Both “miracle” and “supernatural” are umbrella terms coined from Latin to describe various events that the Bible calls “signs” and “wonders.” As I said in another thread:
The same distinction applies to “supernatural.” It’s a useful category in the English language, but it’s not the language of the Bible, so the connotations are different. As for myself, I try to avoid both “miracle” and “supernatural,” but it’s almost impossible.
That sounds like other things I’ve read from Dr. Walton. But in any case, I cannot disagree with him more strongly. Granted, the ancient Hebrews had an understanding of God which was more eminent, that is, they recognized his presence and activity far more readily in the natural course of events.
But the idea that the ancients could not or did not recognize a distinction between the natural and the supernatural is, forgive me, downright ludicrous.
When Hezekiah was asked for a sign, whether he would prefer to see a shadow progress on its natural course, or see the shadow proceed backwards, he did not reply “either one, God would be involved in both.” Rather, he recognized that one event would be common and natural, and the other an unmistakable deviation from what is natural.
When Joshua stopped the sun in the sky, people were able to recognize “there was never a day like that either before or after” when God did something unique and special, and they recognized it as requiring God’s special imtervention in a way that God doesn’t normally do.
And I really could go on and on, but I’d think the point was obvious. Of course the ancient Hebrews could tell the difference bwetween the natural and the supernatural, between the regular way God works within nature, and the times that he directly does things that are contrary to the way nature ordinarily proceeds without his direct intervention.
The point wasn’t that they couldn’t recognize ordinary and extraordinary. It was that they did not make a distinction between the natural world and the supernatural world. The real world for them had both what we would call supernatural and natural elements intertwined and expected as a normal part of reality. This is how many animistic cultures still see the world. The modern distinction between natural and supernatural is influenced by Hume and his definition of miracles, which is philosophical not biblical.
We only know a small part of the Universe, we cannot say for certain that everything follows these laws.
I can’t help but think C. S. Lewis would disagree in the strongest terms that his distinction between natural and supernatural was influenced by Hume, for what it is worth. I don’t know of a more insightful critic of Hume.
Beyond that, I would still disagree with the concept.
I struggle to understand what you’re getting at. They of course recognized (as I do) that larger reality, taken as a whole, had elements that we today would call “natural” and “supernatural.” But they also recognized that these elements inhabited two entirely distinguishable spheres within larger reality. God and his angels could cross that boundary, and enter into and interact with our reality at will, and be frequent visitors in our world. But we could not do the same. They inhabited some part of reality which’s was entirely inaccessible to us, without their permission. I don’t see how that is not recognizing essentially the same thing we mean when we speak of “natural” and “supernatural”?
Besides that, my philosophical understanding of miracle, coming as it does from Lewis, perhaps you could tell me where you object to his philosophy:
But there is one thing often said about our ancestors which we must not say. We must not say “They believed in miracles because they did not know the Laws of Nature.” This is nonsense. When St Joseph discovered that his bride was pregnant, he was `minded to put her away’.’ He knew enough biology for that. Otherwise, of course he would not have regarded pregnancy as a proof of infidelity. When he accepted cepted the Christian explanation, he regarded it as a miracle precisely because he knew enough of the Laws of Nature to know that this was a suspension of them. When the disciples saw Christ walking on the water they were frightened: they would not have been frightened unless they had known the laws of Nature and known that this was an exception. If a man had no conception of a regular order in Nature, then of course he could not notice departures from that order: just as a dunce who does not understand the normal metre of a poem is also unconscious of the poet’s variations from it. Nothing is wonderful ful except the abnormal and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm. Complete ignorance of the laws of Nature would preclude the perception of the miraculous just as rigidly as complete disbelief in the supernatural precludes it, perhaps even more so. For while the materialist would have at least to explain miracles away, the man wholly ignorant of Nature would simply not notice them.
