Mouthing off about history

It’s been 35+ years since my M.Div. days at the Geological Cemetary, and I decided to read a New Testament introduction, just for fun.

It pisses me off.

The author says he is a neutral observer of history, what probably happened. Since miracles are highly improbable, he can’t prove they occurred. But by that logic—the super natural lies outside the realm of the natural, which is all the historian has access to—that same historian cannot prove or disprove miracles.

So how come the author then attempts to disprove every miracle in the NT?

Doubt is not a modern phenomenon. It’s as old as the Garden of Eden. “But the serpent said, ‘You shall not die….’” (Gen 4.4).

No, I don’t know absolutely that there was a snake, a Garden, or a woman named Eve. I’m not sure whether Genesis is an account of data as well as a story.

I believe in miracles. I believe also in the power of Story.

What I’d like to point out is that, when historians pooh pooh the miracles, reduce them to a parlor game of Gossip over time, they are not doing so as historians. But as dis-believers.

It’s okay, fashionable, especially in academic circles to be a dis-believer. So the historians say they cannot write as believers. To be honest, they must say also that they cannot write as dis-believers. Disbelief is  often actually a set of beliefs made popular in the 18^th century by white male Europeans which reduces every miracle to something that fits an 18^th century intellect of this stripe.

The problem of miracle belongs to the Newtonian universe, the machine in a box. But physics today has exploded that universe.

Many of us believe uncritically, unconsciously, what that group of white male European scientists and philosophers in the 18^th century believed, ideas called the Enlightenment.

But that set of beliefs reduces the world to a place without anything intangible. You can see how it works in the definition of the word immaterial, (Dictionary.com)

im·ma·te·ri·al

–adjective

1. of no essential consequence; unimportant.

2. not pertinent; irrelevant.

3. not material; incorporeal, spiritual.

The basic meaning is 3a: not material. But look at all the other stuff that gets piled on: of no essential consequence, unimportant, not pertinent, irrelevant, spiritual. In other words, all that counts in this worldview is what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, count, control.

But wait: love is immaterial, that is, not material. Joy, peace, right, wrong, dreams… the list goes on and on forever. That which makes us uniquely human—not a brick, or a dog, or a widget that produces dollar value—is immaterial, but it is what makes humans human.

Maybe one pair of human eyes cannot see an angel. But over time and space, a thousand human spiritual eyes can see that, indeed, there must be angels, there were angels at Bethlehem.

Okay, that’s a belief statement. It’s beyond the ken of an historian.

That’s a knock against our way of doing history, not belief.

I don’t want the Bible to be historical, in the way my historian friend makes it. I want it to be true.

I just hope our college freshmen know enough to realize that belief and disbelief are the same kind of thing.

My darling girl pointed me to a video by Rob Bell, Everything is Spiritual. One of the most incredibly intelligent addresses I’ve heard, ever.