MIRACLES AND RADICAL THEOLOGY Roger A. Shiner University of Alberta

What, for Sherlock Holmes, was remarkable about the behaviour of the dog in the night was that the dog did nothing. What is remarkable about the radical theologians’ treatment of miracles is that they hardly treat of them at all. In this essay, I shall try to explain why they do not, and to say something about the challenge here presented to the rationality of Christian faith.

I must, however, make clear at the outset that I am concerned only with the philosophical implications of a particular notion of miracles, which one might call the evidential notion. I am concerned, that is to say, with the notion that a miracle is an event which provides evidence in favour of the existence of God, that there is possible a legitimate inference from a claim that some event is a miracle to the claim that God exists. I am not concerned with as it were ‘ampliative’ notions of miracles, interpretations of miracles according to which the purpose of a miracle is to amplify for the benefit of the faithful some aspect of God and/or his works. For example, a mother may already be a devout Christian; but her son contracts an incurable disease, and her faith begins to waiver. She may interpret the unexpected spontaneous disappearance of the disease not as evidence of God’s existence (as a devout believer, she is not interested in such evidence), but as a sign that God still loves and cares for her. Alternatively, the children of Israel may have interpreted the plagues suffered by the Egyptians not as evidence for the existence of God, but as revealing God as the avenging protector of his people.

Furthermore, I am not in this essay going to be concerned with ‘internal’ distinctions which theologians might want to make between different kinds of miracles. One may have sound theological reasons for wanting to differentiate between miracles performed by God, miracles performed by Christ, miracles performed by saints and other holy men. One may also want to distinguish miracles of healing and other miracles. If in what follows I ignore these distinctions, as I ignore other conceptions of miracles beside the evidential one, it is in the presupposition not here defended that what I have as a philosopher to say about the precise, albeit very general, notion of miracles with which I am concerned does not require me to deal with these (as I see them)

Roger A . Shiner, M.A. (Alberta), M.A., Ph.D. (Cantab), Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta, haspubldhed articles on aesthetics, ethics. Greek philosophy and philosophy of religion in various journals including Analysis, British Journal of Aesthetics, Dialogue, Journal for the History of Philosophy, and Philosophy. He is the author of Knowledge and Reality in Plato’s Philebus (Van Gorcum, Assen, 1974) and he is also a previous contributor to The Southern Journal of Philosophy.

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purely theological issues. This 'evidential' interpretation of miracles, of events such as the

staying of the sun, the dividing of the waters, the transformation of water into wine, the feeding of the five thousand, the numerous miracles of healing, is something like the following-they are interventions by a God who stands outside the space-time structure of the natural world into the causal network connecting events in that world; as such, they are evidence for the existence of that God. In an age where very little is known and understood about the workings of nature, the explanation of the inexplicable in terms of divine activity is an extremely tempting one. But we know now a very great deal more about the workings of nature than was known when Christ trod the roads of Galilee; science has given us understanding of our environment, and, through its offspring technology, has given us in large measure the means of controlling that environment. It is true that the Laplacian vision of a totally determined and mechanistic world does not now dominate scientific thinking. Modern physics works within the framework of quantum theory, according to which the occurrence of single events cannot as such be predicted, but only their relative frequency of occurrence in relation to other events. The social sciences are still some way from having any theoretical structure at all. The inspiring conviction, however, is nonetheless that our ignorance is an ignorance in fact, an ignorance which in principle can be overcome. The world has come of age, and, to understand the natural world, we have, as Laplace himself notoriously remarked, no need of the God-hypothesis.

There does seem to be an essential tension between the mounting pile of evidence that there is a non-theistic explanation of some form or other for every natural event, and the view that some events are explicable only as being caused by a supra-natural or transcendent God. One way to resolve this tension is, of course, to declare that God is Dead, and that Science has killed him. It is undoubtedly true that such a notion plays an important role in the Death of God Theology, as Hamilton has acknowledged. We cannot however assume that simply because this tension exists, God must be said to be dead. In making such a move, the Death of God theologians share with the so-called primitive believers whom they criticise the assumption that it is not possible for an event both to be miraculous, in the sense of revelatory of God, and to have a natural explanatiqn. Perhaps, however, as has been argued by, for example, Dewart, we need to deny this assumption, we need to reconcile and not to contrast God and Nature. We need, perhaps, to reinterpret our concept of the miraculous in such a way that an event remains miraculous, even though a plausible natural explanation of it may be discovered.

