Christianity and the supernatural

Front matter

—Angitcan Church Handbooks

THE Rev. W. H. GRIFFITH THOMAS, D.D.

EDITED BY

Preface

Tuis little book is an endeavour to indicate, in a tentative way, the place of Transcendence in Theology.

The idea of Immanence is so prevalent, and has so completely dominated the minds of Christian thinkers of many schools, that we are in danger of forgetting how large a space remains for the contrasted conception.

The line of thought which runs through these chapters is the same as that which the writer attempted to express, in a more philosophical form, in his /éealism and Theology.

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Contents

THE SUPERNATURAL .

. Tue INCARNATION

Tur INCARNATION AS AN EVENT

Chapter I The Supernatural

From the beginning Christianity presented itself to the world as a religion filled with the supernatural. The first Christian writings that we possess—those nearest to the events to which they refer—contain, if possible, more of this element than the later. St. Mark’s Gospel, confessedly the earliest, records a far greater number of miracles than St. John’s. St. Paul’s Epistles of the first and second groups dwell with far greater insistence on the fact of the Resurrection of our Lord than the later Epistles. Compare the first Epistle to the Corinthians with that to the Ephesians. If we had to judge of St. Paul’s presentation of Christianity from the latter alone, we might, with some show of reason, regard him as a great spiritual philosopher, to whom the Resurrection stood for a metaphysical conception rather than a historical fact. But the earlier Epistles set the Apostle before us as a teacher to whom the historical fact and the evidence for it were matters of primary importance, whose whole life and labour depended on their truth and accuracy.

Here the order is exactly the reverse of what our modern rationalising theories require. Instead of finding that, as time goes on, miraculous details accumulate more and more ro CHRISTIANITY AND THE SUPERNATURAL round a saintly life and a noble doctrine, we find the life of Christ and the supernatural inextricably united from the very first, and, as believers reflect more and more upon the wonderful life, the doctrinal or theological element fills an increasing space.

In modern times the growth of science and of the rationalising spirit has made it difficult to maintain a belief in the supernatural. A miraculous tale occurring in an ordinary history throws doubt on the whole narrative. It has become an accepted canon of criticism that accounts which involve such tales cannot be regarded as strictly historical. And the principle must be admitted. It is perfectly true, as has been often said, that miracles do not happen. They certainly do not happen in our ordinary experience : they are not the stuff of which the history of our own times is made.

And this is no new discovery. Rationalism was as powerful a force in the eighteenth century as it is to-day: it was, indeed, so far as we can judge, even more powerful. It had leavened cultivated thought even more thoroughly. Its triumph was greater and more perfect, for the current philosophies of the time had not that profound and reverent sense of the mystery in things which marks our own age.

Yet the names which have lived, and which for us now represent most characteristically the Christianity of the eighteenth century, are those of great thinkers and leaders who frankly and fearlessly, and in spite of the tendency of their age, held Christianity as a definitely supernatural religion: Butler, Berkeley, Paley, Wesley. In character, in mind, in work, these men were very diverse; yet they owed their power to one great faith, which they all held and all maintained in different ways—faith in a supernatural Christianity. This was the inspiration of the philosophical thinker as well as of the man of action.

And when we look back over the last hundred years, with their amazing development of scientific knowledge with their extraordinary record of advance in the mapping ; out of nature on the one hand, and in the writing of its

THE SUPERNATURAL II history on the other; when we reflect upon the rise of the doctrine of evolution, with its great corollary, the continuity of nature; and when we consider how these ideas have captivated the popular imagination, we cannot but be struck with astonishment at the power and variety of the religious movements which have taken place during the same period within the Christian Church, and at the enthusiasm with which Christian ideals have been applied to modern problems. And the most wonderful thing is that the Christianity which has displayed this splendid vitality has kept clearly in view that supernatural character which was impressed upon it at the very beginning of its history. In a world which is doing its best to deny the | possibility of the supernatural, the most supernatural of all religions has shown itself the most potent of spiritual forces.

It is no exaggeration to say that Christianity is the most supernatural of all religions. Buddhism is, at heart, a philosophy. Mohammedanism is Theism, with a belief in future life. In these religions the supernatural element, when it is found, is not of the essence of the creed. With Christianity itis otherwise. To eliminate the supernatural is to destroy. In the face of much earnest thinking of our own time, this may seem a daring assertion. There are many who think they can allow the supernatural to drop away, and yet retain what they conceive to be the essence of the Christian creed. But they have against them the experience of all the Christian centuries, and the creeds of all the Christian communities; and they have against them this extraordinary fact, that during the last two hundred years, while rationalism has been gaining a complete ascendency in every other department of human life, Christianity has always been able to renew its vigour by a strong reassertion of its supernatural faith. Non-miraculous Christianity in its various forms may serve as a creed for certain select intellectual coteries, but it has shown no power to create any definite organic social life, nor to move the hearts of the many, nor even to excite the antagonism cf the unbelieving.

