Sermon quotes on miracles
Augustine of Hippo
Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.
Augustine of Hippo
I never have any difficulty believing in miracles, since I experienced the miracle of a change in my own heart.
Frederick Buechner
A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.
The Alphabet of Grace
Frederick Buechner
The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments, the moments which, if we do not look with more than our eyes or listen with more than our ears reveal only…a gardener, a stranger coming down the road behind us, a meal like any other meal. But if we look with our hearts, if we listen with all our being and imagination… what we may see is Jesus himself.
Frederick Buechner
It is not the objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and that is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.
Thomas Carlyle
We are the miracle of miracles, the great inscrutable mystery of God.
G.K. Chesterton
The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
The Innocence of Father Brown (London: Cassell, 1911), 2.
William Lane Craig
In the proper sense, a miracle is an event which is not producible by the natural causes that are operative in effect at the time and place the event occurs.
Richard Dawkins
Events that we commonly call miracles are not supernatural, but are part of a spectrum of more-or-less improbable natural events. A miracle, in other words, if it occurs at all, is a tremendous stroke of luck.
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: Norton, 1996), 139.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If [an unbeliever] is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact.
The Brothers Karamazov (New York: New American Library, 1957), 34.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. He will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.”
The Brothers Karamazov (New York: New American Library, 1957),
Thomas A. Edison
My guide must be my reason, and at the thought of miracles my reason is rebellious. Personally, I do not believe that Christ laid claim to doing miracles, or asserted that he had miraculous power . . . There is no supernatural.
“Thomas A. Edison on Immortality: The Great Inventor Declares Immortality of the Soul Improbable,” interview with Edward Marshall, Columbian Magazine 3.4 (January 1911).
Albert Einstein
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Stephen Hawking
A scientific law is not a scientific law if it holds only when some supernatural being decides not to intervene. Miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam, 2010), 30.
Timothy Keller
Christ’s miracles were not the suspension of the natural order but the restoration of the natural order. They were a reminder of what once was prior to the fall and a preview of what will eventually be a universal reality once again–a world of peace and justice, without death, disease, or conflict.
David Kinnaman
Surprisingly, the Christian faith today is perceived as disconnected from the supernatural world – a dimension that the vast majority of outsiders believe can be accessed and influenced.
unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why It Matters
Peter Kreeft
God’s interventions are miracles: events that cannot happen by merely natural agents but only by a supernatural agent. They no more interfere with our free will than natural events like earthquakes. We choose how to respond to them.
John Lennox
God is not a prisoner of the laws of nature . . . God, who set the regularities there, can himself feed a new event into the system from outside. Science cannot stop Him from doing that.
Miracles: Is Belief in the Supernatural Irrational? (Cambridge, MA: Veritas Forum, 2013), 25.
Jay Leno
The atheists have produced a Christmas play. It’s called Coincidence on Thirty-Fourth Street.
C.S. Lewis
The Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, which is uncreated, eternal, came into Nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing Nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle.
The Grand Miracle, Random House, 1988, 55.
C.S. Lewis
Miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 13.
C.S. Lewis
The Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, which is uncreated, eternal, came into Nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing Nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle.
The Grand Miracle, Random House, 1988, 55.
Eric Metaxas
If miracles exist at all, they exist not for their own sake but for us, to point us toward something beyond. To someone beyond.
Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life (New York: Dutton, 2014), 16.
Blaise Pascal
It is impossible on reasonable grounds to disbelieve miracles.
Eugene H. Peterson
Miracle, through the biblical tradition, is not what we don’t understand but what is done for us that we can’t do ourselves. Miracle is functional. It’s what God does for us or does for us through other people that we can’t do ourselves…The word does not mean that which is beyond our comprehension but rather that which is beyond our ability.
Every Step an Arrival, The Crown Publishing Group.
Basilea Schlink
When human reason has exhausted every possibility, the children can go to their Father and receive all they need. … For only when you have become utterly dependent upon prayer and faith, only when all human possibilities have been exhausted, can you begin to reckon that God will intervene and work His miracles.
Marcus Borg
Thus, from the standpoint of the gospels, the mighty deeds of Jesus, healings and exorcisms alike, were the product of the power which flowed through him as a holy man. His powers were charismatic, the result of his having become a channel for the power of the other realm, that which Jesus and his contemporaries also called Spirit.
Jesus: A New Vision (Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship). San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, 67.
Raymond Brown
Scholars have come to realize that one cannot dismiss Jesus’s miracles simply on modern rationalist grounds, for the oldest traditions show him as a healer.
The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to Grave. A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1994, pp. 143-144.
John Dominic Crossan
I hold, in summary, that Jesus, as a magician and miracle worker, was a very problematic and controversial phenomenon not only for his enemies but even for his friends.
The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, 311.
Craig Evans
[Jesus’s] healings and exorcisms were an intrinsic part of his proclamation of the kingdom (or rule) of God. The mighty deeds and the proclamation must go together; neither can be understood without the other.
Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2006, 141.
Craig S. Keener
Most scholars today working on the subject thus accept the claim that Jesus was a healer and exorcist.[
Miracles: 2 Volumes . Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 2011, Kindle Location 2420.
Craig S. Keener
So central are miracle reports to the Gospels that one could remove them only if one regarded the Gospels as preserving barely any genuine information about Jesus. Indeed, it is estimated that more than 31 percent of the verses in Mark’s Gospel involve miracles in some way, or some 40 percent of his narrative!
Miracles: 2 Volumes . Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 2011, Kindle Location 2420.
Craig S. Keener
None of the ancient sources respond to claims of Jesus’s miracles by trying to deny them.
Miracles: 2 Volumes . Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition, 2011, Kindle Location 2440.
E.P. Sanders
[Jesus] probably saw his miracles as indications that the new age was at hand. He shared the evangelists’ view that he fulfilled the hopes of the prophets—or at least that these hopes were about to be fulfilled.
The Historical Figure of Jesus. New York: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1993,168.
Geza Vermes
A powerful healer of the physically and mentally sick, . . . he was . . . unconditionally given over to the rescue, not of communities, but of persons in need.
The Religion of Jesus the Jew. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993, 206.
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