Miracles and Make-Believe and Acts 13
MiraclesLast summer I taught for a week on the Bible and Culture course at Schloss Mittersil in Austria. One of the students had a background in philosophy and had a deep grounding in Hegel and his successors. He came to the course deeply distressed by his reading of 19th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach.
Feuerbach was an influential secularist whose thought was widely held to have demolished religion. He claimed to show that the Christian God and Heaven are merely the projection of our own best ideals. Therefore God only exists in as much as He is the object of our faith and mature reflection will reveal that to be truly human we need to replace love for God with love for Man and faith in God with faith in Man.
The thing that troubled my student most of all was the argument that belief, plausibility and validating structures can arise around anything that is firmly believed, and from inside it is impossible to tell whether they are true or not. That is, we set about validating what we believe, consciously and sub-consciously, to the point where we inevitably deceive ourselves about reality. The argument is that there are no certainties and no assurance from within the system because it is demonstrably impossible to tell whether what we believe is true or not.
His conclusion was that he could not tell whether his faith was sophisticated self-delusion, validated and maintained by the expectations of the faith community in which he was involved. After all to believe differently would put him outside the belief structure of the community with the possibility of losing his friends. Isn't that a pretty powerful motivator for comtinuing to belief despite evidence? He was beginning to conclude that everything he believed about God was nothing more than make-believe.
This unusual instance came back to me as I was thinking about the confrontation between Paul and Elymas in Acts 13. Luke tells us that the pro-consul, Sergius-Paulus, was an intelligent man who was interested in the gospel, but it was when God worked supernaturally that he believed the teaching. Note, he didn't believe the miracle, but the teaching. But the miracle had a powerful validating effect.
It has often been argued that Acts miracles are signs of the apostles. That is, they act to affirm the apostles as they teach and hence, by extension, the canon of scripture. When the canon is closed the miracles have done their job and are hence-forward redundant. You don't need miracles, it has been argued, when there is a finished New Testament.
It seems much better to me to argue that the miracles were not signs of the apostles (and therefore really only useful to validate their teaching), so much as signs of the gospel. That is, they demonstrated that the ascended Christ has poured out the Spirit, in order that God be glorified through the Church taking the gospel to all nations in His power.
What the Acts 13 miracle did was provide external, obvious, physical, irrefutable validation for someone who God clearly knew needed it. Praise God that He does this kind of thing. We can think of Gideon, for example. I wouldn't want to make the case that we should normalise Gideon "putting out fleeces", or that we should expect miracles to always and necessarily accompany evangelism. But I do think that God is very gracious in helping people towards faith. Might we not argue that miracles are potentially a powerful antidote to the argument that we have deluded ourselves with sophisticated and self-validating Feuerbachian make-believe?
I want to leave this post open. Because I don't know quite what pastoral advice I should have given to that philosophy student. I am reluctant to suggest he should have been seeking God for miracles, although maybe he was something of a Gideon. I think that belongs in God's gracious purview. Anyone like to come back with any thoughts or advice?
Reader Comments (4)
Hmm. I can empathise with the student, as I've had that accusation (my community's belief-structure makes it easier for me to keep believing despite evidence) leveled at me. My traditional approach has been to point readers back to the (historical, verifiable) resurrection of Christ. But most of us aren't historians, and can quite easily think there's lots of room for the resurrection to be a myth, part of our belief-structure. So I'm not sure what I'd say on top of that.
As to miracles, I remember looking at John's gospel and seeing that, despite all of the signs, people didn't truly believe in Jesus (the end of chapter 2, for example). My experience is that people will ignore the evidence because of their sinfulness - in other words, their unbelief isn't through lack of evidence, but because they're comfortable running their own lives. It's a moral issue.
This is not a fully nuanced or comprehensive response - just a couple of initial thoughts!
Good comment. Of course historical criticism being what it is, people are more and more ready to use the argument that you simply can't tell fact from fiction when looking at historical accounts. Or at least try to make the case that everything historical has such an admixture of both, with inevitable accretions added by (a) successive history, (b) groups with powerful vested interest, (c) the current interpretive community and (d) you who want to believe it that there is no way to speak about reliability. I have had this case made to me. Your point about the historically verifiable therefore needs to be accompanied by why our method is reliable and not tainted by the four points above. Which, granted, is fairly easy to do.
