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Introduction My purpose in this essay is to make the claim that an orthodox Christian understanding of God's transcendence implies miracle. My concern is soteriological, that is, a concern that faith be anchored in a saving God. If God is not a transcendent almighty God, if God is simply a finite power like the gods, then God does not have the power to save humanity against any and every danger. If God is transcendent but does no miracles, then God makes no difference in matters of fact. In that case, God cannot save us when the facts of life go against us. A goodly number of contemporary theologians would agree that God is transcendent. By that it is meant that God is all powerful, utterly beyond life and time, distinct from all created things, and different from every form of being. Many, however, do not believe that God does miracles. In this essay I shall show that a disbelief in miracles implies one of two things: either God is not transcendent, or God is mystically perceived as a monistic One without the inner trinitarian distinctions claimed by orthodox Christian theology. Let me begin by defining the term "miracle" in relation to God's transcendence. A miracle is a specific, objective effect in the world created by a transcendent God which cannot have any explanation in terms of the categories used to understand events in this world. To begin with, the definition is saying that God has effects in the world, God changing events in space and time. Secondly, these effects "cannot" be explained in temporal categories. The definition does not say that a miracle is an event we do not understand, but perhaps may understand someday when our knowledge becomes greater. Rather, the definition states that a miracle is an event in the world, understood as caused by a transcendent God, and this event can never be understood by ordinary categories relating it to other worldly events, regardless of the depth of our knowledge. (1) Understood in this way, a miracle is similar to certain results in mathematics. For example, mathematicians wondered for decades if the real numbers could be put in a one to one correspondence with the set of subsets of the integers. Common sense would seem to dictate that a one to one correspondence either did nor did not exist. Nevertheless, it was eventually proved that the correspondence could not be proved one way or another from the axioms generating the real numbers. In other words, mathematicians have found theorems which can be stated in mathematical terms, but cannot be proved. That is Gödel's famous incompleteness theorem. Or, to put it analogously, there are mathematical "events" which have no other mathematical "events" that can lead to them. Similarly, miracles are worldly events, known to be caused by a transcendent God, and these events can never be understood in terms of other events in this world. My argument follows. Let us assume that there is a transcendent God and that this God does no miracles. This would imply that God never miraculously reveals himself. As a result, the knowledge of God's transcendence would be limited to two ways. First, the mind could consider the world as it is, apart from miracle, and logically infer God's transcendence from it. Or, secondly, the mind could directly "see" God, apart from miracle, and know that God is transcendent. Essentially, these are the only possibilities since, given the assumption of God's transcendence, there are only two realities to know either the world or a God very different from the world. There might, however, be a third way of knowing God's transcendence. This would be a mixture of the two ways just discussed, a mixture of direct vision or inferential insight. But this possibility implies the validity of vision and logical inference. If these are not valid, then any method composed of their mixture would also be invalid. Therefore, I will restrict myself to discussing only two non miraculous alternatives, the immediate vision of God or inferential insight. I begin with the latter. There have been thinkers who have inferred the transcendent nature of God from the world as it is. Thomas' five proofs for the existence of God are the classic examples. In these "proofs," Thomas does arrive at God's transcendence, but he does so in a way that casts doubts on the "proofs" as logical proofs for God's existence and transcendence. Hume was the thinker who best assailed these "proofs" as logical proofs, claiming that their logic was not compelling. Since Hume, there has been a tendency to see these "proofs" as casting some light on the nature of God, once the existence of God has been established on other grounds, namely by revelation. In this essay I will draw on Hume as I consider his arguments compelling from a logical point of view. Without loss of generality, I will restrict myself to one form of inference, inference from effects to causes, where the cause is inferred from the effects. Under this assumption, I will now show that we cannot infer God's transcendence from the world alone, regardless of its constitution. If God does no miracles, we could have a universe in which all events worked together in a smooth and orderly fashion with all effects consistently created by their causes. In such a universe, no one would come back from the dead, the sun would stay its course, water would remain water, wine would be wine. Under these conditions, it would appear that there is no need to infer God's existence from events in the universe since causes alone are sufficient to explain all effects. The only other possibility might be the need to explain the fact of the universe itself, a possibility I will discuss shortly. The assumption that God does no miracles, however, does not imply that the universe be consistent or uniform. We could have a universe