Anonymous Asks (371)

“Should we take miracles literally?”

If we are talking about the miracles of scripture, absolutely. Once we have conceded the existence of God, there’s no logical reason not to. Any being sufficiently powerful to create and sustain the laws of nature, as the Bible claims God did, is also sufficiently powerful to suspend those laws at his pleasure.

Too ‘Unscientific’ for Me!

Taking some miracles allegorically while conceding others actually occurred is both intellectually incoherent and unnecessary. Those who do this are generally trying to reconcile faith and science, but the miracles scripture demands they confess in order to be Christian are as “unscientific” as those they feel could be mythologized without losing anything critical.

The resurrection of Jesus is the most obvious example. People do not walk out of their tombs after three days; we do not observe that phenomenon in nature. Yet nobody who does not believe Jesus rose from the dead is Christian. That confession is a critical component of saving faith. And if we are going to believe in Christ’s resurrection, it makes no sense to disbelieve in lesser miracles like turning water into wine or parting the Red Sea. The same laws of nature we believe exclude them would have also excluded the resurrection.

Embrace the Power of ‘And’

Now, is it possible that God intended some signs and wonders to also serve as allegories? Certainly. It may even be that the spiritual import of God’s interventions in the physical world is far greater than any miracle itself.

For example, many observed as Jesus gave sight to the blind, but only a few grasped the more important reality that he could also give spiritual understanding to those in desperate need of it. Many observed as Jesus made the lame walk, but few understood he is also willing to give self-control to those who have none. Thousands ate bread and fish multiplied by orders of magnitude without recognizing Jesus is able to take our paltry spiritual service and multiply its effects in advancing his kingdom beyond our wildest imaginations. In this sense, we may say that the Bible’s miracles may be taken allegorically as well as literally. But to get the value of the allegorical interpretation, we must first believe these things literally happened.

Parables and Miracles

Samuel Ridout said this about the connection between parables and miracles:

“Everything that our Lord said had a definite, spiritual purpose. The miracles … were not merely supernatural acts to call attention, nor indeed mere acts of kindness.

We find, thus, that blindness is a spiritual, as well as a physical malady; thus the man in the 9th of John not only has his bodily eyes opened, but the eyes of his heart; while the Pharisees, declaring that they saw, really remained blind.

The feeding of the five thousand is connected with the feeding of men with the bread of life. Cases of demon possession are connected with physical maladies in such a way as to suggest not merely that bodily affliction may in certain cases be connected with special Satanic activity, but that the disease typifies a certain form of sin.

The miracle, therefore, is simply an enacted parable.”

So then, we should certainly take the miracles of scripture literally, but that need not be the only way we take them. In fact, if all we do is take them literally, we miss the most important things the Lord intended them to convey.