A UU View of Miracles
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I have several dozen books about Unitarian Universalism in my home office. I looked through them all, and only three have any kind of entry in their index or table of contents for “miracles.” In one the index reference is to “miracles, impossibility of,” and the associated text takes a scientific perspective. A second book, on the history of Unitarian Universalism, relates the question of miracles to three nineteenth century ministers: Andrews Norton, William Henry Furness, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The third reference is in a chapter entitled “How Miraculous Are Miracles?” from a 1987 Beacon Press book by Unitarian Universalist minister Peter Fleck. He ends up saying that miracles don’t exist in the sense of a violation of the law of nature by God.
Not a terribly auspicious start for a sermon on a Unitarian Universalist view of miracles. I could simply stop now and assert: There are no miracles for Unitarian Universalists. Period.
But actually I don’t think that’s true. Moreover, our tradition has had a dramatic impact on all of Protestant Christianity’s understanding of miracles in the modern era. That historical impact continues today, and I think it’s worth exploring. So I’ll forge on.
There are two classic Christian positions on miracles that have inspired debate up to the present time. Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century understood a miracle to be something that occurred completely beyond the order of nature. Miracles are literally supernatural in the sense that they are events that happen, as he put it, “outside the ordinary processes of the whole of created nature.”
Nine centuries before Aquinas, Augustine took a different stance. For him there was only one miracle: creation itself. All of nature and all natural processes are miraculous because they reflect the creative nature of God. Miracles aren’t contrary to the laws of nature; they’re simply outside of what human beings know of nature. They are activities that produce an effect of wonder or awe on the human beholder.
We moderns then might say, Wonder and awe until they are explained scientifically, so that we can then see exactly how they align with the laws of nature. Or we might say, Wonder and awe are actually enhanced for me through scientific explanation: How wonderful—how awesome—is this creation, this natural order in which I find myself! Hallelujah!
Protestant reformers took a different tack, starting in the sixteenth century. They agreed that miracles—in the sense of particular divine interventions in the natural world—had occurred in biblical times, but then they claimed that miracles had ceased to occur anywhere in the world or anytime thereafter. As Martin Luther wrote, all claims of miracles happening in his time were a “tom foolery” of the devil, devised for “chasing people hither and yon.”
Protestants stressed the importance of the Bible in Christian life. Most reformers agreed with John Calvin that believers’ confidence should rest on God’s promises in the sacred text alone and not on any kinds of signs and wonders that they might claim to have experienced personally or that were testified to by their contemporaries. This became known as the cessationist view of miracles: miracles had ceased at the end of the biblical era.
For over three hundred years, from the sixteenth century well into the nineteenth, Protestants were in near consensus on the view that miracles had ceased to occur. The Enlightenment and the scientific revolution bolstered this outlook. David Hume, in a 1748 book, provided a philosophically fatal blow to any claim that miracles can be founded on evidence. Meanwhile, scientists denied that miracles could co-exist with the natural laws of the universe. They began to offer scientific explanations for many miracles described in the Bible. And theologians developed understandings of religion that made the idea of miracles religiously irrelevant.
Then in the nineteenth century along came English Romantic poets and American Transcendentalists (whom Unitarian Universalists hold in high esteem). William Wordsworth wrote that he had personally “felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” Coleridge described a “beauty-making power” that had personally freed him from “dejection,” from “Reality’s dark dream.”
American Unitarian minister Theodore Parker was particularly hard on the Protestant understanding of miracles as having ceased with biblical times. He explained how that was twice wrong: first, that human beings had been “senseless clods until instructed by miracles” in the biblical age; and second, that God had now been removed from active engagement in the world, leaving us only to read our Bibles. That would mean that the current generation is “to have no sense of the presence of God in the world,” relying only on “past relics of the divine presence.”
Since this Protestant understanding of miracles had made God absent from the world, it was not surprising to Parker that there was a crisis of faith among modern believers.
Parker’s contemporary Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson was even harder on both the cessationist view of miracles, and on philosophical and scientific critiques of miracles as not being founded in evidence. Emerson found the power of religion to come not from sterile analysis of a biblical text but from personal intuition. In his famous 1838 “Divinity School Address” at Harvard he explained that Jesus “spoke of miracles; for he felt man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth… But the word Miracle, as pronounced by the Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster.”
That was for two reasons. First, because the church assumed an absence of God from the world after the biblical era. Second, because those who saw God as still intervening from time to time in the natural order radically misunderstood how God is present. God, declared Emerson, is not a watchmaker who then periodically tinkers with the creation he long ago established. Instead, God is one with all that exists—miracles are “one with the blowing clover and the flowing rain.” The great miracle is the energizing force of the universe itself.
The Protestant world never recovered from the Romantic-Transcendentalist challenge. The cessationist view of miracles collapsed, and by the twentieth century sharp conflicts had arisen over questions of miracles. On the one hand, there were those in the church who rejected miracles entirely, including the claim that there had been miracles during the time of the Bible. They spoke of Christian identity as being tied to the character and moral teachings of Jesus, not to his allegedly miraculous acts.
On the other hand, faith healing took off, as many Christians now claimed not only to have experienced miraculous cures and divine interventions in their own lives, but also to be able to produce medical miracles themselves by divine forces working through them. A Time magazine poll has found that just under 70% of all Americans today believe in miracles actively occurring in the world. The modern age has dramatic crosscurrents of the Jesus Seminar whittling away at the gospel miracles, while at the same time respected medical journals publish studies on the effect of prayer on healing.
My personal preference regarding miracles is to see them as poetry, not in the realm of history and science and logic. I prefer the Augustinian view of seeing the miraculous in the regular processes of nature itself, rather than the Thomistic view of miracles happening outside of or contrary to the order of nature. I resonate to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion that “the Highest dwells within us,” although we’re not usually in touch with that reality. “There is a deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is accessible to us… It comes to the lowly and simple; it comes to whosoever will put off what is…proud; it comes as insight; it comes as security and grandeur.”
Emerson does not assume that all of us will know this life force all of the time, or even some of the time. Yet, it can arrive through spiritual disciplines like meditation and prayer and through moral disciplines of character building. Then, when it comes, it seems miraculous. “When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through our will, it is virtue; when it flows through our affections, it is love.”
- A UU View of Miracles - April 1, 2018