Sorry to keep crossing over, but I can’t keep up with two threads at once:
Edit: Speaking for myself, I don’t object to anything you posted from Lewis regarding miracles or the supernatural. It’s just that those categories are extra-biblical and, thus, often don’t fit the biblical data or the worldview of the ancient audience. If we seek to let the Bible shape our worldview, we should recognize the biblical categories, not the philosophical ones.
I embrace these categories Lewis describes because I find them to be Biblical categories.
The Bible of of course emphasizes that God is at work in both what we call the miraculous and the natural. And both occurrences can most certainly be “signs” or ”wonders” in the Biblical sense. I have no disagreement there.
But I object most strenuously to the idea that there was no distinction, corresponding in general to the ideas of natural and supernatural in their mind. Recognizing God”s involvement in all things as they did, it may well have not been a distinction they emphasized or felt the need to distinguish with particular specialized words. Whether or not God was at work was often more important than whether he used natural or supernatural means. All granted. God was at work when he naturally used a wind to drive the locusts away, when he used a wind to bring quail to the Israelites in the desert, when he flooded the earth, etc.
But the idea that distinguishing between “natural” and “supernatural” was not something they did in any way I find far-fetched. I already mentioned Hezekiah and the shadow. Some more…
Jesus was at work doing God’s kingdom work both when he said to the invalid, “Son, your sins are forgiven,” and when he said “get up, take your mat, and walk.” But one was clearly recognized as categorically different than the other. “Which is easier…”, he said, as he and his observers both knew quite well that one involved something anyone could do, and the other only could be done by Divine power.
Thomas said, “I won’t believe unless I put my fingers in his hands…” because he knew the natural course of events means that after someone dies, they stay dead. When he finally saw Christ, he recognized that something extraordinary, outside of the regular laws and processes of nature, had occurred.
Moses turned aside “to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.” Bushes made of wood that burn consume their fuel short of some, and this one that didn’t. He recognized a categorical difference between the two which is what piqued his curiosity.
Nebuchadnezzer knew that very, very hot fire usually kills people thrown into it. We can even assume he had determined this empirically through many previous experiments. So when the three Israelite men emerged unscathed (even when their captors were killed) Nenuchadnezzer recognized that something happened which was not “normal” according to basic principles of Physics that even the Babylonians were aware of. Moreover, Shadrach et al recognized that if they were going to survive, it was going to be only if God intervened in a way to override the regular processes of nature. He may have chosen not to miraculously intervene, at which point they knew what the properties of really hot fire would do to them. As they faced the furnace, they recognized… If
God intervenes and overrides the regular pattern of nature, we will stay alive. If he doesnt, and “nature takes its course,” we will be dead.
And I could go on and on and on. Simply put, the categories of “_what is expected, or at least not outside the regular occurrence of the world which needs no special or unique intervention from God to happen _” and “what would have been utterly impossible short of God’s direct intervention overriding what normally happens over the course of nature” are mindsets, perspectives, or categories that we certainly find all over the Bible. We just use “natural events” and “supernatural events” as shorthand in our day, but those two categories are not difficult to find clearly understood throughout both the old and new testaments.
Find the words “miracle” and “supernatural” in the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament, then.
Because you are being deliberately obtuse.
Because for them nature was inextricably intertwined with God’s activity. Their view of reality was holistic. The divisions natural and supernatural imply a sphere operating without God’s “interference” and a breaking in and “suspension” of the natural when God acts. That wasn’t their worldview. They saw everything in nature as part of God’s activity, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Everything was infused with a spiritual dimension.
I don’t object to his philosophy, but he is speaking as a philosopher and not an anthropologist. “Laws of Nature” is a construct the ANE and the early church did not have. The idea of a miracle being a “violation of the laws of nature” was also not a construct they had. It does not follow that because they had different constructs for understanding reality and categorizing the ordinary and extraordinary, that they could not recognize God’s activity. On the contrary, they saw God’s activity in places we would see “natural causes;” reproduction, droughts and famines, health and illness, wars and conquests, seasons and harvests. For example, fertility and pregnancy were always seen as controlled by God. A virgin birth or a barren woman conceiving were considered signs because they were extraordinary, not because it was God being involved in a “natural” process that he was normally not involved in.
