Doctrine of Creation (Part 14)

We have been talking in our lesson about the doctrine of providence and we looked at God’s general providence in governance of the world. Now we are looking at God’s special providential acts called miracles. You will remember I distinguished between a miracle and what I’ve called a special providence. A special providence would be an extraordinary event which comes about because of God’s governance of the world but doesn’t involve any supernatural intervention on God’s part. Rather, it has completely natural causes whereas a miraculous event will involve the intervention of God into the sequence of natural causes in the world.

Scriptural Data

Clearly, the Bible is a book of miracles. Over and over again in both the Old and the New Testament, you have stories of God’s miraculous acts in history.

In the Old Testament, these tend to center around the Exodus in which God brings his people out of bondage in Egypt and delivers them and then around the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Those tend to be the two foci, as it were, of God’s miraculous acts in the Old Testament. The story of Elijah’s battle with the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18 is a classic example where Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal to perform a miraculous act and they are unable to do so. Then Elijah calls upon God to reveal himself in this miraculous way and he does so thereby vindicating Yahweh’s existence as the true God.

In the New Testament, you have a sequence of extraordinary miracles associated with Jesus of Nazareth. God’s self-revelation in his Son, Jesus Christ, is attended with miraculous acts on Jesus’ part. The story of Jesus healing the blind man in John 9:30-33 is a great example of the use of miracles in the New Testament in the life of Jesus. You will remember in this story, Jesus heals the man who was born blind and then they keep interrogating him and his parents to see if this was really a miraculous act that Jesus had done. In John 9:30-33,

There you see a perfect illustration of how miracles serve to warrant the message and the proclamation of Jesus and his being a special revelation from God.

So, in the Bible, both the New Testament and the Old Testament, we have stories of God’s miraculous intervention in history.

19^th Century Collapse of Belief In Miracles

Unfortunately, the traditional belief in miracles collapsed during the 19^th century. I want to say a word about what led to the collapse of the belief in miracles in the modern age.

In his Wahrheit der christlichen Religion (“On the Truth of the Christian Religion”) which was published in 1758, the Göttingen professor of theology Gottfried Less said that there are two steps in establishing that a miracle has occurred. The first step is to prove that the event occurred – that some event actually took place in history. Then the second step was to show the miraculous character of that event.[1] During the ensuing century, the 19^th century, the belief in both of these steps laid out by Less came to be regarded with skepticism and that led to a general collapse in the belief in the reliability of the Gospel stories in German theology.

The first to go was actually the second step – the miraculous character of the event. German rationalists in the late 17^th and early 18^th century were willing, in fact sometimes they were eager, to affirm the historicity of the events recorded in the Gospels. They agreed that these events actually happened. But they went to great pains to explain away these events naturally without any appeal to God’s miraculous intervention. Given that events with supernatural causes do not occur, they felt that there just had to be some natural explanation of these events. So, for example, the theologian Karl Bahrdt – and this is not the same Karl Barth that is the famous 20^th century theologian, this was an 18^th century theologian – in his book explains the feeding of the five thousand by saying that Jesus and the disciples had a secret stash of bread that they had concealed and then somebody would hand it out to Jesus who would then keep handing it out to the crowds and this is the way they fed the five thousand people. Jesus walking on the water was explained by a floating platform just beneath the surface of the water so that he appeared to be walking across the surface of the lake. As for his raising certain people from the dead, well, these people were actually simply in comas – they were comatose – and Jesus aroused them back to waking consciousness and thereby prevented them from being buried prematurely.

This last natural explanation provided the key to explaining Jesus’ own resurrection. By the end of the 18^th century, the old Conspiracy Hypothesis of the English and German deists – that the disciples had stolen the body of Jesus and then lied about the resurrection – had pretty much lost conviction. Nobody really believed in that old conspiracy theory anymore so German rationalists had to come up with some better natural explanation of the resurrection. This they found in the so-called Apparent Death Theory. Jesus wasn’t really dead as a result of his crucifixion. He was merely unconscious – he was comatose – and he was taken down from the cross still alive, placed in the tomb, and there he either revived on his own or sometimes this could be combined with conspiratorial overtones to say that they hoaxed the death of Jesus in order to convince people that he was in fact the Messiah. It is a sad note of history, I think, that the so-called father of modern theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher, actually embraced this theory of the resurrection of Jesus. Yes, Schleiermacher believed in the Apparent Death Theory. He remained rationalistic with respect to the question of miracles. Miracles do not happen and therefore in his lectures of 1832 on the Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History (notice the division there – the Christ of Faith is one thing, the Jesus who actually lived in history is another) he accepts the Apparent Death Theory saying that it is unimportant whether the death and resurrection of Jesus were real or merely apparent. He thought that Jesus just apparently died, he was resuscitated and then he continued to live with the disciples for some time afterwards. That was the explanation that German rationalists gave for miracles – the natural explanation school of thinking.[2]

