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What Is A Miracle?

I put the title of this new topic as "What Is A Miracle?" because among religious persons I find that they cannot come up with the Biblical examples of a miracle.

First for me a miracle is anything that happens outside the realm of physical or scientific laws. For instance if someone were to walk on water then that would be miraculous because based on physical and scientific laws gravity should make the person sink into the water.

In the Bible we see countless miraculous events but in modern times and among the more conservative religions people talk about miracles being a nice sunny day or smile of a child. Yes, those are nice events, but they are not miraculous as I defined here.

So that leads me to start this discussion... What Is A Miracle?

Miracle Is What

The notion that miracles have to be a literally 'super-natural' phenomenon (I.e. Outside the ordinary course of nature) is certainly one view, and lots of people have put it in those sorts of terms - Aquinas summed it up rather well as 'those things"¦which are done by divine power apart from the order generally followed in things.' While we shouldn't necessarily believe that we know all physical and scientific laws (perhaps God left some esoteric 'back doors' in the laws of physics that we haven't discovered yet? ), that's certainly a good description that encapsulates the basic events of many of the miracles of the Bible.

That's certainly one approach, but if I may offer another ...

In the Koine Text of the New Testament gospels (the actual Greek that they were written in), there's no direct equivalent to the word 'miracle'. Instead, we get things like 'δυναμεις'/'dunameis', which means 'mighty works' (which I grant you does imply a bit of that sort of 'supernaturalness'), but a lot of thee time we have the Greek word 'σημειον'/'semeion', which means 'sign'. Miracles weren't characterised just by the fact that they seemed to contravene scientific laws, but by the fact that they had spiritual and instructive meaning to their audiences. Turning water into wine represented the formation of a new, more powerful, covenant, for example, while raising the dead was a demonstration that people could be reborn from their old lives of sin and death, and given a new chance in Jesus. You get a fair few philosophers today who still argue the same thing, that miracles are defined by their meaning, and the reactions they inspire in observers, rather than their actual content; William Tillich is the one who springs to mind from my A-Level RS lessons.

I don't know if I'd call myself a member of a 'more conservative religion', but I'd certainly describe religious and awe-inspiring beauty, compassion, or selfless actions as 'miraculous'; that we live in a world where such things can take place at all is in itself miraculous. I know that this isn't always a particularly satisfactory view - what about all the horror and suffering in the world, which isn't very beautiful, and it doesn't explain why there aren't constant examples of people being supernaturally raised from the dead in the modern world - but I find it more convincing than the alternatives. The understanding of miracles as a sign of God's presence or love for the world, rather than simply as contraventions of natural laws, doesn't deny the reality of the world around us (I'll keep an open mind, and do believe that Jesus was miraculously resurrected, but I'm skeptical as to the accuracy of many purported 'miracleworkers' today), but does reflect the original Biblical understanding of acts that serve as 'signs' of God in the world. Plus, of course, I think such an approach stands as a challenge, and call to action - we shouldn't sit around waiting for God to solve problems, but instead let God's love work through us to go out and make a difference.

That's my believer's understanding of the miraculous (or should I say the 'sign-bearing' ...), at any rate - I don't speak for all Christians, or even all Quakers, natch, but from Bible study, contemplation, and my experiences of the world, that's what I find. I really recommend that anyone interested in this sort of Bible study gives reading the NT in the original Greek a go - with a good (online) dictionary, it's not that tough, and you can get a lot of understanding and meaning out of it that way, that is 'ironed over' in even the most well-meaning of translations.