Word Finder - miracles

definition

An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin.

example

An example of a miracle associated with Muhammad is the splitting of the moon.

definition

A fortunate outcome that prevails despite overwhelming odds against it.

definition

An awesome and exceptional example of something

definition

To affect by a miracle; to work a miracle upon.

The miracles of Jesus are also canvassed.

An attempt has been made to discover a natural law which will explain some at least of the miracles of Jesus.

He declines to regard miracles as divine action contrary to the laws of nature.

As God is the Saviour, and the chief end of the revelation is redemption, it is fitting that the miracles should be acts of divine deliverance from physical evil.

The divine agency is recognized as combining and controlling, but not as producing, in the teleological notion of miracles.

Of the miracles of Jesus, Bushnell says, " The character of Jesus is ever shining with and through them, in clear self-evidence leaving them never to stand as raw wonders only of might, but covering them with glory as tokens of a heavenly love, and acts that only suit the proportions of His personal greatness and majesty " (Nature and the Supernatural, p. 364).

She thought the miracles of Jesus very strange.

Still, Alex couldn't work miracles.

More reserve is being shown towards the other or " nature" miracles.

These theories endeavour to discover the means by which the exceptional occurrence is brought about; but the explanation is merely hypothetical, and we are not helped in conceiving the mode of the divine activity in the working of miracles.

Ritschl has been unjustly charged with this treatment of miracles.

It is only the theistic view of God as personal power - that is as free-wild ever present and ever active in the world, which leaves room for miracles.

Thus as life is transcendent and yet immanent in body, and mind in brain, and both utilize their organs, so God, transcendent and immanent, uses the course of nature for His own ends; and the emergence both of life and mind in that course of nature evidences such a divine initiative as is assumed in the recognition of the possibility of miracles.

The narratives of miracles are woven into the very texture of this representation.

That this evidence is not as good as that for the miracles of Jesus must be conceded, as much of it is of much later date than the events recorded.

The miracles connected with the beginnings of the national history - the period of the Exodus - appear on closer inspection to have been ordinarily natural phenomena, to which a supernatural character was given by their connexion with the prophetic word of Moses.

The miracles recorded of Elijah and Elisha lie somewhat apart from the main currents of the history, the narratives themselves are distinct from the historical works in which they have been incorporated, and the character of some of the actions raises serious doubts and difficulties.

The Apostolic miracles, to which the New Testament bears evidence, were wrought in the power of Christ, and were evidences to His church and to the world of His continued presence.

It is true that in Roman Catholicism, in medieval as in modern times, the working of miracles has been ascribed to its saints; but the character of most of these miracles is such as to lack the a priori probability which has been claimed for the Scripture miracles.

As Christ and the apostles worked miracles, it is assumed that those who in the Church were distinguished for their sanctity would also work miracles; and there can be little doubt that the wish was often father to the thought.

He had been performing miracles, and claimed to have received his relics, not from Rome like those of Boniface, but directly from the angels.

Within a short time his shrine at Canterbury became the resort of innumerable pilgrims. Plenary indulgences were given for a visit to the shrine, and an official register was kept to record the miracles wrought by the relics of the saint.

While in Egypt he became more and more imbued with superstition, consulting astrologers and allowing himself to be flattered into a belief that he possessed a divine power which could work miracles.

They differ from the older writers in practically ignoring the physical supernatural - that is, though they regard the miracles of the ancient times (referred to particularly in Wisdom xvi.-xix.) as historical facts, they say nothing of a miraculous element in the life of their own time.

Even in Alcuin's time miracles were reported to be still wrought at his tomb.

When he entered the divinity school he was an orthodox Unitarian; when he left it, he entertained strong doubts about the infallibility of the Bible, the possibility of miracles, and the exclusive claims of Christianity and the Church.

The world saw with astonishment this vicious, rough, coarse-fibred man of the world transformed into an austere penitent, who worked miracles of healing.

In 676 he became an anchorite on the island of Farne, and it is said that he performed miracles there.

One main fault of the Speculum Historiale is the unduly large space devoted to miracles.

