Miracles, like the Shroud of Turin, are a kind of religious bling? Really?
From a review of Tim Stafford’s Miracles by Joanne K. McPortland in the Patheous blog, Egregious Twaddle:
We Catholics, after all, have a unique (if bipolar) relationship with miracles. We see them everywhere: in weeping statues and rosary chains turned to gold, in the Turin shroud and the E-Bay grilled cheese sandwich. And yet we’re remarkably blasé about them. We’re not, for the most part, a Church that goes on about miracles, or works them into our day-to-day ministry, even in those parts of what Tim Stafford calls “the majority world” where Western skepticism has not yet worked its unmagic, and where among Pentecostal Protestant missions, Stafford reports, “miracles seem to be the normal entry point for people becoming followers of Jesus” (p. 148). For Catholics, miracles are a kind of religious bling—nice to flash on special occasions, but not a necessary part of the wardrobe of faith.
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Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
Religious bling. Now there’s a contradiction if I ever heard one, albeit a very interesting one.
There’s a lot of interesting material out there on miracles, despite Joanne McPortland’s “no-nonsense” approach, and her apparent classification of miracles as religious bling “nice to have – but not really necessary”. Miracles don’t seem to be play a significant role in her life. I’m not sure that the writers of the Catholic Catechism would concur with that point of view.
Some of the Catholic Catechism material is certainly informative: requirements, categories, evidence etc,, but some of the events it asserts or deems miracles, I feel I would not concur with, and when it comes to biblical miracles, I rather suspect that even Catholic exegetes would differ, or at least have a mental reservation.
However for a really interesting time looking at miracles, check out the Listverse site. It seems it specialises in lists of the ten most whatever you’re interested in. Google on “Listverse ten most astonishing miracles”. No 10 is actually a Coptic miracle witnessed by thousands, an apparition of the Virgin. St John of Cupertino was given to spontaneous bouts of levitation and flying all over the place. The page has 366 comments, which you can scan through, and like this site, all points of view are presented.
Sorry, the flying monk is St Joseph of Cupertino, patron saint of air travellers. You probably know this if you commute intercity.