which, from time to time, without reason or cause, did strange things. It could happen, for example, that water could suddenly become wine, the sun could pause in the sky, or the sick could randomly become well without any known cause. If such things happened, we would not need to say that a transcendent God did them. We could simply say we lived in a universe which, from time to time, did strange and mysterious things. We could even have a universe filled with faith healers or miracle workers who really did miraculous things, and still not believe in a transcendent God. Such faith healers, for example, might heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, and perform great signs and prodigies, and all this in the name of God. But this would not imply that a transcendent God actually did the things done in his name. All we would need to believe is that the universe produced people whose powers were triggered by their using certain names such as "God," "Jesus," or whatever deity they invoked for their cures. In fact, it is difficult to imagine any sort of universe whatsoever in which we could logically infer the existence of a transcendent God from events in that universe. Imagine, for example, that the president announced to the world that God would heal all people on earth at noon the following day. Suppose this great miracle occurred. Would that imply the existence of a transcendent God? Not in the least. We could simply say that some inner worldly power had communicated foreknowledge of this event to the president and he had reported the matter to us. Then, the next day, that same power generated the great miracle. The amount of power needed to communicate to the president is no greater than the amount of power we need to speak to each other, and the power needed to heal everyone in the world is certainly less than the kilowatts generated by the sun each day, although the precise nature of how this power became healing might be unknown to us. In such a case, given that the world wide healing was finite and limited, its cause could also be finite and limited. But a finite, limited cause is not a transcendent power. Transcendence implies a reality utterly different from all created beings, and being finite and limited characterizes created reality. Therefore, a transcendent God need not be the source of the world wide healing. Even the existence of the universe itself, a rather remarkable occurrence, need not convince us of a transcendent God who created it. Whatever caused the universe could be similar to the universe itself since there is no need to ascribe to causes properties other than those found in their effects. And if the cause of the universe has properties similar to the universe, then that cause is not transcendent since transcendence implies utter difference from the world, not similarity. Hume has argued these matters quite well and there is no need to repeat his arguments in detail. He summed up the matter with these words. You persist in imagining, that, if we grant that divine existence, for which you so earnestly contend, you may safely infer consequences from it, and add something to the experienced order of nature, by arguing from the attributes which you ascribe to your gods. You seem not to remember, that all your reasonings on this subject can only be drawn from effects to causes; and that every argument, deducted from causes to effects, must of necessity be a gross sophism; since it is impossible for you to know anything of the cause, but what you have antecedently, not inferred, but discover to the full, in the effect. (2)It might be possible, however, to argue that going backward from effects to causes in an infinite backward sequence leads at last to a first Cause which would be uncaused. Aquinas makes that argument in one of his "proofs" for God. This uncaused Cause could then be called God. This "unmoved mover" would be radically different from the universe itself since it is a cause that is uncaused, a property not belonging to the universe as a whole. Then, being unlike the universe in this respect, God could be considered transcendent. Nevertheless, there is no reason to claim that the backward sequence has a first element. It could go backward forever as is the case of the negative integers. Or, if one wants to, there is no reason to assign to God the property of being an uncaused cause. One can simply assign that property to the universe as a whole. It would then be said that the universe caused itself, a rather strange notion, but no more strange than God causing himself. In short, it is difficult to see how anyone could logically or sensibly infer the existence of a transcendent God from the world, regardless of how the world is constituted. Let us now consider the other alternative, a direct vision of God without miracle. Suppose the mind or soul perceives or glimpses a transcendent power which we may call God. Since this power is transcendent, it is utterly different from the world. If the person seeing this transcendent reality reached the conclusion that God was transcendent, they must have known that they saw God. But if they saw God, then God had some effect on them, or they would not have known that God was seen. Whether these effects can ever be understood in temporal categories will be discussed shortly. But assuming they cannot, then by the definition of miracle given earlier, a miracle occurred. What sort of effects would occur if one saw the transcendent God? Let us assume, for a moment, that these effects were finite, perhaps a sense of ecstasy, a feeling of being commissioned, or any number of things. Then, by Hume's arguments, the cause of these effects need not have properties different from the effects. In that case, since the effects of the direct vision of God were finite, God would be finite. But my argument assumes that God is