Recently Christianity Today published a substantial review of Carlos Eire’s fascinating book They Flew: A History of the Impossible. Eire’s book examines seemingly “impossible” accounts of miraculous events—levitation, witchcraft, etc.—in an early modern period of growing atheism and scientific skepticism. As an evangelical Protestant who is Catholic-friendly and a great admirer of Eire, I was puzzled by the title of the review: “Catholic Miracle Stories Should Take Us Outside Our Protestant Comfort Zones.” The review itself deepened my puzzlement. “The persistence of miracles within Catholicism,” writes reviewer Garrett Brown, “distinguishes it from other Christian traditions. Belief in miracles represents not simply a concession to popular piety but a fundamentally different teaching about the work of the Holy Spirit and the response of the church.”
By the time I finished the review, my head was spinning and I was fuming a bit. I am accustomed to inaccurate accounts of evangelicalism, loaded with indefensible generalizations that don’t gain in plausibility no matter how many times they are repeated. But this contrast between Catholicism and an imaginary Protestantism struck me as unhinged. The subject of the historical enmity between Catholics and Protestants is a vast one, and I am not at all attempting to take that up here. While it still persists, it is much less potent than it was: Praise God for that. But I do want to address this false idea that Protestants don’t believe in present-day miracles.
Let me take you back to the 1950s, when my brother and I were boys in Southern California. We were raised by our mother and her mother after my parents divorced (I was about five at the time). We attended Baptist churches there—and in Northern California, a decade later, we attended a Baptist church in the small town of Paradise. In all of the churches where we worshipped over those years, a belief in miracles “now” was the norm, though a minority of our fellow Baptists were “cessationists,” believing that in God’s plan miracles were limited to the Apostolic Age. At the same time, there was a marked contrast between the Baptist piety familiar to us and the convictions of Pentecostal believers, who emphasized the present-day experience of the miraculous much more strongly. And within any given Baptist congregation of our sort, there tended to be a spectrum of views and emotional attitudes with regard to miracles, based not only on “doctrine” but on temperament, disposition, social class, and other factors. This was clear at the weekly Wednesday evening prayer-meetings, as they were called, where a few congregants would testify to miraculous experiences (at times inadvertently comical); some of those present were clearly uncomfortable with such claims.
Missionaries frequently visited our home; our maternal grandparents had been missionaries to China, and our mom lived in Shanghai until she was eleven or twelve. Missionaries in general—not only the ones who visited us but also the ones who spoke as guests at the churches we attended and the ones whose stories we read as boys—tended to affirm the ongoing reality of miracles. Many of them told of witnessing miracles firsthand.
Well into his review, Garrett Brown writes, “Much more could be said about Eire’s remarkable book. I haven’t even touched on the way he engages with Protestant reactions to the miraculous (almost always dismissed as demonic if not outright fraudulent).” His assessment conflates Protestant “reactions” to specifically Catholic claims in specific historical circumstances with Protestant attitudes toward the miraculous in general and over time.
This is a subject worthy of much more attention. I think it would be accurate to say that in evangelical churches today there is less emphasis on the present-day “miraculous” than there was in the Baptist churches my brother and I were raised in during the 1950s, even as Pentecostalism and related movements have grown enormously. The emphases in “testimony from the mission field” (as we said in the 1950s) have also changed a great deal over the decades. In the churches we grew up in, it was common for visiting missionaries to speak in the Sunday evening service. In those settings we heard many miracle stories, some of them enormously powerful, others less so.
Then again, “the miraculous” takes many forms. Years ago in our church there was a period when we divided into smallish groups before the service and had a time of discussion and prayer. I was “leading” one such group for a while, and in the course of our “sharing,” many people related miracles of such an unspectacular kind that they might be thought unworthy of the description—and yet which clearly entailed miraculous divine attention. I still recall one woman who said that when she was seeking a parking place and struggling to find one, she would pray—and always, without fail, a spot would suddenly be open for her. A parking spot: This hardly rises to the dizzying heights of the miracle-stories taken up by Carlos Eire. But God works in mysterious ways.
John Wilson is a contributing editor for The Englewood Review of Books and senior editor at The Marginalia Review of Books.
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Image by Guillaume Le Rouge, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
