Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
115
The NT could not frame its episteme in any rationalistic terms. Reason is subservient to culture and ‘revelation’ in it. Rationalism is epistemological. The NT certainly has a wide ranging relationship between the miraculous and knowledge. Philosophy has come a long way since.
“I believe, help my unbelief.” was said in person to Jesus by a desperate, honest man. And Jesus made belief/unbelief irrelevant. As any real miracle would. It isn’t my problem.
Jonah isn’t reasonable as history. Superb literature, yes. I love it. For its meaning at the time. Written centuries after its setting. Up there with Job. It’s reasonable for its sublime humanism. God was becoming a responsible adult by the C6th.
I gave you the like because I sympathize,
And here even more so. It’s a brilliant passage. I lost my certainty when I lost the Pericope Adulterae John 7:53–8:11. I can’t get it back.
Aye, if Jesus is not God incarnate, then its all just the greatest story ever told. But His morality is still the finest of its time for all time.
The the sign of Jonah is the resurrection of Jesus. And I never could find certainty about that as a historical fact. Probable maybe, yeah at best. So that passage from John you referred to is no big deal for me after reading NT criticism on and off for 20 years.
It was being convinced that Jesus was a myth and thinking I could know God through a philosophical argument that opened up that most unbearable skepticism I earlier referred to.
And it’s when God visits you and there is that presence that surpasses all understanding, then you can appreciate what the NT has to say about the self-evident testimony of the Spirit.
A triune God is too good to not be true. Otherwise he is just a lonely God, and yet in Christ he became that to deliver us from sin. The greatest most outrageous story ever told.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
118
The sign of Jonah was made up by Jesus as we all deconstruct and make up typologies from ancient literature; He saw Himself throughout the TaNaKh, He was right for the wrong reason, and/or wrong for the right reason. There is absolute certainty that it is excellent philosophical and theological fiction. God or no God, the Jonah fantasy did not happen. 30 years ago it was gospel for me. Losing it to literature and the re-development of civilized thinking didn’t come as a loss, unlike the unbearable loss of the Pericope Adulterae.
It’s all deeply subjective.
I see your pain in trying to know God philosophically without Jesus: it can’t be done as we both know.
And I’ve had numinous and extremely… coincidental experiences, but no Gideon’s fleece. So the Spirit has to testify harder in my case now. And I’ve asked.
The trinity doesn’t work for me any more as God the Son is a back projection too far. Jesus works theoretically as a human-divine natured hybrid, but not in any atonement theory I’ve ever come across, apart from mine. I like the outrageousness regardless, but our milages vary.
His way I know. What I want is Him. I can’t have Him.
That is a lie whether you believe it to be I don’t know and neither do I judge you.
What the arguments do not prove is that you are not God. It’s the rational possibility of solipsism that will sweep even the best philosopher off their feet. If they are honest about it. And from the place of abandonment they can seek after the God that did not have to know loneliness. And those who seek him will find him.
Indeed God doesnt change His ways, which is precisely why He still heals today. There is no indication in the NT that there was a limit to the time God would provide gifts to the church, which include healing and miracles.
Experience can be denied as can the obviously inferable causes behind some events. Take Maggie for instance. She could add 2 + 2 and get 4 (and so should her readers), and we’re not talking about ternary numbers.
It’s important not to lie to yourself (and then blame God).
[Blessed is the one who] …speaks truth IN his heart. Psalm 15:2 NIV
Abraham asks for a sign in Genesis 15:8, and God gave it to him. Jesus tells us to ask God for what we need in Matthew 7. So I don’t think Matthew 16 means any request for a sign means a denial of faith.
Matthew 16 And the Pharisees and Sad′ducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. 2 He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather; for the sky is red.’ 3 And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. 4 An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah.” So he left them and departed.
So when we ask for a sign we need then a sign will be given. It is demanding more than this which is the problem of an evil generation. The problem is that people do tend to demand a change in the rules by which life works – demanding something that makes faith unnecessary. And that is what God will not do.
So no, God will not provide proof. Nor will God provide evidence according to scientific standards. That would be a change in rules by which the world works – a change in the very laws of nature He created to make life possible. The miracle is always exceptional – the exception to the rules in order to inspire faith (and I am talking about statistical anomalies not magic).
Yes even if Jesus was walking on ice, it doesn’t make the events non miraculous! The point is that, whether we are talking about Biblical events or healing events today, just because we find a scientific explanations for things doesn’t mean it wasn’t a miracle. Demanding that miracles violate the laws of nature in a way which makes doubt impossible is the demand of an evil generation.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
125
Show me. Or must I take your statement on faith?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
126
Don’t call me a liar mate. You don’t pay me enough to lie.
Actually, it was more like 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1, wasn’t it, and the binary inference from the least significant digit was most significant: God or no God. Or just take the average. Junior high school math teachers should understand.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
129
OK mate. You didn’t no. The apology is mine. I’m a tad sensitive to that word.
No lie.
Nobody is lying to me. Nobody is lying period.
No lie.
If He wants me to know Him, it’s entirely up to Him. Second to 77th hand won’t do it. And neither will, can He. And none of those hands deal divine intelligence.
No lie.
When He walked the Earth, believing was easy. Believing wasn’t the problem. Believing rightly was the problem. Since the Scientific Revolution catalysed Enlightenment, believing became problematic overnight. Philosophy took off like the music, like a rocket.
I don’t think that much has changed with the particularity of those who believed and those who didn’t.
The revelation of Jesus hits people in rather unique ways. I appreciated how Keener recognized in his comments of the Asbury outpouring that those who waited and sacrificed the most were not the ones who received as much as those who happened by chance upon the work of the Spirit.
Another subject for another day and I’ve yet to read Hamann on this. However, having said that, I do like how the coequal value of fairness and desert squash whatever pipedreams anyone might have for ordering society on a single principle of reason.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
131
No. I cannot know Him until I die. At best. If He were to perform an impossible, consilient, BBC level miracle, I still wouldn’t know Him. But I’d know of Him for certain. I’d know all is well for all forever. That there is transcendence. It would certainly make our conversation more nuanced. I suppose He could blind me off my horse on the road to Damascus, but that wouldn’t be consilient. I wouldn’t trust such an experience. I want it too much.
Culture has changed completely in that it has been augmented incalculably. I believed and now I cannot, because my believing mechanism was faulty. Because I caught up with culture. Such culture did not exist in His day. There is no comparison. Science changes everything.
For me Jesus is the revelation. But that story could be entirely natural, in all good will, by all concerned, starting with His mother. And if He is the revelation of transcendence, of purpose, of Love, I don’t see any other revelation at all.
Asbury looks entirely natural to me, like all ‘revival’. Which caught me up once upon a time. And had no substance whatsoever.
Injustice remains.
All rhetoric hinges on acknowledging our complicity in that.
Should that be surprising when you have forty-seven different ways of calling him impotent and dictate what he may and may not do? That rather belies desire.