by Eric Metaxas
Until I was an adult who had found faith and this world of meaning, I knew very little about C. S. Lewis. He was the Oxford don who turned from atheism to belief in God because late one night in 1930 he was walking along a wooded path behind Magdalen College with his friend J. R. R. Tolkien. This was years before Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings and long before Lewis wrote his famous Chronicles of Narnia. They were just young men who had survived the grim horrors of World War I, who had seen the ghastly hell and death of the trenches and the gas warfare, and who were now brilliant young professors at Oxford University. But as they walked and talked along that path, long past midnight, Tolkien had the grounding of a deep belief in something else, and Lewis did not. Tolkien felt that this world was not all there is, but Lewis felt that it was, that the sad horrors of the war they had both survived told them this, that this ugly world was all there is and ever would be and we must face this, although it made us sad to think of it. But surely Lewis—or Jack, as his friends called him—sometimes also wondered why, if it were true, it would make us sad. If it were true, why would something in us want it not to be true? What was that something in us, and how did it get there? What was the meaning of the fact that we should desire something else? What was the meaning of our desire for meaning?
Lewis and Tolkien both knew and loved mythology and the myths of ancient cultures. They knew the old stories of the Greeks and the Romans, and they knew and loved the stories of the Norse gods. In his autobiographical memoir, Surprised by Joy, Lewis recalled how his heart had been pierced when he had read those lines from the Norse Ballads of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: “I heard a voice cry, ‘Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!’” Why had this so pierced his heart? Why should this nineteenth-century poem about a fictional character move him so? What was the meaning of that? But after the death of his mother and the pains of life and the horrors of the war he had at least halfway pushed aside such feelings and had come to embrace the sad belief that we could not go back, and all of these stories were just stories. Beautiful stories, but just stories.
But Tolkien had another idea, although for him it was no longer just an idea. He knew that all of these ancient and beautiful stories were echoes of something larger and truer. They were signs that the human race knew of another world that had once existed and would exist again and even now existed in another realm, outside time. He knew the myths of the gods who died in a sacrificial way but who would rise again and live, but he did not know them as unconnected to the world of reality and history. For him they were echoes of a larger reality that had at one time burst through into history, but only once. So that night on the dark wooded path with his friend Jack he asked the question that would change Jack’s life. He asked Jack to consider whether it was possible that one time this myth had coincided with history—whether one time eternity might have broken through into time. Tolkien suggested that it had, that the myth of the god who had died and come to life was an echo of a greater story—of perhaps the greatest story that ever was told—and that one time in history this eternal story had bloomed into reality, had broken through into history and time as a crocus breaks through the snow. And it had changed everything forever and ever, had brought spring into winter, had brought eternity itself into time. Lewis had never considered that. But Tolkien pressed him to consider it and so now he would consider it, and it would haunt him. What if this were true and had happened? And if it had happened, how could we know?
What if all the myths and fairy tales were pointing to something that was not only true but also truer than anything we knew in this world, to a realm that was truer and more real? What if this world of materiality and corporeality were only the “shadowlands,” and what if we were meant for another place that was more real and more true? What if our hearts’ longing for that other place was what led mankind over the years to make a place in our world for myths and religions and fairy tales—and what if the God who had created us and loved us had found a way to break through into our world and to offer us his hand, to say, If you take my hand I can take you back to where you once lived and to where you really belong, because your heart knows that you do? Would you take his hand and let him take you there? Would you believe the miracle of his breaking through into this world? Might you believe in the possibility of miracles just enough to believe that that one miracle had happened, once? Because if you believe in just that one miracle it will open up the world of miracles itself, will lead you back into a world where those miracles themselves point to the larger truth, point to the place where they came from and are signposts to that place, signs for us here to know that there is a place there—and the signs do not just point to that place and tell us that it’s true, but somehow they show us how to get back there, if we can see them for what they are, if we can see the signs and read the signs and dare to follow them.
We must think about these things. We must wonder about them and about our lives and about life in general. It is healthy to wonder. We have a deep need for wondering. “Wonder” is of course the root of the word “wonderful,” so we must wonder generally and we must wonder specifically. What if we could accept that our childhood love of Santa Claus was indeed fantasy but not merely fantasy? What if we could accept that although Santa Claus didn’t really exist as Socrates existed, our desire for him to exist pointed to something that did exist, pointed to something that Socrates himself had longed for? What if those who simply believed in anything were only half-wrong, because their desire to believe pointed to something that was true, not just in the world itself but inside them?
And what if those who knew Santa Claus didn’t really exist were themselves only half-wrong, because their rejection of that kind of sloppy, childish belief pointed to a desire to only believe in what was real, what was really real and not just a myth or a childhood story, a desire to believe in things that are as true as the facts in history books and as real as the atoms and molecules we learned about in science books? What if the half-truth of the desire for something beyond us could meet up with the half-truth of the desire for only what is really real and true, which we can know and see and touch in this world too? What if those two halves could touch and become the one true truth we were both looking for?