The tendency observable in many of the austerities and miracles attributed to St Catherine to outstrip those of other saints, particularly Francis, is especially remarkable in this marvel of the stigmata, and so acute became the rivalry between the two orders that Pope Sixtus IV., himself a Franciscan, issued a decree asserting that St Francis had an exclusive monopoly of this particular wonder, and making it a censurable offence to represent St Catherine receiving the stigmata.

The legend reads that in the year 600 Dymphna, an Irish princess, was executed here by her father, and in consequence of certain miracles she had effected she was canonized and made the patron saint of the insane.

In the Christian Church the tradition of faith healing dates from the earliest days of Christianity; upon the miracles of the New Testament follow cases of healing, first by the Apostles, then by their successors; but faith healing proper is gradually, from the 3rd century onwards, transformed into trust in relics, though faith cures still occur sporadically in later times.

Gregory of Nyssa's untrustworthy panegyric represents him as having wrought miracles of a very startling description; but nothing related by him comes near the astounding narratives given in the Martyrologies, or even in the Breviarium Romanum, in connexion with his name.

The village of Philippsdorf, now incorporated with Georgswalde, has become since 1866 a famous place of pilgrimage, owing to the miracles attributed to an image of the Virgin, placed now in a magnificent new church (1885).

Gregory of Tours gives a list of 206 miracles wrought by him after his death; Sidonius Apollinaris composed a metrical biography of him.

The Jewish records are put on a level with the Greek myths, and miracles are laughed at as magical tricks.

This ecclesiastic related wonderful stories of the shrine of St Thomas in India, and of the miracles wrought there by the body of the apostle, including (fn1) the distribution of the sacramental wafer by his hand.

And everything that he had heard from them about the Lord, about His miracles and about His teaching, Polycarp used to tell us as one who had received it from those who had seen the Word of Life with their own eyes, and all this in perfect harmony with the Scriptures.

Thus in 1405 he, with other two masters, was commissioned to examine into certain reputed miracles at Wilsnack, near Wittenberg, which had caused that church to be made a resort of pilgrims from all parts of Europe.

The Manicheans' answer to such arguments was that miracles worked by Christ and the Apostles in the material world were only apparitional and not real, while those of the Old Testament were satanic.

Dr Smith contributed articles on Calvin, Kant, Pantheism, Miracles, Reformed Churches, Schelling and Hegel to the American Cyclopaedia, and contributed to McClintock and Strong's Cyclopaedia; and was editor of the American Theological Review (1859 sqq.), both in its original form and after it became the American Presbyterian and Theological Review and, later, the Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review.

By his preaching, his holy life, and, as his earliest biographers assert, by the performance of miracles, he converted the king and many of his subjects.

Jesus Christ worked miracles and declared himself the Son of the First Man.

The miracles of the New Testament, which had formerly been received as bulwarks of Christianity, now appeared as difficulties needing explanation.

The characteristic of the rationalists was the attempt to explain away the New Testament miracles as coincidences or naturally occurring events, while at the same time they held as tenaciously as possible to the accuracy of the letter of the New Testament narratives.

According to Strauss the fulfilments of prophecy in the New Testament arise from the Christians' belief that the Christian Messiah must have fulfilled the predictions of the prophets, and the miracles of Jesus in the New Testament either originate in the same way or are purely mythical embodiments of Christian doctrines.

In this philosophy the mystical properties of numbers are a leading feature; absurd and mechanical notions are glossed over with the sheen of sacramental mystery; myths are explained by pious fancies and fine-sounding pietistic reflections; miracles, even the most ridiculous, are believed in, and miracles are wrought.

His refutation of Hume's objection to the truth of miracles is perhaps his intellectual chef-d'ceuvre.

Analogy, in its power of transforming unlike and unrelated animals or unlike and unrelated parts of animals into likeness, has done such miracles that the inference of kinship is often almost irresistible.

All these, he says, " were parcels of matter destitute of life and feeling, but through miracles they became vehicles of the power of God absorbed or taken into themselves."