This is not necessarily a wrong view of reality. But it isn’t a modern scientific one. Walton was speaking from a cultural anthropology perspective about worldviews and he wasn’t saying anything different from many other people who have studied the ANE. I don’t think Lewis understood worldviews in the way we understand them today and I think in the paragraph you quoted he failed to suspend his own worldview and projected it on to people who did not share it.
Definitions? Isn’t that definition of nature = fabric of space time with all mass energy residing therein…
Essentially the historic traditional definition for the past 2000 years?
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it?
I fear I will side with Lewis on this one. Joseph would have acknowledged “fertility and pregnancy were always seen as controlled by God”, but that didn’t stop him from planning to divorce Mary when he found out she was pregnant. He didn’t take her pregnancy as a sign of “God’s activity” but rather as a sign of, um, “her activity.”
And if God was understood as being involved in all preganancies equally, what new information was conveyed by the angel telling him, “what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”
Perhaps Joseph, being steeped in ANE culture as he was, should have responded, “EVERY pregnancy is from the Holy Spirit, please tell me something I don’t know.”
I have been following this discussion and only commented once early on that supernatural not sufficient to describe the issues. For me, this is a fundamental discussion for BiloLogos. It leads back to the doctrine introduced to Christianity but the emperor Justinian.
- If anyone says or thinks that the power of God is limited, and that he created as much as he was able to compass, let him be anathema. [1]
This declaration was one of the most deadly created by the Roman Empire, because it allowed the church unlimited power. By exposing the lie, we can return the logic it overturned, and this is - God created the Laws of Nature and the Spiritual Laws, and He chooses not to violate them.
Therefore, a “miracle” is merely accomplished because those experiencing it, did not understand God’s Laws. We are challenged to understand God’s Laws that allowed Him to act while not violating His Laws. In an enlightened age, we should be up to this task, without using the word “mystery”.
Obviously. The pregnancy wasn’t a sign until the angel confirmed she was telling the truth about the whole virgin birth thing. And then, I don’t know, maybe to him the most extraordinary part was the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophesy, not the “suspension of natural laws.” They did not understand pregnancy as a meeting of two human gametes that produced an organism with genetic material from both parents. Babies were seeds planted in the mother’s womb that God caused to grow.
That there was no human father involved.
Evidently you have as much trouble as Lewis trying to suspend your own worldview. If you have a chance some time, you should take an anthropology course or a cross-cultural communication course.
Of course we humans thought the same about aether at one time. Revision of definitions based on speculation sometimes becomes advisable. That structure implies design is one of those.
Is that an ad hominem on both Lewis and me together? I feel honored to be in such good company at least!
It isn’t so much of suspending my own worldview, as much as I object to imposing on another worldview some absolute knowledge of what they didn’t conceive of, without very, very, very good evidence. I have similar suspicion when someone tells me, with some level of certainty, what Ancient Babylonians did or didn’t conceive of, unless such statements are clearly stated as such in their own documentation.
And when there are ample counter-examples to the contrary, I think it wise to refrain from passing some absolute judgment on another culture that “they just didn’t understand / conceive of this…”
N.B., Lewis was in a unique position to challenge such anthropological and cross-cultural assumptions and group-think, by the way. Steeped as he was in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, he was very familiar with people saying, “well, back in the Middle Ages, people didn’t conceive of X.” Yet he was familiar with a dozen works of that time period where people did in fact say X. Hence his skepticism of the methods and assumptions of much cultural anthropology are not dissimilar to mine.
For when I can, just off the top of my head, think of two-dozen counter examples in the Bible where those involved most certainly recognized God’s direct activity as something categorically different, operating in direct contrast to the way he normally operates within and through his creation… my skepticism is heightened.
And when what is believed by some to be the oldest book in the Bible includes a song of praise about God establishing “statutes” for creation which must obey him, and refers to “statutes” that “rule” the way the world operates, then my skepticism is further enchrenched against the idea that these ancient people in no way conceived of “natural laws”.