We have used the word “Supernatural” in the vague old-fashioned manner. But it is necessary to ask, What do we mean by it?

It has become acommonplace in some schools of thought that the very idea of the supernatural is now obsolete, and that the word which expresses it must be abandoned. Science has given us a great conception of the unity of nature and has taught us that the laws which pervade the whole are unvarying. When facts are observed which seem to violate any of these laws, it is a mistake to jump hastily to the conclusion that here is a realm outside the system of nature. In due time, when science has done her patient work, it will be found, we are told, that all such facts must be included ; they are due to the operation of natural forces which were formerly overlooked, and are instances of the sway of laws previously unknown. ‘The process of explanation is always an extension of the field of the natural.

In recent times psychology has been busy with large classes of facts which used to be dismissed as unworthy of scientific examination. So far the work has consisted principally in the observation and sorting of materials; but the whole purpose of the investigation is to bring the facts in question within the sphere of natural law. And who can doubt that only in so far as this is done can there be a true science of psychology? Thus as knowledge progresses the natural takes possession of realm after realm once assigned to the supernatural, and the probability is that, if our capacity were great enough, we should find the whole universe to be one vast coherent system. :

How, then, can we venture to speak at all of the Supernatural? Is not the expression, along with the idea which it endeavours to express, hopelessly misleading ?

Further, from the side of biblical theology, there comes the objection that the word is not to be found in Holy Scripture. We find, indeed, the contrast between the natural and the spiritual (ro Puyixdv and 76 rvevparexdv) in 1 Cor. xv. 44-46 and elsewhere ; also we find the heavenly things contrasted with the earthly in many ways. But the conception of a natural order of things working as a

' THE SUPERNATURAL 13 mechanical system according to its own laws, and broken in upon now and then by forces belonging to a different, a super-natural, order, is, we are told, not to be found in the teaching of the Bible.

In the main it is true that the contrast between the natural and the supernatural, as it is found in the thought of the modern world, belongs essentially to a period of transition—that period when the modern conception of the material universe as a system of things bound by unvarying law was taking hold of the human mind.

This great system, in which every effect follows cause with absolute certainty, and the knowledge of which is assured when the ability to predict occurrences is proved, came to be called “ Nature.” What the law of gravitation was to the thought of the eighteenth century, the law of the conservation of energy was to that of the earlier nineteenth—a demonstration of the material universe as a mechanical system. And then in the latter part of the nineteenth century there emerged the great conception of evolution, revealing the whole process of creation as a development according to law. ‘Thus nature, in its widest ‘extent through space, and in its whole history in time, appears as a universe of ordered events. What place can be found in such a system for miracle, or for the advent of the Christ? For believers as well as unbelievers, the first effect of the great change in thought was to harden the idea of the supernatural and to present it as the breaking in upon the natural of powers belonging to a wholly different order of being. The Almighty seemed to be banished from His universe in its ordinary working, and to manifest Himself only in the extraordinary, the unusual. And as every advance in knowledge diminished the realm of the extraordinary, the work of science, from the religious point of view, seemed to be a driving of the Divine out of things altogether. Hence the opposition between science and religion, with a hatred of the supernatural on one side and an eager clinging to it on the other.

Recent religious thought has entered a necessary protest against this whole way of regarding the work of God in the universe. The unity of nature is, after all, a revelation of the unity of God. The unfailing character of the laws of nature is a witness to His infinite trustworthiness. To think of the universe as a great machine in which the Eternal intervenes only on very special occasions is to forget that He is the Indwelling Spirit as well as the Creator. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” All the laws of nature are His laws, and all the forces of nature are operations of His will. We believe in the immanent as well as in the transcendent God. ,

The fact, therefore, that the universe is ordered according to law is not a reason for denying the Divine control of it; rather it is a support to that faith which discerns the hand of God in all the events of the world and in all departments of experience. |

