I guess. That’s why I did that post that one time so that someone can read through it. Come to their own conclusions.
I still have to work through it a few times a week when studying with someone in person. Every single person I share the gospel with, and baptize into Christ after a few months of studying the Bible I have to work through these subjects with.
I was curious also, I tried to message you before but it said I could not send a pm. Were you ever able to try using smoothies with protein or the workout bands? It was a while back and I don’t really remember the discussion anymore. Or if you were even looking for them yourself. I tried to find the discussion again and could not.
I’ve witnessed two of the gifts that Paul listed in I Corinthians.
I’m sure you have.
I think that the point is “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” This is the conviction that life is not restricted to the body, but that the body receives the breath of God that makes it a living soul.
Clearly you can believe what you wish, but I can testify otherwise.
Richard
So why does Mi insist on blind faith when none of the examples he gave here require any such thing? We don’t have to look far. There are plenty of other things where He will ignore the evidence to the contrary insisting on dogmas such as cessationism.
As for me, cessationism turns the Bible into a work of fantasy and fiction. Either the Bible is about reality as we experience it or it is not. I will not buy into any magical alterations in how things work at some point in history just to support dogma or pseudoscience. It is like saying the earth was flat in Biblical times but God or Satan changed it to a sphere at some time in order to suit some divine/nefarious purpose. Give me a break!
On the other hand… his own testimony is that these things do not happen in his own ministry as compared to that of @RichardG and @St.Roymond. How do we reconcile this. For me it is not difficult for I see little evidence that any of it in the Bible or today are supernatural/magical (apart from being a work of God or spirit) or contrary to the laws of nature (in other words, highly subjective as well as completely real). I believe there is an irreducibly subjective aspect to reality itself – life cannot be reduced to objective observation alone.
All four of those things require faith to believe and no one here can prove that any of those four things are true.
If anyone can do magic it’s easy to prove it. Just do it. But I saw magic happen is no more proof than I saw Bigfoot or aliens.
Even without a Bible, not a single person here could prove magic exists. If you could you would be rich.
And pseudoscience would be thinking God used some kind of quantum mechanics to cause a meteor to crash into earth helping the rise of mammals so that humans could evolve…….
Maybe you should try tooling into cessationism. Or open that thread back up and prove your point. Otherwise it’s just more well I feel….
One reason I believe Jesus performed miracles is because of the consequences that would come upon those who rejected his message. Given the miracles they really had no excuse and so the destruction that came upon them was justified.
Science has nothing to do with the miracles of Jesus and the New Testament. The great God of the universe who also created science is caable of anything including miracles. The creation itself is a miracle because it was done by God and done in a way that from a science point of view is understoood very well. Check out the Habermas evidence that Jesus rose from the dead. Is it surprising that Jesus who gave life to us all through creation cpould rise from the dead? Re the allegory of the Old Testament there is not as much as we are led to believe. I think a lot of the allegory claims for Genesis are due to a lack of aligning the clues from Genesis with the evidence from science. My new book coming out , Refelction on Genesis will address this topic. Lee VMI man
Contrary to what some keep thinking I’m saying despite having had this convo dozens of times and making an entire thread dedicated to it using several verses, I also believe in miracles.
Many in here have never ever studied this subject out from a theological perspective or from the views of the early church fathers. They don’t understand the difference between miracles of god versus miracles of laying on of hands despite scripture saying it’s a basic foundational teaching.
Hebrews 6:1-3
New American Standard Bible
The Danger of Falling Away
6 Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, 2 of instruction about washings and laying on of hands, and about the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment. 3 And this we will do, if God permits.
The miracles of laying on of hands was not random. It was consistent. It was a person having the ability to go and lay their hands on people and instantly heal them. Not just one person, but dozens and even hundreds of people. They would enter a new town, stand before Jews and pagans and begin healing the sick, raising the dead, healing the crippled, casting out demons and so on. Enough that entire crowds would turn out and see the miracles and repent and become Christians. Laying on of hands has nothing to do with prayer or fasting.
