I said I would defend the virgin birth, though I am not attached to the idea. I did not say how I would defend it. I would defend it because there is nothing scientifically impossible about a virgin birth. Pregnancy only requires fertilization not sex. It happens a lot these days with artificial insemination. And while fertilization without sex or artificial insemination is extremely unlikely, it is not impossible. I would certainly call a virgin birth of Jesus miraculous, but that doesn’t mean it had to be magic or a violation of the laws of nature. I do not, for example, believe Jesus did not have a human biological father, so I am not talking parthenogenesis obviously.
And I made it quite clear in every instance I quoted to involve supernatural miracles that violate the laws of physics as we know them. Too many on these forum try to use a fuller definition of miracles when in reality we are discussing the supernatural ones. That is the colloquial meaning of the term. Cancer spontaneously disappearing and the sun rising are different classes of events. The Bible unequivocally describes and attributes to God and his agents supernatural miracle after supernatural miracle. To deny them is to discredit and discount a huge portion of the Biblical witness and a huge portion of salvation history.
As for the the rest of your response, I don’t always prioritize my ability to intellectually rationalize something over repeated Revelation of supernatural miracles in the Bible. With a science degree I certainly have questions and concerns and science does have a tremendous track record but I think you take it too far philosophically. This puts you in a tight spot as a Christian as your thoughts on the virgin birth demonstrate. Jesus may have been non-miraculously born of a virgin? Did he non-miraculously control the weather, multiple fish and bread, turn H2O into C2H5OH, heal at a distance, rise from the dead, and so on and so on all “non miraculously?”
It’s a very unorthodox and strange view. The whole thrust of these narratives is Jesus can do impossible things others can’t.
You also hate Church authority so anything you even think hints at supporting “the clergy” you also reject—whether it does or not. Here you end up dumping out the baby with the bathwater and seeing problems where none exist.
It honestly seems to me like you are trapped in a box of your own making where you have traded in clergy for faith in your own intellect. Biblical based Christianity has supernatural miracles all over it. I’ve never been into the miracle-free Jefferson version of the Bible and have no interest in reading it. Given these vastly different perspectives on what the Bible actually narrates and what occurred during the life and ministry of Jesus, there is nothing really for us to do but agree to disagree. Especially when you cast everything that disagrees with you in such toxic and disparaging terms. Half your post reads as a bitter diatribe against power and authority which you loathe.
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We can really get into the weeds on some of this. i was reading Original Sin and the Fall, and one of authors discussed how some believed original sin was physically transferred through sex and that is why the Catholic Church holds that Mary was conceived though immaculate means as well, so as not to transmit a sinful nature to Jesus. I am not real sure how that works, as you would assume the sinful nature could only be transmitted by males. If it was transmitted by male and female, then Mary could not of contributed the egg as well, and would have been essentially a surrogate mother. And wouldn’t have to have an immaculate conception in that case. Like I said, in the weeds.
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I don’t think so.
John 5:19 Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing
It has nothing to do with magical powers. Jesus simply sees what the Father is doing in the world.
John14:2 “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do
Jesus was 100% human with all of our limitations. Yes He was 100% God because God can become a helpless human infant growing up as one of us. So He explains He did nothing that we cannot do. We just have to believe in God.
I don’t believe in those. And I explained why. God created the universe to support life and allow His interaction with the world. So He doesn’t have to break anything in order to participate in events. It is how He made the world in the first place.
I discount nothing. I simply don’t see anything in the Bible which violates the laws of nature. That is why I have no need for cessationism. I don’t think any of the Biblical miracles are any different than the miracles we see today.
Incorrect. I just don’t believe God has given any authority to sinful human beings. There is only the authority given to them by the members of their church.
There are wonderful clergy who are very humble even in the Catholic churches. And then there are those who think people need to be put in their place – yeah those have only my contempt.
Yeah, I came from a non-Christian background made well aware of all the things wrong with the Christian establishment. But then reading the Bible I was amazed at how much of it is about the problems with religion. Thus I can be Christian without closing my eyes to all the things wrong in Christianity.
indeed… the props for racism and other sorts of nastiness. I don’t believe in any of that.
Some day I’d like to hear where your deep prejudice against clergy that leads you to twist various scriptures came from.
The apostle tells us that God sustains everything in existence continually, which first of all indicates that the only thing scientists are doing is studying how it is that God goes about sustaining things in existence. So “break the laws of creation” is a view that stems from thinking of Creation as a machine that runs on its own and doesn’t need God since those “laws” are just God being dependable and faithful.
