An Irrefutable Blow To Pentecostal And Charismatic Claims

The word miracle is the ordinary translation in our Authorized English Version of the Greek σημεῖον. Our translators did not borrow it from the Vulgate, apparently from their English—Tyndale, Coverdale, &c.—and it had before their time acquired a fixed import in theological language which is directly suggested by its etymology. It perhaps may be found that the habitual use of the term miracle has tended to fix attention too much on the physical strangeness of the facts thus described, and to divert attention from what may be called their signality. In reality, the practical importance of the strangeness of miraculous facts consists in this: that it is one of the circumstances which, taken together, make it reasonable to understand the phenomenon as a mark, seal, or attestation of the divine sanction to something else.

And if we suppose the divine intention established that a given phenomenon is to be taken as a mark or sign of divine attestation, theories of the mode in which that phenomenon was produced become of comparatively little value, and are only serviceable as helping conceptions. In many cases, that which constitutes a divine sign may be not in itself at all varying from the course of nature. This is the common case of prophecy, in which the fulfilment of the prophecy—which constitutes the sign of the prophet’s commission—may be the result of ordinary causes, and yet, from being incapable of having been anticipated by human sagacity, may be an adequate mark or sign of the divine sanction.

In such cases the miraculous or wonderful element is to be sought not in the fulfilment but in the prediction. It appears indeed that in almost all cases of real or evidential miracles something prophetic is involved. In the common case, for example, of healing sickness by a word or touch, the word or gesture may be regarded as a prophecy of the cure; and then, if the whole circumstances be such as to exclude just suspicion—(1) a natural anticipation of the event, and (2) a casual coincidence—it will be indifferent to the signality of the cure whether we regard it as effected by the operation of ordinary causes or by an immediate interposition of the divine.

Theories reversing the course of nature by which such cures are attempted to be accounted for by ordinary causes are indeed generally wild, improbable, and arbitrary, and are on that ground justly open to objection; but if the miraculous character of the predictive antecedent be admitted, they do not tend to diminish the phenomenon of its signality. And there are minds who, from particular associations, find it easier to conceive a miraculous agency operating in the region of mind than operating in the region of matter.

The improbability of miracles is resolved by Hume in his famous Essay into the circumstance that they are contrary to experience. This expression is, as has often been pointed out, strictly speaking incorrect. In strictness, that only can be said to be contrary to experience which is contradicted by the immediate perceptions of persons present at the time when the fact is alleged to have occurred. The terms contrary to experience are used for contrary to the analogy of our experience, and it must be admitted that in this less strict sense miracles are contrary to experience so far as their mere physical phenomena visible to us are concerned. This must not only be admitted but strongly insisted upon by the maintainers of miracles; it is an essential element of their signality.

And this leads us to notice one difference between divine miracles and alleged facts that seem to vary from the course of nature. It is manifest that there is an essential difference between alleging a case in which all the real antecedents are, or appear to be, similar to those which we have daily opportunities of observing, and a consequence is said to have ensued quite different from that which general experience finds to be uniformly joined with them; and alleging a case in which there is supposed, and indicated by all the circumstances, the intervention of an invisible or divine cause which we know to exist, to be adequate to the production of such effects, for the special operation of which in this case we can assign probable reasons, and for its not generally operating in a similar manner.

This latter is the case of the Scripture miracles. Even if we do not regard the existence of God in the proper sense of that term as proved by the course of nature, still, if we admit His existence to be in any degree probable or even possible, the occurrence of miracles will not be incredible. For it is surely going too far to say that because the ordinary course of nature leaves us in doubt whether the author of it be able or unable to alter it, or of such a character as to be disposed to alter it for some great purpose, it is therefore incredible that He should ever have actually altered it.

It will be proper to say a few words here upon some popular forms of expression which tend greatly to increase in many minds the natural prejudice against miracles. One of these is the usual description of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. This metaphorical expression suggests directly the idea of natural agents breaking, of their own accord, some rule which has the authority and sanctity of a law to them. Such a figure can only be applicable to the case of a supposed and arbitrary variation from the uniform order of sequence in natural things; it is wholly inapplicable to a change in that order caused by God Himself.

