the most powerful force known to me is the power of love - and it is the one that allows us to move mountains. And if we use prayer, it is not to ask God to move mountains on our behalf but to ask him to give us the strength to carry our cross or to move the mountain.
If you look at the birth of Jesus it is clear to me that the power behind it was the love of Mary, and her commitment to live the word of God and to love this neighbour like thyself, e.g. thy own. To believe that Mary would have got away to sell her pregnancy as an act of magic by God and that her comtemporaries would have believed that is at best naive. To believe they would have accepted magic conceptions and that a girl at the time would not have killed herself or at least the baby as evident in the more recent history of rape victims in the [cosovo conflict]. The miracle of a woman and her husband to be raising such a child and loving it like “thyself” goes beyond our comprehension, but it is a miracle as it turns an act of power, hate and oppression into a beacon of love and hope - the most profound change to reality. In his death Jesus did the same to the cross, thus putting the nail in the coffin of the Roman empire by turning victims into victors.
I know of two young austrian/serbian women born out of such situation, now pro life campaigners. I do wonder if they are aware of their brother, children not born because humans willed them to be there, quite the opposite, so free of sin to begin with.
I wondered why the catholic church was so obsessed with Mary, the mother of Christ. Did they ever admire her for what she had dome in changeing history by being obedient to God - or was it by her status as an A-list celebrity as they see it? I wonder even more why people would look at such divine intervention as unworthy of consideration for a miracle. Would it not be supernatural enough, would it be because such a son of God would not fit our concept of divinity and being free from sin?
You can see why I am a Christian sceptic, as in being sceptic about our materialistic interpretation of miracles etc. To me the love I experience is the most supernatural power I an understand and be thankful for. It is more than enough to follow Jesus on this basis - free from wishful thinking
The world is not fundamentally evil, but it is not perfect either. Here the commonsense judgment coincides with the Christian assessment that the world in its current predicament is deeply wounded, so that the whole creation suffers and awaits healing.
It doesn’t mean that God is not good.
Being the first and the last, God encompasses all the times, encircles the entire history of the world, and waits for us at the end of times to heal everyone and everything that would not reject healing.
But God can’t spare us the painful experience of history because it’s the life we live that makes us what we are. This is true for individuals, for communities, and for the entire world.
While history is not over yet, God is present at every moment of time and shares all our tribulations. This is the image of God embodied in Jesus Christ; and this revelation of divine Logos in Christ confirms the ultimate goodness of God.
if you live in God and God in you the suffering is overcome as he is the way to overcome suffering. Suffering is the logical consequence of being apart from God. If is the discrepancy between reality and how we would like it to be. As soon as we accept Gods reality we overcome all suffering and if we live his word we overcome the suffering of others.
God does not need to change the laws of nature but needs to change us to how we ought to be.
If all suffering were just the discrepancy between our illegitimate wishes (i.e., wishes that contradict the will of God) and reality, your position would be correct. But I suppose it’s oversimplification of suffering and evil.
Moreover, if every suffering were like you’ve said, why would anyone bother to relieve the suffering of anyone else? If you were right, those who suffer would rather need to be lectured about their inordinate desires than to get any (other) help.
The problem is not whether there is such discrepancy or not; certainly, this discrepancy is real. But the problem is, what is the reason of the discrepancy? Your position implies the reality is totally ok, while our wishes are inordinate. That’s where the point of contention is.
One late night in grad school someone decreed that we would debate the proposition that “In miracles, conservation of mass and energy hold”. I remember none of the debate except a lot of laughter and more beer than was wise.
I sometimes think of miracles in terms of a science fiction series where someone devises apparatus that can “rewrite” the portion of the “equation of the universe” in the range covered by the apparatus. The device had a limitation in that mass and energy had to be conserved.
I “demand” a physical resurrection because that’s what the term ἀνάστασις means. It will be more than merely a physical resurrection, but it is not less than one.
Really? God owed something to the Adversary?
The debate over this has potent advocates on both sides.
I can’t figure out what you’re really saying here – it sounds like you’re denying the Incarnation.
