Miracles

But "nature" and its "laws" are notoriously loose, historically conditioned concepts, and the constructs of contemporary sciences correspond to no one's sense of "the order commonly observed in nature." Far more useful and descriptive in any cultural context is the biblical understanding of miracles as "signs and wonders" (Hebrew, otot u-mofetim). Viewed this way, a miracle (from the Latin miraculum) is an event that astonishes beholders (wonder) and at the same time conveys meaning (sign). Absent the sign factor, it is impossible to distinguish miracle from mere coincidence. Since signs are always signs of something, we can say that a miracle is an unusual event that discloses the meaning and power of the transcendent within the world of time and space.

From this definition it follows that miracles are always narratively constructed. To take a common example: if a terminally ill patient is suddenly cured and attendant physicians can find no cause in medicine or science to explain the cure, the patient or others may claim that the patient's sudden restoration to health is the result of prayer to God for a miracle. That is, they explain the otherwise inexplicable by fashioning a story. This is precisely what happens within the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints, the most rigorously methodological source of contemporary miracles and their stories. Once church officials are satisfied that a candidate for sainthood exhibited extraordinary virtue, they require two posthumous miracles attributed to the intercession of the candidate as a sign from God that the deceased candidate truly is now with God in the afterlife. Only after a board of physicians concludes that an unexpected healing has no known scientific cause does a board of theologians consider whether the healing is also a "divine sign."