The word law, applied to material things, ought only to be understood as denoting a number of observed and anticipated sequences of phenomena taking place with such a resemblance or analogy to each other as if a rule had been laid down which those phenomena were constantly observing. But the rule in this case is nothing different from the actual order itself, and there is no cause of these sequences but the will of God choosing to produce those phenomena, choosing to produce them in a certain order.

The term nature suggests to the mind the idea of a great system of things endowed with powers and forces of its own, a sort of machine set a‑going originally by a first cause but continuing its motions of itself. We are apt to imagine that a change in the motion or operation of any part of it would produce the same disturbance of the other parts as such a change would be likely to produce in them if made by us or by any other natural agent. But if the motions and operations of material things be really regulated by the divine will, then His choosing to change for a special purpose the ordinary motion of one part does not necessarily or probably infer His choosing to change the motions of other parts in a way not at all requisite for the accomplishment of that purpose.

It is as easy for Him to continue the ordinary course of the rest with the change of one part as to continue all the phenomena without change at all. Thus, though the stoppage of the motion of the earth in the ordinary course of nature would be attended with terrible convulsions, the stoppage of the earth miraculously, for a special purpose to be served by that only, need not of itself be followed by any such consequences.

From the same conception of nature as a machine, we are apt to think of interferences with the ordinary course of nature as implying some imperfection in it. But it is manifest that this is a false analogy; for the reason why machines are made is to save trouble, and therefore they are more perfect in proportion as they answer this purpose. But no one can seriously imagine that the universe is a machine for the purpose of saving trouble to the Almighty.

Again, miracles are described as interferences with the laws of nature. This description makes them appear improbable to many minds, from their not sufficiently considering that the laws of nature interfere with one another, and that we cannot get rid of interferences upon any hypothesis consistent with experience.

Furthermore, whatever ends may be contemplated by the Deity for the laws of nature in reference to the rest of the universe—a question of which we have as little knowledge as interest—we know that in respect of us they answer discernible moral ends, that they place us practically under a government conducted in the way of rewards and punishments, a government of which the tendency is to encourage virtue and repress vice, and to form in us a certain character by discipline; which character our moral nature compels us to consider as the highest and worthiest object which we can pursue.

Since, therefore, the laws of nature have in reference to us moral purposes to answer, which, as far as we can judge, they have not to serve in other respects, it seems not incredible that these peculiar purposes should occasionally require modifications of those laws in relation to us which are not necessary in relation to other parts of the universe.

After all deductions and abatements have been made, however, it must be allowed that a certain antecedent improbability must always attach to miracles considered as events varying from the ordinary experience of mankind as known to us; because likelihood, verisimilitude, or resemblance to what we know to have occurred is, by the constitution of our minds, the very ground of probability. And though we can perceive reasons from the moral character of God for thinking it likely that He may have wrought miracles, yet we know too little of His ultimate designs and of the best mode of accomplishing them to argue confidently from His character to His acts, except where the connection between the character and the acts is demonstrably indissoluble, as in the case of acts rendered necessary by the attributes of veracity and justice.

Miracles are indeed, in the notion of them, no breach of the high generalization that similar antecedents have similar consequents, nor necessarily of the maxim that God works by general laws; because we can see some laws of miracles, as e.g. that they are infrequent, and that they are used as attesting signs of, or in conjunction with, revelations; and we may suppose more. But they do vary, when taken apart from their proper evidence, from this rule: that what a general experience would lead us to regard as similar antecedents are similar antecedents; because the only assignable specific difference observable by us in the antecedents in the case of miracles, and in the case of the experiments from the analogy of which they vary in their physical phenomena, consists in the moral antecedents.