transcendent and not finite which implies that the transcendent God did have finite effects different from himself. But this line of reasoning assumes that the vision of God had effects. There might be experiences of the divine without effects. An effect occurs when something impacts something else. To "see" God without effects is to perceive a reality that isn't objective, something that isn't over against the seeing self. In this case, the "seeing" takes place beyond what theologian Paul Tillich calls the subject/object split. In other words, within the vision, there is no difference between the God who is seen and the self which sees. All is one, incomprehensible reality. Under these conditions, the One fuses with the many, the All with the Nothing. This is the monist vision of God. This monist mystical vision is beyond effects since the self is one with the "thing" seen, so that there is no "thing" to have effects on the "self." Since language refers to distinct objects in relation, the mystical monist vision will have to be described in a series of paradoxical statements. A good example can be taken from the Gita. A one point, Arjuna asked to know Krishna's "unnumbered forms," and Krishna responds with a manifestation. In this manifestation Krishna is all things, the shining sun, the dappled moon, the skies, the mountain peaks, the mind, prayers, birds, tigers, alphabetic letters, fame and fortune, silence and speech all things in one vast mystic unity. Since Krishna is ineffable, however, it is not enough to say that Krishna is all things, that would define the incomprehensible as the universe itself. It must also be said that Krishna is also "I, who am all, and made it all, abode its separate Lord." (3) In other words, Krishna is all, yet creates all, yet is separate from all, so that in the end, the mystic vision will see Krishna in all possible relations to all things the mystic one, the many as one, the one in, from, through, and beyond the many. The One even becomes the end of the many, the destroyer of all things. From this point of view it could be said that the vision of Krishna had effects on Arjuna, yet Krishna did not have effects since Krishna was Arjuna and all things besides. Whatever happened, it cannot equivocally be said that Krishna had effects on Arjuna, since, in the end, Krishna and Arjuna were not clearly distinguished. It could be said that I as an author do not have a detailed knowledge of Eastern religion and philosophy. This is true. But, I do have a knowledge of mystical experience, both from my reading and from experience as one who has had mystical experiences from childhood onward. My point is not so much that I have accurately depicted Eastern thought, but rather, that there are mystical experiences in which the self dissolves into the One which is the many. That I know, and I know it is not Christian. I also know it doesn't take a miracle to explain it. It is not Christian because Christian theology believes that God is distinct from the self. God is not the world. The biblical God never says, "I, who am all, ..." Nor is a miracle required to understand the mystical experience. For whatever reason, the soul simply dissolves and becomes one with all things. For a miracle to occur, the self and God must be seen as distinct, otherwise, there are no effects between different realities. When all is one, time, effects, and causes, disappear into the silent moment of eternity. Schleiermacher puts it quite nicely. In fact, he makes it the cornerstone of his monist theology. Even as the beloved and ever sought for form fashions itself, my soul flees toward it; I embrace it, not as a shadow, but as the holy essence itself. I lie on the bosom of the infinite world. At this moment I am its soul, for I feel all its powers and its infinite life as my own; at that moment it is my body, for I penetrate its muscles and its limbs as my own, and its innermost nerves move according to my sense and my presentiment as my own. (4)In short, an experience of the sublime is possible. But if it is not miraculous, that is, devoid of effects between two realities, then it is monist and decidedly not Christian. Let us now consider a biblical alternative, Isaiah 6:1 5. In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory." At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty."In this vision Isaiah saw the transcendent God. The text reveals this quite clearly. The divine being was the "Lord," "high and exalted," "seated on a throne." He was the "Lord Almighty." His holiness and transcendence were so intense that the seraphs could not look at him, and Isaiah knew that he was ruined, a man of unclean lips, for "my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty." The term "almighty" does not simply mean that Isaiah took the secular concept of "might" or "power," and then by intellectual extension, raised it to an unbounded extent. No, Isaiah saw God as "almighty," the one utterly different from all earthly powers, thrones, and dominions. Had Isaiah seen a finite power, one similar to the powers of this world, he would not have been ruined, the seraphs would not have covered their eyes, the intensity of the divine holiness would not have burst forth in song. No, Isaiah saw a transcendent God. Further, upon seeing God, Isaiah was affected. He was moved. He cried out. As the passage unfolds, he hears the transcendent God speaking to him, "Who shall I send," and Isaiah replies, "Here am I. Send me!" Assume for a moment that no miracle was involved in this vision, where "miracle" means finite effects in this world by a cause that is not finite but utterly transcendent. Under this assumption, the lack of a miracle in Isaiah's vision could happen in at least two ways. First, it may have been that Isaiah did see something, but the thing seen was not really a transcendent God. Logically, no