In Our Time - Miracles

Episode Date: September 25, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the parting of the Red Sea, the feeding of the five thousand and the general subject of miracles. Miracles have been part of human culture for thousands of years. From St Augustine in the 4th century through the medieval cult of saints to David Hume in the 18th, miracles have captured the imaginations of believers and sceptics alike. The way they have been celebrated, interpreted, dissected and refuted is a whole history of arguments between philosophy, science and religion. They have also been used by the corrupt and the powerful to gain their perverse ends. Miracles have been derided and proved to be fraudulent and yet, for many, the miraculous maintain a grip on our imagination, our language and our belief to this day. With Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture;Janet Soskice, Reader in Philosophical Theology at Cambridge University; Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the parting of the Red Sea, the feeding of the 5,000, the turning of water into wine, miracles. Miracles. Yes, miracles have been part of our culture for thousands of years, from beliefs about the shinbone of a saint

to ideas about the nature of creation and the laws of nature. Miracles have been a measure of dispute. within religion and between origin and rationality, from St. Augustine in the 4th century to David Hume in the 18th century. They've also been used by the corrupt and the powerful to gain perverse ends. Miracles have been derided as mere magic and proved by fraudulent. And yet, for many, the miraculous still maintains a grip on our imagination, our language, and our beliefs.

With me to discuss miracles at Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway University of London, Janet Soskis, reader in philosophical theology at Cambridge University, and Martin Palmer, director of the international consultancy on religion, education and culture. Martin Palmer, the origins of miracles, let's take the judo Christian tradition in the Bible. Can you begin describing one in Heightfordson

with, say, the parting of the Red Sea? The parting of the Red Sea is actually a very good example because the story itself is very dramatic. It forms a major focus for Jewish self-understanding and Israelite self-understanding. As time goes on, it also gets glossed. So by the time you get to some of the later rabbinical commentaries in the Talmud and the Mishnah, it's beginning to be really spectacular. So the waves go up 1,600 feet.

How did they start? And what was a particular situation? Oh, right. What actually happened? Yes, good point. The Israelites are seeking to flee from Egypt. They are being pursued by Pharaoh's troops, who are intent upon capturing them and probably destroying them. They reach the Red Sea, an impassable huge body of water.

Moses prays, he stretches forth the rod that he's been given, the water's part, the Israelites walk across on the dry land, reach the other side, and then as the troops as the chariots and the horsemen and the soldiers of Pharaoh, reach the Red Sea, they plunge onto the dry land, and then the waves crash back and drown all the Egyptian troops. And so the people of God, the Israelites, are saved and taken on the beginning of their long journey to the promised land. And this was seen as a quintessential sign, both of God's power, but also a sign of God being in control.

And I think that's very important. For the Old Testament, for the Hebrew Bible, miracles are both power and wonder, but they're not. are also a sign of something greater. They indicate something greater. And what is intriguing about the Red Sea story in particular is that it is then used as a story to show that the miraculous has been built into creation from the very beginning. Because the rabbinic commentators make the point that although the waters have been given boundaries, if one particularly looks at day two within the story of creation in Genesis 1,

nevertheless they were originally divided as well. So you have the story on day two of how God divides the waters into those above and those below. And so there comes within the Jewish tradition a, if you like, a logical explanation as to how the waters could divide, which is that they were already divided by God, that there is nothing particularly extraordinary, and that God has built into the very nature of water its ability to obey his command. The story then does grow in terms of extra details that arise and there are stories that all the waters in the world, every river, every lake, every stream,

every bowl of water separated at the same time and all sorts of other miraculous explanations go on. And in our own time, various attempts have been made to explain scientifically how this could have happened. And the favourite theory is that there was a huge volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini, which is north of Crete, around about 1500 BC, and that this would have launched a tsunami, a tidal wave of such proportions, but it would have sucked the water back first and then flooded forward.

