I’m perfectly fine with a natural explanation for things that seem supernatural in nature. As mentioned in other threads I outright reject an overwhelming large amount of things under the umbrella of modern miracles through the laying on of hands such as instant healing, casting out demons , speaking in tongues and so on.
But for me the belief in a god instantly opens up what we call the supernatural, or even a term maybe like multidimensional or whatever. Either ways it’s something outside of our typical reality.
I know that if I wanted too I could try to read Matthew 14 naturalistically.
For example the word for walking can mean walking around. The word there that means sea ( lake ) is also used in some places to say seashore.
So it could be read that Jesus was walking around on the seashore and the disciples saw him from the boat and thought it was a ghost. I mean I know people nowadays who believes in ghosts and have thought people in windows or cemeteries were ghosts. So maybe they saw him and thought he was a ghost. Then Peter realized it was Jesus and so he said to Jesus tell me to get out of the boat and maybe the water was not that deep right there but like with big waves, perhaps they were several feet high and it was causing Peter to stumble and sink. Jesus rushed out and grabbed him and they climbed back into the boat and the wind calmed down and maybe the wind instantly calming down is what lead to the exclaim about Jesus. After all it talks of God calming storms as well and maybe it was read as Jesus calming the breath of God and in order to calm the breath of God you just be God etc.
Now I don’t find that interpretation crazy, I definitely find it less crazy than an ice bridge in the Mediterranean, but nonetheless, I feel like the image is of Jesus somehow walking about the waters hyperlinking to all the chaos and death and resurrection language.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
41
Gravity wasn’t the problem. you can’t walk without it, or Velcro… AH!!!
Well, whatever the mechanism. Sort of goes the question of if Jesus was walking across a flowing river, would he go straight across it, or be carried downstream with the flow.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
43
The custard would have to cancel catadromous inertia. Nothing the Spirit can’t handle I’m sure. But wouldn’t Jesus know to step upstream at an angle to offset the flow? Or start out upstream taking the downstream angled destination in to account? Or would He just step out in faith?
Although miracles happen in the Bible, their use seems to be minimized. Not sinking while walking across the lake is certainly unusual, but slogging across the lake in a storm by foot is not making things easier for Himself. Many miracles likely have more of a natural explanation than popular imagination holds. For example, Exodus mentions the wind that was used to part the water. Wave calculations support the possibility that just the right wind would have set up a seiche, parting one of the Bitter Lakes. But it’s not as if this happened every afternoon at five on Egypt’s border and the Egyptians never noticed - there’s some impressive coordination of timing involved.
Walking on water itself does not have a plausible natural explanation. There was a study showing that the underwater springs in the Sea of Galilee produce patches of water with different salinity and thus different freezing points. As a result, one could have small patches of ice on an otherwise unfrozen lake. So far, so good. But the idea that Jesus was standing on such an ice patch to apparently walk on water does not reflect serious consideration of the practicality. Besides the very low likelihood that He was a champion surfer, even champion surfers do not use blocks of ice for surfboards. This is during a storm, which would interfere both with having stable patches of water of differing salinity and with the ability to balance on a melting bit of ice. Similarly, the suggestion that Elijah actually dumped kerosene, not water, over his sacrifice fails to explain Elijah’s miraculous ability to refine hydrocarbons well before the procedure was invented.
Maybe he was paddle boarding, and this was the only way they knew to express it. Peter’s experience certainly is very similar to what happened to me when I attempted to paddle board, as well.
Kidding of course. I accept the miracle of it, but if I were to learn it was a literary device illustrating Jesus’ divinity, I would not be upset. Sort of like the strange rendering of the dead coming out of their tombs at the time of the resurrection.
Welcome, @Jason_Patterson. Good point. Some of us have more trouble with the resurrection than with other miracles; maybe others do with walking on water, too. I wonder why–maybe both are examples of things we wish we could do on a daily basis, but can’t.
Maybe you can tell us more about yourself sometime, either here or on the “How’d you get here” thread.
Blessings.
It fits the story better than any other explanation even magical ones. He wasn’t bobbing up and down like a ping pong ball on the surface of stormy water. Nor was He floating above the water. Therefore he was waking on a solid surface below the surface of the water. And water in the form of a solid surface is called ice.
It is still miraculous because ice in the sea of Galilee is unexpected. Scientists do think it was colder in the time of Jesus (between 1,500 and 2,500 years ago) – thus it was more likely in the time of Jesus than today but still far from normal expectations.
Well…sure, Jesus conquered. He also paid the penalty for everyone’s sins. Is that just a literary device? The Bible has different kinds of literature. The chaos imagery goes into the primeval past and may generally refer to early conditions (who knows) but only obliquely… If they wanted “literal” for that, then we are missing the chapters on plate techtonics. The gospel accounts of the life of Jesus are different. They are or were biographies. As such they are accounts that discuss what the individual writers and followers saw and experienced. They were also meant to persuade/demonstrate/ illuminate how Jesus fulfilled long-extant expectations of the coming of a Jewish man who would be Messiah and God…Remember what Jesus told the disciples of John. They came with a query from John (who at that time was in prison and about to lose his head). John wanted to know if he had it right —was Jesus in fact the One prophesied? Not the moment for symbolism or hyperbole. Jesus recited a list of things that were also in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. See Luke 7:22…“Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor."
