quote:

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The older I get the more inclined I am to take such stories with a pinch of salt. Particularly when Christians in Iraq, Syria and so on don't appear to escape the degradations of ISIS unscathed ...

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Originally posted by Stetson:
Not that I believe that for one split second, but if someone DOES subscribe to the view that there is an afterlife, the attainment of which takes precedence over any earthly pleasures, then it does sort of logically follow that God would care more about getting Bibles into Atheistania than about saving Christians from being crucififed in ISIS territory.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

quote:

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Originally posted by Stetson:
Not that I believe that for one split second, but if someone DOES subscribe to the view that there is an afterlife, the attainment of which takes precedence over any earthly pleasures, then it does sort of logically follow that God would care more about getting Bibles into Atheistania than about saving Christians from being crucififed in ISIS territory.

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Well, you'd also have to believe that attaining the afterlife (or at least a favorable one) is based solely on holding the correct theological opinions at the moment of death, but that seems like a fairly standard Christian belief, though rarely stated so baldly.

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Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:

So God can enable a car to get across a border with Bibles in, sometimes. Not other times. It seems pretty random.

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God seems to permit / allow / enable / facilitate cars getting across a border with drugs in, quite often...
 

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Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :
 
I've often wondered how may 'likes' on Facebook a problem or request has to get before God pays it attention.
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
I don't think Jesus wanted this. That it furthered His kingdom in any way, that it was an effective witness, a worthwhile martyrdom. It exposed, provoked the sickest evil, for no gain whatsoever.

In - be very warned indeed - this account.

The only good is that Jesus will reconcile all involved. He is that effectual.
 

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Posted by anteater (# 11435) on :
 
I good ex (since I became the sperm of Satan) friend had God help him smuggle Watchtowers and Awakes into Commie countries.

So at least God's ecumenical.
 

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Posted by Goldfish Stew (# 5512) on :
 
Well a friend of mine got stopped at a checkpoint in her car by police in a communist country years ago. After checking the car for contraband, they let her go - apparently not noticing her husband's pile of porno mags on the back seat.

Divine intervention

ETA: True story

[ 06. December 2016, 09:25: Message edited by: Goldfish Stew ]
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
Perhaps they were being polite ...
 

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Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :
 
This is such an alien mindset to what I know that I may have misunderstood, but for what it’s worth, here’s my tuppence.

I find it totally natural to give God thanks for any blessing, particularly any one unexpected. But the Bible smugglers weren’t just attributing their escape to God’s will “They put this down to 24/7 prayer”, which could be taken that the miracle was a result of them somehow manipulating God. (I still believe in the importance of intercessory prayer as it is what God has asked.)


PS I hope the Bibles were complete by Orthodox standards.
 

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Posted by Stetson (# 9597) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Perhaps they were being polite ...

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quote:

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Originally posted by Honest Ron Bacardi:
A theist believes that God is involved in absolutely everything, creating and upholding his creation. It's an almost-deist belief that God just reaches down to zap your goods through customs once in a while.

So yeah, God was involved. The question is how.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:

Brother Andrew seemed like a Boys Own superhero, alongside Jim Eliot and other fairly contemporary Christian missionaries.

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Originally posted by Komensky:

quote:

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Originally posted by Honest Ron Bacardi:
A theist believes that God is involved in absolutely everything, creating and upholding his creation. It's an almost-deist belief that God just reaches down to zap your goods through customs once in a while.

So yeah, God was involved. The question is how.

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This sounds a but like like having your cake and eating it too. If you're right, then God is involved in toddler's developing bone cancer, babies born with HIV, children caught in crossfire in Aleppo—and so on. Is that what you mean, or have I misunderstood you?

K.

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God does and allows very strange things. And he feels no need to explain himself to us

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and I think those of us who bear the curse of belief are meant to be. I'm reading a massive OT Theology tome at the (two-year-long) moment, and in it John Goldingay argues again and again that the telling of the story of the Hebrew People of God is precisely designed to acknowledge "God does and allows very strange things. And he feels no need to explain himself to us."

Scientific normality and the occasional extraordinary event ... and love, and a Beethoven sonata and a sunset ... and existence all miracles.

Some nasty things, too. Snakes and slugs and the rise of a Donald Trump.

So I keep on stumbling along. But I eschew the Boys Own Bullshit. Becuase it's Boys Own Bullshit.

Oh, and Brother Andrew?
 

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Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:
I totally believe that Bibles can get into an anti-Bible country without divine intervention if the country's security forces are anything like our TSA.

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
I've often wondered how may 'likes' on Facebook a problem or request has to get before God pays it attention.

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Originally posted by Gamaliel:
My question is, at what point does a healthy roll-the-eyes scepticism topple over into raw unbelief?

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

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Originally posted by Gamaliel:
My question is, at what point does a healthy roll-the-eyes scepticism topple over into raw unbelief?

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To the original question...

I think everybody who sets foot in a pulpit or writes anything for any Christian publication should follow a mandatory course in fact-checking. Last Sunday we were treated to the testimony of the Psalm 91 regiment which sent at least two members of the congregation (me and my son) reaching for our smartphones to confirm it was an urban legend.

There are often a number of telltale signs when a story is not properly grounded in fact. How much energy is put into proving a story is not true depends on the medium and the context. In this context (a congregation member's extempore contribution one Sunday morning), I simply took steps to ensure it didn't make it into our church's weekly e-mail shot.

If the claims are bolder, or reaching a wider audience, I may do more (I am currently biding my time until January, as challenged, to take up Ramarius' suggestion of an update on the Reading Outpouring...).

If the claims directly impact something I consider to be within my sphere of responsibility, I usually do more still.

Genuine faith withstands legitimate doubt and has nothing to fear from fact-checking.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
I see an empty, faithLESS determinism about getting Bibles in to communist countries.

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What difference did they make? They didn't bring the Berlin Wall down after all did they Eutychus?

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Look at the difference they made to Russian and Chinese culture

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The same determinism keeps Bibles and missionaries most effectively out of Islamic countries - as in the Turkish Zirve Publishing House massacre - and communities (any in Europe) and is squeezing ancient Christian creedal communities out of Islamic countries for a start.

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I don't see what God's gift of faith has to do with any of it and what God has to do with the success or failure of these self praised activities. As in the sad dead bear bounce revivals in the UK.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
I see no parallel with the four thousand year old mythic Abraham story whatsoever. How could I? There is none.

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The determinism is that it's all historically inevitable, it has nothing to do with people praying any more than healing has.

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One must take part, scary as it is

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I paid to see Reinhard Bonnke's right hand man, a former British army officer, say that 7 7 happened because their prayer team didn't cover Britain at that time.

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We must put away childish things. Including mere scepticism.

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I note with interest that you don't challenge the utter futility of converting Islam that nobody dares try.

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And aye, I'm glad communists like Solzhenitsyn, Gromyko and Gorbachev and even other little people were reached in the Soviet Bloc and China, I had the privilege of fellowshipping with some from my para-Christian cult in Czechoslovakia in 1979. What good being given bibles does I'm not quite sure.

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Some aspects of probably genuine belief get twisted by humans. Hence we have kings appointed over the Israelites, some of whom came out wrong.

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I think this specialness underlies our willingness to relatively ignore the plight of people "not like us"

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do even more damage by organizing their politics, cultures and economies to serve our's.

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So we need to harbour a healthy scepticism of Abraham's specialness, our specialness as Christians, the specialness of any faith, nation, people. Because it is probably foundational to great, great sin.

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I think everybody who sets foot in a pulpit or writes anything for any Christian publication should follow a mandatory course in fact-checking. Last Sunday we were treated to the testimony of the Psalm 91 regiment which sent at least two members of the congregation (me and my son) reaching for our smartphones to confirm it was an urban legend.

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

A little more work threw up this site which gives a well-researched explanation.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
I've always thought that Abraham is a very odd choice as a "man of faith" notwithstanding the epistle-writer's poetry. Before he set out on his epic journey along the fertile crescent, we've got no particular indication that he was a prayerful man at the biginning of the story, and iirc the first time we read of him conducting the blood sacrifice was when he attempted to use Isaac was the victim.

Quite how this relates to the modern religious Protestant views of justification-by-faith and the efficacy-of-prayer, I have no idea.

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For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.

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Originally posted by chris stiles:
This kind of thing works so long as people occasionally come out of their bubble - recently it seems they are increasingly resistant to it ("Of course the media will try and suppress it - God can do this if he wanted to").