And in a sense, that attempt to give a scientific, rational explanation, isn't really necessary in classical Judaism, because there's a wonderful comment in the Talmud, which says that it is as wonderful to watch the support, of a family for somebody in trouble as it is to see the parting of the Red Sea. And I think that puts in context. It was dramatic, but maybe actually

ordinary miracles of love and compassion and care are equally miraculous. As I understand it in Hebrew, the word miracle is wonder. It's wonder and sign. Can I just ask you briefly, Martin? We're going to talk mostly about Jude and even more about the Christian tradition of miracles. But miracles are not only in the general.

Judeo-Christian tradition, aren't they? No, not at all. But the difference of interpretation is fascinating. Within Islam, you have a very different approach, which is that everything happens in order that the will of God can be fulfilled. And therefore, nature, history and time are absolutely fluid. They are there to be constructed by God both as a test, but also as a reward. So whereas in a certain extent within the Judeo-Christian tradition,

we have the notion of a world that's been set up, and to a certain degree, miracles of God intervening. Within the Islamic perspective, everything is fluid, and therefore a miracle is simply the working out of the will of God. You've been tested, you say you've been horrendously ill with cancer, you've been tested, you've come through this with prayer, your community has shown that they're prayer for. Therefore, God says, fine, you now understand the will of God,

which is, I'm going to give you more time to live, what are you going to do with it? So time and nature of fluid. In Hinduism and in Taoism in particular, you have a completely different notion. Recently there was this extraordinary phenomenon of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god, about seven years ago on one day all around the world, all the statues drank huge quantities of milk. And if you ask any Hindu theologian or divine or leader,

why this happened, they'll say, I'm got a clue, not an idea, no idea at all. But isn't it wonderful? And I think in Hinduism and Daoism, it's a sense of the world being infinitely more wonderful and that there are layers of worlds and that what we normally see is only one quite thin layer and that every so often other layers of reality, other layers of possibility, break through. But there's no desire to explain it as particularly theological. Janet Soskis, can you take a miracle from the New Testament and show how the miracle in the New Testament were different from those?

in the old and what that will lead us to. Well, I was thinking when Martin was speaking that there's actually a great deal of continuity. First of all, miracles in the New Testament are always signs. They're not just crazy things that happen. And in the New Testament in particular, there are signs indicating who Jesus is.

The gospel writers, Paul, anxious to show that Jesus is the promised one. So the New Testament is written after there's been a number of centuries of expectations of a Messiah coming, inaugurating a new age, an age of redemption. And this new age is going to be characterized. There's also the beginning in Judaism at that time

and say the three centuries before Jesus of belief that the dead will be raised. Do we know from the New Testament itself there's a big debate between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, will the dead be raised or not? So the idea of the Messiah will come with this in-breaking of the power, the possibility, Martin, you said, of God creating a new,

a new kingdom, a new creation. So an example of a miracle that I think shows this is Jesus is out on the Sea of Galilee with his disciples in a boat. And Jesus is fast asleep and a storm, a terrible tempest comes up and the disciples are worried they're all going to drown. And they wake up and say, master, master. And he just says a word and instantly everything is calm. Now what's very interesting about that,

then the disciples say, who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him? Now, that is actually a quote from the Psalms, Psalm 1-10a, I think, where it is the Lord whom the wind and the waves obey, the Creator. So what this shows is Jesus is somehow inhabiting the power of the Creator. Jesus, in the person of Jesus, there has somehow the power of the Creator God. And that will become very, very important, of course, when we get to things like Jesus' own resurrection, which isn't quite a miracle, but you could say becomes the basis for all kinds of subsequent miracles in the Christian faith.

In the early Christian church, it was, as you say, miracles came through Jesus or the effect, it was felt because of what Jesus said or did. Quite soon, that is in a few centuries. The relics of the saints and the saints themselves became, as it were, miracle makers. Both the saints themselves, the worship of the dead saints and the relics of the saints, and the objects, the things, which were said to keep. exist in the shinbone of a scientist, not a... Can you tell us why you think that happened and what do you affect it, how?

