Miracles: A Preliminary Study

Whereas the last chapter dealt with the objectors who feel that the idea of miracles makes a mockery of nature, this chapter begins with those who feel that miracles make a mockery of the supernatural—that there is an elevated dignity to the divine which is lost by portraying supernatural reality as breaking in and meddling with mere earthly things. Such people are likely to find traditional Christianity’s insistence on practical, earthy miracles like the Virgin Birth of the Son of God to be distasteful. To say that Jesus “came down from heaven” or to picture God as a bearded man on a throne strikes such a critic as absurd and primitive, and Lewis acknowledges that some Christians take such symbolic language to absurd degrees. Nevertheless, he argues, this does not discount the actual core truth of the miracle: Even once one realizes (as Christianity has always taught) that heaven is not a place “up there” from which someone physically descended, such a realization does nothing to change the Christian insistence that a miracle has taken place: The Son of God has stepped out of eternity and into history to be with us.