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.. and that's before you run into embellishments rather than outright fakery (aren't there some suggestions that the story of the missionaries and the Huaorani may have not been as simple as commonly portrayed?).

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Some aspects of probably genuine belief get twisted by humans. Hence we have kings appointed over the Israelites, some of whom came out wrong.

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That particular narrative is expressly detailed and acknowledged in the Bible. Kings were, we read, the people's idea, not God's.

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I think this specialness underlies our willingness to relatively ignore the plight of people "not like us"

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No, I think human nature does that all by itself. The Gospel is an appeal positively not to ignore the plight of people not like us, against our better instincts.

quote:

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do even more damage by organizing their politics, cultures and economies to serve our's.

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Missionaries may have played a role, more or less wittingly, in imperialism, but they were certainly not the only factors and quite arguably not the worst. Western civilisation expanded pretty relentlessly in the 19th and 20th centuries; the question may well have been seen as whether or not it was accompanied by the Gospel. For all its ills, I'm glad to enjoy the freedoms of Western society (especially as I wonder how long it might last...), including the freedom of religious belief.

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So we need to harbour a healthy scepticism of Abraham's specialness, our specialness as Christians, the specialness of any faith, nation, people. Because it is probably foundational to great, great sin.

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If you are so willing to discredit Abraham as wholly self-deluded, what is your definition of sin?

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
We read that God spoke to him asking him to up sticks and leave, and he did. Prior prayer is not required unless you think, rather UNprotestantly, that good works are prerequisite to God calling someone, or blood sacrifice is somehow a means of justification.

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We further read, notably in Romans 4, that Abraham's belief in God's promise to him of a descendance is why God counted him as righteous. Paul's whole point in this chapter is to demonstrate justification by faith: Abraham's justification predated even the covenant of circumcision. Romans 4:13 says

quote:

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For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith.

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Interestingly in this context, Romans 4:19 also says Abraham did not "weaken in the faith". He must have had some doubts, witness the whole Hagar episode, but he apparently did not reject God's promise in outright unbelief.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
I see no parallel with the four thousand year old mythic Abraham story whatsoever. How could I? There is none.

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The parallel I see is that God promised something to Abraham that Abraham believed, on his own account, thanks to which, according to Paul, he was justified i.e. in the right place with God, acted, and the promise was fulfilled.

The coming of Christ is understood by Paul as the ultimate fulfilment of that promise to Abraham. I don't have a model for God working with humanity outside that narrative. Do you?

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The determinism is that it's all historically inevitable, it has nothing to do with people praying any more than healing has.

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History happens because it has to? Sounds a bit marxist to me. What became of the sentiment I quoted from you in my sig?

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One must take part, scary as it is

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I paid to see Reinhard Bonnke's right hand man, a former British army officer, say that 7 7 happened because their prayer team didn't cover Britain at that time.

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There is a big difference between praying FOR something and being berated for NOT praying for something.

quote:

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We must put away childish things. Including mere scepticism.

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Why? And to be replaced by what, precisely?

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I note with interest that you don't challenge the utter futility of converting Islam that nobody dares try.

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That was not a deliberate omission. The gospel is folly, according to Paul. But also the power of God for salvation. What do you think would be involved in "converting Islam"?

quote:

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quote:

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And aye, I'm glad communists like Solzhenitsyn, Gromyko and Gorbachev and even other little people were reached in the Soviet Bloc and China, I had the privilege of fellowshipping with some from my para-Christian cult in Czechoslovakia in 1979. What good being given bibles does I'm not quite sure.

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Why are you glad if you're not sure what good being given bibles did them?

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quote:

---

Originally posted by Eutychus:
Without getting into the factual/non-factual discussion, it seems to me that if you seriously entertaint with the possibility of Abraham either not existing at all or being simply deluded, and Paul's explanation of his actions, either factual or as part of an accepted mythology, as being, at best, so enculturated to 2,000 years ago as to be utterly irrelevant to us, I fail to see why I should bother wrestling with any biblical approach to any concept at all, including sin.

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quote:

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
In isolation, I'm not sure that it is possible to get that from reading the OT story. To me it reads far more like Abraham leaving Ur because of the drought and God somehow catching up with him along the way.

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quote:

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On the blood sacrifice thing, I'd say this was an important prerequisite for a protestant understanding of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, which is dominant in many but not all protestant circles.

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quote:

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Even if we're not going to talk about the formal theory of God's interaction with man, Abraham doesn't fit the informal way it is usually discussed in many protestant circles; Abraham did not obviously convert, did not obviously make a commitment (or at least not in a given temporal point in the story), did not have his sins covered by the sacrificial blood of the lamb, did not go from strength to strength dependent on a pattern of regular prayer.

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quote:

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Yes but as I say, the Romans poem seems to use a particularly bad example in Abraham which does not really seem to prove the point it is trying to make.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:

quote:

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The coming of Christ is understood by Paul as the ultimate fulfilment of that promise to Abraham. I don't have a model for God working with humanity outside that narrative. Do you?

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Why do you ask? (That's rhetorical btw). And what's it go to do with the claims being made here?

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The determinism is that it's all historically inevitable, it has nothing to do with people praying any more than healing has.

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quote:

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Incarnationality.

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quote:

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quote:

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What do you think would be involved in "converting Islam"?

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Incarnationality.

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Sure. I like to think the many Muslims I talk to in jail are impacted by my bleeding-edge incarnationality. But you know what's weird? Invariably they go on to ask me for a Bible. I'm no bibliolater, but I'm confident that God can and does use the Scriptures by his Spirit to change them just as he did the disciples on the Emmaus road.

The Bible, illumined by the Spirit, is like Heineken: reaches the parts brash evangelists and stalwart incarnationalists cannot reach.
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
Bravo mon brave it doesn't get any better than that. How many apostatize, sorry, convert?

Funnily enough it's one account in the gospels that does it for me above all. Nothing anybody does, as I don't know anybody incarnational. Period. A couple historically come to mind. And one of them's a Muslim.

And there's every point to prayer apart from futilely try to get God to change the laws of physics for our convenience.
 

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Posted by chris stiles (# 12641) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Eutychus:
In Ecuador I was told the Huaorani's specialist adaptation to Western culture was as aircraft pilots (not that I have verified this!). I have spent time in a Quechua village in Ecuador and indeed preached there in battered Spanish. There's little doubt the Gospel has become well-established in remote villages and they seem to have got more out of it than from the oil companies

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Bravo mon brave it doesn't get any better than that. How many apostatize, sorry, convert?

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quote:

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Funnily enough it's one account in the gospels that does it for me above all.

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Nothing anybody does, as I don't know anybody incarnational. Period. A couple historically come to mind. And one of them's a Muslim.

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And there's every point to prayer apart from futilely try to get God to change the laws of physics for our convenience.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
You must be reading a different bible to me. Whatever value you assign the text, it quite clearly says God called Abraham and he went. It doesn't say a thing about him leaving because of a drought, although he does later go to Egypt from Canaan because of a famine. If you want to tell a different story go ahead, but don't pretend the biblical text backs it up.

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quote:

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
Terah was already leaving Ur with his family for Canaan (Gen 11:31)

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So we have Abram who is already travelling with his family.

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quote:

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We have God appearing to him in Genesis 12 to talk about descendents (to which, I note, Abram appears to have no reply).

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there is no suggestion that God appeared to Abram because he was upright or sinless before God

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I fail to understand what exactly this is supposed to be saying about near contemporary bible smugglers.

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quote:

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Originally posted by chris stiles:
Yes, I was referring specifically to the events surrounding the killings of the five missionaries (which I've heard related as a kind of mini-atonement for the Huaorani people). Perhaps the reaction to 'No Graven Image' is instructive in this context.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

If one comes to the conclusion that Abraham was deluded, or nothing more than a mythical construct, or that the narrative is merely an after-the-fact spiritualisation of the random march of history, and that faith is basically self-delusion, I am (again) genuinely curious to understand on what basis those arriving at such conclusions might claim to live out their Christianity.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
when people continually make stupid choices and stupid claims backed up by - in my opinion - utterly theologically faulty pointing at old testament characters in order to justify themselves. And when people seek to justify their dangerous, stupid and irresponsible actions in the past by pointing at said characters.

