FAR AWAY & LONG AGO.

The Book of Miracles
The Meaning Of The Miracle
Stories in Christianity, Judaism,
Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam
Kenneth L. Woodward
Simon and Schuster, $27, 419 pp.

Talk about miracles often degenerates into debates over whether they happen. Kenneth Woodward invites the reader to a richer and more rewarding consideration of what miracle stories mean to the traditions that recount them. A senior writer at Newsweek and that magazine's religion editor for thirty-six years, Woodward has had the occasion to read more than a few books and cultivate some scholarly contacts. He has combined these resources in a volume that functions quite well as an anthology of miracle stories from five religious traditions, but that also serves as a distinctive (and often undervalued) point of entry into the study of religion itself. The advantage of having a journalist--especially one as well-read and as well-directed on technical points as Woodward is--writing this sort of book is that it entertains as well as instructs, with very few descents into the solemnly didactic. Woodward keeps the prose clean and allows his judicious endnotes and extensive bibliography to offer quiet support for his unpretentious and efficient management of a complex collection of stories and religious traditions.

In his introduction ("Making Room for Miracles"), Woodward acknowledges the very different worlds inhabited by the recorders of his miracle stories and those who, like Thomas Jefferson, wish for a religion purged of all supernatural (that is, superstitious) elements. Woodward argues that the miraculous is at the heart of the world's religions and that such stories deserve attention today for two reasons in particular. First, since the global village is now in our neighborhood playground, it might be a good idea to know each other's stories. Second, against the tendency to think that all religions are basically saying the same thing, close study of miracles within their respective contexts--even miracles that strongly resemble each other--shows just how distinctive those traditions are. A third reason is not spelled out at the beginning but becomes more explicit at the end of the book. There is a long distance between the sense of enchantment found in these stories and the crude credulity/wish-fulfillment reflected in surveys, which report major portions of the population believe more firmly in UFOs and personal angels than in God, and are more passionate about spirituality than about religion.

Woodward's principles of selection and exposition are simple. He includes stories that are both interesting and classic. He interprets them from within the respective traditions. He recounts only stories involving figures who are (at some point in time) human--even if as avatars. Finally, he wants to include stories that in principle were witnessed by others, thus excluding the Resurrection of Jesus but including (perhaps inconsistently, but we are glad) the Buddha's experience of enlightenment.

Part 1 deals with monotheistic religions. After an introduction to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that surveys their respective founders and sacred texts, Woodward walks the reader through the miracle stories of the Hebrew Bible, noting how they tend to decrease as the story progresses. He then tells miracle stories associated with Jewish sages, saints, and spiritual masters. The section on Christianity traces the miracle stories of the Gospels (especially Mark), the Acts of the Apostles, and Christian saints from antiquity to Francis of Assisi. The same pattern obtains for Islam, as Woodward includes miracles associated with Muhammad and then a number of Sufi saints. Part 2 provides an introduction to the religions of India, followed by sections dealing with the miracles of the Lord Krishna and Hindu saints, and then the miracles of the Buddha and the Buddhist saints. Readers working their way through the miracles and their explications will be impressed by certain patterns that Woodward has built into his structure: the way founders attract miracle stories, especially around their births; the way miracles serve as demonstrations of divine power for purposes of publicity and polemic; the way the miraculous and the mystical are frequently found together. Most of all, readers will notice that virtually all these stories are about long ago and far away.

In part 3, Woodward turns briefly to the survival of the miraculous in contemporary manifestations of these classic religious traditions: the medicalization of the miraculous in the modern Roman Catholic process of canonization; the democratization of the miraculous in Pentecostal healings through ministers like Oral Roberts; the miracle as blessing through the Hasidic rebbe; and finally, miracles and God consciousness in a contemporary Hindu saint (Mata Amritanandamayi). An even briefer epilogue suggests that in contemporary Western rootlessness, the desire for the miraculous has much less to do with a reverence for the power of the divine outside of us and much more to do with "the theater of the questing inner self."

Woodward leaves undeveloped some intriguing themes that his examples and his commentary suggest. It would be instructive to pursue through his examples the multiple ways in which the human body serves as the arena and the symbol of the divine presence and activity through these diverse traditions. And each tradition also shows a persistence between the popular embrace of the miraculous and the suspicion of signs and wonders from the intellectual elite. These and other fascinating aspects of religion lay embedded in these odd yet compelling stories, and make the book a genuine resource not only for general reading but also for courses in religious studies. Most difficult of all are the questions with which Woodward leaves the reader: What are we to make of the contemporary willingness to believe in miracles despite all the arguments made against them by Enlightenment critics? And what are we to make of the fact that such belief is detached from convictions concerning God's power in the world, or the pursuit of exemplary holiness, or the cultivation of rigorous spiritual discipline? Is Woodward right in suggesting that for present-day Americans this is a matter of affirming a divinity within, "a way of saying that in the privacy of individual experience, where all meaning resides, I have come to believe in myself"?

Luke Timothy Johnson is the author of Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel (HarperSanFrancisco).