They didn’t understand pregnancy to the same degree that we do, but they certainly understood the basics well enough… one more observation from Lewis, which I find inescapable…
'Miracles," said my friend. 'Oh, come. Science has knocked the bottom out of all that. We know that Nature is governed by fixed laws.’
‘Didn’t people always know that?’ said I.
‘Good Lord, no,’ said he. ‘For instance, take a story like the Virgin Birth. We know now that such a thing couldn’t happen. We know there must be a male spermatozoon.’
‘But look here’, said I, ‘St Joseph —‘
‘Who’s he?’ asked my friend.
‘He was the husband of the Virgin Mary. If you’ll read the story in the Bible you’ll find that when he saw his fiancée was going to have a baby he decided to cry off the marriage. Why did he do that?’
‘Wouldn’t most men?’
‘Any man would’, said I, ‘provided he knew the laws of Nature — in other words, provided he knew that a girl doesn’t ordinarily have a baby unless she’s been sleeping with a man. But according to your theory people in the old days didn’t know that Nature was governed by fixed laws. I’m pointing out that the story shows that St Joseph knew that law just as well as you do.’
‘But he came to believe in the Virgin Birth afterwards, didn’t he?’
‘Quite. But he didn’t do so because he was under any illusion as to where babies came from in the ordinary course of Nature. He believed in the Virgin Birth as something supernatural. He knew Nature works in fixed, regular ways: but he also believed that there existed something beyond Nature which could interfere with her workings — from outside, so to speak.’
I think “supernatural” is a perfect word. It means something that cannot ever, even in principle, be explained by the laws of physics (1). Ever. (The word has meaning even if it represents the null set, which I personally do not think is the case.) What is interesting to me is that a miracle (if you are lucky to be near one) could be observed and recorded and analyzed, but a natural explanation would never be forthcoming. (2) Virgin birth is no longer uncommon, but Mary’s virgin birth is forever inexplicable.
(1) I use “laws of physics” because of my “it’s all physics or stamp collecting” chauvinism.
(2) Although a good (believing) scientist who happened to witness a miracle should go to his/her deathbed trying to find a natural explanation. The famous Sydney Harris cartoon should remain a cartoon.
Daniel, the Bible scholars who write OT commentaries have spent years studying such documentation in the Bible and in extant literature. They don’t just make the stuff up, and it has nothing to do with thinking people in Bible times were ignorant. On the flip side, can you point to a single example from ancient literature or the Bible that gives definitive evidence that the construct “natural law” existed? It’s fine to be skeptical, but that’s why you should take an anthropology class.
Do you think you have provided these? You haven’t. All you have pointed out it that people could recognize the difference between ordinary events and extraordinary ones. Nobody is arguing they couldn’t. That doesn’t in any way prove that they had a supernatural/natural distinction in their worldview.
Lewis was steeped in modernism and did not have the post-modern paradigm of perspectivalism that we have today. You can be as skeptical as you want of cultural anthropology. But it’s kind of obvious your skepticism is rooted in a lack of awareness of how it is done.
“Natural laws” as a philosophical construct has nature operating without God. That is not how the world is presented in Psalms, where God is actively reigning over creation.
Even if it cannot be explained, it is still no less natural. I’d think before calling it ‘perfect’.
Dear David,
Mary’s “virgin birth” is just an illogical byproduct of the trinity dogma. The physical body of Jesus was conceived naturally, with Joseph as his biological father. But the spirit that incarnated into that body was the King of Heaven, the Son of God. Jospeh and Mary had other children in the same way. Mary’s virginity was, and still is, her spiritual purity. She was an incarnated angel of God, sent to carry the most precious gift of God, but Jesus had to become human in every way.
The birth of Jesus is shaded in the same mystery created to disguise illogical doctrines. Nothing supernatural here, unless you want to count the human birth of a pure soul as supernatural. (This has happened many times.)
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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