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Supposing (...) each person came to church with a regulation black briefcase containing, in some impossible way, their personal evidence that the Christian faith was true. Every Sunday, we would nod and smile at each other, indicating our briefcases with genial confidence as if to say, 'Lots in mine, brother. NO problem here!' One awful Sunday, though, the minister would announce that, today, we were all going to open our cases in front of each other, and examine this mass of evidence. One by one, in a heavy silence, the cases are opened. They are all empty...

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
I googled something like "91st regiment" and "prayer" without quote marks. Google returned hits including the story from WW1, WW2, and variously referring to "brigades" and "regiments", including one with an actual name. That was enough of a mix of detail and confusion to convince me.

A little more work threw up this site which gives a well-researched explanation.

My day job as a translator involves a fair bit of fact-checking and has probably helped me developed a flair for dodgy ones.

Many years ago I also read an excellent book on rumours (I think this is the English translation). I defy anyone to read this and not find out they'd believed a common rumour (of which many local variations may exist) that is untrue - in my case, the rumour that it had been planned at one time to surround a seedy district of my city with a wall.

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Originally posted by Penny S:
And I can add to that that I developed a scepticism about stories told in sermons after I found a book of such things which included a couple which I had heard from the pulpit told as if they were events which had happened to the speaker.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
I broadly agree with all that and am glad somebody else shares my dilemma.

quote:

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
when people continually make stupid choices and stupid claims backed up by - in my opinion - utterly theologically faulty pointing at old testament characters in order to justify themselves. And when people seek to justify their dangerous, stupid and irresponsible actions in the past by pointing at said characters.

---

I think there's a distinction between justifiably explaining and learning from the biblical accounts of the process of faith (of which I think Abraham is a perfectly good example, warts and all) and copy-pasting Bible characters' implementations of faith in a manner whereby one's confidence is not so much in God as in the method, which in my book is legalism or if I'm in a bad mood, witchcraft.

I think in many cases, both biblical and extra-biblical, there is an original genuine exercise of God-given faith by someone, which is then attemptedly replicated or systematised/exaggerated/misreported/turned into a movie.

At the end of the day the question to my mind is "what faith do I have?" Adrian Plass puts it well in The Growing up Pains...

quote:

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Supposing (...) each person came to church with a regulation black briefcase containing, in some impossible way, their personal evidence that the Christian faith was true. Every Sunday, we would nod and smile at each other, indicating our briefcases with genial confidence as if to say, 'Lots in mine, brother. NO problem here!' One awful Sunday, though, the minister would announce that, today, we were all going to open our cases in front of each other, and examine this mass of evidence. One by one, in a heavy silence, the cases are opened. They are all empty...

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quote:

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
Aye. I know mine is pretty bare. Lots of people tell me there's plenty in theirs but they're always very reluctant to let me see it, which is frustrating.

---

I think/hope this may be one of the instances where "the last shall be first" will come into play for the likes of us, eventually.

In my experience many of those with the most actual, genuine, fire-tested faith are those who make the least noise about it.
 

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Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :
 
Eutychus, I should have enlarged the thing about the book by explaining it was a book intended to be used by preachers. I was not impressed by its devotion to the truth.

There are a cluster of rumours I have stocked up for knocking down when appropriate. Not relevant here, though, except to say that I find other people not easy to discuss my scepticism with when they believe the rumours.
 

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Posted by Barnabas62 (# 9110) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Barnabas62, why on Earth, in Heaven's name, the Hell should they offend me? They make my point.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
The incarnational Muslim.

And an incarnational Christian.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.

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His salvation was obvious.

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quote:

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There's NOTHING elliptical about it.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
His salvation was obvious.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
In fact, isn't that testimony precisely the sort of hagiography that's been railed against elsewhere on this thread? What's the difference? Your heroes are more credible simply by not being Good Little Evangelicals whose motives are automatically suspect?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
I was thinking more along the lines of someone like Jimmy Savile. The unfortunate truth is that acts of heroism don't tell us the whole story.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

Chris, I'd be interested in your sources re: the Ecuador five.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
He'll do what He says on the tin.

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It's got nothing to do with our mangled, nominal, weak, ignorant hearing.

I'm somewhat bemused by how challenged you appear to be by the good captain

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quote:

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none of the Bible smugglers show any incarnationality in comparison.

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quote:

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I'm confused generally about your position on the supernatural claims in this thread that you agree didn't happen

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that the activity shorn of claims, including the 'demonic' response in Zirve, is somehow worthwhile?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Faith is shown by works. . . . Beliefs are two a penny.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
And I am to judge the foolishness, the hubris that led those men to die for no faith at all, for no reason at all, no purpose, no gain for the Kingdom, for the gospel. Turkey is sealed, impervious for another thousand years. And another. And another.

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I don't know why or how you believe in God's capacity for supernatural intervention and that cannot be transferred. I am averse. I'm leadenly, grimly content that He consistently never does. Ever. Apart from in and around the Incarnation.

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I can't see how it helps to believe otherwise apart from how it helps those who have to to get through the day.

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I won't see any tomorrow night bar the twitching of a little finger during the 1% of my time and 0.1% of my 'potential'

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What has faith got to do with it? What?

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Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

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I don't know why or how you believe in God's capacity for supernatural intervention and that cannot be transferred. I am averse. I'm leadenly, grimly content that He consistently never does

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jamat:
God's weather 😳

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
I thought gravity was to do with mass not weight.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
And I am to judge the foolishness, the hubris that led those men to die for no faith at all, for no reason at all, no purpose, no gain for the Kingdom, for the gospel. Turkey is sealed, impervious for another thousand years. And another. And another.

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I am mystified as to how you can be so sure of any of this. How can you know all the motives, causes, and effects? - and that they were inferior to your "incarnational" examples?

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I don't know why or how you believe in God's capacity for supernatural intervention and that cannot be transferred. I am averse. I'm leadenly, grimly content that He consistently never does. Ever. Apart from in and around the Incarnation.

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Why the exception? He decided to intervene just once? My view is that if supernatural intervention is acknowledged at least once, there is no reason it shouldn't happen more than once. It's either never at all or always a theoretical possibility. If you write off all the biblical accounts of supernatural intervention as primitive/mythological/ex-post fabrications, why change the rules when it comes to the Incarnation?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Jamat:
Just what the devil wants you to think. The Screwtape letters come to mind. God's weather 😳

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Besides, to my mind that supernatual invervention is ongoing to the extent that even as God became flesh in Christ, today he gives us his Spirit. That's at the heart of being "incarnational" today.

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I can't see how it helps to believe otherwise apart from how it helps those who have to to get through the day.

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I never made any claim to it helping. In many ways life would be a lot easier (at least intellectually) if that option could be ruled out entirely. But like I say, as far as I'm concerned ruling it out entirely rules out the claims about the Incarnation too, and yes I do think that leaves one without hope.

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I won't see any tomorrow night bar the twitching of a little finger during the 1% of my time and 0.1% of my 'potential'

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I have no idea at all what this means. But it looks as though you are being hard on yourself. If you are, and it's a byproduct of your "leaden, grimly content" stance, then I dare to think that your deterministic views are not the whole truth.

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What has faith got to do with it? What?

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Reflecting on your comments above, I think a large part of the answer is freedom. Faith stands over and against determinism. It generates hope, even when it is "hoping against hope". Because it has a personal dimension, it sets us free from the judgement of others. It spurs us to responsibility and maturity as we seek to live with both the personal conviction we have forged and a clear conscience, not simply before our peers but also in the sight of God.

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This is beginning to sound like Romans 5:1-5:

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Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

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Originally posted by mr cheesy:
I've lost the plot. Why are we talking about gravity?

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Originally posted by Martin60:
I'm mystified how you can't be. The naivete, the lack of due diligence. Who led these young men to belive that sticking their heads in a wasps' nest wasn't going to get them killed? The inferiority is obvious. Diagne and Fatba were fully aware of the risks they were taking in defending the weak. That's qualitatively superior along two axes. It's all easily quantifiable, like all faith.

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There is no comparison between the Incarnation and any other phenomenon in human experience. Why do I have to say this? No supernatural claim outside the context of the Incarnation, its first couple of circles has any traction whatsoever.

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Besides, to my mind that supernatual invervention is ongoing to the extent that even as God became flesh in Christ, today he gives us his Spirit. That's at the heart of being "incarnational" today.

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Agreed. Which has nothing to do with claims of external intervention, breaking the laws of physics, stupefying border guards whilst letting three naive young men be psychotically butchered.