Which is why there is the idea of Jesus Ben Panthera, or why Bruce Chilton wrote a book about the historical Jesus where one of his major points is Jesus grew up with the stigma of being a “mamzer,” an Israelite of suspect paternity. This would be true whether born of a virgin or not, if that virgin story was not a later fabrication. Those who called him Lord would have believed it. Those who did not would see Mary as a “whore” or victim of a Roman rape.
Am I reading this right? Women pregnant out of wedlock are all expected to kill themselves? I doubt God would have chose that type of woman to be his mother. Am I missing something?
Augustine said this:
The Redeemer came and the deceiver was overcome. What did our Redeemer do to our Captor? In payment for us He set the trap, His Cross, with His blood for bait. He [Satan] could indeed shed that blood; but he deserved not to drink it. By shedding the blood of One who was not his debtor, he was forced to release his debtors.
I prefer to think of us as holding ourselves hostage and through solidarity and love, Jesus paid a debt to us to release ourselves. I would t take the language too far though.
The idea of God paying a debt to the devil or himself just doesn’t sit well with the Christian skeptic in me.
I am wondering if he thinks Jesus was a flesh and blood individual or just a spiritual being that appears to us. I really can’t tell.
As you know, there are different viewpoints (interpretations) to why Jesus had to die on the cross.
One viewpoint is connected to the combination of ‘mercy and truth’. We have to include both into the good news or we get an unbalanced, misleading message.
God told there will come a payment for what we do. Wrongdoings will get a punishment. Truth includes that we do not just forget what God promised about the wrongdoings and rebellion. That problem needs to be solved and what Jesus did was a solution to the problem. It has been argued that dying on the cross was only one step in the forgiveness, the atonement was ritually accomplished when Jesus brought the blood (symbol of life) to the heavenly temple. Anyhow, the crucial point is that we were given a truthful solution to the problem of wrongdoings. Mercy and truth joined.
I am thinking of Marshall brains slogan “why wont God heal amputees”. If you look at Martine Wright, who lost her leg in the July 7th bombing you can see how her suffering is overcome by accepting the reality of the situation, or Nick Vujicic, or Joni Eareckson Tada. Would you say their wishes are inordinate? Should they not demand that if there is a God he would have to heal them by giving them functional arms and legs?
To believe in a God that holds humans at ransom is perverse.
Ransom: something paid or demanded for the freedom of a captured person
God gave us our freedom. to begin with. A ransom is not something you “owe” but something extorted from you by deceit.
The prophecy said that a virgin will become pregnant. It does not say that she still is a virgin after becoming pregnant but implies her virginity at the point of becoming pregnant. Why do we feel it has to be an act of magic for jesus to be born instead of an act of pure love, love that is selfless? Do we want a Mary that is an A-list celebrity by having a magic baby that points us to an irrational God - or a Mary that generates a miracle in showing us what selfless love can lead to that points us to a God of love and logic?
It is precisely the opposite. It is the change in perception of loving that neighbour like thyself - not oneself - that made people realise his divine nature. It turned a “victim of a Roman rape” into a victor. To create a human being free of sin he has to exist against human will but be born of Gods will. A magic baby would make Mary an A-list celebrity - and who would not wish for a magic baby?
looks like the link did not work
It is precisely that she did not do what most of us would do why God chose her. In their decision to love that baby like their own they profoundly changed reality to turn this act of hate and oppression into a beacon of love and hope. Look at todays debate about abortion and how people argue that in cases of rape its okay to kill the baby - not the rapist. It is that which is perverse!
@St.Roymond Vinnie explains it quite well in saying that Jesus paid for our sin, e.g. the devil in us to release us from being hostage to our “self”. The atonement works the other way round, not in God being atoned to us but in us being atoned to God so we can become one again.
I believe Jesus was very much a flesh and blood individual. That’s the whole point of it. And he is risen indeed, risen inside us so we can live together with him
As I learned to pray as a child I would translate as:
May I be humble
and my heart be pure
shall no one live in there
but Jesus for sure
Happy Easter everyone and may Jesus come alive inside of you today. May you meet him outside the grave and see him inside some of those around you and how the resurrection transforms us and sets us free from ourselves.
Yes, Jesus was a human, 100%. At the same time, he was the Word of God incarnated to a human being, 100%.
