scientific understanding of the cosmos.

What are we to make of this understanding of the miraculous? For myself, I don't think we need take miracle stories literally. Which is not to say they aren't true, only that the truth they point to is allegorical and deeper than we think. I think that what the miracle stories point to is an attempt by the writers and editors of both the Old and New Testaments to respond to the possibility of God through the limited media of human understanding and communication. Miracles in this context are therefore to be seen as a kind of parable, a concise depiction of both the transcendence and immanence of God.

Nor is this a modernist or revisionist approach. I was surprised to learn in a recent lecture that one of the earliest Christian writers, Origen of Alexandria - who was also one of the first Christian theologians to conduct detailed exegeses of Scripture - argued that Biblical truth was allegorical, that it was a vehicle through which humans could express the inexpressible mystery of God and the human relationship with the divine. For example, the creation story in the book of Genesis, and the story of the Fall and humanity's exile from the Garden of Eden, represent not historical events, but are allegorical depictions of a time when all things were united in God, but which were subsequently alienated from God because of their imperfections. Thus, the creation of the world and the exile from Eden represent metaphysical events that happened before the advent of the physical universe.

On a less exalted plane, I think if anyone wants to think about the miraculous, they should contemplate the sheer unlikeliness of life, never mind intelligent life. Some people find doing so nihilistic, or even atheistic, a denial of God and the goodness of "God's plan"; but contemplating it actually brings you face to face with the truly miraculous. If you want to understand just how miraculous, I suggest you read the opening chapters of Bill Bryson's wonderful book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bryson explains that our little planet in its insignificant solar system not only moves in and out of the spiral arm of the Milky Way in which it is located, it also moves through the galactic arm. That is, it moves up and down through the galactic arm, which is actually quite dangerous: in the more densely packed regions, the gravitational pull of all the bodies within the solar system (as well as the gravitational tides of the other solar systems) cause various objects such as comets and meteors to drop out of their normal orbits. Some of these inevitably plunge toward, and strike, the earth.

If you want an idea of the consequences of this, consider that a meteor strike on the earth 65 million years ago (which created the Gulf of Mexico and the Yucutan peninsular) not only wiped out the dinosaurs but 75% of life on Earth. Likewise, scientists have discovered an enormous impact crater under the Antarctic ice-sheet that corresponds to a mass extinction 365 million years ago, in which 90% of life forms were wiped out. In other words, there have been at least two occasions in the earth's history in which life on this planet was nearly wiped out - in other words, in which human beings came close to extinction millions of years before they evolved! And yet, conversely, had these extinctions not occurred, human beings might never have evolved, because their niche in the evolutionary process might have been occupied by some other species.

So here is the real miracle: that we live in a cosmos so subtle and complex and extraordinary that, despite all the factors militating against it, our species, with its unique self awareness and awareness of God, has evolved and (somehow) survived. If that doesn't talk to the miraculous power of God, I frankly don't know what will.

Talk to you soon,

BB

Quote for the Day: Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. (C S Lewis)