Miracles and Supernatural ReligionWhiton, James Morris
Religion
Miracles and Supernatural Religion
Whiton, James Morris
Jesus Christ -- Miracles; Miracles; Religion and science; Supernatural (Theology)
has disposed a growing number of thoughtful minds to regard occasional
signs and wonders, reported from ancient times, as far less evidential
for the reasonableness of religious faith than the steady sustentation
of the Providential order and the moral progress of the world. Fully
convinced of this, we should now estimate, before proceeding further,
the present net results of the discussion, so far as it has gone, of
what is called the miraculous element in the Bible.
First, its former evidential value in proof of divine Revelation is gone
for the men of to-day. The believer in a divine Revelation does not now,
if he is wise, rest his case at all on the miracles connected with its
original promulgation, as was the fashion not very long since. This for
two reasons; chiefly this: that _the decisive criterion of any truth,
ethical or physical, must be truth of the same kind_. Ethical truth must
be ethically attested. The moral and religious character of the
Revelation presents its credentials of worth in its history of the
moral and religious renovations it has wrought both in individuals and
in society. This is its proper and incontrovertible attestation, in need
of no corroboration from whatever wonderful physical occurrences may
have accompanied its first utterance. Words of God are attested as such
by the work of God which they effect. It may well be believed that those
wonderful occurrences--the Biblical name for which is "signs," or
"powers," terms not carrying, like "miracles," the idea of something
contra-natural[11]--had an evidential value for those to whom the
Revelation originally came. In fact, they were appealed to by the
bearers of the Revelation as evidencing its divine origin by the mighty
works of divine mercy which they wrought for sufferers from the evils of
the world. But whatever their evidential value to the eye-witnesses at
that remote day, it was of the inevitably volatile kind that exhales
away like a perfume with lapse of time. Historic doubts attack remote
events, especially when of the extraordinary character which tempts the
narrator to that magnifying of the marvellous which experience has found
to be a constantly recurring human trait. It is simply impossible that
the original evidential value of the "signs" accompanying the Revelation
should continue permanently unimpaired. To employ them now as
"evidences of Christianity," when the Revelation has won on ethical
grounds recognition of its divine character and can summon history to
bear witness of its divine effects in the moral uplift of the world, is
to imperil the Christian argument by the preposterous logical blunder of
attempting to prove the more certain by the less certain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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