But when we have got so far, we have not dealt finally with the question of the supernatural; for there may be evidence to show that God’s work in nature is not the only form of Divine activity. Again, we have in our own experience instances of laws which seem to us higher in kind than the uniformities of nature. The moral law of which we are conscious tells, not what is or what must be, but what ought to be; and in obedience to it we constantly endeavour to modify or counteract many of those very laws of nature which we have just recognised as laws of God. We have the faith that the moral law is also a law of God, and that it has a character which exalts it above those other laws of His which rule in the realm of cause and effect. In the strength of this faith we use our personal will, and intervene in the succession of natural events ; we struggle, and often successfully, against the forces of nature, making the earth to yield us its treasures and the physical elements to serve our purposes; we fight against disease and other natural evils, and frequently prevail. Nor can such action be referred to law like that which keeps the stars in their courses, or those which control the combinations of the chemical elements. No effort of mind can reduce moral law to physical law. The laws which guide purpose are different in kind from those which control

THE SUPERNATURAL : 15 cause and effect. Certainly the former cannot be explained in terms of the latter. Further, the laws of purpose are higher in the scale than those of physical causation: our whole moral life is an assertion of the superiority.

When, with these thoughts in our mind, we turn back upon the revelation of the universe which science has given us, we see that the question is not the simple matter which it appeared at first. Science, we now see, deals only with selected departments of experience. It carefully eliminates all that does not belong to the special department on which it is engaged. Especially does it remove from its consideration the disturbances produced by human activity. Yet the world as we know it in our experience is full of these disturbances ; and no view, of the world as a whole, which leaves them out can claim to be complete.

Moreover, if we think of the universe as all of a piece, and all under natural law, we are led to the conception of a great multitude of physical causes all connected together into one system, pervaded by one universal plan. How can such a system be the work of one supreme will? Evidently only through its being the expression of a single great purpose. But, if this be so, what about the multitude of human purposes which express themselves in the world? We find ourselves led back at once to the old conflict between the will of man and the Divine Providence. It is the controversy about predestination all over again.

The only reason for returning here to these ancient -problems is that in this way we can see at once that the apparent simplification which has been attained by the modern scientific conception of the unity of nature does not get rid of the problem of the supernatural. Our experience shows us the existence of higher laws than those which belong to the physical world as science regards it. And when this has been grasped we find God and man face to face in a region of being and of action higher than that which we call ‘‘ Nature.”

The astonishing complication which is thus revealed to us makes clear the impossibility of settling such a question as that before us by the assertion of some one general principle. The natural sciences have assuredly given us a new insight into the great truth of the unity of the world; but it would be a fatal error to regard the special statement of that unity which has thus come to light as valid for departments of experience with which the natural sciences have never found themselves able to deal. So far as our power extends we must grasp all the facts we must lose hold of no side of the truth. We must take all that experience gives us, whether it be the experience of the individual or the records of history. ;

When we endeavour to present to our minds the essentials of the Christian Faith, we find that our thoughts fasten inevitably upon a Person, and that this Person is marked out by certain attributes which are not in accordance with our ordinary experience. Though miracle is not placed first among the evidences of His mission (see John iy. 48, x. 38, &c.), it was a necessary element in the manifestation of Him to the world. The miracles of our Lord are usually described as “signs” (onpeta), “ works” (epya), or ‘ powers” (Svvdpers), words which indicate their character as witnesses to His nature and mission. They are never mere wonders or portents. The word répara (wonders) is indeed frequently used with reference to them, but never alone. It is in every instance united with onpeta (signs), showing that the signs were also wonders ; they were evidences which struck the imagination, and so awakened attention. Our Lord is therefore never represented as a mere wonder-worker. His marvellous works were part of the revelation of Himself which He gave to man. They have a character which stamps them as Divine and which reveals their author. ‘‘ No man can do these signs that Thou doest except God be with him” was the inevitable deduction of an honest but cautious observer. It was the least that could be said by a candid intelligence. Our Lord did not base His claim to human allegiance on His mighty works. That claim sprang from His consciousness of His own authority and His recognition of His unique relation to God and man. But in stooping to human infirmity—an essential part of