Yes, this is something that looks far more ludicrous from a distance than I think it does, examined with some historical sympathy. First of all, you have the resurrection of Jesus, which obviously for Paul is the main thing. Jesus, Paul believes, has risen from the dead and is inaugurating a new creation, a new time,

when the faithful will be gathered together and the dead will rise. This is clearly something the early Christians believed in quite positively. And so the saints and the martyrs that are faithful that are gone before are not just dead bones to be tossed away. And there's been an interesting study done by Peter Brown called the Cult of the Saints, which pointed out that generally in the surrounding pagan culture was pretty repulsed by their ideas of graves and bones

and the dead were outside the city. The Christians, on the other hand, they bury their dead in catacombs, they go down and have picnics on the tombs, they celebrate this, they want to be near the dead. Why? Because when these faithful dead rise, their bones are going to be covered in flesh again. You're proximity to the holy ones of God.

So you're actually in a physical proximity to a God who, in Christianity, has become incarnate, has taken on flesh himself, And in a sense, the saints who are participating in this new life in Christ, their bones experience this power, if you want to take it back, the power of creation again. So it's not ludicrous. It's all to do with this power of creation and renewal. I agree then it does become rather extreme.

But initially, I think this is quite unusual. It's distinctive to Christianity and it's connected with belief in the power of Jesus and the raising of the dead. One interesting things that we're getting on already. It's a way of finding out. It's an area of knowledge when the tools for evidence were very limited. That's one of the things that interests everybody really. I was going to say, me, but obviously everybody. And already, quite early on, it's bringing in powers of skepticism and thought against it.

The most important is St. Augustine in the early 5th century, Justin Champion. Can you talk about what he said and did? Because he is a key factor there, isn't he? And we are talking now as much about the way that people are trying to learn about the world, world with the tools to hand. I think that's a very good way of putting it. I'd like to introduce a little bit of politics into the discussion. Obviously in the early church there are competing definitions of what that church should look

like, and certainly there are a rival pagan, non-Christian traditions who also claim to be able to do wonderful, miraculous, magical things. And Augustine is really the person who theorizes what a miracle is. and I should say one of the peculiar things is that there isn't a great theory statement throughout most of the medieval world. You see bits and pieces in order. There isn't the definition, definitive definition of miracle?

Because it's ubiquitous, it's part of the culture. Augustine's view is pretty much, as we've already seen from the Judeo-Christian tradition earlier, is that everything that exists is miraculous. God has created the world. So there's no fundamental distinction between natura and miraculous. And that's one of the problems that later deists try and separate those two. But one of the problems for Augustine is, of course, we are sinful and we are ignorant,

and we're very easily duped. If you look at the language, the vocabulary of miracles in his work, there's a range of things he talks to, angelic intervention, diabolic intervention, pagan deities, working certain sorts of things, prodigies. So Augustine is very concerned to ensure that our perception of something as a miracle is accurate. Otherwise, you're going to be duped by a perhaps pagan imposture or the work of Satan. So he introduces that notion that in one sense a miracle is a relative thing to the individual experiencing it. And we have to be sure that we're experiencing

the true sign of God, otherwise we'll be led. led a strain. One thing you said, and I've got this from your note, so I'm just putting something back to which I thought was a very fine sentence. Miracles, he wrote, miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature. He's emphasising the relativism again. If I look at the world and see a rainbow and don't understand optics, I may see this as a sign of God. What Augustine argues is that everything in the world is miraculous. I mean, so a little bit of a little bit. like Richard Dawkins every now and again says, you know, the real miracle is that life exists. So Augustine is arguing my perception of that world

needs to be disciplined and institutionalised. And I think that's where some of the stuff to do with relics and processes for identifying what is a good miracle and not are so important. That becomes a sort of technology of proving the credibility of miracles that persists for a thousand years. Do you think that Augustine's work and those particular words and the line that far from those words had much of an immediate effect or did it go to underground for several centuries?