Such reinterpretations of the miraculous, of divine intervention in history, have been attempted by Bultmann and Tillich. Bultmann condemns the world view of primitive Christianity as mythological, and

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regards it as a piece of ballast modern Christian belief must abandon, if it is to stay afloat. The story of a miracle would not, for Bultmann, be significant because it recorded the occurrence of some extraordinary factual event; the need to demythologise the story renders the objective character of the event irrelevant. It would be given significance by leading to the understanding by an individual human being of his place in the world, of human existence and its possibilities. Bultmann falls short, however, of advocating the death of God, for he still wishes to maintain that this understanding of human existence is ultimately dependent on the event of Christ, the decisive saving act3 of transcendent God present and active as that point in history, also wants to retain a “meaningful doctrine of miracles” without interpreting them as “supranatural interference in natural processes”. For him, a miracle is a “sign-event” which satisfies three criteria. It must ( i ) be astonishing without contradicting the rational structure of reality, (if) point to the mystery of being, and (iii] be received as a sign-event in ecstasy (his word for the state of mind in which revelation occurs). Thus, a miracle is revelatory of God, without necessarily being a supranatural act of God in the traditional sense.

Both of these conceptions of the miraculous are radical departures from the traditional view. Both theologians, however, share with the traditional view the ideas that there is a God who transcends the natural world, that there are events which are miracles, and that their being miracles is a function in some way of their relation to that God. The Death of God theologians propose to be even more radical than this. They regard the views of Tillich and Bultmann as unstable, half-way houses on the road to the truth which is that God is Dead.’ Since even the above minimum content of the notion of ‘miracle’ still retains, however reinterpreted, the activity in history of a transcendent God, it too must be rejected, as such a God himself must be rejected. The element of the miraculous does not disappear, only to reappear in a revised form: it disappears, never to return. This absence of any reference in the Death of God theology to the miraculous is significant, as indicating how far this theology is prepared to go beyond the theologies of Bultmann and Tillich, who are themselves frequently regarded as crypto-atheists by supporters of traditional theologies.

Various Death of God theologians differ among themselves in the precise positions they adopt. Altizer insists on a sharp distinction between God and Christ; this enables him to write a book called fie Gospel of Christian Atheism. His thesis in that book is that, in Jesus of Nazareth, God has become totally incarnate; he has ceased to exist as a transcendent or disincarnate spirit; his death is an irrevocable historical event. The Incarnation is the final act of God in history; after it, there are only the acts of the incarnate person of Jesus. We must infer from this (for Altizer does not spell it out clearly) that those acts of Jesus which are regarded as miraculous are not such; they are the acts of an immanent

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and incarnate Word, emptied of transcendent significance. Thus, for Altizer, the miraculous dies with the God out of whose activities it was constituted. The concept ‘miracle’ cannot be re-defined so as to survive the death of God; if there is no transcendent God to intervene supranaturally in the causal order of this world, then there are no events which are supranatural interventions by a transcendent God into this causal order. There were miracles when God was alive; now that he is dead, there are none.