Just three years after Schleiermacher’s lectures in 1832, a work appeared which sounded the death knell for this natural explanation hermeneutic. This was the book by David Friedrich Strauss called The Life of Jesus,[3] 1835. Strauss explained the life of Jesus and the miraculous elements in it as the product of mythology. The application of mythology to the Gospels, as a category, meant that Strauss denied not simply the miraculous nature of these events but he denied that the events ever occurred. So the first step of Less’ argument for establishing a miracle was now going by the board as well. The rationalists granted that the events had occurred but sought to explain them naturally. Strauss said that the events never occurred; rather, the Gospel accounts are the result of myth, legend and editorial activity on the part of the evangelists. Strauss rejected both the conspiracy theory of the deists as well as the natural explanation school of the rationalists. But he would not accept the traditional view of the supernaturalists that Jesus was actually raised from the dead. Instead, he said that the Gospel accounts are historically unreliable. The Gospels are not historically accurate records of what happened; rather, they are the product of a long evolution in which the original facts were lost and became overlaid with legend, myth and other editorial additions by the Gospel writers.

It is interesting that Strauss claimed, at least, to operate without any religious or dogmatic presuppositions. He thought that he was a perfectly neutral investigator of the Gospels. He ascribed his neutrality to the influence of his philosophical studies. Because he had studied philosophy he felt he could approach these documents neutrally. When you read Strauss, however, it becomes very apparent that the man obviously did have certain philosophical assumptions which determined the outcome of his work. For example, he presupposed the impossibility of miracles. Strauss was an acknowledged pantheist, that is to say he thought that God and the world are identical – there is no transcendent being, no Creator and Designer beyond the world. In later life, he actually embraced materialism – the material world is all there is. So he proceeded on the same assumption that the rationalists had – miracles are impossible. He said this is not a presupposition that requires proof. You just start with this presupposition; you don’t need to give any proof for it. On the contrary, he thought to affirm miracles are possible is a presupposition that requires proof. When it comes to Jesus’ resurrection, in particular, Strauss says that the idea that God has intervened in the regular course of nature to bring about some miraculous event is, “irreconcilable with enlightened ideas about the relation of God to the world.”[4] If you are enlightened, you will recognize that this is simply impossible. Any supposedly historical account of miraculous events can just be dismissed on the basis of this presupposition. He says, “indeed, no just notion of the true nature of history is possible without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of miracles.”[5] So, the chain of natural causes he says is inviolable – it cannot be interrupted and therefore miracles are impossible.[6]

Although Strauss rejected the so-called natural explanation hermeneutic of the rationalists, he was no more sympathetic to miracles than they were or the deists. Instead, he adopted the mythological application. This work, The Life of Jesus by Strauss, was a watershed in the critical study of the New Testament. The importance of this work simply cannot be exaggerated. Albert Schweitzer, who wrote a history of the Life of Jesus movement during the 19^th century, says that The Life of Jesus by Strauss was a watershed, or a division point, in this movement. He says prior to Strauss the main question that occupied students of the life of Jesus was the problem of miracles – how do you reconcile a historical approach to the Gospels with their miraculous character? But he says, “With the advent of Strauss, this problem found a solution, viz., that these events have no rightful place in history, but are simply mythical elements in the sources.”[7] So by the mid-1860s, Schweitzer says, the problem of miracles has lost all importance. Let me quote from Schweitzer’s book The Quest of the Historical Jesus as it is translated in English published in 1906. This is what Schweitzer says:

So as a result of Strauss’ influence, the problem of miracles simply disappeared. He says historians looking at the life of Jesus just assumed that they had to take a naturalistic approach and that miracles were impossible and then the question was just explaining them away. So up until the time of Strauss, it was pretty widely recognized that the Gospels were historically reliable accounts of what had happened. These events actually took place. The question was: how do you explain them naturally rather than supernaturally? But, with Strauss, the miraculous events narrated in the Gospels never really took place – they are just myths. The narratives in the Gospels are therefore unhistorical in character.

I would be remiss if I were to leave it at that and not mention that, although Strauss’ mythological approach to the Gospels remained the dominate viewpoint right up until the mid-20^th century, there has now occurred what Craig Evans (a New Testament scholar) has called the eclipse of mythology in New Testament studies. Over the last fifty or sixty years, New Testament scholars have come to realize that, in fact, mythology is the wrong category for interpreting the historical Jesus. This has led to, really, an eclipse or abandonment of Strauss’ mythological approach to the Gospels. It still lingers on in certain radical left-wing groups like the Jesus Seminar but, among mainstream New Testament scholarship today, it is recognized by the majority of scholars that Jesus was in fact a miracle worker and exorcist.[9] That is not to say that they agree that these events were supernatural. The second of Gottfried Less’ steps would still need to be established – the miraculous character of the events. But his first step has been reclaimed, I think, against Strauss. It is widely recognized today that Jesus of Nazareth did carry out a ministry of miracle working however you might want to explain these. In fact, he was also an exorcist who cast demons out of people however you might want to explain that. So we have thankfully seen some reversal of this collapse in the belief of miracles. The events themselves, at least, are back on the table once again as a result of the eclipse of mythology in 20^th century New Testament studies of the life of Jesus.