This is a book about that.
2
WHAT IS A MIRACLE?
There is no standard definition for miracle to which we may all turn. In fact, what is and isn’t a miracle is extremely subjective. Nonetheless a discussion of what miracles are—and are not—is well worth having.*
Webster’s dictionary defines a miracle as “an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs.” More colorfully and memorably, C. S. Lewis once explained that a miracle is something unique that breaks a pattern so expected and established we hardly consider the possibility that it could be broken. “If for thousands of years,” he said, “a woman can become pregnant only by sexual intercourse with a man, then if she were to become pregnant without a man, it would be a miracle.”
Though we probably weren’t expecting ribaldry from Lewis, his observation gets our attention. The skeptic and philosopher David Hume spoke famously against miracles but defined them as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”
We may essentially concur with Hume on this definition, which is probably as close to a standard definition as we will be able to settle on. But I would further simply say that it is when something outside time and space enters time and space, whether just to wink at us or poke at us briefly, or to come in and dwell among us for three decades.
CAN A RATIONAL PERSON BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?
No sooner does the subject of miracles arise than someone must ask whether anyone can today really believe in such things. But consider the following. Science today teaches that the universe came into being via the Big Bang, approximately fourteen billion years ago. According to this general
ly accepted theory, all matter in the known universe—more than one hundred billion galaxies, each of which contains hundreds of billions of stars and many more planets—exploded out of something smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
But who was behind all of that? Many people would say that God was, although people’s definitions of God and how he created the universe will certainly vary. That a creator was behind it all might be shocking to say in some circles, but for most people on the planet, it is essentially taken for granted. But if we believe that God created the universe out of nothing—ex nihilo, to use the famous Latin phrase—how can we possibly quibble over smaller miracles like turning water into wine or giving sight to a man born blind? Believing that God could create the universe but could not perform any infinitely smaller miracle is illogical. It is very much like saying, “Oh, yes, I certainly believe that Tolstoy could write War and Peace, and did, but I could never believe he’d be able to move a comma in the manuscript. That would be too much.” If God actually created this universe—somehow—can we not believe he would be able to do almost anything else? It seems we would have to.
So if, like most people, we can agree with the first words of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” why wouldn’t we agree with the innumerable instances in the Bible that follow of his miraculous intervention? If God could speak the universe into existence, could he not afterward speak into that existence?
EXAMINING MIRACLES CRITICALLY
If believing in the possibility of miracles is logical, or at least certainly not illogical, that does not mean we should believe in anything claiming to be a miracle. On the contrary, we should examine miracles with the greatest critical rigor possible.
Mark Twain said that if you dissect a joke, you kill it, just as you must kill a frog before dissecting it. Of course there’s some truth to this. As a sometime humorist, I well know how this can work with jokes. If you must explain why something is funny, you will almost certainly kill the humor. There are many who say the same thing about faith and miracles. They are in love with the idea of believing, with the ineffable magic of it, and don’t think any of it should be examined too closely. For these people, exactly what one believes in matters less than belief itself, and they don’t want to get too close to the details of it, lest they eff the ineffable and the fairy dust be blown away. But true belief is really not like frogs and jokes at all. We must examine what we believe. We must blow away the fairy dust. Though there is great mystery involved, it’s not all mystery. Exactly what we believe is vitally important. Do we believe in something that’s really true? Or are we afraid to find out? We have to separate the fake miracles from the real ones, or we do the real ones a grave injustice and do the truth itself an injustice too.
It is vital that we not have a “Disney” theology that only says “Believe!”—one that is merely about childlike wonder—because if we aren’t careful with what we believe in, we will end up believing in anything. To believe in anything is to potentially believe in nonsense, some of it downright harmful. It’s one thing for children to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but at some point we need to grow up and be able to deal with the fact that some things are actually not real. If an adult really believes in Santa Claus or in the Tooth Fairy, we know that something is wrong. We wouldn’t humor such a person, but we might consider having him committed. At some juncture, we must gird our loins and make these distinctions between what is real and what is imaginary. It’s vitally important.
So when we talk about miracles, we talk about things that, to some extent, must be criticized and understood, otherwise we are merely being so open-minded that we are simply gullible. It’s one thing to be innocent and another thing to be naive or willfully ignorant. By critically examining things like the phenomenon of life on Earth (see chapter 4) or the existence of the universe (see chapter 5) or the resurrection of Jesus (see chapter 8) or the healing of my friend Paul’s marriage (see chapter 11), we help determine if these things really are miraculous, or aren’t. If it turns out that through our critical examination we discover that they are actually not miraculous, that’s all to the good. We don’t want to get excited about nothing, and we don’t want to believe in anything. We want to know what is actually miraculous and what is not actually miraculous. True faith is not a leap in the dark; it’s a leap into the light.* We shouldn’t be afraid of the facts. If God is God, he is the God of reality and facts and science and history.