And these, in cases of physical phenomena, we generally throw out of the account; nor have we grounds a priori for concluding with confidence that these are not to be thrown out of the account here also, although we can see that the moral antecedents here—such as the fitness for attesting a revelation like the Christian—are in many important respects different from those which the analogy of experience teaches us to disregard in estimating the probability of physical events.

But in order to form a fair judgment we must take in all the circumstances of the case, and amongst the rest the testimony on which the miracle is reported to us. Our belief indeed in human testimony seems to rest upon the same sort of instinct on which our belief in the testimony, as it may be called, of nature is built, and is to be checked, modified, and confirmed by a process of experience similar to that which is applied in the other case. As we learn by extended observation of nature and the comparison of analogies to distinguish the real laws of physical sequences from the casual conjunctions of phenomena, so we are taught in the same manner to distinguish the circumstances under which human testimony is certain or incredible, probable or suspicious.

The circumstances of our condition force us daily to make continual observations upon the phenomena of human testimony; it is a matter upon which we can make experiments with peculiar advantage, for every man carries within his own breast the whole sum of the ultimate motives which influence human testimony. Hence arises the aptitude of human testimony for overcoming, and more than overcoming, almost any antecedent improbability in the thing reported. So manifest indeed is this inherent power of testimony to overcome antecedent improbabilities that Hume is obliged to allow that testimony may be so circumstanced as to induce us to believe in some cases the occurrence of things quite at variance with general experience; but he pretends to show that testimony to facts when connected with religion can never be so circumstanced.

Over and above the direct testimony of human witnesses to the Bible miracles, we have also what may be called the indirect testimony of events confirming the former and raising a distinct presumption that some such miracles must have been wrought. Thus, for example, we know by a copious induction that in no nation of the ancient world, and in no nation of the modern world unacquainted with the Jewish or Christian revelation, has the knowledge of the one true God as the Creator and Governor of the world, and the public worship of Him, been kept up by the mere light of nature or formed the groundwork of such religions as men have devised for themselves.

Yet we do find that in the Jewish people, though no way distinguished above others by mental power or high civilization, and with as strong natural tendencies to idolatry as others, this knowledge and worship was kept up from a very early period of their history, and according to their uniform historical tradition kept up by revelation attested by undeniable miracles.

Again, the existence of the Christian religion as the belief of the most considerable and intelligent part of the world is an undisputed fact; and it is also certain that this religion originated, as far as human means are concerned, with a handful of Jewish peasants who went about preaching on the very spot where Jesus was crucified that He had risen from the dead, and had been seen by them and had conversed with them, and afterwards ascended into heaven. This miracle, attested by them as eye‑witnesses, was the very ground and foundation of the religion which they preached; and it was plainly one so circumstanced that, if it had been false, it could easily have been proved to be false.

Yet, though the preachers of it were everywhere persecuted, they had gathered before they died large churches in the country where the facts were best known, and through Asia Minor, Greece, Egypt, and Italy; and these churches, notwithstanding the severest persecutions, went on increasing until, in about 300 years after, this religion — i.e. a religion which taught the worship of a Jewish peasant who had been ignominiously executed as a malefactor — became the established religion of the Roman Empire, and has ever since continued to be the prevailing religion of the civilized world.

It is manifest that if the miraculous facts of Christianity did not really occur, the stories about them must have originated either in fraud or in fancy. The coarse explanation of them by the hypothesis of unlimited fraud has been generally abandoned in modern times; but in Germany especially, many persons of great acuteness have long labored to account for them by referring them to fancy. Of these there have been two principal schools — the Naturalistic and the Mythic.

The Naturalists suppose the miracles to have been natural events, more or less unusual, that were mistaken for miracles through ignorance or enthusiastic excitement. But the result of their labors in detail has been, as Strauss has shown in his Leben Jesu, to turn the New Testament, as interpreted by them, into a narrative far less credible than any narrative of miracles could be.