The next great theorist is probably Gregory the Great and then we have St. Thomas Aquinas and that they all exploit exactly those sorts of core values. Aquinas will make it much more subtle and have a whole range of distinctions about precisely what sorts of categories of miracles exist. but that notion that it's our perception and essentially our ignorance, we can never be sure that what we're seeing is a miracle. Martin Palmer, the book we have to skip until 1260, the Golden Legend, the book full of miracles,

where miracles, as it were, are on the rampage in a society which was desperately poor, suffering incredible deprivations. And that was part of it, I assume, from what I've read. anyway. Can you give us just a little flavour of the kinds of stories in this bestseller as it became book The Golden Legend in the 13th centuries? It was sort of a Da Vinci code of

its time, I think, in terms of the adventures and the fun in it. I suppose one of the classic ones is the story of St. Catherine who dramatic descriptions she's stunningly beautiful of course and at the age of 18 when Maxentius is

persecuting the church, she personally goes to him and argues with him and says you mustn't do this. He brings in 50 philosophers to debate with her. She converts them all, so he has them all beheaded. He then goes away on a trip, which is probably quite a dangerous thing to do if you're leaving St. Catherine wandering around, because the next thing she does is she converts his wife, his mother, and 200 of his household. So when he comes home, he has all them executed, and then he decides it's time to get rid of her. So he puts her on this spiked wheel, the Catherine wheel, of our own use and name. This shatters, and in true Christian compassion, pierces various people nearby and kills them, whereupon he eventually has her beheaded, and all sorts of other miracles flow from this. And the wonderful thing is that if you then look at Butler's lives of the saints, which is, in a sense, I think one could argue the sort of authoritative Catholic chronicle of saints produced in the 18th century, revised every century since, and still very much in print, it basically says there is

absolutely no evidence that she existed at all. But there is a wonderful Irish phrase which is that some saints are prayer born. They are created, if you like, because they're needed. And maybe she was needed for some reason. I can go back to Justin Champion for a moment.

That is an example people would use to say, look, it's mumbo-jumbo. And yet, as mountains pointed out in the description there, it was detailed, it was significant, it went into the culture, it's still in the culture, in some ways in quite a lot of parts of the world is massively in the culture.

I mean, we mustn't sort of ignore that. Why were they so powerfully held? What do we talk, I mean, is it mass hypnosis, is it a sort of mass cult? What's going on in that medieval period when it is so, and we're just talking about let's call it Western Europe, and let's stay there for the way, it's enough to deal with. Okay.

I think one of the things we need to remember is that the culture of that period, religion was not just theorized, it was lived. So, you know, we have the great stories of the great saints, but pretty much everywhere throughout Western Europe, there would have been local traditions, local relics, local saints. And all of those sort of provincial local societies needed saints, needed relics to intervene on their behalf with God. So we're living in a world where this world is the anti-chamber to heaven.

You need people to intervene for you. Saints have the power to do that. Medievalists who work on it. on this stuff have thousands and thousands of records of little saints' lives, of traditions that are distributed. And it's interesting that one of Kackston's

first printed books is precisely the golden legend. So it persists all the way through this period. Justin, would it also be the case that we seem to see in the Middle Ages arise of interest in the body, which is sometimes called somatic piety. So you have

saints like Julian of Norwich experiencing the pains of Jesus in her own body. You have the emergence of a depiction of Jesus on the cross in the Gothic crosses as crucifixes as wounded and broken, whereas the earlier Byzantine crosses show him triumphant in a crowned king. And so there's a great interest in physicality at this period.

And on the upside for relics, they're physical. They are tangible. They are a reminder of the incarnation of the physicality of this, faith, which is about the God taking on a body, having a body, that body being raised, nor a body being raised. I think that's very important. And one of the things that, one of the

mundane miracles, if you like, are always to do with healing. And in one sense, if you have been healed, then the miracles worked. So it's evidence, if you like, testimony that God has intervened. Can I come back to something I rushed earlier and I want to focus on, just for a moment,

everything that I've read about that particular period, let's talk for, let's say 11th, 12, 30th, on the whole, it's a severity of the condition. We see now in what we call the emerging nations, it's almost a direct parallel with what was going on. Now, was that particular hardship? And also that, we don't mean ignorance that they were stupid people,

it's what the tools they had to what they knew about. They were every bit as clever. We need to go to that. So what, can you just give, can you link that up as to people living in the conditions they lived in with plagues, mass failures of harvest and all that. I'd like you to give us the connection now for this one. I think the connection is living in those circumstances. Human beings look for meaning in the world they live in.

