The Miraculous Nature of our World. By Andre Rabe.
This essay is a meditation on the miraculous and proposes an alternative understanding of what constitutes the miraculous.
I’ve just poured myself a cup of coffee and am sitting on my porch, or ‘stoep’ as we call it in my native South Africa. Golden rays of light seem to slow down as they flow through the mist covering the mountains. The chatter and songs of feathered visitors fill the air. And a most beautifully patterned work of art just fluttered by and settled on a plant still wet with the morning dew.
Are these just ordinary events, or are they miracles I’ve grown accustomed to? Despite having experienced similar mornings before, I simply can’t describe it as ordinary! Our ordinary world is saturated with miracles, if only we can see anew.
This essay is a meditation on the miraculous and proposes an alternative understanding of what constitutes the miraculous. Recognizing God as an essential component in each event opens new possibilities of experiencing our world, of recognizing the wonder in the ordinary. It also considers our participation in surprising and unusual events.
The theme of miracles in the context of an amipotent God has been addressed before.[1] In defining miracles, Thomas Oord writes that they:
are unusual events;
are good events;
and involve God’s special action in relation to creation.[2]
Definitions can be useful as catalysts for further conversation and clarification. We will explore the first and third statement further. The second statement – that these events are good – I affirm and assume to be valid in the rest of this work.
The nature of events.
Our understanding of unusual events depends on our understanding of events in general. Two general characteristics of events that are most relevant to our inquiry are regularity and novelty. Let’s first consider regularities. Ideas about an omnipotent God often go hand in hand with the old metaphor of ‘laws of nature.’ From this perspective, God imposes laws onto nature, and these laws are the reason for the regularity we see in nature.
However, the metaphor of an external lawgiver has become obsolete. Few scientists or philosophers still support this view to explain the regularities we see in nature. Many theologians also see God as immanent rather than external to nature. The regularities we observe, therefore, need an alternative explanation. The alternative view that has been most persuasive is that these regularities result from patterns of process arising from within nature. No external lawgiver or authoritarian is necessary to explain these patterns. This view complements the understanding of an amipotent God, immanent in nature and influencing it towards greater beauty and goodness.
The second characteristic of events we must explore is novelty. The concept of novelty corresponds to the word unusualin Oord’s definition. Events introduce novelty into our world. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead considered this “creative advance” as the most fundamental aspect of reality.[3] This concept of ‘creative advance’ challenges us to perceive the world in a new light. It highlights the fact that every event has some degree of novelty, even when it is not that obvious. For example, if one could have observed this planet 4 billion years ago before the advent of biological life, the appearance of a butterfly would have been miraculous. Yet the processes required to produce butterflies were already in play – events that introduced incremental novelty.
A butterfly is just as much a miracle today as it would have been 4 billion years ago, for it embodies a history of unusual events. We have simply become too familiar with this phenomenon and with nature in general, to recognize that the miraculous is fluttering around us all the time.
It is not only the accretion of novelty, but the trajectory of history that is surprising. Our world tends to produce greater diversity, complexity, beauty, and consciousness. The nature of our world is not only creative, but it also produces an advance. It is easy to miss this miraculous trajectory when our focus tends to be more narrowly aligned with our immediate situation.
We are born into a world saturated with beauty, novelty, and the miraculous. As young children, we appropriately respond with wonder. As we mature, we often lose sight of the novelty of our world, for it is more practical to understand the regularities. And so our awareness of the wonders of our world grows dull. It often takes an event with a high degree of novelty to wake us from our slumber and remind us that there is more to our world than boringly predictable routines. We then call these events miracles, not realizing that the miraculous (novel beauty) has been present to some degree in all our life events.
The flow of events in our world displays both the characteristics of regularity and novelty. The ordinary and the miraculous are intrinsically intertwined and do not require any laws of nature to be broken. It is the very nature of reality to be miraculous, to introduce novel possibilities into our world.
Recognizing the miraculous has less to do with defining and categorizing these events, and more with the way we attend to our world. In other words, finding an event surprising has as much to do with our subjective perspectives as with the intrinsic quality of the event.
If we focus on the intrinsic quality of events, then every event has some degree of the miraculous in it, for every event is novel to some degree. The miraculous is therefore not as much a category of events as it is an aspect of all events and our awareness of those aspects. Cultivating awareness is essential in opening ourselves up to novel possibilities.
Special Divine Action?
In defining a miracle, Oord states:
In addition to being unusual and good, miracles involve special divine action.[4]
He elaborates on what he means by special divine action:
The special divine action that makes miracles possible occurs when God provides new possibilities, forms, structures or ways of being to creatures.[5]
God lovingly invites creatures and creation to cooperate to enact a future in which well-being is established in surprising and positive ways.[6]
However, does this not describe God’s action in every event? Indeed, Oord argues throughout the same work and others that offering contextualized possibilities is what God does in every event. For instance, he writes that God “…is present to all creation and always lovingly influences everyone and everything.”[7] So, what makes God’s action special in miraculous events? The possibilities on offer might have a higher degree of novelty, but God’s action remains the same: to influence and lure creation toward these beneficial possibilities. Maybe the intensity of God’s intention, the mental work they need to do to contextualize possibilities, can be categorized as special.
A better way of characterizing a miracle may be found in the cooperation between God and creation to bring about a surprising new event. Oord advocates for creaturely involvement in the miraculous but neglects to include this crucial point in his definition. He does use the word ‘involves’ which alludes to other entities, but it’s not explicit.
To make this co-creativity more explicit, we can say that both God and creatures act to actualize events. God offers contextualized possibilities, and all creaturely entities involved decide, mostly unconsciously, which possibilities to realize. All parties are involved in creating a new event. Events that display a high degree of novelty are not so much dependent on God’s special action as they are on a high degree of cooperation between all involved. God, as always, offers the possibilities, and the entities involved harmonize in their conscious and unconscious decision-making to actualize an exceptional event.
In revising the definition of miracles, we can say that miracles:
refer to the unusual or novel aspect of events,
they are good events,
and that events with high degrees of novelty involve a surprising level of cooperation between God and creatures.
The aim of this essay is more than redefining the miraculous. Rather, I hope to stir your awareness of the wonders surrounding you. Your own existence was a possibility nurtured by our universe for billions of years. What loving influence God had to exert throughout millennia, what surprising cooperation our universe gave to bring about the wondrous event of you!
Bio
Andre Rabe is a storyteller, theologian, philosopher, author, and public speaker. He earned his doctorate degree in theology from Northwind Theological Seminary. He is known for his contributions to research on mimetic theory, open and relational theology, process philosophy, science and religion, and how to make these ideas relevant to real life. Among the numerous books he authored are, Creative Chaos and Processing Mimetic Reality. His website: https://alwaysloved.net
[1] Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (p. 187). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition; Why Oord’s Essential Kenosis Model Fails to Solve the Problem of Evil While Retaining Miracles.” Wesleyan Journal of Theology (fall, 2016): 174-187; and Oord’s response, https://thomasjayoord.com/index.php/blog/archives/response-john-sanders; And for a video conversation on this theme see: https://youtu.be/SlSpIee9HGY?si=CobJTynqDPAk11fk
[2] Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God, 196.
[3] Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 21). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
[4] Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God, 199.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 200.
[7] Oord, Thomas. The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence (p. 140). SacraSage Press. Kindle Edition.
This essay was first published in “Amipotence: Expansion & Application“
