VI THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD W E have been going back, step by step, from the surface disputes toward the source of differences. The principal reason given by those who reject portions of the Bible is that they do not believe in miracles. As the Bible is full of miracles, beginning with the one recorded in Genesis 5: 24, and ending with the one recorded in the twenty-eighth chapter of Acts, those who reject all miracles leave little of the Bible that they can accept. Those who reject the deity of Christ do so because it involves the miraculous and the supernatural; the same reason is given by those who deny the Virgin Birth of Christ. And so with the Atonement and the bodily resurrection of Christ. In the concluding article of the series we shall consider the evolutionary hypothesis, which, when accepted as if it were a fact, leads to rejection of miracles. But here we shall deal with the miracle as a test question with Christians. It is a central point in Church discussions at the present time. A dissenting rector in the Protestant Episcopal Church was quoted as saying in a recent sermon that the record of Christ walking upon the sea could not be true," because Christ must have weighed as much as a hundred and fifty pounds," a revelation of the rector's ignorance on the subject of miracles, as well as of his modernism. A leader of the modernist side in the present controversy treats the miracle wrought in the rescue of Jonah as an allegory. Give the modernist three words, " allegorical," "poetical," and "symbolical," and he can suck the meaning out of every vital doctrine of the Christian Church and every passage in the Bible to which he objects. Illustrations of Dissent In an issue of a leading religious weekly the editor gives the views of "teachers in our schools for theological learning and leaders in thought in Congregational pulpits, east and west." He says that "they practically agree that belief in miracles is not essential to faith or to fellowship,” adding, " we do not see how they could take any other position, consistent with Congregational principles." Similar illustrations of dissent could be quoted from members of other Evangelical Churches. These wide differences among members of the Church on the subject of miracles may be accounted for in part, but only in part, by differences in definitions of the miraculous. Some regard as miraculous everything that man cannot do; this, of course, draws the larg、 est line around the miracle because everything that God does would, by this definition, be ascribed as miraculous. A second definition defines the miraculous as anything which man cannot understand,— not that any man does not understand, because there is a vast difference between the understandings of different men, but that which man cannot understand. This definition leaves the area of the miraculous to be decreased as man's understanding of nature increases. That seems to be the definition of the editor above quoted. He says: Therefore, we do not deny the popular idea of the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Discoveries may be made that will shew that the birth of Jesus into the physical world, without physical generation, and the physical reanimation of His body, after the heart had been pierced and the blood emptied out of it, are consonant with the laws with which the Creator of the universe brought humanity into being. At present, to many educated minds, these ways of doing things do not appear to be the ways of God, and we seek |