Although van Buren does not himself speak of the Death of God, Hamilton, in a shrewd assessment of van Buren’s relation to himself and Altizer,6 counts him among the Death of God theologians. This accurately reflects the extremely radical nature of van Buren’s theology, and he can appropriately be considered in this essay. He is also silent on the subject of miracles, as suFh, but his view can be inferred from his treatment of the Easter story. If a man who died and was buried then rose again on the third day, and moreover, subsequently appeared before his disciples, this would indeed be miraculous. But such things cannot happen to historical persons in the natural world, and Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person. The disciples’ story of the reappearance of the living Christ must, from a Christian point of view, be given credibility; the development of the Christian Church and the continued spreading of the gospel of Christ stemmed from the inspiration the disciples received from the reappearance of Jesus. If this story is to have any credibility for modern man, it must therefore be reinterpreted. In his reconstruction, van Buren makes use of a distinction between a statement such as ‘There is a lamp on my desk‘, which describes a physical object, an inhabitant of the public world of fact, and a statement such as ‘It seems to me that there is a lamp on my desk’, a statement describing a sense-content, an inhabitant of the private world of inner experience. The statements in which the disciples described the reappearance of the risen Christ, van Buren argues, are not, as they have traditionally been taken to be, statements describing the public world; our understanding of the workings of that world excludes the possibility of the actual physical reappearance of persons who have died. These statements must therefore be taken to describe the private world of the disciples’ own consciousness, and, as such, can be true and credible, even when the corresponding physical object statements are not. The subsequent renewing and revitalising of the disciples’ faith is, by this reconstruction in terms of the inner life of the mind, as well explained as it was before.

We can perhaps best understand the concept of the miraculous which can be derived from this by comparing it with Tillich’s account, as I described it above. Tillich regards all three of his criteria for ‘miracle’as equally necessary: in contrast, it is, for van Buren, sufficient for an event to be a miracle that it satisfies merely the third of Tillich’s criteria, the one which has to do with the state of mind of the person experiencing the

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event. Provided that a person has an experience which to him is an experience revelatory of God, it is irrelevant whether there exists in actual fact anything in the public natural world corresponding to and causative of the experience. Christian theology need no longer concern itself with questions of whether a transcendent God can intervene supranaturally in this world: Christian faith can survive the proof by science that no such interventions are possible. The foundation of Christian faith is the occurrence of certain inner and private experiences in believers’ minds. The existence of these experiences, unlike the existence of miracles in the traditional sense, is immune to the attacks of science, whose domain is the public physical world.

In a later essay,’ van Buren acknowledges and submits to the influence of Werner and Lotte Pelz, the authors of God is No Morei: The position they adopt is very much akin to that of Hamilton himself, a position which is yet a more radical descendent of the position of Dr. John Robinson in Honest to God. We have seen that it is, for Altizer and van Buren, still important to preserve a distinctively rheologicalelement in Christian faith. Theology is still God-talk, even though it is not talk of a God who is dead, but of a Christ who lives on in a“universa1 form, and continues to be present in a forward-moving and transfiguring Word”,” in the experiences men have of him, in a “discernment-situation in which Jesus the free man whom they had known, themselves, and indeed the whole world, were seen in a quite new way” (van Buren SMG 138). Hamilton and the Pelzes, however, are prepared to discard even this. Hamilton says of faith that “it is not a means of apprehending God at all. This faith is more like a place, a being with or standing beside the neighbour. Faith has almost collapsed into love. . . ,” (RTDG 48), and that we must “trust the world, not God, to be our need-fulfiller and problem-solver” (ibid., 52); in NEC, he suggests that the new essence of Christianity is “a distinctive style of life” (1 13fs.). For the Pelzes, it is simply irrelevant whether or not the miracle stories are rejected as unscientific, whether or not the ‘miraculous’ is still meaningful: what is important is that “the words of Jesus were experienced, from the beginning, as a promise of something that can only be described as health, wholeness, fulness, abundance of life” (GNM 20). For these theologians, the consequence of the death of God is the death of theology as such: talk about God becomes ethical talk, a certain vision of man and his world, their value and their values. At a time when a plethora of moral challenges present themselves to the ethically sensitive man, it cannot be doubted that such a vision must be an integral part of Christian faith, and that the concept of the miraculous is indeed irrelevant to the formation of such a vision. Since Hamilton and the Pelzes see little more to faith than the formation of such a vision, the concept of the miraculous is not for them, as it is for Altizer and van Buren, something relevant though in need of radical redefinition, but something simply irrelevant.

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The image evoked by the name ‘radical theology’ is the image of a horticulturalist who prunes away everything inessential from a plant, who trims it almost to the roots, so that it may grow again with renewed vigour and splendour. The Death of God theologians are utterly convinced of the need for such surgery, if Christian faith is to survive and flourish in the modern world. The horticulturalist must, however, be careful that he does not cut so deep that he cuts into the roots themselves, with the consequence that the plant dies anyway. Theologians such as Bultmann and Tillich are radicals, and, as we have seen, the Death of God theologians offer more drastic proposals. Do they preserve the essential root elements of Christian faith or not?