The hidden plan of God was to unite everything on earth and in heaven, and atone these, in Christ. Paul wrote about this in the letters to Ephesians (1:9-10) and Colossians, and elsewhere. If Jesus would have been just a human, he could not have united the heavenly to the earthly. For me, it does not matter much if Mary was a virgin (I do not believe in the doctrine of original sin as teached by the church in Rome) but a logical conclusion of everything written in the biblical scriptures is that Jesus was not just a human, he was also the heavenly Lord.
Why won’t God heal amputees? Why won’t God heal terminally ill? Why won’t God protect us from ever losing our loved ones? All these are legitimate questions; and there may be some valid, although incomplete answers. I have already mentioned an answer that is almost obvious from the Christian vantage point.
Certainly, this answer may be rejected by those people who believe that, if God has power over natural laws, divine goodness demands nothing less than immediate divine intervention.
Hence they often attempt to redefine God as someone or something entirely stripped of any supernatural power; e.g., as the power of selfless love that is sometimes felt by human beings (in this case, why employ any God-talk at all? Let’s call a spade a spade, and a human feeling - a human feeling).
The bottom line is that theodicy is the wrong starting point to talk about God. Faith is about feelings, but it is not only about feelings. The first thing to consider is whether it’s reasonable to assume that the world is created out of nothing by a free and intentional force? Moreover, do we have any ground to claim that the writers of Christian Scriptures - that is, of the Old and New Testament - have correctly grasped this force’s intentions?
These questions are for rational consideration, which is the task of natural theology. To disregard natural theology was a huge mistake of previous centuries - and now we’ve got the bad theologies that denigrate and deny sciences as well as the other bad theologies that distort the most basic Christian doctrines to such extent that the Gospel itself becomes meaningless.
Only if you’re imposing modern categories on ancient concepts.
The Greek λύτρον (LU-tron) doesn’t really match any modern English term. It in monetary contexts means a payment to secure someone’s freedom, but that is not the only use. The root indicates “release” or “loosing”, so the base meaning of λύτρον is something that leads to something or someone being set free, which in the case of slaves or prisoners of war tended to be money and was indeed “something you owe”. This is especially true with prisoners of war in ancient times; it was established practice that prisoners could be “bought back”; in fact in some periods and places the amount to be paid for common soldiers, officers, and commanders were set by custom, so if a king or noble lost a certain number of men to a foe he could calculate the amount owed – no need to bargain.
The monetary meaning interestingly applied not just to people but to anything including cattle, land, and other property. In this use it was related to what we might call right of first refusal, i.e. when a property becomes available for purchase someone with that right has the first option to buy (this shows up, BTW, in the book of Ruth). There was no deceit or extortion involved any more than with the ransom of soldiers; it was a known obligation plus an opportunity.
But as noted money – or even goods – was not the only meaning. In terms of a payment, it could be made by actions, including acts of valor that provided nothing at all to the one holding the one(s) being “ransomed” but merely demonstrated that the one seeking their release was worthy of receiving the one(s) being sought.
And while the common understanding of Christ ransoming us has generally been that He paid a price (to whomever), this last understanding makes more sense: as in Revelation in order to open scrolls someone had to be worthy, worthiness was demonstrated by actions. This can be seen in the phrase “gave His life as a ransom for many”, rendering it “gave His life a release for many”: His life wasn’t a payment given to anyone but was given to demonstrate that He was worthy of receiving us as His.
Magic isn’t involved. Magic is a matter of performing actions that compel forces or powers to behave in a desired way.
That said, your two statements above seem to contradict: first you affirm a virgin birth but then deny any divine action involved.
This again sounds like you’re denying the Incarnation. That’s a problem because without the Incarnation there is no Redeemer.
No, it wasn’t. People realized Christ’s divine nature due to His matching (fulfilling) declarations about divinity in the Old Testament writings, and because He made the claim of being divine in word and action repeatedly and confirmed His claim by action including miracles.
That’s not what the Resurrection is about – it is about His body regaining life, the kind of life we were intended to have in the first place.
Yet it still seems you deny the Incarnation when you say things like this:
That sounds like you do think it was rape by a Roman soldier.