Who are we—in a universe that defies our sense of proportion, and with individual selves to which we can lay only tenuous claim—to speak with assurance about what might or might not be called “miracles”? For this is really the focus of this and the previous two posts: The importance of remembering that attention to the teachings of Jesus hinges not on an acceptance of Jesus’ challenging assertions as rightfully altering our perceptions of ourselves within a universe that we understand, but rather on an acceptance of Jesus’ mission to challenge our prevailing conceptions of that universe itself.
It is not that Jesus is presenting a version of the universe that must be gleaned simply from his recorded teachings; rather Jesus is presenting a version of the universe consistent with the initial statements in Genesis. To Jesus Genesis is neither historical nor mythological (or at least fundamental in either sense); to Jesus Genesis is normative, and much of this blog must explore how the prevailing Christian view of Genesis is demonstrably untenable.
For the moment I will touch on how our perceptions of ourselves lead to indefensible ideas about our origins and our relationship to the world. One apt example is to be found in the types of silly arguments that much of Christianity can hold. It is not at all uncommon for otherwise reasonable Christians to hold (or at least tolerate unchallenged in their belief systems) two contradictory assertions. One, that the argument from causation is valid—that God must exist as the first cause, since everything in our perceived world must have a cause. Two, that the historical evidence in its preponderance supports the historicity of the miraculous resurrection. A moment’s reflection will reveal that the second argument asserts a situation existing within the scope of secular analysis: an uncaused event (the resurrection) by the very rules of logic as applied to our understanding of the empirically-observable world. So, apparently, there ARE uncaused phenomena—and the argument for the first cause is rendered without substance to the conscientious secular observer.
What, then, shall we say of miracles within an understanding of the teachings of Jesus? Do we not have an obligation to consider what a miracle really is, or at least of what a miracle might consist within the arguments that (I say) are inherent in Jesus’ teachings? I say (for whatever that is worth) that our universe as we might ever experience it is a place of imbalance and disproportion, and that our experiences of ourselves are ever open to question.
More importantly, if we postulate the existence of souls (that is to say, describable entities separate from the biochemical processes of our bodies) then what are be boundaries of miracles as we might experience them? We can say that our free will as ensouled creatures allows us to speak or to move our limbs, but so far we have contended nothing that will frustrate the analyses of secular physiologists—a person decides to move his or her body, and it moves. Moreover, the effects of such motions will—it is reasonable to contend—line up with our mundane expectations of causation.
But we do not have to encroach on the realm of the physiologist to create effects on ourselves. If we contend (and admittedly it is a contention) that we have souls that exert our free wills, can we not rouse our bodies to many states of agitation with only our wills, no physical motion being required? Setting aside the estimable opinions of psychologists and biochemists, can we ourselves believe other than what we have wrought are miracles? And can we not, by directing our inner selves this way or that, change the very world we experience? If our souls exist—a contention about a miracle in any event—then can anything in the universe be held by us to be other than a miracle?
This is one of the most important things to be remembered about the realm of Jesus’ teachings: “signs,” as crucial as they are to many of the narratives, are not most crucially understood as miracles, but rather as collections and presentations of the miracles that always exist. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of the Resurrection; the single greatest “sign,” as conventional Christianity would have it, was something, apparently, that Jesus did not want to show to anyone. (And small wonder, in the conceptual life of the ancient Near East the relating of this or that person emerging again from the ground was not all that uncommon.) The “sign” of Jesus’ resurrection was his manifest overpowering of the fears of mortality that cripple mankind—he was never and could never be “dead,” as the world fears it. Or as the angels told the disciples, who were greeted only with an empty tomb, “Why seek ye the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5).
This and the prior two posts are directed at a single theme: The contention that our conceptions of the world must be shaken before we can understand the teachings of Jesus. The world is not proportionate, guided by reassuring certainties; we are not possessors of selves that can function as dispassionate, fixed platforms from which to view the world; and if we can admit the possibility of a miracle of God’s existence or of Creation, then we must admit the possibility that everything is miraculous. The reverse of such contentions is a person who imagines himself or herself lord of a conceptualized mental dominion, a place of regularized proportions and phenomena that he or she surveys in stability and assurance, a place forcibly sanitized from miracles in which he or she either searches for miracles or searches for their non-existence. He or she can lord over such an existence as a Christian or as anything else, but he or she cannot thereby inhabit the world that Jesus describes and uses as the setting for his lessons.
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