one can deny this possibility. Isaiah may have had an hallucination, or he or others may have taken an experience of the finite world and described it language pointing to the transcendent. This denies the text, but any biblical text can always be reduced to conventional categories. From the point of view of faith, I cannot think of anything more wretched than reducing the great and holy God of Isaiah 6 to some mundane and finite being. Such a pitiful finite reality should never be worshipped, loved, or obeyed. Even so, I do not need to claim that Isaiah saw a transcendent God. I have not even claimed there is a God, nor that God is transcendent. I have only claimed the truth of an if then proposition: "If there is a transcendent God in the Christian sense, then such a God can only be known by means of miracle." Isaiah 6 is a classic biblical text pertaining to the divine transcendence. Therefore, with the assumption of transcendence, Isaiah 6 is a ideal text to examine to see if it implies a miracle. Without miracle, and with the assumption of transcendence, it could then be said that Isaiah "saw" a transcendent God, but this vision had no effects on Isaiah. This, of course, violates the plain sense of the text and entails a severe reduction. It means, as discussed above, that Isaiah had some sort of "mystical" experience in which Isaiah became one with the "object" of his vision. There is absolutely no hint of this in the text. In fact, the text demands exactly the opposite. The otherness of the transcendent God was so intense that the seraphs could not bear to look at him, and Isaiah's brief glimpse almost cost him his life and the life of his people. In fact, the finite effects of Isaiah's vision were profound and on going. Not only was Isaiah affected, not only Israel to whom Isaiah prophesied, but even world history has been affected. The words of the Seraphs are recited each Sunday in the Sanctus all over the world, and even today, God's people are lifted up to the transcendent vision, profoundly affected and made anew. It might be possible, however, to adopt a two language theory to explain what happened to Isaiah. (5) According to this theory, a detached scientific observer would describe Isaiah reactions to "revelation" in purely scientific terms. Isaiah, however, would describe the same events as acts of God. According to this two language approach, these two ways do not contradict or overlap. They are like the wave/particle polarity in physics. Given the polarity, whether a miracle did or did not occur would then depend upon one's point of view, scientific or religious. The two language is a statement about the world, not about God and the world. It is the perspective of an observer, noting that religious people use divine action language for certain types of experience, others do not. When theologians present the two language doctrine as a solution to the problem of miracle, they are no longer speaking as theologians. They are speaking as professors of religious experience. Professors of religious experience, however, need not believe in a transcendent God to describe the results of their research. As scientists, they can use Hume's logic, finite effects require no more than a finite cause. That hypothesis is sufficient to account for the evidence of religious experience, including Isaiah's. In other words, the two language theory does not require transcendence, and I assumed transcendence as the major premiss of this essay. Theologically, the two language theory belongs to the doctrine of creation. It describes one aspect of the created world, how religious and non religious people describe religious experience. God's revelation to Isaiah, however, belongs to Incarnation. It is an example of God speaking his Word. It is God the Word made active, the same Word that became incarnate in Jesus Christ. If the effects of God's speech on Isaiah could be understood in terms of creation alone, apart from God doing something utterly new, then Isaiah would have said that creation spoke to him, rather than something beyond creation which affected him. link The great classical theologians of the church knew that God's speech could not be understood in terms of creation. Hooker, for example, believed that something happened in revelation that was not within the power of creation. Following Aquinas, he made a distinction between natural and supernatural, between creation and incarnation. In his view, God's speech, the sending of his Word to become incarnate, was a supernatural miraculous event. Athanasius held the same view. For him, incarnation was not the power of creation at work. If so, creation would have sufficed to reveal God and God would not have sent his son Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ, by the miraculous works of his body acting to restore a corrupted creation, God acted to reveal himself. Perhaps one might say that the same means were open as before, for him to show forth the truth about the Father once more by means of the work of creation. But this was no longer a sure means. Quite the contrary, for men missed seeing this before, and have turned their eyes no longer upward but downward. Whence, naturally, willing to profit men, he sojourns here as man, taking to himself a body like the others, and from things of earth, that is, by the works of his body [he teaches them], so that they who would not know him from his providence and rule over all things may even from the works done by his actual body know the Word of God which is in the body and through him the Father. (6)From this it follows, that the effects of God speaking to Isaiah must be understood as miracle, for if not, Isaiah's awareness of God could be effected by creation alone and not by a second divine act. Or, to put it another way, the divine impact on Isaiah can never be understood in