THE SUPERNATURAL 17

His work, as we must remember—and in meeting the attacks of His critics, His miracles were a necessary element in His presentation of Himself. So it was that He said, in reply to the challenge which He detected in the minds of the scribes who were present when he declared the pardon of the palsied man: ‘‘ Why reason ye these things in your hearts? Whether is easier, to say to the sick of the palsy, thy sins are forgiven; or to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins (He saith to the sick of the palsy), I say unto thee, Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thy house” (Markii. 8-11). Here the miracle is deliberately presented as our Lord’s own demonstration of His spiritual authority. The modern critic may very easily raise the question as to the connection between the authority to pardon and the power to cure disease. How can the claim to spiritual power be proved by an exhibition of control over natural forces? No doubt, as a general proposition, such a proof is impossible.. But here again the answer to the question is supplied by considering the character of the miracle. It was a manifestation of Divine mercy triumphing over evil, breaking through the barriers which shut in mere human effort, and so coming to the relief of human need. A limitless control over the forces of nature in the exercise of infinite beneficence is the most Divine characteristic which our minds can conceive; and it was because the miracles of our Lord displayed this characteristic that they carried conviction to the minds and hearts of men. The accounts which the Gospels give us of His miraculous activity are essentially of this nature. Therefore it was that His works were truly ‘“‘signs.” They pointed to Him as one exercising a Divine authority, fulfilling a Divine mission. That the power of God was working in Him and with Him was the very least inference which could be drawn from the facts which His ministry exhibited.

It is therefore clear that, apart from the miraculous element in the life of Christ, the Christian Faith would have been impossible. St. Paul tells us (Rom. i. 4) that

B our Lord was “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead.” . The resurrection was the crowning miracle which completed the revelation of Divine power and goodness in Jesus Christ. Here was sovereign power breaking through the barriers of ordinary experience in order to give to men the gift and assurance of salvation. It was the culmination of the whole miraculous manifestation which characterised the life of Jesus Christ. By the fact of the resurrection the Christian Faith and the Christian Church were established. Can we imagine that the great result could ever have come about otherwise ?

When the Christian consciousness turned back upon the facts of the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord, it was led to certain great convictions. We can follow the process in its earlier stages in the New Testament. From experience of what Jesus said, did, taught, and suffered, there sprang the belief in Him as the Incarnate Son of God who overcame the power of evil and gave to men all those great gifts which are summed up under the term ‘‘Salvation,” who is all through the ages a living, Divine Saviour, and who will finally prevail over all opposing forces, and bestow upon His followers a blessed immortality in a life belonging to a higher realm of being. Such a faith as this may be called supernatural. Its character corresponds exactly to the miraculous history of the Gospels. It arose out of that history, and unless it is wholly changed it must remain true to the source from which it came. If the natural be a name for the facts and laws of our ordinary experience, and the supernatural a name for facts and laws which belong to a higher order of things, this faith may truly be said to be supernatural. And the claim of Christianity has always been that it does speak to us of something higher than our ordinary experience. It has to do with the heavenly things, and it everywhere supposes the existence of those heavenly things. (See John iii. r2 ; Eph. i. 2, &c.) Moreover its value for our life on earth is derived mainly from the fact that it brings that life into relation with the heavenly things,

Chapter II Miracles

In view of the conclusion at which we have arrived, it is alarming to find within the Church a tendency to minimise or explain away the miraculous elements in the traditional creed of Christianity. While it is perfectly true that the old faith has held its own, and has always been able to renew its vigour by a reassertion of its essential character, it is also true that the temptations created by the influences of the age are too strong for many individuals. It is not unusual to find, in recent theological works, the assertion that the question of miracles has ceased to be troublesome—that so many facts revealing the power of mind over matter and of mind upon mind have come to light that we should not rashly condemn all the miraculous accounts contained in the Gospels. Some of those accounts, it is added, are probably exaggerated ; others are ‘mistakes, or parables turned into history. The residuum is quite probable, and amounts indeed to little more than could be shown to have happened at Lourdes or under the influence of Christian Science. To this it is further added that the Resurrection narratives have certainly a basis in fact, and must be regarded as reminiscences of visions which many of the disciples experienced, and of which we have the type in St. Paul’s account of his conversion. - Whether these visions were subjective or not is a question on which opinion is divided.

The effect of all such explanations is, of course, to reduce miracles to the level of natural events of an unusual kind. They are instances of the working of certain laws of nature whose existence has not been hitherto suspected, and which come into operation only under special conditions. But whenever these special conditions arise, these laws will certainly prevail and like effects will be observed. At present, great attention is being given to psychology, and we may hope that mental therapeutics will become a recognised branch of medical science. When this happens, the miracles of the Gospels—such of them as are really credible —may possibly be repeated.

Can such an apologetic as this be admitted? Is it really a defence of the Christian position, or is it a surrender?

