The Supernatural in the New Testament, Possible, Credible, and Historical / Or, An Examination of the Validity of Some Recent Objections Against Christianity as a Divine Revelation

by C. A. Row

The Incarnation has frequently been designated a miracle. To do so seems to me to incur the danger of involving the whole controversy in confusion of thought. In a loose way of speaking, the creative acts of God may be called miracles: that is, they involve a deviation from the previous order of existing things, and the introduction of a new one; all such results are unquestionable manifestations of supernatural agency, but they differ wholly in conception from what we usually designate by the term miracle. The Incarnation, therefore, ought not to be placed on the same [pg 070] footing as miracles, which are supernatural occurrences, having a definite evidential value, but with God's creative acts, being the highest manifestation of himself which he has made to man. It is perfectly true, as I have already observed, that the miracles of Jesus Christ stand in a double aspect, as part of his supernatural manifestation, and as possessing an evidential value.

It is clear, therefore, that a supernatural event such as the Incarnation, if evidential, can only be self-evidential. It was not wrought for the purpose of proving anything. But, as we have seen, the sacred writers and our Lord himself assert that in a certain sense it was self-evidential. “For the life was manifested, and we have seen it and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life which was with the Father and was manifested unto us.”

A recent writer affirms that Christianity professes to be a revelation of supernatural truths utterly inconceivable to reason, and that such truths can only be proved by miracles. I can understand what is meant by a truth derived from a supernatural source of information, or one respecting a supernatural being or occurrence: but what a supernatural truth can be contradistinguished from other kinds of truth is far from evident. Revelation may disclose truths which reason alone would have been unable to discover; but this does not make the truths themselves, when they are discovered, either supernatural or incomprehensible.

I will now proceed to consider whether there is any real ground for affirming that occurrences which we designate as miracles are the only proofs of a divine revelation.

The same writer, whose object is to prove that Christianity is utterly destitute of all claims to our acceptance [pg 071] as a divine revelation, endeavours to show that miracles, viewed as bare objective facts, are the only evidence which can substantiate such a mass of incredible assertions as those contained in the New Testament, and that their moral environment cannot be taken into account in estimating their evidential value. For this purpose he quotes the following passage from Dr. Mozley's Bampton Lectures: “Dr. Mozley,” says he, “supposes the case, that if a person of evident integrity and loftiness of character had appeared eighteen centuries ago announcing himself as pre-existing from all eternity, the Son of God, the maker of the world, who had come down from heaven, and had assumed the nature of man, in order to be the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, and so on, enumerating the other doctrines of Christianity; Dr. Mozley then adds, what would be the inevitable conclusion of sober reason respecting that person? The necessary conclusion of sober reason would be that he was disordered in his understanding.... By no rational being would a just and a benevolent life be accepted as a proof of such announcements. Miracles are the necessary complements of the truth of such announcements, which without them are powerless and abortive, the fragments of a design which is nothing unless it is the whole. They are necessary to the justification of such announcements, which unless they are supernatural truth are the wildest delusions.”—Supernatural Religion.

In justice to Dr. Mozley, the passage which is omitted in this citation from his lectures ought to be quoted. It is as follows: “What other decision could be come to when a man, looking like one of our own selves, and only exemplifying in his life and [pg 072] circumstances the ordinary course of nature, said this about himself, but that when reason had lost its balance a dream of supernatural and unearthly, grandeur might be the result.”—Bampton Lectures.

Some expressions in this passage leave it open to the assumption which this writer wishes to fasten on it that Dr. Mozley intended to affirm that the only adequate proof of such affirmations as were made by Jesus Christ respecting himself would have been visible miracles wrought in confirmation of them. This, however, is not necessarily its meaning, for the omitted passage above cited, distinctly affirms that the person who is supposed to make such assertions is only an ordinary good and holy but imperfect man.

But the assertions in question were not made by an ordinary man like ourselves, but by one who is described as possessed of superhuman greatness and holiness and of profound spiritual insight into truth. He is uniformly depicted as speaking with the fulness of knowledge of the subject on which he speaks. I cannot therefore admit, supposing the character of Jesus to have been historical, that if he had made such assertions respecting himself prior to the performance of his first miracle at Cana, they would have been utterly unworthy of serious attention. It must be readily admitted that if they had been affirmed of himself by an ordinary man like ourselves, no affirmation of his would have been a guarantee of their truth, for the simple reason that they would have been self-contradictory. Nor would the performance of a miracle have made them one atom more credible. But the credibility of such an assertion, if it had been made by such a person as Jesus Christ even prior to his performance of a single miracle, is a wholly different question.

It follows, therefore, on the supposition that the delineation given us in the Gospels is that of an historical reality, that his assertions respecting himself would stand in a wholly different position from those of any other man. He could neither deceive nor be deceived. When he made assertions respecting himself he must have known whether they were true. The assertions of such a person therefore would be worthy of all acceptation.

Miracles are not the means of substantiating assertions respecting the truth of unseen realities, nor are they used for such purposes in the New Testament. The whole question is one of adequate knowledge. If we have the means of knowing that a person has a complete acquaintance with truths of which we are ignorant, we can rationally accept them as true on his assurance that they are so, exactly on the same principles as we accept the truths of physical science although we ourselves are ignorant of the processes by which they are arrived at. To state the position generally, it is quite rational to accept the affirmations of those who possess full knowledge of any subject of which we ourselves are profoundly ignorant. The only thing necessary is to attain an assurance that the knowledge of our informant is adequate to justify his assertions. It is on the ground of the fulness of his knowledge that we accept the assertions of Jesus Christ, and not because he wrought a miracle for the purpose of proving that his assertions were true.