The Mythic theory supposes the New Testament Scripture narratives to have been legends, not stating the grounds of men’s belief in Christianity, but springing out of that belief, and embodying the idea of what Jesus, if He were the Messiah, must have been conceived to have done in order to fulfil that character, and was therefore supposed to have done. But it is obvious that this leaves the origin of the belief — that a man who did not fulfil the idea of the Messiah in any one remarkable particular was the Messiah — wholly unaccounted for. It is obvious also that all the arguments for the genuineness and authenticity of the writings of the New Testament bring them up to a date when the memory of Christ’s real history was so recent as to make the substitution of a set of mere legends in its place utterly incredible; and it is obvious also that the gravity, simplicity, historical decorum, and consistency with what we know of the circumstances of the times in which the events are said to have occurred, observable in the narratives of the New Testament, make it impossible reasonably to accept them as mere myths.

It is observable that in the early ages the fact that extraordinary miracles were wrought by Jesus and His apostles does not seem to have been generally denied by the opponents of Christianity. They seem always to have preferred adopting the expedient of ascribing them to art, magic, and the power of evil spirits. We know that in two instances in the Gospel narrative — the cure of the man born blind, and the Resurrection — the Jewish priests were unable to pretend such a solution, and were driven to maintain unsuccessfully a charge of fraud; and the circumstances of the Christian miracles were in almost all respects so utterly unlike those of any pretended instances of magical wonders that the apologists have little difficulty in refuting this plea.

This they do generally from the following considerations:

The greatness, number, completeness, and publicity of the miracles.

The natural beneficial tendency of the doctrine they attested.

The connection of them with a whole scheme of revelation extending from the first origin of the human race to the time of Christ.

This evasion of the force of the Christian miracles by referring them to the power of spirits has seldom been seriously recurred to in modern times; but the English infidels of the last century employed it as a kind of argumentum ad hominem to tease and embarrass their opponents, contending that as the Scripture speaks of “lying wonders” of Antichrist, and relates a long contest of apparent miracles between Moses and the Egyptian magicians, Christians could not, on their own principles, have any certainty that miracles were not wrought by evil spirits.

Particular theories as to the manner in which miracles have been wrought are matters rather curious than practically useful. In all such cases we must bear in mind the great maxim:

SUBTILITAS NATURÆ SUPERAT SUBTILITATEM MENTIS HUMANÆ.

Another question, more curious than practical, is that respecting the precise period when miracles ceased in the Christian Church. It is plain that whenever they ceased in point of fact, they ceased relatively to us whenever a sufficient attestation of them to our faith fails to be supplied.

In the case of the Scripture miracles we must be careful to distinguish the particular occasions upon which they were wrought from their general purpose and design, yet not so as to overlook the connection between these two things. There are but few miracles recorded in Scripture of which the whole character was merely evidential — few, that is, that were merely displays of a supernatural power made for the sole purpose of attesting a Divine Revelation. Of this character were the change of Moses’ rod into a serpent at the burning bush, the burning bush itself, the going down of the shadow upon the sun‑dial of Ahaz, and some others.

In general, however, the miracles recorded in Scripture have, besides the ultimate purpose of affording evidence of a divine interposition, some immediate temporary purposes which they were apparently wrought to serve — such as the curing of diseases, the feeding of the hungry, the relief of innocent persons, or the punishment of guilty persons. These immediate temporary ends are not without value in reference to the ultimate and general design of miracles as providing evidence of the truth of revelation.

And in some cases it would appear that miraculous works of a particular kind were selected as emblematic or typical of some characteristic of the revelation which they were intended to attest. In this point of view, Christian miracles may be fitly regarded as specimens of a Divine Power alleged to be present. In this sense they seem to be called the manifestation or exhibition of the Spirit.

In the case of the Old Testament miracles, in order to understand their evidential character, we must consider the general nature and design of the dispensation with which they were connected. The design of that dispensation appears to have been to keep up in one particular race a knowledge of the one true God, and of the promise of a Messiah in whom all the families of the earth should be blessed. And in order to this end it appears to have been necessary that for some time God should have assumed the character of the local tutelary Deity and Prince of that particular people.

