Miracles of the New Creation

Big idea

Summary

Lewis turns to a second family, which he calls Miracles of the New Creation: events that do not merely accelerate an existing natural process, as the previous chapter's miracles did, but introduce something with no real precedent in nature's ordinary operations at all — a break not in degree but in kind. The Virgin Birth heads the list: unlike ordinary conception, sped up or intensified, it is a genuinely new mode of origin, foreshadowing, Lewis suggests, a fresh start for the created order rather than an accelerated version of an existing one.

The Resurrection is the pivotal case: not, on Lewis's reading, simply the resuscitation of a corpse back into ordinary biological life (which would eventually end in death again, as with Lazarus), but the emergence of a transformed, glorified mode of bodily existence, still recognizably physical (the Gospels stress that the risen Christ eats and can be touched) yet no longer bound by the limitations, and eventual decay, that govern ordinary matter. Lewis treats this as the 'firstfruits' of an entirely new kind of nature, not a return to the old one.

The Transfiguration and Ascension continue the same theme: momentary, and then permanent, glimpses of matter itself being taken up, transformed, and glorified rather than left behind or discarded, which Lewis takes as evidence against any reading of Christianity that treats the material world as something to escape rather than something ultimately to be redeemed and renewed alongside humanity.

Lewis closes the book's argument here by drawing the two families of miracle together: the Old Creation miracles show God's power fully at home within nature as she now stands, working through and intensifying her existing patterns; the New Creation miracles show that same power breaking beyond nature's current limits altogether, giving advance notice, in Lewis's phrase, of a new chapter about to begin for the whole created order — not the abolition of nature but her transformation, with the Resurrection standing as the pattern and guarantee of what that transformation will finally look like.

Key points

• 'Miracles of the New Creation' introduce something with no precedent in nature's existing patterns, a difference in kind rather than merely in degree or speed.
• The Virgin Birth is a genuinely new mode of origin, not an accelerated version of ordinary conception.
• The Resurrection is not resuscitation back into ordinary mortal life (as with Lazarus) but the emergence of a transformed, still-physical, no-longer-perishable mode of bodily existence — the 'firstfruits' of a new order.
• The Transfiguration and Ascension extend the same theme: matter itself being glorified and taken up, not discarded, which counts against treating the physical world as something to escape.
• Old Creation miracles show God's power at home within nature as she now stands; New Creation miracles show that same power breaking beyond nature's current limits, previewing her ultimate transformation rather than her abolition.

Illustrations & analogies

• Lazarus's resuscitation back into ordinary mortal life is deliberately contrasted with Christ's resurrection into a transformed, undying bodily life, to sharpen exactly what Lewis means by a 'New Creation' miracle.
• The risen Christ eating and being touched by the disciples is used to insist the Resurrection body is still recognizably physical, not a ghost or a merely spiritual survival.

Related Scripture

• 1 Corinthians 15:20-23
• Luke 24:36-43
• John 11:38-44

For reflection and discussion

1. What difference does it make to Christian hope, in your view, whether the Resurrection is pictured as a return to ordinary mortal life (like Lazarus) or as the start of a genuinely new kind of bodily existence?
2. Lewis argues the Transfiguration and Ascension count against treating matter as something to be escaped. How does that sit with ways you've heard Christian hope described, as 'going to heaven' versus creation being renewed?