Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life - Softcover

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Eric Metaxas is a senior fellow and lecturer-at-large at The King’s College in New York City, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

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INTRODUCTION

Most readers will consider this volume a departure from my previous oeuvre, and from my recent biographies it is certainly a departure. In fact, the subjects of those books, William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, do not seem to have had any experiences that could be described as miraculous, at least not in the sense of that word as it is used in this book. Their deeply inspiring lives—their extraordinary actions and accomplishments—were manifestly fueled by their passionate faith in the God of the Bible, yet we have no record of that God speaking to them or revealing himself to them in any ways that would qualify for mention in a book like this. So perhaps we should let their exemplary lives stand as evidence that one can have a world-changing and even saintly life of faith without miraculous experiences. This is a helpful counterpoint to the thinking that these experiences are the ne plus ultra of the Christian faith. On the other hand, let this book and the accounts herein stand as a helpful counterpoint to those who believe such stories impossible.

In considering what form this book should take, I felt a large part of it should be miracle stories themselves, since they are perhaps the best evidence we can have for miracles. (Some readers may wish to skip directly to those stories and read the first part of this book second, a choice I would cheerfully countenance.) I decided to limit the book only to the stories of people I knew personally. This naturally limits the scope of what stories I could include, but the advantage is that I wouldn’t have to wonder about the character and credibility of the people telling these stories. It also underscores how tremendously prevalent such stories are. I did not scour the known world for these tales but only asked people I knew well enough to trust their accounts. There are many friends and acquaintances I did not ask because it became clear to me that had I asked every friend for stories like these, I would have had far too much material for this book and might never have finished it. But the wealth of the miracle stories I was able to find within a fairly close circle of friends makes one wonder how many other stories are out there among my friends, and yours.

I vetted these stories and all their details as carefully as possible. It was vital to me to get as much specificity as I could, and anything that did not seem clearly to be a miracle, I simply did not include. I often asked questions to get clarification on things. Many times the person telling the story was assuming something that—unless I teased it out and made it explicit—would have felt like a hole, whether in the logic of the story or in the artistic shape of it, or both. I asked questions I thought the reader would ask and tried to answer them in the course of telling the story.

I heard some stories that very likely were miracles but that might have been natural coincidences. The slightest question in my mind whether something was genuinely miraculous eliminated it from consideration. But all in all, listening to people tell these stories of God’s direct intervention in their lives was tremendously affecting. It is humbling and exhilarating and it can be simultaneously enlightening and stupefying, because the idea that the God of the universe would humble himself to touch the lives of any of us is, in the end, far beyond our full comprehension.

To those who might think these stories merely subjective accounts and not objective evidence, it must be said that history comprises the subjective accounts of human beings; and from these subjective accounts we arrive at an “objective” truth—which is itself still somehow and to some extent subjective. There can never be a question whether such things are subjective; the only real question can be whether those subjective accounts are reliable. Answers to that question are themselves subjective, depending on the point of view and presumptions of the person making that judgment. This is not to say that there is no such thing as objective truth, or to lead us into a swamp of relativism. On the contrary, it is to say that we must do the hard work of sifting what information we have, of carefully considering the witnesses, as it were. This is what every jury must do when it decides a case in law, and it is what every person must do in deciding what to make of any story. Here we stand. We can do no other. To shrink from that task is to shrink from life itself.

PART ONE

THE QUESTION OF MIRACLES

1

BELIEVING IN MIRACLES

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

—C. S. LEWIS

In a 2013 article in The New Yorker about faith and belief, Adam Gopnik wrote the following: “We know that . . . in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession [sic] with the laws of nature.”

I thought this was an extraordinary statement. To anyone who has experienced the miraculous or who knows people who have experienced it, or who is familiar with the literature of miraculous accounts, it’s difficult to imagine being so confidently dismissive of something that seems at the very least to be entirely possible, and at best to be entirely certain. As someone who lives in Manhattan and who is familiar with the world in which such writers live, I’m afraid I’m not all that surprised. Nonetheless, it’s extraordinary. In the article, Gopnik continues: “We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain.”

Of course, the reason the writer makes these statements has to do with his presupposition that this world is all there is. That way of seeing the world dismisses outright any possibility of anything beyond the material world of time and space. It can be summed up in the words of the late Carl Sagan, who glumly intoned, “The Cosmos is all there is and all there ever will be.” He tried to put some hopeful English on this bleak equation by observing that we were made “of the same material as the stars,” as if being composed of the same elements as distant balls of burning gas could be a poetic consolation to us. Of course the word “stars” carries with it the connotation of magic and wish-fulfillment, but why trade on that when one is saying that there is nothing beyond the material world, and therefore such things as magic and miracles and wishes do not exist and should be abandoned? And if we are not more than aggregates of the elements on the periodic table, why should we want that poetic consolation? Isn’t playing to that desire a contradiction of the main point? Is Dr. Sagan trying to have it both ways and therefore hedging his bet? Or is he simply catering to a television audience by fudging the paralyzing bleakness of what he is saying?

If someone insisting on that strictly materialistic worldview encounters a miracle, or something purporting to be such a thing, he must, by definition, deny that it can be a true miracle. If he insists that the only “evidence” of a miracle he could ever accept must be “naturalistic” evidence, then there obviously can never be any such evidence. It is a tautology, a self-defeating koan, along the lines of “Could God make a rock so big that even he couldn’t move it?” Can one take it seriously?

The second part of this book contains a host of stories that are, if not some kind of evidence for miracles, then...