Did the Iron Axe - Head Float?

Did The Iron Axe Head Float?

By Harley Wheeler

Sixteen years ago, a story was going around about a test for professors in Christian (Southern Baptist)colleges. Professors were suddenly taken into an office and asked one and only one question: “Did the Iron Axe head float?” If they answered “No”, they were fired, and if they answered “Yes”, they kept their jobs. These stories were passed in whispered tones, as describing a great scandal.

The wonderfully bizarre question refers to events described in 2 Kings 6:1-7, when the prophet Elisha was camped by a river with a company of disciples. One of them had an axe-head fly off the handle and land in the river. He cried out to Elisha that it was a borrowed axe-head. Elisha threw a stick into the water and the axe-head floated to the top.

This bail-out of the disciple certainly shows that Elisha was a kindly, helpful miracle-worker. However, the suspicion that we have here a miracle done over a trifle, or worse, a story concocted to enhance Elisha’s reputation, apparently makes professors of religion really squirm.

But should it?

I don’t really believe for a minute this bit of folklore about the professors, but as a practical, not an academic theologian, I sincerely believe that when scripture describes certain people, at certain times, doing and saying certain things, then those things were done and said by the people so described. Interestingly, if you ask the lay people in my church about the “axe-head” test for seminary professors, they fail to see anything wrong about it. Most of my Christian lay friends consider requiring direct answers to questions of this kind an obvious step.

So should professors blanch at the story of Elisha, his clumsy disciple and floating Home Depot products? I would say no. But, as G.K. Chesterton said, “The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them..” (G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy p.228 Waterbrook Press, 1994) This being true, we must lift the fog of that doctrine and uncover the truth.

The first usual objection to the story is that it describes an improbable event that cannot be proven scientifically. One can answer this by remembering that the text does not say;”in the event you lose your axe-head in the river, this is an unfailing remedy.” The ancients knew they were describing a unique event, like your choice of donuts at the staff meeting. No contention is made that stick tossing is experimentally repeatable. Does this mean that it is a false story? No, because many events, the Crimean War, the writing of Das Kapital and Woodstock are not experimentally repeatable, but remain true nonetheless.

Scientistic minds usually object that we have no natural cause for the miracle, but in this they are wrong. The cause of the miracle is the will of a rational being.

Allow a brief apologetic for the admission of rational choice as one of the known causes of events in the material universe. Imagine a speaker asking a lecture hall full of people to decide on the count of three, to raise or not to raise their arm. The speaker makes clear that he or she does not care which they do, it is their choice. On the count of three, some number of arms will be raised. What caused this event? The proper answer is rational choice. Rational choice may be described in terms of probabilities, but cannot be explained in naturalistic terms except by appealing to random causes, and this is patently false, because the audience experienced making a rational choice, not a random impulse. Rational choice is a very real factor in the events of the portion of universe in which we live, seeing as it is somewhat cluttered with choice-making, rational beings.

So our answer to the first objection is that the scripture consciously describes not a recipe or incantation, but a discrete, one-time event, caused by the choice of One Who Has Miracle Power. God does something in response to Elisha. So we have a cause that is known to the universe of conscious minds, and an agent, God, whom even modern educated Baptist and Methodist minds agree is real.

The other usual objection is that this miracle describes a trifle. It seems to be beneath God’s standards and therefore smacks of paganism or reputation-building hype on Elisha’s behalf. It carries for some the scent of superstition and credulity that I am told the west has struggled against for many years.

Before we answer this, we may reflect that I have so far asked no one to be more credulous than one must be to admit that there is a God, who does, on occasion, do things.

We might also reflect that the professors are in a polite way calling the story a fabulous lie, and the miracle-working Elisha of 2 Kings an old fraud. Is it any wonder that the pew-sitters are in sympathy with me?

Does the story really provoke the darkness of superstition or paganism? It does not if you know anything about superstition or pagan myth. A fine old superstition might caution us that axe-heads will always fly off after you see a barn owl. Pagan mythology would alter the story by having the woodcutter lured to his doom by a river nymph who offered to show him where to find the axe-head. He might, as an alternative, be punished for his clumsiness by the having the axe attached permanently to his arm. The Bible event, like most personal miracles in the Bible, is remarkably low-key. Furthermore, it is not a capricious act, since Elisha merely responds to help a friend in need.

So I believe that the story of the axe-head that floated is, after a fashion, a beachhead in the battle between faith and modernist thought. What is our confession of faith before the modern world? Does the God we worship answer prayers and act to help individual humans? Do we believe that God gave Elisha a ministry of miracles for the encouragement of his people? Affirmative answers to these questions bring the pastor and the professor in line with the centuries-old, sensible orthodoxy of the ordinary Christian.

I further believe that this involvement in the affairs of humanity that we recognize as answered prayer was always a sign that God would involve Himself decisively in the person of Christ. St. Romanos, an orthodox liturgical poet of the fourth century, set forth this truth when he wrote these lines:

“Elisha of old painted its image in prophecy

when he drew the axe–head from the river.

With a light object the prophet dragged a heavy,

Warning you (Satan) and teaching you

That, by a tree, Adam is to be brought up

From wretchedness again to paradise.”

(St.Romanos the Melodist, On The Life of Christ translated by Ephrem Lash Harper Collins, 1998 p.156)

So in your prayers today, will you be praying to the One who made the iron axe-head float?

Pastor Harley Wheeler