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Changing Water Into Steam

Luke Timothy Johnson is hardly a silly man. But he has written a very silly book in which he tries to demonstrate the validity and relevance of the Christian belief in miracles by redefining them as imaginative breakthroughs in human understanding about the world. For Johnson, suspicion of both biblical miracle stories and their more modern counterparts is merely a result of a lack of imagination. Alas, it is difficult for me to imagine him as other than an educated crackpot trying desperately to find a way to intellectually justify some very serious delusions.

There is actually very little written about the theology of miracles.* This is more than surprising given that, as Johnson says ��...the question of miracles pervades the entire structure of Christian identity.�� Miracles of course are the principle verifying events in the Hebrew Bible and its Christian additions. Miracles are meant to attest to the existence and power of God and to the involvement of the divine in material affairs. For Christians, of course, the apex of miracles, as it were, is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. One might expect therefore a substantial theological literature on miracles. But such hope would be vain.

Johnson points to some important reasons - both ancient and modern - for this reticence about miracles. Many religions claim miracles; to allow comparison with the Christian variety would open a dangerous Pandora’s box of competition. Further, historically miracles are associated with evil demons as much as they are with divine intervention; discerning the beneficent from the malignant is problematic. And miracles have an unsavory connection to magic and other superstitions; prayer is not all that easy to distinguish from incantation. The gospels of Matthew and Mark attest to the reality of demonically-sourced miracles. Moses and Aaron engaged in a sort 0f magic rap session with Pharoah’s lads in the Hebrew bible. Mention need hardly be made of Circe and other infamous witches and sorcerers of both sexes who performed many equally verified miracles in Ancient Greek tales. Finally, and theologically more fundamental, miracles pose some tough moral questions to religious believers - like the arbitrary injustice of the Divine Will, the rationale for spiritual obsequiousness in miracle-begging prayer, and the frequently vengeful character of miracles involving war and male competition.

But Johnson believes he has a way round these difficulties. First he subtly redefines what miracles are as “experiences that could not be ascribed to merely human agency.�� (By whom? one asks, and using which criterion?). ‘Experiences�� have only a very tenuous connection with ‘events�� of course. His definition removes the topic entirely from the possibility, much less the need, for verification. Experience has its own laws which are not those of science or logic. Unfortunately Johnson has nothing to say about how Christian experience might be distinguished from pagan delusion, except by simply defining it as a distinct and superior category.

He then uses two intellectual moves. The first is the adoption of an early 19th century subjectivist theological epistemology - the principle of which is that what counts is personal religious experience, inner feeling, not religious doctrine. Perhaps the most well-known exponent of this sort of theology is that of Frederich Schleiermacher, the founder of what would eventually evolve into liberal Protestantism (and against which the Fundamentalists would react vigorously a century later). Schleiermacher’s theology, like Johnson’s, was a protest against the Enlightenment. By locating God ‘in here�� rather than ‘out there�� Schleiermacher, also like Johnson, wanted to insulate the divine from the threats of rational thinking.

Johnson’s second move is to insert post-modernist philosophy, without attribution, into his argument. In his hands, post-modernism becomes a sort of radical romanticism. Reality is not just the cumulative narratives we have about the world, it is our imaginative capacity itself. This capacity is uniquely human and connects us with the divine. It is the source or conduit of divine revelation. Johnson uses post-modernism as a sort of fundamental anthropology, another story to be sure but one that he wants us to believe is definitive.

Johnson then establishes a composite straw man based primarily on the empiricist philosophies of David Hume and Epicurus. He is careful to reject what they thought of as miracles, namely: “the breaking of the established laws of nature by divine agency.�� This is obviously in order to remove them from the realm of any kind of ‘objective�� analysis. Miracles, he would like us to believe, are not exceptional but routine. Why he believes such routine events would be considered significant by either the original evangelists or modern evangelicals is something of a mystery. But, he claims, only by re-entering this sort of primitive psychological frame can we comprehend what the gospels are about.