So the facts matter. They aren’t beside the point. If something turns out to seem genuinely miraculous, then we are free to enjoy it, to rejoice in it, and to celebrate the true wonder of it. We don’t need to hedge our bets. When we finally know something to be true and real, we can really leap and shout with abandon, because we’ve determined that the thing we are leaping and shouting about is worth leaping and shouting about. If it turns out that the thing we believed in or wanted to believe in is not true and real, we may experience a momentary letdown, but in the end we will be in a far better place than if we had blindly clung to something that was really just wish-fulfillment or a feel-good invention or a flight of fancy.
We are therefore not talking about the mushy idea that lurks behind such pop-cultural clichés as “Miracles happen!” or “Believe!” Those sloppy and vague concepts only add to the confusion about miracles. They add to the thoughtless and uncritical view of these things, so that everything wonderful is thought to be a miracle, when everything wonderful is actually not a miracle, in the sense that we mean. We need to be brave enough to dissect a frog now and then, to see what’s inside. In the case of real miracles, they are never in danger of disappearing just because we look at them. If they are real miracles and are from God, they can stand being poked at and examined. So soapy bromides like “Miracles happen!” and “Believe!” which we see carved on artificial rocks sold in places like SkyMall catalogs, are the sworn enemies of a rigorous examination of miracles. Serious questions are to be tolerated and encouraged, but thoughtless gullibility on the one hand, and flippant, dismissive cynicism on the other, are not.
WHAT IS THE MEANING BEHIND MIRACLES?
When I was nine, my class at Beaver Brook Elementary School in Danbury, Connecticut, visited what we called the “Nature Center,” which was really just a small piece of riverbank on the Still River. One day as we studied plants, our teacher explained to us that there was no hard-and-fast definition or category of “weeds.” One person’s weed is another person’s nonweed. If there is a dandelion in your lawn, you’d probably call it a weed, but if you eat dandelion greens in your salad, you might not. He explained that the whole idea of weeds was essentially subjective. I was shocked when I learned this. Surely everyone could agree on what was a weed and what was not. But I was wrong.
One man’s miracle is another man’s eye-rolling What’s the big deal? weird coincidence. So when we are talking about miracles, one thing we can say objectively is that context matters—and who is experiencing the miracle matters. If God is behind a miracle, and we can agree that that is ultimately what makes a miracle a miracle, then a large part of his performing the miracle has to do with communicating with the people who are observing or experiencing the miracle. So we can ask, if a miracle happens in the woods and there’s no one around to see it, is it a miracle? To put it yet another way, why would God perform a miracle if no one realized he had done it? How can we ever conceive of a miracle apart from it being a communication from God to one or more people, at the very least to let them know he exists and cares about them? If a miracle happens in the woods and there’s no one around to see it, it’s actually not a miracle.
The Greek word for miracle is “simaios,” which means “sign.” Miracles are signs, and like all signs, they are never about themselves; they’re about whatever they are pointing toward. Miracles point to something beyond themselves. But to what? To God himself. That’s the point of miracles—to point u
s beyond our world to another world. They are clues that that other world is not in our imaginations but is actually out there, wherever “out there” actually is. Peggy Noonan once wrote that she thought miracles existed “in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.” If miracles exist at all, they exist not for their own sake but for us, to point us toward something beyond. To someone beyond.
As far as this goes, we could say that everything that exists is a miracle, albeit a miracle of creation and not a miracle of overt divine intervention in the sense that the parting of the Red Sea is a miracle (I will explain this difference in chapters 4 and 5). In fact, everything that exists is not just a miracle of God’s creation but also a miracle of God’s sustaining, because things could appear and then vanish. But they don’t. They are here and they remain here, in one form or another, either as energy or matter. So we can ask why something was created, but we can and should also ask, Why does it keep on existing?
It is a curious fact that human beings are rarely satisfied that things just are. The very existence of the universe prompts us to ask why. Why does the universe exist? And why do we want to know why it exists? For some reason, human beings long to see the meaning behind things. So just as what we call miracles point to something outside themselves—which is to say God—the miracle of the very existence of things does precisely the same. Things point beyond themselves. For example, a lion isn’t just a lion; it is an image of royalty and courage and ferocity. Human beings, who are created in the image of God, cannot be satisfied with just the thing itself. We somehow long to know what things mean. Once human beings come into the picture, the question of meaning enters the picture. We cannot help it. It’s in our nature, which is a nature that mirrors God’s own nature.
