Theopedia

Miracle

“Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

— John 20:30-31 (ESV)

Definition

A miracle, in the strict theological sense, is an event in the external, sense-perceptible world produced by the immediate agency of God rather than by the ordinary operation of the second causes he has ordained. It differs from providence in general, which governs the world through means, and from an inward work like regeneration, which is real but not publicly observable. Because a miracle bypasses the natural order rather than merely directing it, it is a public credential: evidence that whoever performs it, or whoever it accompanies, speaks with God’s own authority.12

Confessional Witness

No confession in the Reformed family devotes a chapter to miracle specifically; the doctrine sits inside the chapter on providence. The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states:

“God, in his ordinary providence maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them at his pleasure.”3

The Westminster Confession (1646), the Savoy Declaration (1658), and the Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742) state the same clause almost word for word in their own providence chapters, a doctrine the whole Reformed and Particular Baptist family holds in common rather than a distinctively Baptist formulation.4 The clause never uses the word “miracle” and offers no definition of one; it simply secures the freedom a miracle presupposes, that God’s ordinary governance of the world through means never exhausts what he is able and willing to do.

Biblical Basis

Scripture describes miracle-events with a cluster of terms rather than one technical word. The New Testament calls them “wonders” (terata) and “signs” (sēmeia) when viewed for their effect on onlookers, and “powers” (dynameis) and “works” (erga) when viewed as revelations of God’s own capacity (John 4:48; Matt. 7:22; John 14:11).5 The Old Testament shows the same pattern in narrative rather than vocabulary: God gives Moses signs to authenticate his commission before Pharaoh and before Israel (Exod. 4:1-9), and the exodus plagues themselves, together with the rainbow given to Noah (Gen. 9:12-17) and the seven years of plenty and famine in Egypt (Gen. 41), are “creation signs accompanied by revelation,” miracle bound to a specific communicative purpose rather than wonder for its own sake.6

That purpose is attestation. Jesus appeals to “the works that I do in my Father’s name” as evidence that the Father sent him (John 10:25, 37-38), and John states that the signs he selected for his Gospel were written “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:30-31). Peter tells the Pentecost crowd that Jesus was a man “attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs” (Acts 2:22), the author of Hebrews says God bore witness to the gospel message “by signs and wonders and various miracles” (Heb. 2:3-4), and Paul lists “signs and wonders and mighty works” among the marks of a true apostle (2 Cor. 12:12). Scripture also assumes a miracle-like event can be counterfeit: Moses warns that a “sign or wonder” from a prophet who then leads Israel after other gods is no exception to that prophet’s condemnation (Deut. 13:1-3), and Jesus and Paul both describe false christs and the “man of lawlessness” producing signs and wonders of their own (Matt. 24:24; 2 Thess. 2:9), evidence not of the event’s origin by itself but of a test Scripture applies to it beyond the bare fact of the wonder.

Historical Development

Patristic and medieval formulation

Augustine, answering the charge that a miracle would be “contrary to nature,” argued in The City of God that an event is contrary only to nature as it is currently known, not to nature as God has actually ordained it, since nature simply is what God’s will has made it, so nothing God does can truly work against it.7 Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, allowed that demons can produce real wonders exceeding human power and knowledge, but distinguished these from true miracles by their author and purpose rather than by anything in their outward form.8

Reformation and confessional statement

Martin Luther used the word loosely, calling conversion itself the greatest of miracles: “that any village adheres to the Gospel when a hundred thousand devils are arrayed against it … is a continued miracle to which healing the sick or raising the dead is a mere trifle.”9 The Reformed confessions of the following century, the Westminster Confession (1646) and the Second London Baptist Confession (1677/1689) among them, gave miracle no chapter of its own; they placed God’s freedom to work “without, above, and against” ordinary means inside the chapter on providence, treating miracle as a limiting case of God’s general government of the world rather than a separate category needing its own article.3

The Enlightenment challenge

Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) denied any real distinction between the power of God and the power of nature: if the two are identical, an event conflicting with nature’s universal laws would equally conflict with God’s own intellect and nature, so on Spinoza’s terms “miracle” can only name an event whose natural cause happens to be unknown, not a genuine act of God distinct from nature’s ordinary course.10 David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) mounted a different challenge from testimony rather than metaphysics, arguing that because belief in testimony rests on experience, and experience of nature’s uniformity is never contradicted, it will always be more likely that a witness to a miracle was mistaken or lying than that nature’s course was actually suspended.11

Nineteenth-century responses

Charles Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837) and Baden Powell’s contribution to Essays and Reviews (1860) proposed that miracles are not God’s immediate acts at all but the outworking of some “higher law” of nature not yet known, and the Duke of Argyll’s Reign of Law (1867) argued that God exercises all his power, ordinary and extraordinary alike, only through natural instrumentality.12 Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology (1871) and Augustus Hopkins Strong’s Systematic Theology (1907) both answered this “higher law” theory and Hume’s argument from testimony at length, restating the older definition of miracle as God’s own immediate, unmediated causality in the external world.132

Opposing Views

Pantheism and philosophical necessitarianism deny that miracles are possible at all, because they deny the premise a miracle requires: a real distinction between God and nature. On Spinoza’s reasoning, the universal laws of nature simply are the decrees of God, so any event contrary to those laws would be contrary to God’s own nature, an absurdity on its own terms. The word “miracle,” on this view, describes nothing about the event itself; it only names a gap in human knowledge of the event’s ordinary cause.10