And certainly in those circumstances in the medieval period, life is short, life is brutal. If you have institutions that can give answers to those anxieties and answers to those questions, then you believe in them. And in one sense, maybe not scientifically, in one sense, those technologies, social and cultural and religious,

for explaining problems in the world, work. If we think of Thomas A Beckett, 500 shrines exist around his martyrdom. There are small shrines in tiny little villages in Norfolk that there are recorded episodes of 39 people being raised from the dead. It worked. Is it also a sense that these stories give back to the poorest and the most dispossessed

a sense that they are part of something infinitely bigger? If we take the story, St. Catherine, it's about how all the wise people, all the powerful people, are helpless, ultimately, in the face of God's power. And I get the sense a great deal that a lot of, I mean, we love telling stories. Stories are the way in which religions always pass on their truths. With all due respect to theologians, it's not through. doctrines, it's through narrative. And these are stories about the powerless

feeling that they are part of something infinitely bigger, which gives an enormous amount of reassurance, particularly as you said Melvin, in times when the world seemed to be falling apart and falling apart not least because those in power, with echoes of today, were abusing their power.

Can I just nag on at this a bit, Janus Hoskins? Do you think we're talking, when people say the age of belief, and you remember these books come out, age belief, age of reason, age of this. What significance do you give to that phrase? And what does it mean to you, age of belief in this where this age of enormous miracle, enormous numbers of miracles,

as Justin has said, local, national, we use that word, international and so on. Well, personally, I think we're still within it. I just was sitting next to someone on the tube reading Perry much yesterday. It was all about the Pope's visit to Lourdes, and there was Carla Bruny and Sarkozy, the Pope, lords. You know, as you've said already, where in the world are we talking about. I think one interesting thing that Justin has already mentioned

is if you go back to the history of miracles, there's an age of skepticism and an age of belief going right on, right back into the biblical times itself. Jesus himself is recorded to saying, you faithless generation, you always want a sign. Remember, of course, there's no word for miracle in the New Testament. It's all sign, showing, wonder.

And Augustine's already pretty skeptical. as Justin has indicated about. There are all kinds of wonder workers around always. And some of these... And magicians as well. And magicians. These people are around. People saying the burning bush, we could have done that.

Exactly. And this competition that Elijah the prophet has with the prophets of ball, you know, they both have to light on fire this tank of water sort of thing. So in a way, we in the modern period of over, we've overplayed the significance of miracles because to us this is not part of a world that happens, whereas in the time of Jesus there were many miracle workers. But we've underplayed it as well in that we've tended to sheer away or to fail to remember that if you have a profound undergirding belief

that God created everything that is, including space and time, then for God to do something now is a piece of cake, as it were. Can I bring back that skeptical tradition which you referred to then, Janet, with you, Martin? Let's go to the Franciscans and perhaps between William Ockham. Now, they, Franciscans, they are deeply inside the church, and yet they too are carrying on what Janet said is in the New Testament, justice pointed out with St. Augustine. They're carrying on this questioning, pushing out.

Can you briefly explain what they were doing in that? Francis told his friars, his wandering monks, to actually observe nature, not just to rely upon what they have been told by Aristotle, but to actually look and see whether, in fact, were generated from heat and dung, or whether, in fact, there might be eggs there from which they generated.

And ironically, the very man who at one level brings in one of the most miraculous things of the Middle Ages, the coming of the stigmata, the marks of the crucifixion on his own body. Also, at the same time... That's Saint Francis. Who receives these in his hands, his feet, and in his side.

Also introduces a sense of asking questions of what has traditionally been seen as the second book of God's revelation. You have the Bible, but you have nature. And he asked his, for us, to be critical, to look, to study, to ask questions. And ironically, it is out of that Franciscan quest for understanding and relationship with the rest of nature, that you begin to get the attempt to say, well, if we can see it and observe it, then it must be true. And that, I do find it quite intriguing.