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I 'give' 1% of my time to being 'incarnational' on a Friday night on average. My faith is quantifiable to that degree. When we look at the effectiveness of that time, it'll be an order of magnitude less. At least. How much time I spend encouraging, while the rest is spent in crowd management, clearing up. It's a twitch of my little finger. In being my 86 year old mother's prime carer it feels worse. I undo all the care work with hardness. I am become as nothing.

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Nice rhetoric. I happen to completely agree with it.

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Glad you liked it especially as my eyes weren't yet properly open at the time.

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But again, it has nothing to do with external magic.

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Originally posted by hatless:
Of course, we might want to still say that God is personal, and perhaps we can be ingenious enough to find ways that enable us to think of God as personal, but not like a conscious agent.

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So gravity was just an analogy, and quite an interesting one. Does gravity exist? Is it real? Is it true? Do you believe in it? Is it a construct? Did Newton invent it?

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Originally posted by Martin60:
The naivete, the lack of due diligence. Who led these young men to belive that sticking their heads in a wasps' nest wasn't going to get them killed?

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Sorry for the triple post but I wanted to come back to this as it touches on my stance on faith and also on what I said about freedom earlier.

Romans 4:19 tells us that Abraham "faced the fact" that his body was as good as dead. From this two things can be inferred:

Firstly, that due diligence is part of genuine faith, not opposed to it.

Secondly, that genuine faith may press on even taking account of due diligence.

I don't know whether those guys in Turkey did reasonable due diligence or not, and I cannot decide categorically that their death means they failed.

(Hebrews 11 lists people who died in the outworking of their faith and specifically includes those sawn in two, which is not too far from the fate these men suffered).

I (and presumably you) are far removed from these stories. We are not in their heads any more than we are in the heads of the two "incarnationalists" you cite. The only person whose head I'm in, and for whom I can make a reasonable stab at assessing faith, is mine and mine alone (even then, I should not be presumptive; "My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me", 1 Cor 4:4). Just as at the end of the day, you are the only person for you.

Jesus' words "According to your faith let it be done to you" (Mt 9:20) are central to my understanding here.

As a church leader people are forever coming to me with projects for which they claim to "have the faith" but want my congregation to provide a good chunk of the resources*. If I don't have confidence in the soundness of their project (starting out with due diligence, see above) I feel no compunction whatsoever to lend them support and no guilt whatsoever about withholding it.

(This stance of mine makes a lot of guilt-sensitive Christians very unhappy).

That doesn't mean I think their project is necessarily "not of God" or crap. It just means I don't have the faith for it. If their faith is genuine, then "according to their faith let it be done to them". That way they are free to take responsibility before God for their actions, and I am free to take responsibility before him for mine.

Having got all that out, it's time for me to go off and be incarnational for a bit

==

*I am forever reminded of the family who came with several others to plant a church here in what they deemed pretty much "virgin territory" and expected all the existing churches to provide language training and child care while they did so...

[ 09. December 2016, 11:57: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
 

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Posted by SusanDoris (# 12618) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
Billy Graham says in his autobiography somewhere that he could never fathom the relationship between God and weather.

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Originally posted by Jamat:

quote:

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I don't know why or how you believe in God's capacity for supernatural intervention and that cannot be transferred. I am averse. I'm leadenly, grimly content that He consistently never does

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Just what the devil wants you to think. The Screwtape letters come to mind. God's weather 😳

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quote:

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
But of course. That is in fact desirable -- then you know they are real.
No one wants to read about puppets. The reader has to know and feel that Frodo really could have taken the Ring, that Hamlet on the battlements at Elsinore could really have said, "Oh Dad, c'mon. Mom owns her sexuality. You want me, her son, to call her on it? It's too creepy, man. And I have to finish my Ph.D in heuristics at Wittenberg, you know."

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Originally posted by Boogie:
Gravity is a great analogy for the God I believe in.

God exists, holds the whole of everything together, is intimately involved with the whole caboodle - but doesn't control any of it. She's there, she loves us and she leaves us - and everything - with total freedom because she loves us.

God has no 'ifs' imo. 'If you love me' 'If you pray'. 'If you give'. No ifs - just love and support.

It depends what mood I'm in whether I'm angry with this God or not. Mostly I wish she would intervene - but then how would that happen without unbelievable inequity?

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Originally posted by Boogie:
Gravity is a great analogy for the God I believe in.

God exists, holds the whole of everything together, is intimately involved with the whole caboodle - but doesn't control any of it. She's there, she loves us and she leaves us - and everything - with total freedom because she loves us.

God has no 'ifs' imo. 'If you love me' 'If you pray'. 'If you give'. No ifs - just love and support.

It depends what mood I'm in whether I'm angry with this God or not. Mostly I wish she would intervene - but then how would that happen without unbelievable inequity?

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Originally posted by SusanDoris:
May I ask how you would (approximately) define or recognise 'genuine faith'?

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when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what should we do?’

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Originally posted by SusanDoris:
Eutychus

Interesting posts. May I ask how you would (approximately) define or recognise 'genuine faith'?

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Originally posted by Martin60:
It's unbelievably hard being incarnational. For me. I pray and still raise my voice. Who then will deliver me from this body of death?

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I still think you're too hard on yourself, too quick to do your own actions down and too quick to be impressed by others' without imagining what their inner lives might be like.

Nobody bothers putting the routine and unsightly stuff in the glowing reports of bullet-taking heroes like those you cite. Even the Bible concentrates on the remarkable not the routine. We just get to read the highlights, not actually have to follow others' lives in all their fulness and mundanity (unless they have a Twitter account); it would be unbearably long and boring.

Believers are all simul iustus et peccator, all of us. That's what grace (charis) is for.

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Talking of externals, God is external, yes, and affects my internals in many ways. None by interfering with my feelings, my thinking.

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Comparing the victims of Zirve with Isaiah, sawn in half from the groin up, inside a hollow log, with a giant wooden saw, on the orders of Manasseh, probably in his adamant, sneering presence, is a category error.

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Manasseh repented. Turkey can't. Turkey won't.

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And agreed, the circles around the Incarnation attenuate rapidly. Because of what God had to work with. Superstitious fisherman and the like.

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Originally posted by Jamat:

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Originally posted by SusanDoris:
Eutychus

Interesting posts. May I ask how you would (approximately) define or recognise 'genuine faith'?

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You can observe the faith of others, you can observe changed lives, you can read the scriptures and investigate their claims and finally, if you have the mettle for it,you could jump in the water rather than just observe others bathing.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
And how would anyone know you had faith?

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Originally posted by Martin60:
But when I start making claims about how faithful I am or others are, I better be able to back it up.

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Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
[QUOTE]Faith isn't a competition. It doesn't matter which of us has the most of it, it matters that we all have some of it.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Ever decreasing circles: Attenuation, this occurred in Christ. The Incarnation guaranteed that. The ultimate dumbing down. His hard sayings are very hard indeed, as hard as the time, as the culture. As hard as He? Not trajectorily. After Him it gets much murkier straight away. We know that God didn't assassinate Herod with parasitic worms. Peter knew He did. The same penniless Peter who commanded the paralysed to get up and walk in Christ's name. God knows what happened to Ananias and Sapphira. Did the God we only know in Christ have them executed? The apostles believed all sorts of things that aren't true. Virtually every claim in the Old Testament. Like our Master. That didn't stop Him walking on water and turning it in to Château Musar. This is something you loop over, why is that?

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Sod me man! How many times? Of COURSE I believe in the miracle and miracles of Jesus and the disciples. Because of THE category. Him.

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I don't believe in any one else's claim since because there is no need to, whatsoever.

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There is no warrant, intellectually. None at all. Not in ANY claim of healing or any other supernatural interference in the laws of physics.

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Such claims make a childish travesty, an impossibility of theodicy, of the gospel. They prevent incarnationality, they distract from it with homeopathic fanaticism. They give hope in the wrong, the false, the untrue direction.

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DENY the nonsense and get on with universal social justice starting in ones own front room.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
I deny God nothing. He makes no claims that I can refute. As for there being no miracles beyond the first generation, why would there be?

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Originally posted by Martin60:
I deny God nothing. He makes no claims that I can refute. As for there being no miracles beyond the first generation, why would there be?

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Do you believe all of the Bible's, or let's say for simplicity's sake, the NT's, claims to miracles/supernatural intervention? It didn't sound like you thought Herod was eaten by divinely appointed worms. What about Peter's shadow? If you doubt those claims, why are you so sure about the incarnation/resurrection?
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
Why do you ask? You decide. All the information you need is in front of you. Again. As always. WWJD? WWYD?
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
I'm challenging you as to the consistency of your views on supernatural intervention.

