The lectures are unique because they are based on the premise that Christianity is evidence based, not just faith alone. Walters believed that without factual, historical and logical evidence, Christianity is too easily discredited as the fanciful imagination of fanatics. Without reason and evidence, one could believe in anything, and there are many other fanciful religions and versions of Christianity that are not based on facts or logic.
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| Dr. Stan Walters lectures at Greenville College in 1968 |
Little did I know it would be the last time he taught the course. (There's a chapter about Dr. Walters in my memoir, Growing Up Christian, and his thinking about the evidence in Christianity informed my web-series The Logical Case for Catholicism.) Recently, I was able to transfer the tapes to digital format and transcribe them. And with his permission, he lives not far from us, I'm now in the midst of editing the lectures and hopefully next year will release them as a book.
Today, I edited the last of three lectures on MIRACLES. They are astonishing, and so I wanted to share with you an excerpt from the conclusion. Here it is.
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Miracles - A Significant Adaptation of Means
The regularity of nature, what we call the laws of nature, is God doing the same thing in the same way, most of the time, day-after-day. God does this in order to provide a stable environment so we can develop character and responsibility. Without the stability of nature, if nature was really random, we could never plan what we were to do the next day and would too easily give up telling others what time we'd be over to help them, because time would be unpredictable.
We need to think of the universe and its laws as designed to run in a way to achieve God's purpose, of showing us love. Thus, the universe and its laws are the means to an end, where the end is God revealing his love to us by giving us a stable world in which to live and grow. But sometimes we need an extra dose of love, and so we are confronted with miracles, whether through answered prayer, or just an angel who swoops down and saves us from disaster. It is from these moments that Dr. Walters invokes Dr. Elton Trueblood's definition of a miracle as "a significant adaptation of means." That is, God adapted natural laws significantly in some way to help us. God significantly adapted the laws of the universe: the means to his end of loving us.
The point is, ordinarily the means that God uses to do things are the means we know about all the time. But, if he wishes, he may make a significant adaptation of means and then there occurs something which we're not accustomed, to which we do not find it possible to explain by ordinary cause and effect, and which we would call a miracle.
Now, this idea, that God controls, and manipulates the universe for his own purposes, leads to three implications for our life.
Three Implications
1. Things Don't Happen by Accident to the Christian
One of them is this. There is a sense in which things do not happen by accident. When he was a university student at Oxford the late William Temple (1881-1944), whom some people consider the greatest Christian philosopher of the 20th century, wrote a letter home to his parents in which he discussed a particular examination that he had taken. Temple wrote that he'd done rather well on the exam, better it seems than he had expected to do. And he wrote, "I was going to blaspheme and say 'Lucky'."
Now, why should Temple say that "Lucky" is blasphemy? Because lucky implies there isn't any pattern. There isn't any purpose. It is random that things just happen without being part of some overarching purpose. And the Christian cannot say that, ...not and believe in the God whom he meets in the Scriptures and in Jesus Christ. Because the God whom we meet in the Scriptures is in charge of things.
It is true that the universe operates according to patterns describable by us most of the time. But from the Biblical point of view, God is somehow in these operations working out his eternal purposes. And to say "Lucky" would be to say there are some things that God wasn't in, they just happened. And that would be saying the Creator is not the Creator. He's only a part of this operation. And it would reduce the Creator to the level of the creature. We ought to take this more seriously. Things don't happen by accident to the Christian.
2. The Universe is Run by the Eternal Purpose of God
Secondly, there's an interesting implication, for me at least, in this about prayer. When I first began to see the ideas that I've been trying to develop for you in these periods, it made prayer much easier for me, because I saw that in praying what I really had to do was something like this:
Oh God, here is a particular need. Will you use any means necessary to meet that need? You pick the means Lord. And you know what it's going to take to meet that need. Devise and use whatever means are necessary to meet that need.
I think it's helpful to our prayer life to see that the universe is run basically by the eternal purpose of God and not by a cast iron set of causes and effects.
3. Christians Need to be Open to the Novel and Unexpected
The third implication is that Christian people are required to have a very great openness to the novel and the unexpected. You don't know when it may suit God's purposes to vary things just a little. And therefore, the novel may occur. The resurrection of Christ was an extraordinary novelty for which any kind of meaningful precedent was almost totally lacking. And yet we think that it happened. God is never bound by precedent. And in your life and mine and in those communities of Christian persons which are nearly everywhere in this world, there ought to be great openness so that God may do what he wishes to do even if it is something just a little different than we're used to.
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The Lesson in This Post
In a recent post I shared a picture of a large tree limb that had fallen on my wife's car. It destroyed the passenger door, the windshield and frame, an "A" pillar, and most notably the structural steel in the roof panel. Pam had just acquired the car from her elderly father, and it was special, although it had modestly high mileage. And while it was in generally good shape with no rust (we live in Michigan where they use salt on the roads in winter), we had already put over $1,000 in repairs just in the last few weeks. She loved the car, but I was worried a bit about the future expense of keeping it up.
Unfortunately, AAA Auto Insurance had to "total" the car because the parts were no longer available and it could not be repaired. We were both devastated. We could not afford another car payment, and Pam needed the car for her ministry at church and several other families.
What was interesting about the event was where she had parked the car just minutes before the limb fell (during a wind storm). It was in our driveway, but about six feet further away from where she normally parked it. And that was because while doing some yard work I had temporarily placed something in her side of the garage preventing the car's entry. But, had she parked the car in her normal spot in the driveway, the limb would have missed the car entirely. The circumstances leading up to it, and the limb's falling on her car, were both novel and unexpected. But was it a miracle?
At first, we would never have called it that. But as time went on and as we prayed for wisdom, several things occurred to Pam's mind about the car and its demise. They were incidental things, but they related to two people she was always praying for. Were these people connected directly with the car? Not really. But the car being totaled gave Pam fresh ideas of how to pray for those individuals and how Pam's life and theirs were related. But what to do, we were in a quandary. We expected a settlement check form AAA, but it wouldn't be enough to get another car, and we were already cash strapped.
Then, not thinking of the unexpected, a few days later AAA made a cash settlement for the car in an amount that was far more than what we thought the car was worth. And with a small savings Pam had, it appears she will be just able to acquire a newer car, with fewer miles, that will allow her to continue her ministry in a less expensive manner. Much less, in fact. And, had she tried to trade in the car, she would not have gotten as much for it, and getting a newer car, with less miles, would have been out of the question. So, the limb falling oddly on the car was a blessing? Who would have guessed that?
Pam and I pray together each morning and evening, in addition to our private time of Bible reading and prayer. We try to keep our faith strong, but there are times, like this, that test us. Then, as this car and tree limb situation was unfolding, I was editing these chapters on miracles, and came to the section I've shared with you above. While we do not know the real reason why her car was totaled, the oddity of how it happened brings the implications noted above into focus for us.
1. Things don't happen by accident for the Christian.
2. The Universe is Run by the Eternal Purpose of God.
3. Christians Need to be Open to the Novel and Unexpected.