In a sense, I think it captures exactly what Janet's saying, which is that right, through time you have this tension between skepticism and belief. And it is an interesting holding together of those two traditions. I think that's right, but I think we also need to make a distinction between beliefs in miracles as recorded in the Old and the New Testament and then the persistence of miracles after the apostolic age. Because certainly as we'll see when we discuss the sort of Protestant impact,

but also in some of the medieval traditions, there is a belief that miracles. have ceased. God has set it all up. Any claims to work magic or to work wonder are going to be driven by Satan or the devil. Can I come to the Protestant Reformation then, Janet, with you? That used miracles, didn't it? Miracles were part of the reason that they split away. I'm very simplistic.

We're everybody knows what we're talking about. We're just trying to keep miracles going and keep history going, okay? So we've got the We've got the Reformation here and the argument becomes, not between religion and science, that's in the future, it becomes religion and one sort of religion and another, and an extraordinarily fierce argument, and miracles are very close

to the centre of that. Can you develop that? Well, there's miracles on both sides in a sense that obviously there's been by this time, a lot of people are worried, a lot of good Catholics are worried about excesses in indulgences, in the trade in relics.

relics, I think, become in late medieval Europe, one of England's biggest imports. You're talking about an enormous amount of money changing place and people are worried about this and the excesses that are involved. And so I think in general,

the reformers wanted to say the miracles were characteristic of the New Testament period. They wanted to go back to Scripture. They took the scriptural miracles, the miracles associated with Jesus as a sign of who Jesus was, and that he was quite outstanding, perhaps forgetting that there were other miracle

workers around at that time, and that miracles happen in the apostolic period, but then subsequently no more. And a lot of the reformers will use then that as a kind of a sword against the Catholic Church, that this is degenerated into superstition and idolatry with this veneration of the saints and relics and so on. So the idea, one person idea was that miracles have been caught up in a sort of corrupt industry of holiness. Yes. And not that they couldn't happen now. Part of their opposition to was the relics and the indulgences, you know about the sale of indulgences, but the miracles too.

Well, yes, I suppose they would say genuine. They couldn't be genuine miracles, but a lot of stuff hyped up and sold as miracles are miraculous objects. And so on, and that's where your real faith was back in scriptures, back in the teaching of scriptures. One of the subtle differences that Luther and Calvin bring in, because they want to, in one sense, disable the authority of the Catholic church, is to regard miracles in the New Testament as evidence of God's and Christ's divinity

and therefore as a way of creating faith. What they're absolutely concerned to do is to cut the bond between an intercessory church in the here and now. Catholics, of course, turn back to Luther and Calvin, and this is a constant refrain, well, if you're sent by God, where are the miracles to show your mission? I can't see any. In fact, you deny them.

And that's quite a difficult problem for some Protestant communities to cope with. Well, yes, because this is a coming out of a culture. As Justin said, there's a need to wean very dramatically a population away. And sometimes this is happening in a very short period of time in Geneva, away from not just relics, but images, icons and so on, which have been a very important part of their piety. And this is done quite forcefully at certain times. and never, perhaps sometimes not as effectively as one might have imagined.

So it's a difficult time. And I think from my point of view, very unfortunate, because what happens is if you then shunt all the miracles back just to the apostolic period, they become more and more remote. They're way in the distant past. And you're relying on the testimony of scripture alone to say these things happen. Just as you enter a scientific age where people are beginning to say, there are laws of nature, there's a causal continuum,

these things don't happen, then you've got enormous pressure on the authority of scripture, which is, of course, what happens in the Protestant period. It's only the authority of scripture that can carry all these things because the wider religious world doesn't have the doctrine of creation or the metaphysics that could see it could be carrying on as we speak. Martin Balma, would it be true to say that for a long time, many, many centuries, all the debates have taken place within the circle of interpretations of Christianity and aversion, That's been the thinking.