And indeed it would be more accurate to say that scientists talking about laws of nature are trying to one-up clergy by making God a bit player rather than the whole show.
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But that denies the foundation of the Gospel: it does away with the Incarnation and thus the Redemption.
Supernatural miracles don’t break anything because the mere existence of Creation moment to moment is supernatural: everything but God is contingent; only He can claim to exist on His own. Thus all events are His doing, those consistent with His usual upholding of the universe in all its parts and those where He does something different.
You have to throw out some significant portions of the New Testament to hold that position!
Extreme liberal upbringing. Christianity was the evil empire created to control people. So the real question is why am I a Christian now and how did THAT happen!
Does not!
In a passage seeking to establish Jesus superiority over the angels it uses the word “pheron” which means hold, brought, bringing, or bearing. Yeah God brings all things and holds them to His purpose for creating them. He is not the Deist god who sets everything moving and just watches. And He is not the dreamer god where things only exists because He dreams them. The God of the Bible is a creator of real things which exist and do what they do because of how he made them – part of a system of mathematical space-time laws of nature. And He made this to support the self-organizing process of life and made it for a relationship where He is a participant in the events of the lives of living things.
God is not an inept carpenter who cannot make a table which stands by itself. He is the shepherd who creates the environment to support His flock and guards against things which can make events go against His plans. He doesn’t eliminate all dangers because He doesn’t want sheep but those who will learn and grow as children of God.
Pure nonsense. Scientists simply want to understand how God set things up to work. History demonstrates with perfect clarity that it is the clergy who have always been grasping for power and hate that the scientists can give real answers to questions when they cannot.
The incarnation is the central reason why I became a Christian. It is simply not the magical woo woo version you are pushing. God can become a real human being with real human genetics from a real biological mother and a real biological father. No God doesn’t have to fabricate special DNA in order to deny any genetic relationship with real human beings ( and thus 0% human), because our problem isn’t in our genetics. People are not evil because of their genetic decent from Africans or Asians. They are evil because of the evil they do by their own choice.
I don’t believe in your magical universe. The real universe is contingent only in the sense God created it. But God created something real to exist because of how He created it and not just a dream world which only exists because He says so.
The omnipotence of the dreamer god is the lamest and most pathetic sort of omnipotence because everybody has that. God omnipotence is the knowledge how to do things which none of us can do – to create a space-time structure to support the existence of things and make the process of life possible.
I agree fully but most people don’t approach discussions from this philosophical angle. The problem is not doing so already rigs the deck against God because it treats God like some ordinary object. Every attempt at pitting science against God fits this bill.
Does God the carpenter go to the heavenly Home Depot to buy wood when he wants to make a chair?
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You want to take it to Hebrews? I’ve already addressed that passage, and it can’t mean what you’re trying to force it to. It isn’t talking about angels, it’s talking about Who Christ is; to make it about angles you have to mangle the grammar by setting one of a set of coordinate clauses above the rest. The clause about angels is just one talking about Christ’s identity. If you’re reading a translation it may be possible to make the passage read that way because translators chop Paul’s sentences into pieces.
Go back to Exodus instead, where YHWH_Elohim bluntly states that only He exists by Himself, all else being contingent. That’s where Paul gets his point that Christ sustains all things in existence, that apart from Him they would no longer hold together.
That argument requires reducing God to just another entity rather than an actual Creator because it sets the existence of the Creation apart from God. God is not a carpenter in your sense at all simply because He does not take something that has an independent existence and shapes it, He calls the very substance of all things into existence and sustains them in being. A carpenter can make a table and it will still exist if he totally forgets about it, but in God’s case the table only continues to exist because He holds it together, not as wood and glue and such but as the very subatomic particles at the root of those.
Such a deep bigotry! I’ve known hundreds of clergy and can’t think of any who fit your description. I’ve also known scientists who are rabidly antitheistic because clergy can explain why and how there is meaning to life but science can’t even begin to address the deep questions people have.
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You can twist things that way if you want but the result is not the Christ of the Gospels or of the Apostles – or of the Prophets, for that matter.
It’s not mine, it’s the universe of the Apostles and of the Torah. There is only one “I AM”; there are no little “i ams” running around.