I can understand you rejecting spurious contemporary claims on the grounds that they are a distraction and often poorly reported or fabricated outright, but I cannot understand on what basis you reject the principle of supernatural intervention via individuals other than Jesus if you accept that it really did happen during and immediately after his time on earth.

I understand your idea of "attenuation" and how you link it to "putting away childish things", but that is not the same as "extinction". I don't think what is perfect has come yet.
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
Moses' face glowed.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
Your elliptical responses are certainly the equivalent to seeing (what you're getting at) through a glass darkly
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
Clearly. You don't see the analogy?
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
No. Conversation requires a minimum of effort to make oneself understood. I've requested clarification, clarification which I'm sure on past experience you're capable of giving should you so wish.

I think you might have a lot of insights I'd find interesting and personally helpful, but your current mode of interaction makes me feel like a potential intiate struggling to achieve higher, esoteric knowledge.

If you can't (or won't) make your discourse simpler than that, then I don't believe it's consistent with the truth of the Gospel, which I believe to be fundamentally accessible and simple, and I'm not interested.
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
The disciples - like Moses and more so - came literally closer to God than any of us. He told them that they would do greater things than he. They did. Jesus' shadow didn't heal.

Again, like faith, it's very easy to quantify and qualify. It would be wouldn't it? Nothing complicated. Nothing esoteric.

After His resurrection a handful more, if that, experienced anything claim-worthy. Stephen. Paul. The odd move, direction, vision, dream, divination by the Spirit involving the first couple of circles. Lots of glossolalia by everybody, whatever that was. Anyone, anything else? Oh yes, the entire Jerusalem communist Christian community in, what, 66 AD (halfway through the un-intervened persecution by Nero, which took Paul the following year), heard "Let us remove hence." prior to the holocaust of 70, presaged by Jesus but not recorded biblically.

Nowadays? In your or anyone else's experience? From the C2nd on?

Nothing.

How does that deny God? How does it deny the activity of the Holy Ghost normative after The Acts of the Apostles? Whose exceptional category of faces metaphorically glowed, having basked in The Presence in and beyond His Incarnation.

If one wants to claim qualitative equality with them, then ones shadow will be healing, prison doors will be opening. The Church will be growing exponentially due to the power of incarnational example, leading the way in the transformation of society along the trajectory Jesus started ...

Not doing and claiming everything and anything else (including what ordinary people regard as witchcraft) but and pretending that that is the same.
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
I deny God nothing. He makes no claims that I can refute. As for there being no miracles beyond the first generation, why would there be?

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To show the weensiest little bit of consistency?

Which is why a faith based on miracles may be a little shaky. Or at least mine was and required a full rewiring, replumbing, reconfiguration, reboot. I thought of a bonfire, discarding it all, but that didn't fit for me. So I gave up on miracles, and thought I should set aside such things, and just make an effort to live a decent life, trying to be kind to others. Missing the mark of course, but not paying much attention to the miracle claims, and just trying to, as a friend from another country told me his church says "live like Jesus".

I'm okay with the miracles if you really need them, I just don't give them much mind, not really caring much if they are true any more.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
After His resurrection a handful more, if that, experienced anything claim-worthy.

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Nowadays? In your or anyone else's experience? From the C2nd on?

Nothing.

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How does that deny God?

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If one wants to claim qualitative equality with them, then ones shadow will be healing, prison doors will be opening.

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Not doing and claiming everything and anything else (including what ordinary people regard as witchcraft) but and pretending that that is the same.

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
Thanks for being more explicit. It really makes a difference.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
After His resurrection a handful more, if that, experienced anything claim-worthy.

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That we know of.

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Nowadays? In your or anyone else's experience? From the C2nd on?

Nothing.

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How can you be so sure? Who knows what has happened in this big wide world that believers have had the common sense to obey Jesus about and keep schtum? "Things of which it is not permitted to speak."

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How does that deny God?

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It denies God the faculty of acting as he wishes if you say he's never done anything like that since. Whether it matters if he actually has for the solidity of our personal faith is another question entirely.

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If one wants to claim qualitative equality with them, then ones shadow will be healing, prison doors will be opening.

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It's you that's chasing windmills here, at least as far as I'm concerned. I don't believe these things are eschatalogical imperatives. I'm not a proponent of "kingdom now" theology. But I think they can happen. That they don't most of the time is no different from Jesus not healing everyone at the pool of Bethesda.

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Not doing and claiming everything and anything else (including what ordinary people regard as witchcraft) but and pretending that that is the same.

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Again, don't mix up actual happenings, claims, and interpretation of happenings. Those are three very different things.

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Originally posted by Raptor Eye:
Yes, Martin, it does happen today too, and it has happened over the last 2000 years. Check out the recorded saints! I myself have been given a vision - not because I am anything special, but because it was necessary.

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You're a good man too Raptor Eye NFN Can you recommend a recorded saint for me please? My patron of Tours I admire. Francis. Aspects of Augustine. We need a thread on Official Saints that stand the test of time.

I'm happy for you, but not for myself in your claim.

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The pendulum has always swung one way and the other, toward religion and away from it, according to the pull of the world against that of the desire to carry out the will of God for the good of all. The latter can only be done in isolation with limited effect. Christianity is about co-operation, working together to utilise all of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

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You hold great store by good works, rightly so where they are the fruit of the spirit. Good works do not express worship of Christ unless they are carried out through love of God and the love of other people, and not through self interest.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:

quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
Thanks for being more explicit. It really makes a difference.

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You and your bloody graciousness.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:

quote:

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Originally posted by Raptor Eye:
You hold great store by good works, rightly so where they are the fruit of the spirit. Good works do not express worship of Christ unless they are carried out through love of God and the love of other people, and not through self interest.

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Then they aren't good works.

All good works are self serving. But as the pagan Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said I think, we should do them like breathing.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Eutychus man. Brother. Don't you know me for my 'puckish' sense of humour?

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Originally posted by Martin60:
You're a good man too Raptor Eye NFN Can you recommend a recorded saint for me please? My patron of Tours I admire. Francis. Aspects of Augustine. We need a thread on Official Saints that stand the test of time.

I'm happy for you, but not for myself in your claim.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Eeee Raptor Eye. I cannot imagine what a personal, untransferable, uncommunicable, yet necessary miracle is. I can never know. I can never experience such a thing. I could only experience a no-holds barred, scientifically attested miracle, my favourite being the one of the daytime in the middle of the night at the old Man City ground in Second Coming. SCIS repenting would be a good one. I can't think of a miracle of healing that could work, apart from one of the absolutely scientifically impossible ones that, interestingly, are never claimed. And if such did happen, which would jam the media globally, then what? Anything less would be a non-event, unless it was the start of an epidemic. Like global parthenogenesis in Darwin's Radio.

You had an experience that if I and Richard Dawkins had been party to, before, during and after, centred on you, we would have to interpret as supernatural. It would remove all doubt.

But as I wasn't there, like glossolalia, it's useless to me. Actually worse than useless.

I'm serious here. Such happened to you, but there is no proof whatsoever. What kind of God does that?

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Originally posted by Raptor Eye:
God is active within relationship Martin. The proof is in the pudding. Without the event, my path would have been very different, and I would not be speaking to you today.

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Originally posted by Martin60:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
Thanks for being more explicit. It really makes a difference.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
After His resurrection a handful more, if that, experienced anything claim-worthy.

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That we know of.

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Which is a lot (Brit. understatement) more than happens nowadays.

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Nowadays? In your or anyone else's experience? From the C2nd on?

Nothing.

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How can you be so sure? Who knows what has happened in this big wide world that believers have had the common sense to obey Jesus about and keep schtum? "Things of which it is not permitted to speak."

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Not the believers I've known for 40 years. And the believers at Lourdes and the believers all over the Internet and the believers publishing before that in the likes of Colin Urquart or Jack Deere etc, etc, etc. If believers would only keep schtum that would be great.

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How does that deny God?

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It denies God the faculty of acting as he wishes if you say he's never done anything like that since. Whether it matters if he actually has for the solidity of our personal faith is another question entirely.

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God does not wish other than He acts.

quote:

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quote:

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If one wants to claim qualitative equality with them, then ones shadow will be healing, prison doors will be opening.

