Paul pens both his letters to Timothy to encourage him to continue his struggle against the false teachers in the congregation at Ephesus. Paul planted this church years earlier. Luke records this in Acts 19—20. As Paul was leaving Ephesus he warned the church that false teachers would creep in and even arise out of their own number. There was something about the church in Ephesus that made it especially susceptible to a certain form of false teaching.
I think at least part of that reason for this susceptibility was Ephesus’s culture of magic. It was a city steeped in magic. By “magic” I don’t mean sleight of hand, Penn and Teller, or Branson, Missouri—I mean incantations, hexes, or what the KJV calls “witchcraft.”
But it was precisely that culture of magic that also led to Paul’s success. Luke tells us in Acts 19 that God was doing many great miracles through Paul. Handkerchiefs that touched his skin were being brought to the sick and they were being restored. It was Paul’s spiritual power—his spiritual street cred—that had the Ephesians intrigued by his gospel proclamation.
The obsession with magic was a sort of double-edged sword cutting both ways. And I think Paul knew it would continue to be a problem, which was why he left Timothy in Ephesus to pastor this church.
It is easy for us modern people to think that the issue of “magic” is something of the past—not something we need to be concerned about. After all, we live in what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor called the “age of disenchantment.” We live in a world that is drained of magic. It would be fairly difficult to find someone who believes in witchcraft or incantations. We live in the age of scientific enlightenment.
But I don’t think the truth is quite that simple.
While it is true that magic is not practiced in our corner of the world like it was in former times, I think we still live in a world that is steeped in what Chris Green calls magical thinking.
I learned this first from C.S. Lewis. Lewis often made the case that modern, western people are actually some of the most magically minded people in the world–even if it looks a bit different than it did in first century Ephesus.
Magic vs. Miracles
What has to be disentangled in Ephesus (and for us today) is the difference between magic and miracles. There is a marked contrast between the miracles God was doing through Paul and the magic practiced by the Ephesians.
I spell this out in the podcast, but here is the short of it:
* Magic is about bending nature/reality to my will; Miracles are nature/reality coming to align with the will of God.
* Magic is a technique and is marked by mechanical thinking; Miracles give birth to relational thinking.
* Magic violates nature; Miracles fulfill nature.
C.S. Lewis, in his book Miracles, puts it like this:
I contend that in all these miracles alike the incarnate God does suddenly and locally something that God has done or will do in general. Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature.
So, let’s take his first miracle as an example: turning water into wine. Is that magic? Is he violating the nature of water to turn it into wine? No, Lewis says, in that miracle Jesus is doing something suddenly in one moment that is already written in the canvas of nature.
“Every year, as part of the Natural order, God makes wine. He does so by creating a vegetable organism that can turn water, soil and sunlight into a juice which will, under proper conditions, become wine. Thus, in a certain sense, He constantly turns water into wine, for wine, like all drinks, is but water modified…God, now incarnate, short circuits the process: makes wine in a moment: uses earthenware jars instead of vegetable fibres to hold the water. But uses them to do what He is always doing. The miracle consists in the short cut; but the event to which it leads is the usual one.”
And it is for this very reason that Jesus refused when he was tempted by the Devil to turn stones to bread. That’s magic! Lewis says that Jesus refused because “The Son does nothing except what he sees the Father do.” And that father made that stone a stone.
Lewis is picking this up directly from the Scottish preacher and author George MacDonald. Lewis referred to MacDonald as his “master.”
Here is how George MacDonald puts it in a sermon on the wilderness temptations:
“The Father said, That is a stone. The Son would not say, That is a loaf. No one creative fiat shall contradict another. The Father and the Son are of one mind. The Lord could hunger, could starve, but would not change into another thing what His Father had made one thing. There was no such change in the feeding of the multitudes. The fish and the bread were fish and bread before… There was in these miracles, I think in all, only a hastening of appearances: the doing of that in a day, which may ordinarily take a thousand years, for with God time is not what it is with us.”
Is it even possible for Jesus to make stones into bread? I think MacDonald is suggesting that it is not possible for Jesus to do this and remain who he is. Jesus cannot turn stones into bread without ceasing to be who he is.
Why? Because he is the Father’s Word that makes the stone a stone. For him to do magic and turn a stone into a loaf of bread would be for him to contradict himself and to contradict himself would be to contradict the Father. Jesus will not—indeed cannot!—violate or deform anyone or anything in its integrity. Magic mutilates in order to gain power. God creates, fills, and fulfills all things to make them what they are.
All this is grounded, of course, in the incarnation—what Lewis calls “the grand miracle.” When the Word becomes flesh it does not violate the nature of humanity, it fulfills it, and makes it what it was intended to be.
The Magician’s Twin
Are we still magical? This is where Lewis is most insightful, I think.
In an essay entitled “The Abolition of Man,” published in 1944, Lewis was concerned with the way the world was going. World War 2, technology, the atomic bomb—science was producing new technologies at rapid speed. What worried him was that as we were technology was making massive advances we were losing our moral formation.
We knew how to make a nuclear bomb, but the question was not whether or not we knew how, but whether or not we should.
At the end of the essay Lewis compares our scientific thinking with magical thinking. In fact, he thinks they are twins. (We discuss this in class, but I’ll leave you with his words.)
“I have described as a ‘magician’s bargain’ that process whereby man surrenders object after object, and finally himself, to Nature in return for power. And I meant what I said. The fact that the scientist has succeeded where the magician failed has put such a wide contrast between them in popular thought that the real story of the birth of Science is misunderstood. You will even find people who write about the sixteenth century as if Magic were a medieval survival and Science the new thing that came in to sweep it away. Those who have studied the period know better. There was very little magic in the Middle Ages: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the high noon of magic. The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. I allow that some (certainly not all) of the early scientists were actuated by a pure love of knowledge. But if we consider the temper of that age as a whole we can discern the impulse of which I speak.
“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious–such as digging up and mutilating the dead.
“[Francis Bacon] rejects magic because it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician.
“It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it was born in an unhealthy neighborhood and at an inauspicious hour.”