The thinking of, let's say, the Western world, has taken place within that circle. Whatever you think of, you're still inside that circle, however you go, philosophy, whatever you do, medicine. You're still inside that circle. And it's beginning to break, they're beginning to break out now. Very much so. And that's the next movement.

We're beginning to go out of that circle now. That's what we've come to after. And the Protestantism is, let's say, the trigger, and then it moves into the next stage. Can you just take us through that? transition. I think it goes back to this Franciscan tension between these extraordinary events and then trying to actually understand them. And what we have inhabited really, I think, since the 17th century, certainly, is a world in which we've sought to combine scientific knowledge and rationalism and a certain reductionism and phenomenology with some understanding of miracles and the world of Christianity, which is why we essentially go back into looking at, the miracles in the New Testament. And there was a huge movement in theology to get rid of those,

to demythologize the New Testament. You always run up against the rock of the resurrection. Is that a miracle or is that something beyond that? I think what has happened more recently has been a breaking out of the understanding that we know enough to know what really works. A very classic example of this would be the dismissal, the wholesale dismissal of miraculous healing.

by herbs, by traditional medicines and so forth, which were often wrapped up with astrology, wrapped up with certain periods of the moon when you picked the particular flower. And that is beginning to break down as we begin to actually discover that an awful lot of ancient wisdom, which was wrapped up in miracles and myths and legends and stories,

a lot of the material that Justin was talking about very local stuff, actually contained a profound insight and truth. And that by simply taking a redoubt, ducionist approach, how could this possibly work rather than, gosh, this works? We've lost a lot of knowledge which we're now recovering. I think we probably want to just revise slightly what we've said. Protestant theology has an argument about the cessation of miracles in the apostolic age, but almost immediately within Protestant communities around Europe,

that there are Protestant miracles. One of the theological issues is, of course, Providence. Protestants believe that God intervenes in the world. And within, again, their local societies and their local communities, there are examples of healing. The print culture of the time broadcast these in little pamphlets, people respond, people criticise. So that there are possibly more miracles by the time we're in the 17th century,

and more people know about them because of the agency of print. And you can't really get rid of miracles are continuum with, with, as you say, with prayer, with the belief that God acts in your life. Every time you read a Psalm, it's asking for God's protection, for God's shelter and so on. No one can be praying the Psalms or praying at all without believing that God can act. So you really can't get rid of miracles. It's a sort of continuum or signs that the signs that God is active in one's individual life or in wider circles. There was a sort of attempt, wasn't there, with deism, well, they're still in.

and deism in the 18th century. Can you take that on? Can you explain a little bit about deism, Janet? Well, Justin's probably better equipped to do so, but I'll make a stab at it. As you begin to get the move into the early modern period and the impact of the work of people like Newton and so on, people are immensely impressed by the regularity of the universe.

And, of course, early modern people are no less frightened by chaos, and disorder than medieval's. And medievals may have wanted to latch on to relics, but early moderns want to latch on to our scientific explanations. So you have an idea of a fixed, set causal order. And deists vary, but there were deists who believe in God, as it were, but they believe that it seemed to believe in a God who is like a divine clockmaker. He set up the world in the first place. He gets it on its way. He spends the rest of the time playing a backgammon in the back room, or patience probably, because he's a lot of alone and the world just tinkers along.

And then some people say, well, God wouldn't intervene in that. God wouldn't poke a stick in to intervene with that. So the idea of God intervening becomes kind of oteous to a lot of these people. And that's taken up, I mean, not taken up, but the Scottish philosopher David Hume in the 18th century, his essay on miracles in 1748. He, I believe, was a deist, which was, as Janitor said, there was a God who created the world and then he left it alone and the world gets on with it. own devices at no intervention whatsoever.

