Miracles: A Preliminary Study

Lewis continues his assessment of miracles in Christianity by dividing them into two classes: miracles of the Old Creation and miracles of the New Creation. Both categories rest on a fundamental argument: that in Christianity, all the miracles are simply local and particular manifestations of what God has already done on a broad scale, or of what God will do in the consummation of the divine plan. They are not aberrations or exceptions, but rather sketches-in-miniature of the grander work being painted. Those miracles which manifest patterns of God’s works already accomplished are called miracles of the Old Creation; those which relate to divine acts yet to come are called miracles of the New Creation.

For the miracles of the Old Creation, Lewis focuses mostly on the biblical accounts of Jesus’s own miracles, such as turning water into wine, multiplying loaves and fish for the crowd to eat, and healing the sick. These, says Lewis, are all things that God is at work doing anyway—using natural elements and processes to turn water into wine (through the agency of soil, grapes, etc.), turning out crops of grain and schools of fish in multiplying numbers each year, and using the body’s natural processes to bring about healing in many cases. This doesn’t make what Jesus does any less miraculous, but it does show that his miracles are not mere magic tricks or aberrations by which Jesus is short-circuiting nature by sleight of hand. In Lewis’s view, Jesus’s miracles are little portraits of the grander works which God is always doing.

Lewis ascribes miracles of renewal to the category of miracles of the New Creation, all of which are focused on one miracle in particular: the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Lewis defends the biblical accounts against the work of modern critics who attempt to make the resurrection story a myth-making addition to the gospels by later generations of Christians, pointing out the clear biblical evidence that the resurrection was itself the very first form of the Christian message, as it came from the lips of those who claimed to have witnessed it. The resurrection does not contain any of the mythologized elements one would expect: it is not connected in its source documents to any of the old death-and-rebirth cycles of nature which underlay some other ancient religions, is not a spiritualized or ghostly account, and it strikes the reader in its strangeness as the story of witnesses grappling with how to tell of the confounding experience they’ve had. In theological terms, the resurrection was an entirely new event, the foundation of a brand new work which God was beginning to do in the world, and the crowning capstone of the work of Christ. “It is at this point that awe and trembling fall upon us as we read the records. If the story is false, it is at least a much stranger story than we expected […]. If the story is true, then a wholly new mode of being has arisen in the universe” (241).

Some of Jesus’s historical miracles point forward to the truth of the resurrection and the wild, nature-turned-upside-down flavor of its narrative, so Lewis includes the miracles of Jesus walking on water, raising Lazarus from the dead, and undergoing his transfiguration as being in the category of miracles of the New Creation. The New Creation signified in the resurrection encompasses the full healing of our disordered existence, in which spirit and nature are so often opposed in us. Resurrection points toward the overcoming of even those aspects of our existence—like death—which, while now entirely natural to us, strike our spirits as something tragic and unfair. In the Christian conception, all these sentiments of the way the world ought to be will find their fulfillment in the realization of the fullness of every joy—both spiritual and natural—a consummation made possible by the redemption wrought in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In this short final chapter, Lewis addresses his readers directly, advising them to be on their guard as they study further on the subject. Those who are reading books to learn more about the Bible and Christianity will encounter many, even some written by clergy, which are nonetheless pervaded by naturalistic assumptions that cast doubt on the place of miracles. Lewis reminds his readers, then, to be watchful for the fallacies he has outlined—those which describe miracles as impossible, improbable, or improper. He also encourages them to remember that they, too, have grown up in a cultural milieu that has granted them an instinctive naturalistic sense, over against the supernatural. As such, some will continue to feel an emotional weight against the notion of miracles, but emotions are not the same things as facts, and Lewis urges his readers to be careful about such things.