In the first place, we have to remember that it was not our Lord’s way to make use of miracle where ordinary agencies were available. If there are forces of mind and of will which can cure disease and restore disordered intelligences, can we doubt that He would make use of them? If there are spiritual powers inherent in a personality of sufficient magnitude which can direct physical forces by some inner compulsion, why should we hesitate to believe that He employed them? As He used the powers of eye and of ear, of hand and foot, for their proper purposes, so would He use all natural powers which were inherent in the mental and bodily organisation which was naturally His. It is clear, therefore, that we must not deny that some of the phenomena which have recently come to light, pointing, as they do, to powers of mind over matter which have not been recognised by science hitherto, have a real value for Christian apologetics. On the other hand, is it not equally clear that if, in order to bring the life of Christ into line with what we now know of the working of such forces, we minimise the miraculous element in the Gospel narrative, we are pulling down the mighty works to the level of everyday experiences and depriving them of all evidential value. What is essential to the function of miracles in the witness to the Divine mission of the Christ is, not that they should be shown to be in every instance an employment of superhuman powers, but that they should have the stamp of superhuman authority. The Gospels show us, and intend to show us, Jesus of Nazareth moving freely in regions of beneficent activity where unassisted man cannot move at all. They also show us, and here again with intention, the same Jesus commanding with absolute certainty forces which others can use but tentatively, or only by special reliance upon His assistance. In the New Testament, He appears as one possessing a limitless power over the forces of nature—a power in the highest degree beneficent—and therefore He is, in contrast to all others, the Lord. How constantly the recognition of this Divine authority is conveyed to us by the Evangelists! The cry, ‘“ Lord, if thou wilt thou canst make me clean,” is met at once by the response ‘“‘I will, be thou. made clean.” (Mark 1. 40, 41; Luke v. 12, 13.) It was this recognition by the centurion which called forth the strongest approval of all: “T have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel”; for what is peculiar in the centurion’s case is the fact that he discerned the boundless authority of the Lord.

Most writers who explain our Lord’s miracles as instances of mind-cure, of the sort now become familiar, take refuge in vague generalities. A careful and detailed examination of the subject by a competent medical authority has appeared in the Abbert Journal? Dr. Ryle points out that none of the critics who have adopted the neurotic theory of the miracles of healing have made any attempt to carry it out in detail. Instead of this, we are offered a number of quite commonplace allusions to the power of mind over body. ‘‘But we do not find any recognition of the fact that only a small portion of the diseases to which human flesh is heir are nervous diseases; and that of nervous

1 Even Dr. Du Bose is satisfied with vague generalities as to *“‘ psychic and spiritual forces as yet latent in human nature of which we know not whereunto the future development may reach,” in his endeavour to justify the miraculous element in our Lord’s life to the thought of the present day. Yet it is hard to see how this is consistent with the perfectly just statement that, with our Lord, ‘*‘ the power to heal sickness is but proof of the power to heal sin.” If the miraculous element is indeed a proof of this kind, it must be contrasted with, and not similar to, such powers of healing as may be ‘“‘latent in human nature.” See The Gospel in the Gospels, Chapter vi.

2 The Neurotic Theory of the Miracles of Healing, by R. J. Ryle, M.A., M.D., in Aiddert Journal for April 1907 (Vol. V. No. 3).

diseases, again, only a very small and unimportant group admit of cure in this way.” In a brief but careful examination of the narratives of cures given in the Gospels, Dr. Ryle shows that the great majority of the cases described are not instances of diseases which can be cured by “moral impression.” Even the nervous disorders which are mentioned are not susceptible of healing in this way. The demoniacs described are “the subjects which lend themselves least of all to the modern remedial measures of hypnotism and suggestion.” Similarly the paralytics are, so far as can be judged, of that more numerous class in which the loss of power arises from organic disease and not from hysteria. Paralysis of this kind cannot be cured by emotional shock. It is not susceptible of faith-cure. The general conclusion, therefore, is that the attempt to explain the Gospel miracles as instances of faith-healing, or mind-cure, of the kind which has attracted attention in recent times, completely breaks down. The extraordinary abundance of detail supplied by the Gospels, the simplicity and actuality of the narrative, the impossibility of separating the miraculous element from the rest of the history, the fact that many of our Lord’s most characteristic utterances arise directly out of the circumstances of His mighty works ; all these considerations conspire to produce a mass of evidence which modern criticism of the saner type has found to be irresistible. It is now admitted, even by strongly negative critics, that the “healing ministry, judged by critical tests, stands on as firm historical ground as the best accredited parts of the teachings.”! This being so, Dr. Ryle urges, with great force, that “the partisans of a more conservative position may very fairly demand that the attempt to draw arbitrary lines of distinction between one kind of mighty work and another shall be given up.”