The world is the world as he has created it and he goes away. What influence did the Hume essay have? It is now thought of as very influential, although he was very worried about it and very careful about publishing it and his great mind of the Enlightenment, which indeed he was. So can you

just put Hume in our story? What it did is exactly what Janet said. He in a sense encapsulated this move towards having a world that was knowable, that followed patterns that could be discerned, and therefore introduces in a very sharp and stark way attention with a God who, as Janet has also said, in a sense has retired and therefore has to intervene into the world to produce a miracle. And what Hume sets up is a polarity, which

had been there, I mean, just to mention this with Augustine, it had been there right from the earliest days, but he hardens it. It's either true, or it's not. And therefore, if it's not within the natural law, it's an intervention. And what kind of God intervenes, which goes against the general sense of most people, that the world is a little more fluid than that,

a little more exciting than that. And in a sense, we've been struggling ever since with those who want to say, God could not act like this, and those who say, well, actually, maybe the world is the mind of God. Briefly, John. Yes.

Well, Hume is very famous for defining miracles as a violation of a law of nature. It's very contentious and very difficult to defend this, but because it's almost saying miracles are things that don't happen effectively. But that does sharpen things up very much. If you say, now at the time when he... It would be miracle if you could find the evidence for a moment. Exactly.

And at the time of his publishing, I don't think these ideas had much of an impact, but sort of 70, 80 years later, in a more skeptical age, yes, they did. We've refrained from saying that Boyle, who came in on this argument with the Royal Society and Newton. They both were believers in God. Their theories which are skeptical,

and let's take continued the tradition of Augustine and so on, still within the context. This circle has not been entirely broken out of. They're producing, instead of busting the circle, they're having other circles beside it. But can we come to stick with the Royal Society and talk about what Richard Meade did and how he figured in the development

of ideas away from the belief system that had obtained for so many centuries. I think one of the things, Hume has a wonderful reputation as a destroyer of miracles, but his arguments are philosophical and about testimony and evidence. The scientists or the natural philosophers of the time Boyle, Newton and then people like Mead, actually want to use their science to explain miracles. And certainly for Boyle and Newton, although they have an idea, of an abstracted God. God works by coincidence. Miracles can be explained naturally,

but of course the fact that they happen at this particular moment is God's will. Richard Mead takes that materialism one stage further, and we know Mead is fully provided with all the clandestine, irreligious texts of the age. And Mead says, let's look at the Old Testament. We've got lots of accounts of healing, of bodies being resolved and non-corrupted. Well, it's just medicine. So his book in the 1730s applies modern medical knowledge

to the Old Testament accounts of healing and illness and says, it's just they were ignorant. And it's that attempt to give historical explanation to assess the evidence for both the old and the New Testament that becomes the really destructive force, I think. So we can see hume is at the end of a tradition, although a very influential author himself. I know we have Strachers 3-volume Life of Jesus.

which is translated by George Eliot. Jesus was a historical man and they were best to me of his miracles. What about Boltman? We're nearly the end of the program, sorry to say, Janet. Can you bring Boltman onto the table before we finish? Well, there is a continuity. You've already mentioned, going right back into the middle of the 19th century

because of demythologizing, the feeling that with people like Strauss and then famously Forbock, that, okay, these stories of miracles aren't true. true exactly, but they're nonetheless housed symbolically very important things for us. So not about any transcendent God in farabakh sense, but about man. So all the stories about Jesus are really telling us about what man, and I use the exclusive term inclusively should be gentle, kind, loving, and all these sorts of things.

So this is already a demothologization. I think you have to see these people are also very influenced by Hegel, and they view religion is progressing from the early primordial, of days of Christianity when you've got a few Galilean peasants who don't understand what's going on, up through more spiritual religion that has its supreme flowering in Hegel. So then Boltman comes in in the 20th century. He says people in the 20th century, you can't listen to the wireless and use electric light and believe in miracles. So all these miracle stories are really just a way of immediately presenting to you the Kourgma,

the moment of pietistic change where you as a reader of scripture read these things and God speaks to your heart and your change. So they become almost like events. They become merely vehicles for this change of life. I can see Martin and Justin and Justin and Justin, Justin Champion, Martin Palmer, and Janet Soskis. Thank you for listening. Next week we'll be talking about the 9th century translation movement of Greek philosophical ideas into Arabic. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

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