categories used to describe "ordinary" events in this world. If this be true, then God does only one thing, create a closed causal nexus, rather than two things, create the world and then speak to it. If God does only one thing, create the world, then his speaking would be an aspect of his creating. In that case, God the spoken Son would simply be God the Father who creates. God the Father and God the Son, however, are distinguished within God because their actions in the world are distinct. (7) The same can be said of the divine effect of the Spirit. It is a third divine act, not reduced to the other two. Without the distinctions between divine effects in the world, one is left with a monist God. But this essay began with the assumption of an orthodox Christian understanding of God's transcendence, that is, a transcendence that entailed Trinity and Christology. If what God does in creation is distinct from speaking his Word as in orthodoxy, then speaking his Word entails miracle. If God's speech can be seen as belonging to creation, intelligible in lights of its categories, the incarnation is simply creation and God is no longer trinitarian. It might be argued, however, that since the text of Isaiah 6 uses language taken from this world, the vision of God is thereby made comprehensible by means of the language of the text itself. Since this language is finite language, taken from the ordinary categories of experience, God's impact on Isaiah can be described and understood in conventional categories. This would imply that whatever happened to Isaiah could be understood in conventional categories, and therefore, there was no miracle since miracle implies something that cannot be known by conventional categories. There is more to it than that. Anyone can read Isaiah 6, but not everyone will receive it. Only those who catch a glimpse of the transcendent God by means of the text will grasp its message. And when that happens, it will be clear that God is utterly different from the world, yet affecting the reader, and that is miracle. In other words, the text itself cannot be understood except by a miracle. The real mystery, and it is a mystery, is that the utterly transcendent God can have finite effects. Among these finite effects was the fact that Isaiah conversed with God. God spoke, Isaiah understood God's words, and he responded. In other words, the transcendent became intelligible, finite, comprehensible, while still remaining infinite. That is a profound mystery. It is a mystery because how God was able to speak to Isaiah is beyond knowing. If it could be known, then God and his effects on Isaiah would embraced by the same set of categories, and God would be similar to his effects on Isaiah. This would deny God's transcendence. Furthermore, Isaiah not only saw God, he knew that he saw God. In his words, "my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty." Another person, standing with Isaiah in the temple, could have had a similar vision and concluded that it was the effect of the heat, his breakfast, or his medications. This is because the effects of the "vision" were finite and limited various feelings, thoughts, and responses on the part of Isaiah. Since the effects were finite, they could be explained by finite causes such as one's physiological or mental state. But Isaiah was convinced that he saw God. Isaiah did not reach that conclusion apart from God. Rather, the reality of God himself revealed to Isaiah that he had seen God. But this step, that his response to God was a result of God acting rather than a temporal process, entails a further miracle on God's part in which God acted within Isaiah to show him that he had truly seen God. First, it was a miracle to see a transcendent God, and secondly, a further miracle was required in order for Isaiah to know that his experience was caused by a transcendent God rather than a finite reality. In other words, there were two miracles: God's appearing, followed by the recognition that it was God and not an hallucination. In traditional theological thought, the second miracle is the work of the Holy Spirit. Hume saw the matter rather clearly. In his view, miracles were events outside the ordinary, and by definition, uncommon events had the weight of evidence against them. Therefore, if one believed in a miracle, a further internal miracle was required to believe the limited evidence for the external miracle. So that upon the whole, we may conclude, that the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience. (8)It could be argued, however, that a "primitive" person like Isaiah would attribute to God what we moderns might attribute to mental or physical states. This also is possible, although ancient Israel was well aware of the fact that there were true and false visions of their God. But even so, I will now leave it to the reader as to whether he or she wants to believe that an infinite transcendent God can reveal himself today with miraculous finite effects. If one does not believe in miracles, and this is a major point of this essay, there is no need to believe in a trinitarian God who became incarnate. One can be a monist and account for the facts of experience. I know where the great tradition stands. Among others, Hooker was quite clear on the matter. It is the principle of the incarnation, an infinite God humbling himself to take finite form. If therefore it be demanded, why God having power and ability infinite, the effects notwithstanding of that power are all so limited as we see they are: the reason hereof is the end which he hath proposed, and the law whereby his wisdom hath stinted the effects of his power in such sort, that it doth not work infinitely, but correspondently unto that end for which it worketh, even 'all things chrastos, in most decent and comely sort,' all things in Measure, Number, and Weight.(9) |