Distinctively Christian faith is rooted, as Tillich and Bultmann very well realise, in the unique event of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Christianity is a historical religion, making a double and a unique claim, that Christ is both man and God. Christianity is inconceivable without the humanity of Christ the Son of God, the crucified and risen Lord, and the divinity of Jesus, son of Joseph and Mary, the carpenter of Nazareth. It follows from this that the historical life of Jesus, including the miracles he performed and the supreme miracle performed by God in him, are also of this indissolubly double character. Christian faith, if it is to be Christian faith, must proclaim the inadequacy of any account which represents the miracles as only the acts of a totally incarnate God (Altizer), as essentially private and not public happenings (van Buren), or as irrelevant to the essence of faith (Hamilton and the Pelzes). The conclusion must be drawn, therefore, that, insofar as Death of God theologians think of themselves as cutting down to, but not into, the fundamental roots of distinctively Christian faith, they so think mistakenly. Whether, with Bultmann, one is prepared to abandon the miraculous entirely except for the notion of the Christ event itself, or whether, with Tillich and Dewart, one preserves the miraculous by reconciling God and Nature, it is clear that some such manoeuvre must be carried out, else what survives will not be Christianfaith as such at all.

To say that, however, is to be concerned with the narrow, local issue of whether the Death of God theologians have produced a concept of ‘miracle’ which is consistent with their professed aim of being the radical heirs of the true Christian tradition. It is not to face the wider issue lurking behind this one, the issue of whether the necessity of some concept of the miraculous is compatible with the rationality of Christian faith. To this issue I would now like to turn.

The traditional concept of the miraculous has discredited Christian faith in the eyes of modern, secular, scientific man. To surmount this, the Death of God theologians proposed to redefine or to abandon the miraculous. In their attempts to do this, however, they have, from the theological point of view, gone too far. The theology they offered as consistent with secular man’s contempt for the miraculous turned out

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either not to be Christian theology, or not to be theology. Our original difficulty therefore remains, the tension between, on the one hand, seeing an event as a miracle and wanting to make evidential use of it, and, on the other hand, possessing a natural explanation of it. Is it possible to reconcile these two? The Death of God theologians have failed in their attempt to reconcile the two in a manner consistent with the claims both of Christian theology and secular man. This failure is nonetheless crucially important, for it may represent an indication that no such reconciliation is possible. But we cannot come to that conclusion yet.

The pivot of any putative reconciliation of Christian Faith and secular science is going to be this, that the man of faith and the man of science do not differ in their understanding of what in fact has happened, does, and will happen in the natural world; it must be the case that “the existence of God is not an experimental issue in the way that it was” (John Wisdom). Insofar as traditional faith shares with contemporary secular agnosticism and atheism that it is an experimen- tal issue, with miracles the decisive evidence, both are mistaken. However, as Wisdom argues in the paper which begins with the sentence just quoted,” this does not mean that the issue between believers and non-believers is not a rational issue.

There are other cases where the issue is not an experimental one, but is still a rationally settlable one. In courts of law, the primary facts of the case may be known and agreed upon by the disputing parties, and yet the dispute as to whether there was negligence, or whether there was consent to the risk, remain alive. Counsel for the plaintiff and counsel for the defence may differ, not in that one maintains to be true some factual claim the other maintains to be false, but in that one sees a pattern in the case which the other does not see. The argument proceeds by both sides indicating features of the case in question in virtue of which it is similar to or different from cases not in question. By argument, by the indication of features and the comparison of cases, it may become manifest that the description of that pattern seen by one counsel is a more accurate description of the case itself than is the description of that other pattern seen by the other counsel, and thus the question before the court can be and indeed is, in consequence of this greater underscanding, answered.