He then argues in a way that makes it difficult to know whether he is trying to justify post-modernist philosophy or Christianity. One gets the impression he in fact equates the two. In modern epistemology, he says, “What stems from fantasy and the imagination belong to the realm of the ‘not real�� and therefore the ‘not serious��... The greatest deficiency of the secular construction of reality, in fact, is its refusal to recognize that it is in fact an imaginative construct rather than a straightforward perception of ‘how things are.’�� Secularism, that is, is merely a variety of modernism. Are there any modernists left? The only ones I know are fundamentalist Christians. Are these Johnson’s undesignated opponents? Much of his other writing suggests that they are.

And indeed, Johnson makes it clear that his mission is to convert the converted. He doesn’t like what he calls double-mindedness among believers, that is their own world of experience and the world of experience reported in the gospels. “C��������پ����Բ�,�� he exhorts, “need a conversion of the imagination.�� What he means by this are several things that would be dismissed out of hand as ridiculous if they hadn’t been asserted by an eminent theologian.

First, he says, we have to get rid of this highly questionable idea of ‘laws of nature��. Science, he claims, is insufficiently imaginative for the religious mind and therefore must be put in its place. Rational thought in its entirety is an outdated concept. The fact that he has problem with imaginative biblical exegesis which demonstrates the implausibility of many biblical readings is something he doesn’t dwell on of course. Apparently it is his imagination which is to be given priority. Thus he falls into the fundamentalist habit of telling the rest of us what true religion consists of.

Second, Johnson wants us to get beyond our literalism when it comes to miracles. He implausibly blames our tendency to take the words of the Bible as they stand as another consequence of modernism: “Enlightenment thinkers cultivated a literalistic reading of texts.�� And we all thought that it was the church authorities and the evangelical fundamentalists who insisted on biblical literalism. Thank goodness for that clarification! It was really down to Hume and Rousseau.

The residual problem of course is that if the words can’t be taken literally and if there is no legitimate authority to specify their figurative meaning, do they have anything resembling meaning at all? Post-modernism does have a tendency to disappear up its own backside when it comes to questions like this.

So it is not surprising at all that for Johnson, “Revelation is a process of interpretation.�� Imagination is the still small voice which can show the truth of biblical myths as they were meant to be understood, including of course the various miracle stories. Forget about the factuality of these stories, he says. What is relevant is their liberating power to show an alternative imaginative (not to say imaginary) world: “The language of heaven and earth enables readers to ‘see�� a world that does not offer itself easily to immediate comprehension.��

There are a number of defined mental illnesses which offer similar refuge for the soul. And there are an infinite number of imaginary worlds one might choose to inhabit. A glance at the internet and its conspiracy theorists, science-deniers, cultural warriors, and racial bigots is enough to make the point. If the only option to religious dogmatism is California Dreamin��, I’d be hard pressed to make a choice. Agnosticism is a sane alternative.

Apparently, therefore, Johnson wants us to consider religious talk as a sort of poetry. Fair enough. I can understand such an idea. In fact it makes sense to me that fiction - narrative construction of reality - is as close as we come to the sacred. But his co-religionists will no doubt smell the scent of several ancient heresies in this assertion. In any case, a poetic interpretation of miracles doesn’t do very much for the credibility of either traditional Christianity or for Johnson’s insistence on their importance other than as edifying fantasy.

What he’s admitting of course is that the purportedly miraculous events never actually happened the way they are reported; or if they did happen, they were the consequence of human skill that hadn’t been recognized at the time, or just random luck. The miracle stories are making a point not recounting events. Whether these stories are lies or imaginative embellishment is a matter of faith, or lack of it. He urges us to imagine creation itself as the fundamental miracle which we all can experience. So much for the resurrection of Jesus and the other gospel-propaganda then. Changing water into steam, not wine, is the real miracle.

Or perhaps the real miracle is that things like this are published. No merely human agent would bother.

*Subsequent to writing this I discovered a rather complete treatment of miracles from an unexpected source: /review/show...

Postscript: For an interesting fictional treatment of miracles, see: /review/show...