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It's you that's chasing windmills here, at least as far as I'm concerned. I don't believe these things are eschatalogical imperatives. I'm not a proponent of "kingdom now" theology. But I think they can happen. That they don't most of the time is no different from Jesus not healing everyone at the pool of Bethesda.

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Can you quantify most?

quote:

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quote:

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Not doing and claiming everything and anything else (including what ordinary people regard as witchcraft) but and pretending that that is the same.

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Again, don't mix up actual happenings, claims, and interpretation of happenings. Those are three very different things.

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Not to me. They are all part of the same distraction.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Not the believers I've known for 40 years. And the believers at Lourdes and the believers all over the Internet and the believers publishing before that in the likes of Colin Urquart or Jack Deere etc, etc, etc. If believers would only keep schtum that would be great.

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Can you quantify most?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Not the believers I've known for 40 years. And the believers at Lourdes and the believers all over the Internet and the believers publishing before that in the likes of Colin Urquart or Jack Deere etc, etc, etc. If believers would only keep schtum that would be great.

---

The problem with these people is that God continuing to intervene supernaturally is an eschatological imperative, or otherwise foundational to their faith (or, in some cases, whether they can make a fast buck out of claiming such). The answer to that, inasmuch as there is one, is better teaching, in short focusing on fruit rather than gifts, and the occasional exposé.

Not simply to say "that's all finished now".

quote:

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Can you quantify most?

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No, but even once would be enough to overturn your theory of cessationism.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
God must be doing all this intervention to justify our faith.

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When I shook my head at a small group, a woman vastly deserving of sympathy and a lot more besides said, "What's the point then?". A question you have asked more than once I recall. Her desperate circumstances needed miracles on all fronts and therefore they could happen and had to be constantly prayed for.

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I agree, once would be enough. Daytime in the middle of the night at Maine Road, anything that would have Dawkins on his knees, yes please, as soon as you like Lord.

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The ABoC met an agnostic bloke on a plane he'd encountered before elsewhere this year and that was a miracle, "not a coincidence" (I've heard "God incidents" claimed from the front)

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where is the theology of suffering?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Martin60:


For you, me, Raptor Eye, Lamb Chopped, everybody who is invincibly convinced that they have experienced divine intervention despite the fact that they manifestly haven't.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:

If that cap doesn't fit you LC, then could you post a link to a post where you've described the experiences you are alluding to here?

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:

Until then I take these claims with a massive shovel of salt. Been disappointed too many times.

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
I mean, if you've been - let's pick a possibility at random - healed of terminal cancer, then you must, surely, have given a lot of thought to the question "if God shows his care for me by healing me in this way, why does he apparently not care about the other millions of people who die when they get this diagnosis?"

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quote:

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
You could actually tell us what the experiences are so that we can evaluate them.

I'm starting to get a little fed up with people telling me they've had experiences that convince them of God's existence and intervention but not being willing to expand on them and actually tell what happened.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:

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Originally posted by Martin60:


For you, me, Raptor Eye, Lamb Chopped, everybody who is invincibly convinced that they have experienced divine intervention despite the fact that they manifestly haven't.

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Would you please stop tempting me to say "Fuck off!" in Purgatory? You manifestly cannot know what my experiences have been, and to make dogmatic statements about how wrong I am, it really pisses me off.

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Originally posted by Raptor Eye:
Did you see the earlier post where I did share, as you requested? I posted the link.

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
For some reason God will reveal himself to you, but not to me. Do you know what I sometimes think? I sometimes think there's been a colossal cosmic mistake. The Calvinists are right; the elect have been preselected from eternity, I'm not one of them, and by some weird mistake nevertheless I'm drawn to the idea of God. But he's not interested in me, because I'm on the fry list.

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
You could actually tell us what the experiences are so that we can evaluate them.

I'm starting to get a little fed up with people telling me they've had experiences that convince them of God's existence and intervention but not being willing to expand on them and actually tell what happened.

If that cap doesn't fit you LC, then could you post a link to a post where you've described the experiences you are alluding to here?

Two things I ask from the people who claim they've had convincing experiences.

1. what actually bloody well happened;
2. some kind of consistent theology that explains why other people have had life shit on them until it kills them with not the slightest sign of divine giving of a shit.

Until then I take these claims with a massive shovel of salt. Been disappointed too many times.

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
No bother; found it. I had missed it, and to that extent I owe you an apology.

I read your post in All Saints. This is not your fault, but it just makes it worse. For some reason God will reveal himself to you, but not to me.

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For those still struggling to find the post in question, here it is.

Raptor Eye, if I can switch sides for a moment here, I can believe your story but it is not in the same category as turning water into wine or raising the dead. Neither are stories (of which I have some near-first-hand experience) of healthy babies being born over and against doctors' depressing prognoses. Not to dismiss them, but they are not in the same law-of-physics-breaking category as a resurrection three days after death.

(However, I still wouldn't rule the possibility of the latter category out completely today. But I'd say the odds on it occurring are inversely proportional to the presence of theology teaching that it should occur.)*

Karl, if I may I think the problem is wanting someone else's faith experience. To go back to my earlier image borrowed from Adrian Plass, the challenge is what we each have in our briefcases, not what we would like.

The worth of what's in them is not tied to the kind of miraculous occurrence we're talking about here. As Lamb Chopped correctly points out, I don't think it's orthodox to believe that Peter, walker on water, healer via shadows, etc. was somehow a better saint than John the Baptist - who it would seem failed to witness any of Jesus' miracles, lost his following because of them, and ended up being decapitated in jail on someone else's whim.

There is however (and sadly) no shortage of churches where one is made to feel inferior if one has not had this kind of experience. But I think your problem is with them rather than with the Bible narratives.

Blessed are those that have not seen and yet believe

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*Bethelised contacts of ours recently prayed for, nay, declared the resurrection of a beautiful young mother of five of their acquaintance who died more or less overnight from viral meningitis a few weeks ago. I almost started a Hell thread to establish the cut-off point in terms of ugliness, social standing, age (and dare I say it race?) beyond which praying for resurrections was non-U, but refrained.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
Do you know what I sometimes think? I sometimes think there's been a colossal cosmic mistake. The Calvinists are right

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Raptor Eye. Do you mean that God is active within relationship with each of us? As opposed to in interpersonal relationships with other humans? I imagine you must mean the former. I have no proof of that, but I believe it as I demonstrate by prayer and in my declaration of belief of the normative work of the Holy Ghost
(It, He, She convicts, guides, regenerates, glorifies, testifies, reveals, leads, sanctifies, empowers, fills, teaches, witnesses, fruits, distributes, anoints, washes, refreshes, unites, guarantees, frees, seals, quickens, reveals, speaks ...). Where I experience those things and more I acknowledge that as proof of the pudding, yes. I'm extremely grateful for connections, realisations, understandings, perspectives in His provision and am not sceptical of that.

Where do we differ? You had an event which you ascribe to divine intervention that I could not even if I experienced the same event, even if it would convert Richard Dawkins? That's just a trivial dispositional difference. The Spirit unites us despite that.

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
No bother; found it. I had missed it, and to that extent I owe you an apology.

I read your post in All Saints. This is not your fault, but it just makes it worse. For some reason God will reveal himself to you, but not to me. Do you know what I sometimes think? I sometimes think there's been a colossal cosmic mistake. The Calvinists are right; the elect have been preselected from eternity, I'm not one of them, and by some weird mistake nevertheless I'm drawn to the idea of God. But he's not interested in me, because I'm on the fry list.

That's the sort of dark thought that haunts me. That God is silent because I either the universe or I have fucked up and it's sunk, lost, without hope. God has turned his face away from me and will never turn back, because I'm not destined to be one of his. I was never meant to be interested in God; I was meant to be an atheist. And something went wrong, which makes me play at belief. But it's just that; I'm the uncoordinated nerd who not only wants to be on the football team, he's not realised that he's not on it, and that's why the coach is ignoring him.

Bugger. Never meant to put this here. Tear me apart; you can do no more than has been already done.

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
God must be doing all this intervention to justify our faith.

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I never said such a thing.

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When I shook my head at a small group, a woman vastly deserving of sympathy and a lot more besides said, "What's the point then?". A question you have asked more than once I recall. Her desperate circumstances needed miracles on all fronts and therefore they could happen and had to be constantly prayed for.

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And I say to you again, who are you to judge another man's servant? Why shake your head? She has to work through and be accountable for her faith, not yours. Her intellectual and existential struggles, and how she sees God answer them/rationalises it, are for her conscience to decide.