You’re the only one talking about such a deity. And no, “everybody has that” is false; no human is capable of dreaming simultaneously of all the individual particles that make up everything in their dream and maintain them in the relationships that form macroscopic entities. A human can dream of a star, but not of all the protons and neutrons and electrons and their interactions as a plasma where fusion happens. A human can dream of a river, but not of all the individual water molecules and the forces by which they carry along sediments.
To even think of God as merely a dreamer requires a god who is pathetically impotent.
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No, He can’t.
God claims a personal interest in Jesus. He claims Jesus to be his actual son. If jesus is the product of a human union then God has no part in Him. Jesus becomes a servant, and our salvation comes from a human and not from God.
There are three elements essential to the Gospel
The divine incarnation
The death of Christ
The resurrection of Christ
remove any of these and the gospel fails
Richard
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The church teaches that Jesus was 100% human and 100% God. I don’t think that precludes him having male-female genetics. God could have even used Joseph’s genetics. We have no clue how God made Jesus/lowered himself into human form.
Jesus comes from Mary. He was born as a baby. This isn’t the Middle Ages where women don’t matter anymore and it’s only the male lineage that counts for sin or something else. Jesus was carried in a womb like all other babies and had a real, genuine human birth.
Jesus is God incarnate. If God chose to lower himself and become human via a virgin birth, or through a human sexual union or He just appeared fully mature like Adam then that is all God’s prerogative. You are committing the same mistake as Mitchell. Limiting God to a box of your own making.
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If God had no part in the birth then how can Jesus be any percent God?
If Jesus was just a human filled with the Holy Spirit then He is no different to any other spirit filled Christitian.
Jesus must be unique. Why deny the virgin Birth?
Scripture says how this came to be. I see nothing wrong with asserting it.
Richard
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How long is this list you have of things God cannot do.
My list is short – there is nothing on it. I do not enslave God to my theology like so many theologians and clergy do. I think they do that in order to make God serve them better.
I think God is a real creator. He can create things that would continue to exist even if He disappeared. And no I don’t think that is a blasphemous suggestion. Suggesting things contrary to what some puffed up human clergy and theologian believes is not blasphemy no matter what he says. It is far far more blasphemous to say God cannot do what you don’t want Him to do. There are certainly things I don’t think God would do, but I would not say God cannot do them… only that I think God wouldn’t do them.
If He created it then it isn’t self-existent. It exists because He created it. It doesn’t follow that God cannot create anything with a real existence of its own. That is just a limitation you are putting on God.
Does He just want the dream of a chair or does He want a real chair which exists because it is made of wood made of molecules made of particles made of energy in a space-time continuum. For the latter He doesn’t need a home-depot because He can create a space-time continuum with energy making particles and molecules supporting the development of life in which trees can evolve and grow to produce the wood from which a chair can be made.
So you edit the word “angels” out of the text in verse 4. The whole paragraph and chapter is about comparing Christ to the angels. It is saying that Jesus is not some creature like the angels which God made, but was a participant both in the creation of everything and in God continued work to make His creation serve His providential purpose.
The word “pheron” means hold, brought, bringing, or bearing, and it has nothing to do with this panentheistic theology which transforms creation into an emanation of God which would vanish without God like some kind of dream.
Ok… shrug…
Exodus 13 Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
Nope. Doesn’t say what you insist – that God cannot create anything which continues to exist on its own. I certainly think God is self-existent but no I don’t think that justifies altering this passage to make it say anything of that sort either.
Total baloney… It is just simply this. I believe in a God that CAN. And you believe in a God that CANT. This enslavement of God to theology is just plain nonsense, and I am not buying what you are selling.
Do I think God CAN make things which cannot exist on their own but vanish the moment He disappeared or woke up. Well yeah. But the point is that even I can do that. That is what dreams are.
I didn’t say God had no part. I said God may have chose to lower himself and enter the world during a human union. That is God having the most important part. The involvement is God somehow lowering himself and entering the world, which is just as explicable by a virgin birth or a normal human birth. How God can strip Himself of divinity is a divine ineffable mystery regardless of how you slice it. Claiming He MUST have incarnated via a virgin birth is you just overstating what you could ever possibly know.
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Create it with “what” materials? Create it “where?”
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You are twisting this.
God did it. But even He has to work within the limits of reality.
I am not claiming God could nt have done it through a human union. I am saying that He said He did it by divine fertilisation. That is the scriptures.
Your rhetoric is a strawman.
Richard.
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