And from this peculiar relation in which He stood to the Jewish people — aptly called by Josephus a Theocracy — resulted the necessity of frequent miracles to manifest and make sensibly perceptible His actual presence among them and His government over them. The miracles therefore of the Old Testament are to be regarded as evidential of the theocratic government; and this again is to be conceived of as subordinate to the further purpose of preparing the way for Christianity by keeping up in the world a knowledge of the true God and of His promise of a Redeemer.

With respect to the character of the Old Testament miracles, we must also remember that the whole structure of the Jewish economy had reference to the peculiar exigency of the circumstances of a people imperfectly civilized, and is so distinctly described in the New Testament as dealing with men according to the hardness of their hearts, and as being a system of weak and beggarly elements, and a rudimentary instruction for children who were in the condition of slaves.

It has been often made a topic of complaint against Hume that, in dealing with testimony as a medium for proving miracles, he has resolved its force entirely into our experience of its veracity, and omitted to notice that antecedently to all experience we are predisposed to give it credit by a kind of natural instinct. The argument indeed in Hume’s celebrated Essay on Miracles was very far from being a new one; the restatement of it, however, by a person of Hume’s abilities was of service in putting men upon a more accurate examination of the true nature and measure of probability.

Bishop Butler seems to have been very sensible of the imperfect state in his own time of the logic of Probability; and though he appears to have formed a more accurate conception of it than the Scotch school of philosophers who succeeded him and undertook to refute Hume, yet there is one passage in which we may perhaps detect a misconception of the subject in the pages of even this great writer.

“There is,” he observes, “a very strong presumption against common speculative truths, and against the most ordinary facts, before the proof of them, which yet is overcome by almost any proof. There is a presumption of millions to one against the story of Cæsar, or of any other man. For suppose a number of common facts, so and so circumstanced, of which one had no kind of proof, should happen to come into one’s thoughts, every one would, without any possible doubt, conclude them to be false. And the like may be said of a single common fact.”

And from hence appears that the question of importance as to the degree of the peculiar presumption against miracles is not whether there be any peculiar presumption at all against them. For if there be a presumption of millions to one against the most common facts, what can a small presumption additional to this amount to, though it be peculiar? It cannot be estimated, and is as nothing. (Analogy, Part II, chap. ii.)

It is plain that in this passage Butler lays no stress upon the peculiarities of the story of Cæsar which he casually mentions; for he expressly adds “or of any other man,” and repeatedly explains that what he says applies equally to any ordinary facts or to a single fact. And this becomes still more evident when we consider the extraordinary medium by which he endeavors to show that there is a presumption of millions to one against such common ordinary facts as he is speaking of.

For the way in which he proposes to estimate the presumption against ordinary facts is by considering the likelihood of their being anticipated beforehand by a person guessing at random. But surely this is not a measure of the likelihood of the facts considered in themselves, but of the likelihood of the coincidence of the facts with a rash and arbitrary anticipation. The case of a person guessing beforehand and the case of a witness reporting what has occurred are essentially different.

The truth is that the chances to which Butler seems to refer as a presumption against ordinary events are not in ordinary cases overcome by testimony at all. The testimony has nothing to do with them, because they are chances against the event considered as the subject of a random vaticination, not as the subject of a report made by an actual observer.

But it should be observed that what we commonly call the chances against an ordinary event are not specific but particular. They are chances against this event, not against this kind of event. The chances in the case of a die are the chances against a particular face, not against the coming up of some face.

The ecclesiastical miracles are not delivered to us by inspired historians, nor do they seem to form any part of the same series of events as the miracles of the New Testament. The miracles of the New Testament, setting aside those wrought by Christ Himself, appear to have been worked by a power conferred upon particular persons according to a regular law, in virtue of which that power was ordinarily transmitted from one person to another; and the only persons privileged thus to transmit that power were the apostles. The only exceptions to this rule were (1) the apostles themselves, and (2) the family of Cornelius, who were the first‑fruits of the Gentiles. In all other cases miraculous gifts were conferred only by the laying on of the apostles’ hands.

