The first is the cognitive adjustment that allows us to imagine the world that Scripture imagines. This Copernican turn demands that we reclaim the organ of imagination, which the Enlightenment scorned, and recognize that the Bible does not describe empirical realities, but rather imagines them as suffused with the presence and power of God. In some ways, the biblical world is much smaller than the world of Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking; but in the most important way it is infinitely larger, for it includes the presence and power of the Creator. In each of its parts, and as a whole, Scripture imagines the world of humans as defined by their relationship to the God who intimately and insistently presses on creation, inviting readers to enter imaginatively into the world so construed and, through embodied practices, to make that imagined world empirically visible. An example: Scripture proposes that humans are created in the image and likeness of God. This is clearly not a truth ever to be reached through empirical analysis of human behavior. Yet Scripture imagines such a link between God and humans, and invites us to live by that imagined image. And when we regard and treat fellow humans as created in the image of God, things actually can change in the empirical realm; our fellow human being, now perceived as bearing a divine image and likeness, may respond like someone bearing such an impress. This is a truth about humans that is not described by Scripture but rather prescribed by Scripture, leaving it to us to make it real.

The world imagined by Scripture is one filled with the presence and power of God, or, to use Scripture’s own parlance, signs and wonders that reveal God’s glory. A narrow historicism dismisses such signs and wonders as nonhistorical, and therefore not real, thus eliding the distinction between an epistemological incapacity and an ontological assertion. But the premise that only what fits the frame of historical inquiry is real is patently false. And if we take seriously the language of Scripture concerning signs and wonders, which include not only the plagues and the Exodus, and the visions of the prophets, but also the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus and the mighty works of the Spirit among believers, then Scripture’s imagined world invites us to see our own empirical reality with new eyes—eyes open to mystery and magic, and, yes, to miracles—as we learn to perceive the presence and power of God in the creation that is new every day.

Celebrating a Robust Theory of Creation

The second element in this epistemological curriculum is a robust theology of creation. Enlightenment thinkers and Deists—together with all the Christians influenced by them—focused exclusively on the creation accounts of Genesis 1–2, which encouraged the notion that creation happened at a chronological beginning, when God established the “immutable laws of nature” that miracles supposedly violate. Such a view was easily demolished by scientific accounts of the material world’s chronological origins. No need here to rehearse the embrace of Darwin by the New Atheists or Bertrand Russell’s mockery of an infinite series of horizontal causes (if God caused the world, what caused God, etc.). It helps little to argue feebly that the Genesis accounts teach existential rather than scientific truths; once the location of creation is placed at the start, it is difficult to focus elsewhere.

But a shift in focus is absolutely necessary, for as beautiful and true as the lessons of Genesis 1–2 are, they are not Scripture’s most important way of imagining the world as created by God. To gain a more robust and realistic sense of creation we must turn above all to the psalms and the prophets and the letters of Paul. In these writings, creation is something that happens constantly, as God brings into being that which is—whether it be the new creation of the restoration from exile or the new creation that is the Resurrection of Christ. In such declarations and prayers, “creation” is not a pretty metaphor or strong analogy; it points to the constant presence and power of God, bringing into being that which is not, the unseen first cause that underlies all secondary causes. Thus, Paul links God’s creation out of nothing to the birth of Isaac from Sarah’s dead womb, to the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and to the coming into being of the Corinthian community: they are all unthinkable apart from the presence and power of God. They are all equally miracles.

If God is the implicit premise of all that appears in the world, if God’s presence and power are the invisible cause of anything existing at all, then creation does not concern so much the chronological start to the world as it does the mystery of anything at all existing now. Creation in the fullest sense is not about the what or even the how of the world—these aspects are the purview of science—but rather the sheer existence, the isness of the world, dimensions to which science has little to contribute. The pertinence of this robust understanding of creation to the topic of miracles is clear. We believe, or profess, that God’s presence and power is everywhere all the time: everything that comes into being is a “wonder,” because it is not necessary and thus surprising; everything that comes into being is a “sign,” because it points beyond itself to God’s implicit presence and power. The real question, then, is whether we have the capacity to perceive wonders as wonders and signs as signs; whether we, unlike modernity, can imagine a reality that is greater and more powerful behind the veil of mere appearances. And this is, as Augustine already recognized, an epistemological issue.

Privileging Narratives of Religious Experience

The third element is asserting the validity of personal religious experience. A key prop of Hume’s argument against miracles was his insistence that the witness to individual experience has no standing against what he considered “universal” human experience. If no Europeans of Hume’s acquaintance had visions, then neither could the prophets have had visions; if no one in Hume’s Scotland rose from the dead, then neither did Jesus. Modernity has followed Hume’s lead, favoring statistics over individual cases, theory over personal narrative. Much of the tragic history of the past hundred years reflects the triumph of theory over individual experience; racism, sexism, and xenophobia signal a process in which generalization becomes stereotype, then caricature, then excuse for suppression. Once the individual profile, the personal narrative, has no value as evidence, then the individual has no value as a person.

The world imagined by Scripture, in contrast, is based entirely on the witness of individual persons rather than statistical theories about social entities. Moses heard the Lord and told the people what he had heard; Elijah heard the Lord and stood against the priests; Isaiah and Ezekiel saw the glory of the Lord; and Paul said, “Last of all, he was seen by me,” asking “Have I not seen the Lord?” When speaking of the spirit-gifted speech of believers at Pentecost, Peter declared that the risen Lord had poured out “this which you see and hear.” The Old and New Testaments alike derive in the first place from intense personal experiences of the presence and power of God in creation, experiences that demand interpretation and narrative expression.

Witness to personal religious experience must, of course, be tested, through a process of communal discernment such as I have tried to describe in my book Scripture and Discernment. Just as a scientific discovery or philosophical proposition must be supported by appropriate evidence—in one case rigorously tested data, in the other case, close and consistent reasoning—so must claims to the experience of God’s presence and power in today’s world be tested within the assembly of the faithful by the use of three criteria: coherence (Is it consistent within itself and with the character of the witness’s life?); convergence (Does it align intelligibly with other reliable witnesses?); and edification (Does it build the church in its distinctive call to holiness?) But without the recognition of the religious experience of the saints among us—hardly the experiences of a statistical majority!—Christianity is in danger of becoming simply a set of formal doctrines, rigid rituals, and encrusted morality.

The present generation actually pushes back against the Enlightenment tradition when it asserts the validity of individual experience—sexual, familial, ethnic—that challenges this or that assumed societal norm. “Listen to me because I am different,” is the message, and increasingly society has shown a certain openness to it. But if the experience of being gay or lesbian or abused or bullied or vilified demands respect, why should experiences of God’s presence and power fail to? By entering into the imaginative world of Scripture, and embracing a robust view of creation, Christians are led to a new appreciation of stories told about religious experiences in our own day.

Embracing the Truth-Telling Capacity of Myth