During my first year at the University of Virginia, I attended an evangelical event where a girl offered testimony about her being led by the Holy Spirit to a small lake near her home, where she encountered a woman who approached her with a mysterious box. The woman instructed the girl that there would come a time when she would know what to do with the box and its contents. An impressionable young evangelical, I was spellbound by the story. This is how the Christian faith works, I surmised: we feel the mysterious pull of the Holy Spirit, and we go places and do things that to us make little sense but have some transcendent purpose.
I have no clue what happened with the upper-class girl or the box. But inspired by such stories, I spent a lot of time in college trying to determine what the Holy Spirit was leading me to do, in all manner of mundane circumstances. By my third year (we UVA folks refer to being “years” rather than freshman, sophomore, etc.—I know, it’s pretentious), this provoked a spiritual and psychological crisis. For a time, I was so paralyzed by anxiety and depression over what God was calling me to do (and the lack of any miraculous events that might direct me one way or another) that I found it difficult to do much of anything besides trudge to class.
I think this was one of the reasons that Calvinism became so appealing to me. In contrast to the subjective emotivism of low-church, charismatic-leaning evangelicalism, Presbyterians (typically) take their cues from proper reading of Scripture and a prudential evaluation of circumstances. “The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit or traditions of men,” reads the Westminster Confession of Faith (1.6). Read the Bible, pray, and then prudently apply the “liberty which Christ hath purchased for believers under the Gospel” (WCF 20.1)—that’s the Christian life. Don’t expect direction or intervention from the Holy Spirit. Miracles, “those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people,” have “now ceased” (WCF 1.1.).
In one sense, it was a helpful solution to my debilitating spiritual and psychological turmoil, but in another sense, it was like much of Protestantism: the proposed solution to a legitimate problem—in this case, how to determine what is truly the movement of the Holy Spirit—is an untenable over-correction. When later in Calvinist seminary I sought to understand the basis for believing that miracles had ceased, the answer amounted to a curious interpretation of a few verses, such as Hebrews 1:1-2: “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.” If the argument is that Christ’s miracles, culminating in the Resurrection, supersede the need for any future miracles, why is the post-Ascension church constantly performing them (see Acts 3:1-10, 4:29-30, 5:12-16)? Alternatively, the argument that the closure of the biblical canon negates the need for miracles seemed to me confusing—when, exactly, was the canon “completed”?—if not arbitrary.
Though it was relatively easy to dismiss much of the often-bizarre “miraculous” demonstrations of the Spirit I had witnessed in evangelicalism, it was harder to make sense of the fact that the early Church, the very same Church that compiled and defined the biblical canon, so demonstrably believed in the continuation of miracles, evidenced most saliently in the Eucharist itself, as Shaun McAfee notes in his new book, Compendium of Eucharistic Miracles. “What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the body of Christ and the chalice is the blood of Christ,” writes St. Augustine (Sermons, 272). Moreover, the various lives of the saints of the post-Patristic and early medieval Church brim with stories of the miraculous.
Granted, we could discount the ancient Christian belief in continuing miracles as a reflection less of historical truth than the prevalence of superstition in pre-modern peoples. The Reformation and the Scientific Revolution cured us of that flaw, the story of modernity goes. (Though, as Carlos Eire notes in They Flew, Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the patron of German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and not exactly one prone to credulity, became Catholic after witnessing the miraculous levitations of Franciscan friar Joseph of Cupertino.)
But this line of argumentation becomes much harder if we actually study Catholic claims regarding the continuation of miracles. McAfee, for example, notes that recent eucharistic miracles such as those that took place in Buenos Aires in 1996 and Sokółka in 2008 have been subjected to all manner of scientific evaluations, including microscopic examination of tissue, blood type and DNA analysis, forensic medical studies, chemical and material analysis, and radiological and imaging analysis. The World Health Organization in 1973 published a thorough report acknowledging a scientific inability to explain the phenomenon of the transforming flesh and blood of Lanciano, Italy, the oldest eucharistic miracle endorsed by the Vatican.
There are at this point more than a hundred incidents of reported eucharistic miracles going back to the fourth century. It’s certainly possible that some (perhaps even many) of these events have been embellished or even fabricated. But their historical and geographic ubiquity—not to mention the reams of scientific evidence supporting many of the incidents’ veracity—should give pause even to the most strident miracle-skeptical Protestant.
Many people witnessed Jesus’s miracles and still did not believe in his authority. Curiously, all four Gospels report that far from denying that something extraordinary had occurred, Jesus’s critics labeled the events as demonic (see Matt. 12:22-24, Mark 3:22-30, Luke 11:14-20, John 10:19-21). That’s actually how early Protestants also explained away claims of continuing Catholic miracles. Regardless of how we react, witnessing such events can’t help but provoke an internal psychological tension, precisely because they defy our expectations of how the world works.
The question I faced as Protestant seminarian, and the one that should prompt reflection for every Protestant who so willingly accepts the miraculous as described in the New Testament, is this: what if even a single miraculous event confirming Catholic doctrine—be it a eucharistic miracle or what occurred at Lourdes or Fatima—is true? And if that event may be true, what does my disinterest, if not revulsion toward it, say about my Christian faith? “These very works which I am doing, bear me witness that the Father has sent me” (John 5:36).