The Gypsies I know are forever telling me stories of miraculous healings. Do I shake my head at them? No. Do I encourage them in it? No.

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I agree, once would be enough. Daytime in the middle of the night at Maine Road, anything that would have Dawkins on his knees, yes please, as soon as you like Lord.

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You only have to open your Bible to know it wouldn't work. It wouldn't work "even if someone was raised from the dead". "Seeking signs" doesn't work. That doesn't mean there never are any.

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The ABoC met an agnostic bloke on a plane he'd encountered before elsewhere this year and that was a miracle, "not a coincidence" (I've heard "God incidents" claimed from the front)

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At the risk of disappointing you, I experience God-incidences from time to time. I do my best to explain them away as cognitive bias but it doesn't always work. The way I perceive it, sometimes God is in the randomness. Rarely might I talk it up into a miracle, though.

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I still have a problem with your "attenuation" theory. I could see some logic in just Jesus doing miracles, but if they still happened after he left, e.g. in Acts, then there's no real reason I can see for them ceasing altogether. I just don't see them as an eschatological imperative. Do we come to Jesus just to get free bread to eat?

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where is the theology of suffering?

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In a nutshell, suffering comes along with the human condition of being cut off from God. God is at work from within history to bring a final end to suffering. He does so thanks to the victory of his Son over evil at the cross. He acts by his Spirit, primarily through those born of the Spirit, to that end. Any exceptional miracles along the way are not so much indications of the Kingdom being just around the corner, i.e. the more the merrier, as prophetic signs that one day it will come in fulness. And so we pray "your Kingdom come" and "deliver us from evil". That's as far as I've got.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
nothing that could stand up in court or a laboratory, nothing that would make Dawkins a believer.

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Funnily enough two of the middle class couples availed themselves of such non-miraculous but surprisingly effective help in creating headspace and hope.

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We are Christ's arms and wallets now after all.

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I've had them too. Got one that still stops me in my tracks.

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The rapid, exponential attenuation is a fact of the texts and Christian experience since. The half life seems pretty steep.

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How were we cut off by the way?

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Originally posted by Martin60:
[QB]
We believe that miracles are all happening in private, in secret (as you say, the beneficiaries of the real miracles are all keeping schtum) and in Angola and South Korea and therefore that we can expect the same despite no one we know ever letting on about the real wheat but just going on about the chaff. Just keep believing despite there being no actual evidence at all, nothing that could stand up in court or a laboratory, nothing that would make Dawkins a believer. That's how we operate credulously, full of cognitive bias, of experiential reasoning. Been there, done that.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Eutychus, death was involved (doctor said so). That's as far as I can go with the details of that particular story, which nobody needs to credit. But it was past the level of "unlikely birth."

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
I'm an idiot for even mentioning what i cannot give all the details for. Erase, delete, forget it.

But the other one..

Seriously, i feel like i laid a great big turd in the middle of the thread and everyone's carefully walking around it. Will nobody have the guts to address it?

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Will nobody have the guts to address it?

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
I'm an idiot for even mentioning what i cannot give all the details for. Erase, delete, forget it.

But the other one..

Seriously, i feel like i laid a great big turd in the middle of the thread and everyone's carefully walking around it. Will nobody have the guts to address it?

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
Well, I've been out all day. Been to the Deep in Hull with the kids to see the fish.

I think, LC, and RE, that all I can say is yes, you've told me the story. And it's proved what someone said upthread - that I'm seeming to want to believe on someone else's faith, and it just won't work. Not your fault, either of you. There are two reactions I can have; two responses. I can take it at face value, and question why God is so absent from my experience, or I can find various "ah yes, but...". And indeed, like a quantum superimposition I can do both at the same time. Neither really helps me; my own experience remains atheistic. My challenge was a mistake, because it resolved nothing. Forgive me.

This is out of place in Purg. I've derailed this thread enough with my own faith crises.

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
ETA: [before crosspost, to Eutychus:]

Why the fuck should I call you to Hell?

I don't in fact expect most of you to believe it. Perhaps any of you, who knows. And I don't expect to be hurt if that's the case, either. My own grandparents who knew us couldn't believe it. What then should I expect of you?

I posted the story because I'm tired of hearing people say or imply "Such things don't happen, witness the fact that nobody I know or trust ever tells such a story." (Yeah, I flatter myself that I might have a smidgen of credibility with some of you. Or once did.)

So I've told the story. That's enough. I've told it, you all have heard it, and you can process it however you want to. I was pissed with Martin, not for doubting me, but for blowing me off. I don't see any of you blowing me off here. Right?

The story is just one more tiny bit of data to push around the chessboard here. Do as you like with it. Just don't blow me off.

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Eutychus, death was involved (doctor said so). That's as far as I can go with the details of that particular story, which nobody needs to credit. But it was past the level of "unlikely birth."

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Past the level of "he stinketh, for he hath been dead three days"? I doubt it.

Speaking as one who has prayed, faithlessly, over the fast-cooling body of a dead child, and opted not to when it was that child's mum's turn, in the same hospital, with the bereaved father-just-turned-widower in attendance, just a few years later.

[x-post]

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What I don't like in hatless' post is what I perceive as a patronising tone, which I often find explicitly in yours, Martin, that comes across as implying one can somehow grow out of these things. On the one hand you and he often seem to say everyone's story is legitimate and of equal value, and yet you come across as very dismissive of certain stories that don't fit your views.

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
Well, the first time was in the presence of a sort-of-apostle and medical doctor on record as having allegedly "resurrected" someone, and the father asked us to pray. The sort-of-apostle was a bit sheepish.

The second time it was just the now-widower and me and he said to me "I guess praying for resurrection is no use" or some such, which I suppose was the fruit of experience. I was happy to comply, especially as I had parted company with the sort-of-apostle and restorationism in the meantime.

What I don't like in hatless' post is what I perceive as a patronising tone, which I often find explicitly in yours, Martin, that comes across as implying one can somehow grow out of these things. On the one hand you and he often seem to say everyone's story is legitimate and of equal value, and yet you come across as very dismissive of certain stories that don't fit your views.

On the "Fall" thread I linked to above, Martin, you repented of being "illiberal in your liberality". Time to do so again?

To me the problem is much less with whether these things happen or not as with the attitude of

a) those who present them as normative Christian experience to which others should aspire [which I don't think anyone here on this thread has but these people are the actual target of most of the criticism]

b) those who for lack of having experienced them either i) declare categorically that God did not spontaneously intervene for anyone anywhere as though they had the definitive or at least superior view, as opposed simply to their own "frame story" or ii) relegate themselves to some inferior category as a result (looking at you here Karl).

I don't think extraordinary experiences are either a badge of faith or a sign of immaturity. The maturity or lack of it is in how we respond to them and the degree of importance we ascribe to them.

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
Euty, it's not so much relegating myself to a second class status.

It's more that I cannot commit and trust myself to a God who I am not sure exists, and on whom I cannot actually depend, because despite the hype, I can still die by violence or by illness; I can still experience pain and loss, whilst apparently in his hands. Now, you might say that that's abundantly clear anyway and is the problem of theodicy, which is true, but if one is sure that God is real, and personal, one can at least be sure that he knows and cares about what is happening, and that we can trust him that it will sort itself out in the end, for certain values of "the end".

But not if he's not actually there.

Hence my point that my experience is atheistic. I cannot point to anything in my life and say "if God wasn't real, then that couldn't have happened". For all I can tell, my life need not be any different if God were not there.

A careful reader may note my use of the subjunctive there - there are many things, good things, that have happened in my life that I'm glad of. Perhaps God is behind them. But not in a way that I can say "yep, that was God". If I was sure he was there, I daresay I could ascribe those things to him.

So if I look for experiences and signs, it's not to promote my second class relegated position; it's to know that there's actually a firm basis for faith at all, of any status.

Does this make any sense?

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Originally posted by hatless:
But how can you affirm someone's right to an opinion whilst explaining why you have rejected it?

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
For all I can tell, my life need not be any different if God were not there.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
How do I healthily, for the benefit of our relationships here, our metanarrative, engage with my utter invincible denial of divine intervention in externals as a given?

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Hmmm. I aspire to be humbly in invincible denial, I really do. Is that absurd? Not worth the candle?

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Originally posted by hatless:
Hm, a masterclass in how not to patronise by someone who uses himself as an example of excellence, who suggests Martin60, one of the least patronising people around, might be in denial because admitting the truth would be too much for him

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, and who dismisses social science for always making a mistake they just can't see.