It seems, then, it may be argued that just because the question of whether a certain event was a miracle, and so evidence for the existence of God, is not to be solved by considering the factual question of whether the event is scientifically explicable, we cannot therefore conclude that it is not a rationally settlable question. One who sees the world as revelatory of the existence of a transcendent God, who sees certain events, viz. miracles, as peculiarly revelatory, who sees one particular event, viz. the Christ event, as supremely revelatory, has no need, it may be said, to deny any statement made by science about the

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workings of the world. The Christian man of faith differs from the agnostic man of science in that he has a different vision of what all these natural happenings add up to. To him, they reveal, in Tillich’s phrase, the mystery of being; to the secular scientist, on the other hand, they reveal not this, but simply how the world is. Seemingly, if the legal parallel is carried through, the believer may be able to indicate those features which support his claim, and the non-believer those which support his, and soon it may become evident that the description of the pattern seen by the believer is a more accurate description of the world itself than is the description of the pattern seen by the non-believer (or, of course, vice versa), and thus the issue between them may be resolved. Against this background, to say of a certain event that it is a miracle will be to assign it to a place in the structure of one pattern, with a view to providing evidence in the specific manner just outlined of the existence of God.

This, however, I want to suggest, is just the vital point at which the parallel between the theological case and the legal case breaks down. Suppose the question before the court is whether there was negligence; a relevant feature of the case is whether there was consent to the risk involved. Now here, the subsidiary question of whether there was consent to the risk is a quite separate question from the main question of whether there was negligence; it can be answered without prejudicing the answer to that main question. But, in the theological case, the subsidiary questions turn out to be the main question in another form, to raise issues subject to logically similar dispute. There is no logically and epistemologically independent way of settling putatively subsidiary questions about whether a certain event was a miracle, or whether a certain man was Christ the Son of God, independently of settling putatively main questions about whether there is a transcendent God with certain attributes. To settle the main question will open the logical and epistemological way to settling the subsidiary questions, and vice versa; the whole set of questions are indissolubly linked, they stand or fall together, in a way which the legal questions do not.

I am not saying that the theological questions are beyond the scope of reason. As Wisdom has argued, “In Nero God was incarnate” is absurd and against all reason and therefore not beyond the scope of reason; if this is true of “In Nero God was incarnate”, then it is true also of “In Jesus God was incarnate”, a statement of a logically similar type.I3 My thesis is that statements of the form ‘This event E is miraculous’, including such statements about the supreme miracle of the Incarnation, present precisely the same kind of issues as wider and supposedly more fundamental statements asserting the existence of God.

Faith in God is, in terms of the foregoing argument, in principle reconcilable with the acceptance of scientific descriptions of the world, and in principle rationally defensible. That is to say, theistic belief may have as its opponent secular scientific belief, even though the dispute

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between them is not one to which further empirical information is relevant. Moreover, the issue between them may be rationally settlable even though it does not proceed by the further compilation of empirical evidence. These things may be so, because disputes with such a structure do in point of fact exist, and the dispute we are concerned with can on the surface be cast in that form. However, a person can only see an event as a miracle, and thus push it forward in the campaign to defend the viability of his pattern, if he already believes in the existence of God, and vice versa. To say an event is a miracle is not to provide independently assessable evidence for, but is to express one’s belief in the existence of God. To express one’s belief in the existence of God is to express a preparedness to see events as miracles. The thesis of secular man is precisely that the scientific understanding of the world is sufficient unto itself. He will argue that to point to a scientifically explicable happening in the natural world as a miracle, and so revelatory of God, even as a part of the attempt to bring out the existence of a pattern rather than as offering direct factual evidence, is to prejudice the issue between himself and the believer as to whether more can be said of an event than simply that it occurred.

Tillich, certainly, is peculiarly conscious of this. He explicitly acknowledges the existence of “the theological circle”: l 4 “every understanding of spiritual things is circular”, he writes. This is true of that understanding by which we see the raising of Lazarus as a miracle, and the birth, life, death, and ‘resurrexion’ of Jesus as the supreme miracle. These things are seen as such in faith by men of faith, and, in so seeing them, they express their faith. The consequence, however, is that the relation between miracles and the existence of God is still not an evidential one. This conclusion must be reaffirmed, even though we have passed beyond the stage of primitive faith and its equally primitive detractors in thinking that miracles are evidence for the existence of God as spots are evidence for measles, into a fuller understanding of what it is for a thing to be evidence for a conclusion.