We know with fairly good odds that those things don’t happen anymore. There is not a single person who can go and begin healing dozens and dozens of people from death, crippled bones, blindness, and sickness by just laying their hands on them. A work that takes a few seconds. Can be done before crowds. Is instant.
Instead what we have now is miracles that occur through prayer. People may spend days praying and praying for someone and that person pulls through. But they can’t go and lay their hands on them and command the sickness to leave and the person instantly jumps up and then they do it to the next and the next and the next. When people claim that somehow has this ability, that person can never do it before a crowd like the apostles did.
So since it’s not instantly and supernatural, instead it’s prayer and prayer does not work most of the time. By that I mean almost everyone in America with stage 4 cancer gets prayed for and don’t come back. Almost everyone born crippled gets prayed for and never gets to walk. So when this kind of prayer works, such as praying for days or weeks for someone and so on it comes down to faith. So far no one on earth from any nation has been able to prove the supernatural.
So whenever prayers seem to be answered and very unlikely coincidences occur, they are not evidence that it was a supernatural event. You can always fall back to another explanation or a gap.
Which is why Christianity is a faith, and not a conclusion that everyone must come to if they oook at the evidence.
I think the world as revealed by science is amazing enough to support belief in a creator, a Christ and miracles. Particularly, the evidence of the fine tuning of the laws of nature, the existence of codes in DNA, and the existence of consciousness makes something like an omnipotent creator and miracles reasonable. Second, Christianity supports key intuitions that make life meaningful - that good is to be followed and not evil, to tell the truth and not lie, that there is a creator who loves us, to love others, and that there is life after death. In other words-without these intuitions made solid, evil would be the more rational short-term choice.
I’m not sure where quantum mechanics would be involved. As I understood some comments by Stephen Hawking over a quarter century ago, quantum mechanics allows for pretty much anything to pop into existence, including a kitchen sink, but that this is only actually possible right outside the event horizon of a substantial black hole because anywhere else it would flash right back out of existence.
Why should I read a book about history from a philosopher? This is not enough to discredit her ideas but with a million books on the Gospels, why this one?
Spend a few minutes watching one of her YouTube videos to see if what she has to say is interesting.
Or whoever posted a random link to a lesser known individual who does not appear to be a credentialed scholar in the field of Biblical studies could provide an example of an argument the person makes that shows how the general belief of critical scholars is wrong?
Russia is the biggest country in the world and full of so many scholars. Why should anyone pay any attention to us capitalist dogs explaining why Marxist theory is nonsense contrary to the opinion of all those scholars?
(insert sound of big raspberry here)
I am not saying the opinions of these critical scholars are not worth listening to. But treating them like some kind of gospel truth is just plain ridiculous.
God doesn’t have to make meteors appear out of nothing. The universe is full of them. All that is required is the tiniest tweak from a quantum fluctuation to send one of these in the desired direction, because the dynamics of even a three body problem is quite nonlinear and thus susceptible to the tiniest perturbations.
Yes, just because the vast majority of trained experts who spend their lives studying an issue, reading ancient ancient literature, reading and writing peer reviewed journal articles, believe something does not make it true. I agree. Most on this forum seem to love to tout consensus when it agrees with them though.
No one said all of critical scholarship is true or to treat them as such. Caricature much? There is remarkable diversity in many areas. My question is, given the extreme abundance of actual credentialed scholarship in the field, why should anyone be expected to buy an amazon book of an unknown person who is not an expert in the field based on someone just posting a link with absolutely no commentary or discussion of it on a, you guessed it, discussion forum.
The views of critical scholars aren’t hard to find. So if you, the lady who wrote the book or the person who posted the link thinks they get most things wrong, feel free to raise the specific issues.
I am not saying her work is or is not valuable. I am saying a link to an amazon book by an uncredentialed scholar on gospel authorship is not very helpful on a discussion forum. If you want to buy the book and summarize her ideas, or explain why we should buy the book, I will listen intently.
Vinnie
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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