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

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Originally posted by Martin60:
Hmmm. I aspire to be humbly in invincible denial, I really do. Is that absurd? Not worth the candle?

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You can be in invincible denial for you. But only if you admit, at least when posting, the possiblity that others might legitimately come to a different conclusion.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
I have no reason to doubt anyone here not coming to legitimate conclusions based on their disposition, beliefs, hermeneutic, epistemology. Is that weaseling?

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I really want this to work.

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I always endorse and encourage her, in my most patronizing manner of course

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This isn't going to work for now, at least not as far as I'm concerned, unless you can bring yourself to edit this kind of remark out before posting. You have to give at least a semblance of serious interaction.
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
I'm giving up the will live here. But I'll try another breath.
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
You're losing the will to live?



I've not lost it yet, but I'm not holding my breath ...



Meanwhile, I've been interested to see the direction this thread has taken, although it's been like watching an impending car crash at times.
 

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Posted by Golden Key (# 1468) on :
 

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Originally posted by hatless:
Hm, a masterclass in how not to patronise by someone who uses himself as an example of excellence, who suggests Martin60, one of the least patronising people around, might be in denial because admitting the truth would be too much for him, and who dismisses social science for always making a mistake they just can't see.

Do you also do lectures on irony? Modesty? Self-awareness?

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
GK, as I said to hatless, you are welcome to engage with me on this accusation. In Hell, where such engagement belongs.
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
OK. With a beloved Holocaust denier and conspiracy theorist (Kennedy, Apollo, 911) I have to acknowledge that our truths are different. I have to confess that my epistemology is fixed and I cannot change it even if I wanted to, I don't know how. I will always listen to the arguments and will not argue back and will acknowledge them. I'm not asked to critique them, what do I think, I might ask 'what would you say to those who say ...'. There is always an answer I can nod to and be thankful for. On the libertarianism AKA alt-right that comes with the package I can be a bit feistier, but invariably acknowledge the humour and wit, the 'good' and 'fair' points. I will always look for common ground. And there always is.

But of course I don't believe any of it. I don't think for one moment I could be wrong, I could be mistaken. But I cannot say that in that relationship. Only with trepidation, apology, if pressed. This person has expressed deeply sincerely that they want to save me from my epistemology.

So it is with divine intervention beyond the first rapidly attenuating circles propagated forward centred on Jesus.

I must say it with trepidation and apology. In so doing, here and now, that actually feels like I'm thinking, counting those who erroneously believe otherwise as better, more worthy than myself. Is that possible? Do I deceive myself? As I should with Muslims or Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons. And find that I am able to do.

I need to tread carefully. But this is Purgatory, this is a dialectical crucible and ... I feel the need for it to be known on this thread, that my truth is a universal for me, an absolute, that not for one moment could anyone else's different truth be true for me, be true period. But of course I DO acknowledge that it has to be utterly invincibly true for them. I have to regretfully, regrettably disagree.

Sorry, is this just another iteration of what's been said above in effect? Is there any improvement in how it is said? Can anything more be said? Can the metanarrative be pursued?

And as for this subject, so for others of course. Is this the way?
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
That's certainly much clearer

Firstly, I don't think anyone here is contesting anyone else's right to their strongly-held belief.

Nor the fact that some strongly-held beliefs on the part of others make us want to tear our hair out.

The question of form relates to how that is expressed.

Firstly, when it comes to communication (especially in a text-based medium) I think there's a generally-held convention that we moderate the strength with which we express our convictions; this is the price to pay (or, if you prefer, the respect that is owed) to enable back-and-forth discussion to occur as opposed to simply shouting at each other.

Of course just where the cursor is set moves up and down over the course of the conversation but it has to be somewhere on the scale for conversation to continue.

Again, conventionally, I don't think people feel it's hypocritical to express oneself in less absolutist terms than one might feel, and I don't think you should either.

Secondly, and at the risk of repeating myself, spirited debate is welcome; being deliberately obscure is not the same thing at all. It makes a viewpoint harder to understand.

Finally, there is the question of stance. I was taught in counselling training to adopt a stance of belief. In other words, a good listener will at least give the appearance of believing the speaker (as opposed to being scornful or dismissive) - however unlikely the discourse.

I get plenty of practice with this in my prison, where a significant percentage of the inmates also have severe psychiatric problems.

Again, this may seem hypocritical or dishonest, but in fact it is a way of allowing the other person space to express themselves and instilling confidence in the relationship such that over time, the insaner parts of their argument may be gently challenged as appropriate.

Finally, as to the substance, you may not have noticed that in the midst of all this I have been considering your idea of "attenuation", was more drawn to your expression of it as a "half-life", and (no doubt in view of just how long that can be - I've just been translating something on Fukushima) found it quite palatable expressed thus (especially because theoretically at least, "never" never arrives with a half-life ).

I'm reasonably sure that idea will make it into my theological discourse sooner or later, so you see, you can get me to shift my views when you're not being obscure or oxymoronic.
 

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Posted by Martin60 (# 368) on :
 
Thanks again Eutychus. I cringe that you should have to state the obvious and give such excellent examples from experience.

In the game of rhetoric I'm unable to handle the emotional impact, the pathos of reacting to the logos of others counter to my own and as a result have failed for decades, life, in my ethos.

I hope that's not too obscure. Which admits that it is obscure to start with.

What went on in my potty training I don't know. What infant conditioning. I have my suspicions as the main protagonist is now in my care. And drives me beyond nuts where I am to start with.

From a child I felt surrounded by idiots. Along with everyone else. I seemed to feel it with more frustration than most. Which is, of course, projection at my own failure to express myself.

Eeeeeee. Cringe. At my age, I ask you. There is a lonnnnng, slow, big roller coaster loop of cognitive dissonance going on here.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
That was all nice and clear, thank you. Apart from the last sentence, but I think that was directed at yourself rather than me.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
I cringe that you should have to state the obvious

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There is a trap, into which I think practitioners of the social sciences fall all the time, of thinking that because they have produced a model to explain something it somehow places them in an ivory tower of objectivity outside the model. That isn't exactly what I feel happens here, but it's something akin to it.

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Originally posted by Martin60:
realizing

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la mémoire est pathogène, la prise de conscience est curative

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"Memory is bad for you; realisation helps you get better". Which I observe to be largely true. It's never too late.

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Originally posted by mark_in_manchester:
His argument is that the kinds of knowledge are the same, and on the way there he maintains that standing 'outside' in objectivity is always impossible.

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Do '1) a mountain of academic references' chime with 'knowing with the heart'? 2) Surely the heart is a separate realm from the academic? 3) I know many things with my heart that I could never prove or give references for.

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Originally posted by mark_in_manchester:

I think you might enjoy Clouser - he seems to defend your point from an unusual angle.

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
Thanks for the book recommendation, but I'm increasingly convinced my working theology is based on little more than a combination of CS Lewis, Douglas Adams, and Os Guinness.

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Terry Pratchett is currently my fave theologian, with traces of Anne Lamott, Madeleine L'Engle, Annie Dillard, CS Lewis, and many, many others.

 

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Posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider (# 76) on :
 
Ian Anderson. Side 2 of Aqualung is my sermon.
 

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Posted by hatless (# 3365) on :
 

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
Ian Anderson. Side 2 of Aqualung is my sermon.

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Originally posted by Karl: Liberal Backslider:
Euty, it's not so much relegating myself to a second class status.

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It's more that I cannot commit and trust myself to a God who I am not sure exists, and on whom I cannot actually depend, because despite the hype, I can still die by violence or by illness; I can still experience pain and loss, whilst apparently in his hands. Now, you might say that that's abundantly clear anyway and is the problem of theodicy, which is true, but if one is sure that God is real, and personal, one can at least be sure that he knows and cares about what is happening, and that we can trust him that it will sort itself out in the end, for certain values of "the end".

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But not if he's not actually there.

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Hence my point that my experience is atheistic. I cannot point to anything in my life and say "if God wasn't real, then that couldn't have happened". For all I can tell, my life need not be any different if God were not there.

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A careful reader may note my use of the subjunctive there - there are many things, good things, that have happened in my life that I'm glad of. Perhaps God is behind them. But not in a way that I can say "yep, that was God". If I was sure he was there, I daresay I could ascribe those things to him.

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So if I look for experiences and signs, it's not to promote my second class relegated position; it's to know that there's actually a firm basis for faith at all, of any status.

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Does this make any sense?

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