Now, if you want, you could say that any one of those things was symbolic or hyperbolic, if it seems too incredible to you. But hyperbolic raising of the dead hardly inspires one to declare a Man the Messiah, God-Incarnate. Would it have consoled John who was about to experience something that was not hyperbolic? It seems to me to be the same with the issue of Him walking on the water. You and I cannot do it. But for the Creator of the Universe, it is a walk in the park. (so to speak!). And this is a biography.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
52
Entirely. What else? All theology is. The only possible ontic aspect is the incarnation.
No, not really. The sacrificial system in the Temple – which had existed for centuries – was not even a literary device. It was something people really did. The outworking of it was more a less a pre-figuring (if you can use that word) of the Real Deal which was to come. There really is going to be a judgment someday. All evil needs to be accounted for. You and I actually believe in that ourselves. And that is how the universe works. But the price for evil could only be paid by a spotless “no imperfections” substitute – that is, since the actual perpetrators (you and me and 7 billion of our closest friends) are hardly sinless and thus cannot make up for what we have done. That was the sacificial system. It was a teaching device to demonstrate a particular need, or conundrum of the human race. But Jesus’ death was no literary device. It really happened. If it did not happen, then we have no possibility for forgiveness. If it really did happen and there was no actual resurrection, then we also have no possibility for forgiveness — because, obviously, the sacrifice was not sufficient and God is dead. But there WAS a resurrection (the real deal, not Caspar the Friendly Ghost) — and consequently there IS the possibility of forgiveness. “There is no other name given among men whereby we may be saved.”…"If Christ be not raised, then our faith is in vain. "
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
54
No really. The sacrificial system was ritual. That’s entirely anthropological. Made up. A device. It has no ontic aspect. PSA, judgement, evil, evil needing to be accounted for are all made up, just stories whether God grounds being or not. Jesus is the at-one-ment with God by being the only possible demonstration of Him, in the claim of His resurrection. If there is transcendence then all our brokenness will be deconstructed and fixed by Him. All our ritual and theology points through a glass very darkly to that.
Of course, the sacrificial system was ritual. But these sacrifices actually occurred. And they were meant as a “picture” of the real thing to come. Brokenness, as you put it, will be “deconstructed” but there is the image of God separating the sheep from the goats. So de-construction seems to be selective…Well, you have a different view of these things than I do…but nothing in the concept of “without the shedding of blood there can be no forgiveness of sins” is entirely figurative of “made up” as some sort of device. Too violent or disturbing an image (shed blood?) and meant to be that way — since the price for human evil is steep.
I don’t find the gospels reliable enough on epistemic grounds to justify accepting the miracle accounts in them. Even a friend I knew personally reporting a supernatural miracle would would leave a lot of room for doubting a supernatural event they might claim to have seen. The gospels are 2 thousand years old, anonymous writings that come at least a generation after the events they narrate. There is no way of confirming or disproving a lot of what is in them.
But since I do believe God actually incarnated himself and rose from the dead, I am not sure what the issue is with walking on water? Jesus walking on ice or underwater rocks is a mockery of what the gospel stories actually relay. They depict supernatural miracles. End of story. If they are false and misleading stories, we can imagine how they originated. For example, the feeding story may have originated and developed out of large communal meals Jesus had by the sea. Maybe someone saw Jesus walking on water in foggy conditions and it was really rocks.
Either way, this is NOT at all what is actually in the Biblical accounts which are reduced to creative fiction. Either Jesus performed supernatural miracles or he didn’t. A Jesus who walks on solid ground isn’t special. We all do that. A Jesus who has big communal meals is nothing special.
I don’t understand how Jesus “could” walk on water or what that means in wavy conditions. It’s nonsense from a physics standpoint.
But if there is an infinite God who created the entire universe, a God very well beyond our comprehension and understanding in every way imaginable except what He has chosen to be revealed to us, I don’t feel comfortable denying that (extra-dimensional?) Being the possibility of doing miraculous deeds that defy my current understanding of the universe. Especially when that Deity incarnated himself to bring about radical change. It’s hubris or pride that puts God in a such a tiny box. It’s elevating the intellect of man at God’s expense.
Yes, “we see as in a mirror dimly lit” or God’s ways are higher than our ways” are often abused and used to justify whatever a person believes in no matter how absurd. Despite this they are both true statements as far as I can tell. A healthier dose of intellectual humility from some Christian scientists would be nice. Some of us seem to have everything figured out and it all fits nice and neat into the little box we have made for it. Sometimes we rebel too far against bad ideology to the point where we are the purveyors of what we abhor.
Jesus received the Holy Spirit without measure. All the miracles were done by the Holy Spirit, including walking on water. Hebrews 2:4 states God’s testimony - the purpose of these miracles like walking on water was to verify the deity of Jesus.
Your question should relate more to Jesus 'teaching where he uses a range of literary techniques.
Sounds good, but elaborate a bit if you would. It sounds like you are saying Jesus was limited as being fully human, yet the Holy Spirit worked through him in the case of miracles? And God the Father looked on? Of course that chops God up into discrete entities at least on the surface of things, which is not consistent with how I understand the Trinity, but await your elaboration.