Point taken about some of the miracles in John. But surely we need to be rather more nuanced than that. Even Jesus says "if you won't believe my words, believe on the basis of the signs themselves." And it seems in John as if some didn't (eg 12:37, because of the Isaiah 6 judgement), while others definitely saw it as the work of God (eg 7:31, 9:16). It seems that some people were happy to get the goodies provided by the signs but not trust (eg 6:2, 6:26).
BUT (and it's a big but!), the stated purpose of the sign in John 2:11 is that it showed God's glory and the disciples DID put their trust in him. At the end of the chapter you correctly point out that others didn't, but those God was calling did. Perhaps we ought to be saying that miracles, like the gospel, divide, causing both some to trust the message and others to deny? That would make sense if they are functioning as signs of the gospel. The faith in 7:31 seems to be genuine, because it is contrasted with the hostility of others, and if not caused by the miracles, it is at least amplified by them.
I think a useful perspective for me is to avoid thinking that we are the validating agents, but rather to realise that it is God's testimony about himself that we trust. Feuerbach is absolutely right that from within a framework, we cannot validate it, and that open ended nature is the fatal flaw of any non-Christian worldview, leading to nihilism: we have in ourselves no firm basis for knowing anything. (Godel and Turing are relevant here, but as a mathematician, I would advise not to invoke these unless you actually have understood their work; my philosophy may be correspondingly off.) The presuppositionalist answer though makes very good sense to me, namely that God's word can explain and testify to itself (ultimately God's truth is asei, unlike us). In the bible, we can embrace the circular logic that scripture shows us the truthfulness of God, on which rests the witness of the bible, since we work from the position of faith seeking understanding. Only God's word can explain itself and hence be the firm foundation of a worldview (see Sire's methods for 'deconstructing the deconstructionists').
Different people have expressed the problem of using this idea in different ways. As I understand it, people like Kierkegaard gave up wondering about how we can gain our knowledge of the truth and instead clung desperately to God, but he maintained a perilous, unstable sort of faith because ultimately the act of trusting rested too much on his grip of God, and not the reverse, so he saw doubt as somehow necessary, while in reality it is a sin about which we must pray and tackle like any other indwelling rejections of God's truth.
If this position of faith is vital to theology, the real question is simply 'How does God lead sinners to faith?', and we can say some things, such as 'The Spirit seals the truth of the gospel on our hearts', or 'Faith is a gift from God', but this really skirts the issue of the mechanism for getting there. As with the way God works through means to effect his purpose, that really is a mystery.
In practical terms, we must be content with the faith that we have, pray for eyes to be opened where that trust has not been given, and always seek a deeper appreciation of how God attests to himself to give a deeper appreciation of what is, after all, the truth. Arguments from design (Anselm) or our doctrines of scripture are demonstrations of this to those of us in the graceful position of faith.
To those seeking a miracle, God is gracious, but the bible's attestation is certainly sufficient, and I guess we should ask for more only on the basis that He is under no covenantal obligation to provide. We can have at best a weak hope that he works the way we want, but a strong hope that his work is sufficient for his purposes. The classic 'Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' perhaps sums up the simplest approach to those clining over the void of uncertainty, Wittgenstein's dark plunging tunnel, endless and lightless, illuminated only by the ray of our words, precept upon precept, line upon line. If by the Spirit we fear this separation from God's truth, and look to his word, he is gracious. I struggle with this sometimes myself, and have found no real answer outside a childlike recognition that we ask and he gives; that in our seeking he reveals, and in the Word is no darkness at all.
Thanks Nicholas
Amen to all that. I love having conversations with folk who are able to invoke Turing, Godel and Wittgenstein, talk sensibly about Feuerbach and still realise that at the end of the day God is God and we have to trust like little children. No surprises that Jesus said that few who are wise by the standards of the world get into the Kingdom. The wisdom of the world is often so antithetical to the wisdom of God.
I agree that we can be happy with the circularity argument because of scripture's self-attestation. But I don't think we have to rest there. We have two firm breaches in circle - namely the historical event of the resurrection and the current experience of the Holy Spirit. Both attesting to the truth of the scripture but not merely internally to the scriptures or to the hermeneutic circle. At the end of the day the non-Christian is still going to maintain that scripture attesting to scripture is not a firm foundation of a worldview. We will want to reply that it has pragmatic, transforming power that goes way beyond Feuerbachian make-believe knowledge. But we also want to maintain that it is attested to in secondary but useful external ways as well