MIRACLE AND MODERN THOUGHT.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1259, 14 October 1911, Page 4

MIRACLE AND MODERN THOUGHT.

The brief cable messages which appear from time to time in the press dealing with great controversial questions concerning which exactness of definition is all-important arc never very satisfactory. Thisremark applies to the message published in Monday's issue regarding certain complaints made at the Anglican Church Congress to the ellect that the .Resurrection of Christ has been dropped from religious teaching except at Easter. The discussion seems to have had some reference, direct or indirect, to the destructive criticism of the New Testament miracles contained in a book recently published by the Rev. J. M. Thompson, Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford, who rejects the physical resurrection of Christ. The appearance of this volume caused some excitement in the Anglican Church at Home and the Bishop of Winchester felt compelled to withdraw Mr. Thompson's "license to exercise the cure of souls." Though he rejects miracles Mr. Thompson believes in supernatural Christianity, and he holds that "in Jesus Christ God is incarnate, discovered and worshipped, as God alone can be, by the insight of faith." There is a school of thought in the Church which has for its watchword "the supernatural without miracle," and which rejects the physical resurrection of Christ, but still believes in His Deity, and that He is alive for evermore. This, they hold, is proved by the experience of Christian men and women in all ages. "The Christian consciousness of ourday," writes Dr. Percy Gardner, "is one with the consciousness which has set apart the followers of Christ from the world since the day when the apostles first realised that though their Master was hidden from sight He was with them till the end of the world." To | go to ' the other extreme there are some who would stake the truth of Christianity on the fact of the physical resurrection of Christ. They would hold that if, for instance, some explorer in Palestine discovered what could be proved to demonstration to be tho tomb of Christ, and that if in that tomb were discovered what could be proved to be the remains of the body of Christ, then the Christian faith would collapse. They regard the empty tomb as the keystone of Christianity; whereas one Christian writer of the other school declares that "it is possible to he so firmly convinced of the fact of the great resurrection as to be almost uninterested in the problem of an empty tomb." He contends that it is not because men have much faith, but because they have little that they need to believe in an empty tomb "in order to know that Jesus rose from the dead and that they also shall rise with Him." There are other Christian scholars who firmly, believe in the actual bodily resurrection on the third day, but who hesitate to stake the truth of Christianity on this fact. They contend, however, to use the words of Professor W. P. Paterson, "that nothing in history is more certain than that the disciples of Jesus believed that after being crucified, dead, and buried, He rose again from the dead on the third day, and that at intervals thereafter He met and conversed with them in different places. _ The proof that they believed this is the existence of the Christian Church." The difference between the two schools of thought, says Professor Sanday, one of the most distinguished. and open-minded of present-day theologians, is not as to the fact of the living Christ, but as to the mode or nature of His revival. As regards the general question as to whether there is room for miracle in the scheme of things it may be sufficient here to say that the mechanical and materialistic theories of the universe aro breaking down under the pressure of recent philosophical criticism, aDd many of the leaders of modern thought are coming to recognise more and more clearly that it is impossible to set a limit to the sphere of the possible.