You are here
قراءة كتاب Miracles and Supernatural Religion
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
MIRACLES
AND
SUPERNATURAL RELIGION
BY
JAMES MORRIS WHITON, Ph.D. (Yale)
Portentum non fit contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura
—Augustine
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1903
All rights reserved
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up, electrotyped, and published May, 1903.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
M. B. W.
PREFATORY NOTE
While the present subject of discussion tempts to many an excursion into particulars, its treatment is restricted to general outlines, with an aim simply to clarify current ideas of miracle and the supernatural, so as to find firm holding ground for tenable positions in the present "drift period" of theology. The chief exception made to this general treatment is the discussion given to a class of miracles regarded with as much incredulity as any, yet as capable as any of being accredited as probably historical events—the raisings of the "dead." The insistence of some writers on the virgin birth and corporeal resurrection of Jesus as essential to Christianity has required brief discussion of these also, mainly with reference to the reasonableness of that demand. As to the latter miracle, it must be observed that in the Biblical narratives taken as a whole, whichever of their discordant features one be disposed to emphasize, the psychical element clearly preponderates over the physical and material.
J. M. W.
New York,
April 11, 1903.
CONTENTS
| PAGE | |
| Introductory | 13 |
| The Argument | |
| I | |
| The gradual narrowing of the miraculous element in the Bible by recent discovery and discussion.—The alarm thereby excited in the Church.—The fallacy which generates the fear.—The atheistic conception of nature which generates the fallacy.—The present outgrowing of this conception. | 25 |
| II | |
| The present net results of the discussion of the miraculous element in the Bible.—Evaporation of the former evidential value of miracles.—Further insistence on this value a logical blunder.—The transfer of miracles from the artillery to the baggage of the Church.—Probability of a further reduction of the list of miracles.—Also of a further transfer of events reputed miraculous to the domain of history. | 37 |
| III | |
| Arbitrary criticism of the Biblical narratives of the raising of the "dead."—Facts which it ignores.—The subject related to the phenomena of trance, and records of premature burial.—The resuscitation in Elisha's tomb probably historical.—Jesus' raising of the ruler's daughter plainly such a case.—His raising of the widow's son probably such.—The hypothesis that his raising of Lazarus may also have been such critically examined.—The record allows this supposition.—Further considerations favoring it: 1. The supposition threatens no real interest of Christianity.—2. Enhances the character of the act as a work of mercy.—3. Is independent of the belief of the witnesses of the act.—4. Is coherent with the general conception of the healing works of Jesus as wrought by a peculiar psychical power.—Other cases.—The resurrection of Jesus an event in a wholly different order of things.—The practical result of regarding these resuscitations as in the order of nature. | 47 |
| IV | |
| A clearer conception of miracle approached.—Works of Jesus once reputed miraculous not so reputed now, since not now transcending as once the existing range of knowledge and power.—This transfer of the miraculous to the natural likely to continue.—No hard and fast line between the miraculous and the non-miraculous.—Miracle a provisional word, its application narrowing in the enlarging mastery of the secrets of Nature and of life. | 75 |
| V | |
| Biblical miracles the effluence of extraordinary lives.—Life the world's magician and miracle-worker; its miracles now termed prodigies.—Miracle the natural product of an extraordinary endowment of life.—Life the ultimate reality.—What any man can achieve is conditioned by the psychical quality of his life.—Nothing more natural, more supernatural, than life.—The derived life of the world filial to the self-existent life of God; "begotten, not made."—Miracle as the product of life, the work of God. | 85 |
| VI | |
| The question, old and new, now confronting theologians.—Their recent retreat upon the minimum of miracle.—The present conflict of opinion in the Church.—Its turning-point reached in the antipodal turn-about in the treatment of miracles from the old to the new apologetics.—Revision of the traditional idea of the supernatural required for theological readjustment. | 95 |
| VII | |
| Account to be made of the law of atrophy through disuse.—The virgin birth and the corporeal resurrection of Jesus, the two miracles still insisted on as the irreducible minimum, affected by this law.—The vital truths of the incarnation and immortality independent of these miracles.—These truths now placed on higher ground in a truer conception of the supernatural.—The | |