Shane Claiborne, in his ‘The Irresistible Revolution’, tells a story of when he was serving at a medical center for the poor (I don’t remember if the story takes place in Calcutta, during his time with Mother Teresa, or somewhere in Central America for some reason). He and his team were treating the poor and needy as they came in, but they ran out of supplies. The only thing they had left was a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. So they just kept giving people Pepto-Bismol. Here’s the thing: people kept getting healed. Here’s the other thing: they never ran out of Pepto-Bismol, even though the bottle should have been emptied several times over with the amount they were giving out.

I submit that this is an instance of God’s will for the recreation and restoration of the world being manifested in an act of faithfulness. It is, in spite of all post-modern pussyfooting around the possibility, a miracle. Must we consequently conceive of God as a cosmic vending machine? No. Must we conceive of the finished task as being a "state of existence where people live forever and angels float around either as ghosts or super-human beings"? No. But I’m stuck with the fact that God created. That the creation is broken. And that it needs more than just human cooperation, even on an imaginative global scale, to be put right. Or at least, to be put profoundly right. And yet this is precisely the hope of resurrection.

You may say "we shouldn’t try to come up with a natural explanation of how those miracles physically happened," but to relegate them to the ‘true myth’ bin seems to me to be essentially the same thing. Instead of trying to explain how the miracles happen, you say they didn’t really happen.

But is the multiplication of Pepto-Bismol a ‘true myth’? If so, I think Shane will vehemently protest. If not, then perhaps you shouldn’t be so quick to exclude the multiplication of the bread and fish…

 Cheers,

 -Daniel-