By this arrangement it is evident that a provision was made for the total ceasing of that miraculous dispensation within a limited period, because on the death of the last of the apostles the ordinary channels would be all stopped through which such gifts were transmitted in the Church. One passage has indeed been appealed to as seeming to indicate the permanent residence of miraculous powers in the Christian Church through all ages — Mark xvi. 17, 18. But (1) that passage itself is of doubtful authority, since we know that it was omitted in most of the Greek MSS. which Eusebius was able to examine in the 4th century, and it is still wanting in some of the most important that remain to us; (2) it does not necessarily imply more than a promise that such miraculous powers should exhibit themselves among the immediate converts of the apostles; and (3) this latter interpretation is supported by what follows: “And they went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with the accompanying signs.”

It is indeed confessed by the latest and ablest defenders of the ecclesiastical miracles that the great mass of them were essentially a new dispensation; but it is contended that by those who believe in the Scripture miracles no strong antecedent improbability against such a dispensation can be reasonably entertained, because for them the Scripture miracles have already borne the brunt of the infidel objection and broken the ice. But this is wholly to mistake the matter. If the only objection antecedently to proof against the ecclesiastical miracles were a presumption of their impossibility or incredibility simply as miracles, this allegation might be pertinent; because he that admits that a miracle has taken place cannot consistently hold that a miracle as such is impossible or incredible.

But the antecedent presumption against the ecclesiastical miracles rises upon four distinct grounds, no one of which can be properly called a ground of infidel objection.

It arises from the very nature of probability and the constitution of the human mind, which compels us to take the analogy of general experience as a measure of likelihood. And this, it is manifest, is neither religious nor irreligious, but antecedent to and involved in all reasoning.

This general antecedent presumption against miracles, as varying from the analogy of general experience, is, as we said, neither religious nor irreligious, rational nor irrational, but springs from the very nature of probability; and it cannot be denied without shaking the basis of all evidence, whether for or against religion. Nor does the admission of the existence of the Deity, or the admission of the actual occurrence of Christian miracles, tend to remove this antecedent improbability against miracles circumstanced as the ecclesiastical miracles are. If indeed the only presumption against miracles were one against their possibility, this might be truly described as an atheistic presumption. But the true presumption against miracles is not against their possibility, but against their probability. Nor can the admission that God has actually wrought such miracles as attest the Christian religion remove the general presumption against miracles as improbable occurrences. It is indeed quite true that Christianity has revealed to us the permanent operation of a supernatural order of things actually going on around us; but there is nothing in the notion of such a supernatural system as the Christian dispensation is to lead us to expect continual interferences with the common course of nature.

It is acknowledged by the ablest defenders of the ecclesiastical miracles that they for the most part belong to those classes of miracles which are described as ambiguous and tentative; i.e. are cases in which the effect, if it occurred at all, may have been the result of natural causes, where upon the application of the same means the desired effect was only sometimes produced.

Though it is not true that the miracles of Scripture have so borne the brunt of the à priori objection to miracles as to remove the peculiar presumption against them as improbable events, there is a sense in which they may be truly said to have prepared the way for those of the ecclesiastical legends. But it is one which aggravates instead of extenuating their improbability. The narratives of the Scripture miracles may very probably have tended to raise an expectation of miracles in the minds of weak and credulous persons, and to encourage designing men to attempt an imitation of them. In this sense it may be said that the Scripture narratives broke the ice and prepared the way for a whole succession of legends.

On the whole, we may conclude that the mass of the ecclesiastical miracles do not form any part of the same series as those related in Scripture, which latter are therefore unaffected by any decision we may come to with respect to the former; and that they are pressed by the weight of three distinct presumptions against them, as being improbable —

1. as varying from the analogy of nature;

2. as varying from the analogy of the Scripture miracles;

3. as resembling those legendary stories which are the product of the credulity or imposture of mankind.

A Dictionary of the Bible: Comprising Its Antiquities, Biography, Geography, and Natural History, edited by William Smith, p. 564-569