Joseph Ratzinger and Peter Seewald. God and the World: Believing and Living in Our Time: A Conversation with Peter Seewald. Translated by Henry Taylor. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002), 60-61.

Faith sees miracles as being always possible, and within their own lifetimes the apostles were offered a lot of money for the secret of their miraculous powers.

There are plenty of provocative accounts of inexplicable events, which move some people to mockery and others to awe. In the great basilica of Padua, for instance, you can see in a shrine the tongue of Saint Anthony, who is said to have been a great preacher. In Lourdes the body of Bernadette is preserved, and Lisieux that of Saint Therese, both are entirely uncorrupt. And they are not embalmed, as was the case with the Communists’ saint, Lenin. How can that be? If we could ask God himself, what would he say about these miracles?

I certainly don’t feel qualified to tell you what God would say. But the question of miracles is there, and a part of what Christians believe is that God has power in the world and really can do things.

To what extent natural laws are broken in this, or whether these laws already have implicit within them a degree of variation that God can make use of, is not the primary question. We can see nowadays, with increasing clarity, that we know the laws of nature only as rules of thumb. What nature is, how universally applicable the laws of nature are, in the end we cannot say with certainty. What is important is to notice that God, after he made creation, did not retire. Retire, in the sense of: Now the machine can go on running in the way it’s been set up. No, God can do things. He is still the Creator and is still able to intervene.

Is every intervention a miracle?

We can’t twist that into a superstitious view of miracles, as if we could have miracles available on order. We can’t make cheap miracle recipes. But we cannot, either, in a rationalistic way know better than God and presume to tell God what he can and cannot do.

I read a very interesting remark on this point. It comes from a book about the Protestant theologian Adolf Schlatter, who was a very firm believer. Schlatter was given an appointment in Berlin, at the time when Adolf Harnack, the great liberal theologian, was teaching there. The Lutheran church intended thereby to balance the liberalism of Harnack to some extent.

Harnack was a truly noble man. Although this appointment was a move against him, he welcomed Schlatter in a most positive manner and said, This is quite right, we will be able to understand each other. And indeed they worked well together. On one occasion, at some session or discussion, when someone alluded to the points of opposition between the two theologians, Harnack said, The two of us, Herr Schlatter and I, are divided only on the question of miracles. Upon which Schlatter called out, No, on the question of God! for the question of miracles poses the question of God. Anyone who does not recognize miracles has a different idea of God.

I think that hits the nail right on the head. It’s not a matter of whether or not we recognize this or that unusual event as a miracle. It’s whether God remains God. And whether he is still able to make himself known in the world as Creator and Lord.

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Return to Lesson 16: Is It Reasonable to Believe in Miracles?