The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel / Eight Lectures on the Morse Foundation, Delivered in the Union Seminary, New York in October and November 1904

by W. Sanday

(iii) We observe further that these extraordinary phenomena of which he was conscious had for him the value of miracle. The ancients conceived of miracle as a mark of the presence and co-operation of Deity. The man who could work miracles showed thereby that God was actively with him. Hence the working of miracles served to authenticate teaching; it was the proof of commission from God. It was in this sense that St. Paul appealed to his own miracles as the ‘signs of an apostle’ (2 Cor. xii. 12), and in this sense that he claimed that his preaching carried with it ‘the demonstration of the Spirit and of power’ (1 Cor. ii. 4; cf. Rom. xv. 19).

(iv) If we enlarge our view and look away from the performance of miracle by individuals to the great part which the belief in miracle has played in the history of mankind, and more particularly in the history of the Christian Church, we cannot, I think, fail to see that it must have had a providential function. I do not hesitate to introduce teleology. The history of the evolution of the world and of man is such that we are compelled to think of it as designed; in other words we are compelled to think that the Power which lies behind phenomena has had a purpose, which is at least analogous to purpose in man. There may be some paradoxical features in the carrying out of this purpose, due to the peculiar conditions under which it has operated; but these cannot obscure the broad lines of purposeful development; and over a considerable tract of that development the belief in miracle has played a substantial part, and a part that we can see to be deeply interwoven with some of the culminating events in the history of the human race.

Some of us might be content to stop at this point; we might be content to accept a belief that has been so ingrained in the mind of man and so important in its effects and associations simply as it stands. But the curiosity of science is not easily satisfied, and in the present day especially it goes on to press the further question, After all, what was it that really happened? We can see clearly enough what St. Paul (e. g.) believed to have happened, but how far did this belief of his correspond to the fact? Were these miracles that he assumes real miracles?

When we ask these questions, it is well to remember that we are still in the region of relative ideas; we do not mean so much What is the absolute reality of what happened? as How should we describe it—we, with our twentieth-century habits of thought and improved scientific categories?

It is here that we get on to the really difficult ground. It is ground that by the nature of the case must be difficult, because it means that we have to put a twentieth-century construction upon first-century records. It is as if a present-day physician were dependent for his diagnosis of the facts upon Galen or Hippocrates; or rather, the real state of the case is worse still, for that would be at least comparing science with science, the science of one century with the science of another, whereas the data that we have to go upon are not scientific (in the sense of proceeding from experts), but rather represent popular ideas and popular assumptions.

i. In spite of these difficulties there are still, I cannot but think, some general considerations that may help us. The first is that the cause must be in some degree commensurate with the effects. Christianity is in any case a very stupendous fact; and it will not do to explain it as arising out of a series of trivial misunderstandings.

ii. The evidence of the Gospels is not quite equal in quality to that of the Epistles. It is the evidence of men reporting what they or others had seen, not (so far as appears) that of men who had felt the current of miraculous energy actually thrill through themselves. St. Paul had felt this; it was part of the experience on which he looked back, and which he felt to be intimately bound up with the whole success of his mission.

And yet we have to remember that the miracles of St. Paul and his companions and contemporaries are secondary, whereas those of the Gospels are primary. They are like the waves caused by an earthquake, but they are not themselves the earthquake. If Christ had not come first and done the things that never man did, there would have been no Day of Pentecost, no outpouring of the Spirit, no overmastering impulse that carried men like St. Paul from one end of the Mediterranean to the other ‘in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Holy Ghost’ (Rom. xv. 19).

iii. The argument is therefore a fortiori. The disciple is not above his master, or the servant above his lord. All these subordinate manifestations, though we have in some ways better evidence for them, do but point back to the one supreme manifestation, the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. We must never forget that behind the alleged miracles of the Gospels we have the absolutely greatest spiritual force that the world has ever known. If our knowledge is as yet very imperfect of the influence of spirit upon matter in general, it is inevitably still more imperfect of this crowning instance of the spirit-world in contact with the material. When we argue upwards from the analogy of the known to the unknown, we must always leave a large margin for the interval between the point at which our common experience, and even higher extraordinary experience, ends, and the point at which this highest of all human experiences begins. Even a strictly scientific method should be conscious of its own limitations; when it has done all that it can do, it should be aware that its ladders are still too short to scale the height that has to be scaled; it must leave room for a venture of faith beyond the furthest horizon of sight.

iv. We are not called upon to believe that anything is really contrary to, or in violation of, nature St. Augustine laid down, some fifteen centuries ago: ‘Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam sed contra quam est nota natura’ (De Civitate Dei, xxi. 8). We can always exercise an act of faith, that if we really knew what had taken place, and if we really knew the highest laws of the universe, there would not be any contradiction between them. As it is, there is a double margin of error: it is difficult, and in many cases impossible, for us so to translate the language of the distant past into the idiom of the present as to be sure that we can realize what are the facts that we have to deal with; and, even if we had got the facts, we should still have but a very imperfect knowledge of the causes by which they were determined.