The death of God may in the end therefore come to this. There is no way out of the impasse that, only if one has a non-rational faith that God exists, can miracles in general and the supreme miracle in particular be seen as such. This point is not affected by the redefining of the concept of ‘miracle’ to reconcile it in principle with man’s coming of age in a secular scientific world. The existence of God is not an experimental issue, nor is it an issue to be settled by pointing to features which can be independently recognised as elements in a theistic vision of the world. The Death of God theology highlights the challenge of secular man to the traditional Christian faith, and we have been considering here this challenge in relation to the concept of ‘miracle’. But this theology is confused about what can legitimately be done to meet that challenge. However, we are left instead with the essential ambivalence of the natural world, which makes it hard to see how the natural world can

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provide evidence for Christian faith. I shall close by mentioning a corollary of this conclusion which is as

equally important as the conclusion itself. This essential ambivalence means that, analogously, to deny that an event is a miracle is not to provide independently assessable evidence against the existence of God, but is to express one’s belief in secular agnosticism or atheism, and to express such a belief is to express a refusal to see events as miracles. The idea that an event has a natural explanation, which is an idea requiring to support it no less and no more than empirical information, has to be distinguished from the idea that natural explanations of events are sufficient unto themselves. To move directly from the former to the latter is just as much to prejudice the issue between believers and secular man as to whether more can be said of an event than simply that it occurred. There may be point to saying “religious belief is a rnadne~s”.’~

If so, then, I want to suggest, there must be as much point to saying that secular belief of the kind described is in the same way a madness. Perhaps the paradox in religious belief, to which the extremism of the Death of God theology directs our attention, is not that religious belief is internally absurd, but that religious belief and secular belief stand against each other like draughtsmen in a strange game where the white pieces are on white squares and the black pieces are on black squares. We know the game (in courts of law a dispute may be such that . . . .); we know the moves (‘In Nero God was incarnate’ is absurd, ‘In Jesus God was incarnate’ is not). But when we try to move the pieces in the game according to the rules, we find they never meet, and that neither side wins, neither loses.

NOTES

‘Altizer, T.J.J., and Hamilton, W., Radical Theology and the Death ofGod(Penguin,

’Dewart, L., The Future ofBelief(Burns and Oates, London, 1967), pp. 191-3. ’CJ, for example, Bultmann, R., Kerygma und Myth (Harper and Row, New York,

Tillich, P., Sysrematic Theology, vol. I (Nisbet, London, 1953), pp. 128-131. ’CJ, for example, Altizer RTDG, pp. 112-5 1 and P. van Buren, The Secular Meaning of

’SMG, pp. 131-9. *van Buren, P.M., Theological Explorations (SCM, London, 1968), pp. 175-181. ’Pelz, W. and L., God is No More (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1967) (hereafter GNM).

RTDG, pp. 47-9; Hamilton, W., The New Essence of Christianity (Darton, Longman

“Altizer, T.J.J., The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Collins, London, 1967), p. 56. ”Wisdom, J., “Gods”, reprinted in J . Wisdom, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

(Blackwell, Oxford, 1953), pp. 149-168; CJ also Wisdom, J., “The Logic of God”, reprinted in J. Wisdom, Paradox and Discovery (Blackwell, Oxford, 1965), pp. 1-22, and J.R Bambrough, Reason, Truth, and God (Methuen, London, 1969), pp. 55-72.

Harmondsworth, 1968), (hereafter RTDG), p. 57.

19f1), pp. 1-45.

rhe Gospel (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968), (hereafter SMG), pp. 67-87.. 6 ~ ~ ~ ~ , pp. 44-7.

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and Todd, London, 1966) (hereafter NEC), passim.

I3“The Logic of God”, p. 20. 14~ysrematic Theology I. pp. I 14. ”Cody, A.B., “Oc the Difference It Makes”, Inquiry, XI1 (1969), 394-405.

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