The “higher law” theory grants that God is personal and distinct from the world but denies that he ever acts on it except through natural instrumentality. Charles Babbage compared God to the builder of a calculating machine engineered to produce an anomalous result, by design, after millions of ordinary operations, concluding:

“It is more consistent with the attributes of the Deity to look upon miracles not as deviations from the laws assigned by the Almighty for the government of matter and of mind; but as the exact fulfilment of much more extensive laws than those we suppose to exist.”14

Baden Powell argued in the same vein that any apparently miraculous effect must eventually be referred to a natural cause, known or as yet undiscovered,12 and the Duke of Argyll’s Reign of Law reached the same conclusion from the side of a God who governs continuously rather than one confined to nature’s ordinary course:

“There is nothing in religion incompatible with the belief that all exercises of God’s power, whether ordinary or extraordinary, are effected through the instrumentality of means.”12

Locke’s own definition, which Argyll quotes with approval, states the position plainly: a miracle is simply “a sensible operation, which, being above the comprehension of the spectator, and, in his opinion, contrary to the established course of nature, is taken by him to be divine,” a matter of the observer’s ignorance rather than a fact about the event’s cause.13

Objections and Responses

A miracle would require actually violating the fixed, immutable laws of nature, which is unintelligible or impossible. Hodge answers that this objection assumes nature’s laws are self-existent or independent of God, when in fact “the laws of nature are uniform only because He so wills, and their uniformity continues only so long as He wills”;15 a God who ordained those laws remains as free to act without them as through them. This kind of counteraction is not unique to miracle:

“One force counteracts another; vital force keeps the chemical laws of matter in abeyance; and muscular force can control the action of physical force. When a man raises a weight from the ground, the law of gravity is neither suspended nor violated, but counteracted by a stronger force.”16

The same holds, on this reading, for Christ walking on the sea or for the axe head recovered by the man of God floating in 2 Kings 6:5-6.

Human testimony can never be strong enough evidence to establish that a miracle occurred, David Hume argued, because confidence in testimony rests on experience, and experience uniformly favors the ordinary course of nature over any report that it was broken. Hodge answers, first, that confidence in testimony does not actually rest on experience at all but on “a law of our nature”: people trust good witnesses because they know deceit is inconsistent with goodness, not because they have tallied a track record.11 Second, Hume’s argument assumes a miracle is inherently as improbable as any random anomaly, when a miracle wrought “on great occasions and for the highest ends” by a God who exists is exactly what “might be confidently anticipated” once theism itself is granted.17 Third, he argues that faith in the biblical miracles never rested on testimony alone in the first place, but on the whole system of revealed truth those miracles accompany.

Even granting that some events defy natural explanation, how can one tell a true miracle from a demonic counterfeit, a “lying wonder”? Scripture anticipates the difficulty rather than leaving it unanswered. Moses instructs Israel to reject a prophet’s sign or wonder outright if it leads them after other gods (Deut. 13:1-3), Jesus warns that false christs will produce signs and wonders convincing enough to deceive “the very elect” if that were possible (Matt. 24:24), and Paul describes the coming man of lawlessness working “with all power and signs and lying wonders” (2 Thess. 2:9). The test Scripture applies is not the wonder’s outward form but its author and end: a real wonder performed to support false doctrine or a wicked purpose is a “lying wonder,” not a miracle in the strict sense, however inexplicable its mechanism.8 Hodge sums up the Reformation-era answer to this problem by quoting Luther’s own rule: no sign or wonder, “however great or numerous,” may be allowed to stand against doctrine God has already authenticated.18

Related Doctrines

A miracle is the exceptional case within providence of God, God’s ordinary governance of the world through means, and its usual purpose is to attest a revelation of God rather than to display power for its own sake. This is why apologetics has traditionally leaned on miracle, alongside prophecy, as external evidence for the truth of Christianity, and why the resurrection of Christ, the paradigm miracle of the New Testament, is the one Paul says the whole faith stands or falls with (1 Cor. 15:14). Christ’s own miracles are the fullest biblical case study of the category defined here, treated at length in Miracles of Jesus. Whether the miraculous gifts described in the New Testament, such as healing and tongues, continue in the church today or ceased with the apostolic age is a separate, later dispute; see continuationism and cessationism.

Notes

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XII. Miracles,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 618: “A miracle, therefore, may be defined to be an event, in the external world, brought about by the immediate efficiency, or simple volition of God.” ↩

  2. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 117-118: “A miracle is an event palpable to the senses, produced for a religious purpose by the immediate agency of God.” ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 5, “Of Divine Providence,” para. 3. ↩ ↩2

  4. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 5, “Of Providence,” para. 3; The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 5, para. 3; The Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742), chap. 5, para. 3. ↩

  5. Strong, 118. ↩

  6. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 4, “Revelation.” ↩

  7. Hodge, 618-619. ↩

  8. Hodge, 630-631. ↩ ↩2

  9. Hodge, 617. ↩

  10. Hodge, 626-627. ↩ ↩2

  11. Hodge, 633-634. ↩ ↩2

  12. Hodge, 622-623. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  13. Hodge, 623-624. ↩ ↩2

  14. Hodge, 622. ↩

  15. Hodge, 620. ↩

  16. Hodge, 621-622. ↩

  17. Hodge, 634-635. ↩

  18. Hodge, 631-632. ↩