Miracles, are they fundamental, or 'fun'?

[_Roger Morrison]

Following is a paste from Spong re "Miracles". That they are more than ever difficult to believe, i think his explaination gives credibility to their origin while recognizing they are not to be believed as historical. As i suggested to Rory in another thread:

[quote]Much, indeed most, of the Bible is miracle free. In those portions of the Torah which fundamentalist religion claims to be the laws of God recorded directly from God's dictation, there are in fact no miracle narratives. In the writing of the prophets from Isaiah to Malachi, there are no miracle stories except in the Book of Daniel which was not composed until 160 B.C.E., clearly the last book in the Old Testament to be written. The miracles in the book of Daniel are of the nature of folk tales about those who are rewarded for being faithful to God. One thinks of Shadrach, Meschach, and Abenego who escaped the fiery furnace and of Daniel who escaped the lion's den. There are no miracle stories in the Psalms or in any of the Wisdom literature, like the book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes or the Song of Solomon. In the New Testament Paul records no miracles in any of his epistles and none in the non-Pauline epistles. As fanciful as the book of Revelation is there are no stories there of anyone doing a supernatural act. By and large there are only three places in the entire Bible in which miracles seem to be prominent. All three revolve around primary, pivotal people in the development of the Jewish faith story and their immediate successors. In many ways it is also worth noting that the miracles attributed to their successors do not look like original stories at all, but, rather, like the retelling of narratives that had been first told abut the primary figure. The three places where miracles invade the texts of the Bible are in the cycle of stories that gathered around Moses, the giver of the law and founder of the Jewish nation and his immediate successor Joshua; those that gathered around Elijah, the founder of the prophetic movement and his immediate successor Elisha, and finally, these that gathered around Jesus, the life upon which the Christian faith is built and his immediate successors, the Apostles. The ability to perform miracles, while thus not being attributed to many in the Bible, do, in fact, surround Moses and Elijah, who were such pivotal figures in Jewish history, that when the Jews talked about the essence of their faith, they said it "hangs on the law and the prophets." In that phrase they are referring to the twin pillars of Judaism: Moses, the giver of the law and Elijah, the father of the prophetic movement. It should be no surprise that when the story of Jesus was written, the images of Moses and Elijah loomed hugely in the background thinking of the gospel writers and they even made this quite overt by assigning to Moses and Elijah cameo roles in the story of Jesus' transfiguration on top of the mountain. The purpose of that story was to demonstrate that Jesus transcended the greatness of the two primary heroes in the Jewish sacred story. So the first thing an interpreter of the gospels must do, especially the interpreter of the inter-related synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, is to grasp the connectedness between the miracle stories attributed to both Moses and Elijah and those attributed to Jesus in these gospel accounts. I do not believe that it is co-incidental that miracle stories surround all three of these religious heroes. I am also convinced that any attempt to make sense out of the miracle stories of the gospels must begin with an analysis of the miracle stories of Moses and Elijah.

In the Moses stories, God appears to work through Moses to do miraculous things in the world of nature. The book of Exodus tells us that Moses first meets God in an encounter with a burning bush in the wilderness. The fire seems to surround the bush but the bush miraculously is not consumed. It is out of that bush that God calls Moses into leadership. This power over nature continues to highlight the Moses story in the book of Exodus. God next equips Moses with miraculous power to be used in negotiations with Pharaoh. On cue, Moses can hurl his staff to the ground and cause it to turn into a snake. Moses can stick his hand into his tunic and then draw it out filled with leprosy. God also provides a cure for this miraculous trick because when Moses sticks his leprous hand back into his tunic, he draws it out clean. These are all stories in which Moses is said to have power over the natural order. That theme is continued in the stories of the plagues against Egypt. Moses becomes God's agent in the turning of the Nile River into blood. This causes the fish to die and the frogs to evacuate those waters. Then come in quick succession the plagues of insects, hailstones, darkness, boils, cattle disease and other horrors designed to force Pharaoh to set the Jewish slave people free. The final plague inaugurates the reign of terror in which the first born male in every Egyptian household is slain by God on the night of the Passover. This is followed by the splitting of the Red Sea so that the Israelites can cross it to safety, but it closes just in time to drown all the Egyptians. Next while in the wilderness comes the raining of heavenly bread called manna on the Israelites when they were hungry. That is not a complete list of Moses' ability to perform miracles, but it should be sufficient to make the point that in the Bible Moses possesses the miraculous power to manipulate the created order, to control the elements in the world of nature like water, as God's instrument on behalf of his nation. Nature miracles are thus a significant factor in the cycle of Moses stories.

When Moses is succeeded by Joshua, some of his miraculous power appears to make its way into the Joshua narrative. Joshua is also confronted by a body of water that impedes God's people so he too splits the water, this time the swollen and flooded Jordan River instead of the Red Sea, so that the Jews can walk across on dry land. When Joshua faces his enemies in Jericho, he causes the walls to fall down miraculously, so as to win a great military victory over the city. When he is confronted by the possibility that the Ammonites might avoid total defeat on the battlefield by escaping in the falling darkness of evening, Joshua asks God to stop the sun in the sky so that daylight will not disappear until the Ammonites are destroyed. All of the miracles attributed to Joshua appear to be drawn from the Moses story in that all are nature miracles simply being retold about Joshua. That was the way Jewish writers portrayed the idea that God, once present with Moses, was now present with Joshua. Miraculous power over nature belonged to God, but Moses and Joshua were the lives through which that power was deployed.

Last week we observed that nature miracles were one of the three kinds of miracles attributed to Jesus in the gospels. Among Jesus' nature miracles was his ability to control things like wind and water. Jesus' power to walk on the water might be an even greater demonstration of miraculous power than splitting the Red Sea and would be an attempt to show Jesus as acting with expanded Moses power. While Moses could pray to God to send manna on the starving Israelites in the wilderness, Jesus, portrayed as the new and greater Moses, could with his own power expand loaves and fish to feed a similar hungry multitude in the wilderness. All of the nature miracles attributed to Jesus appear to be expanded Moses stories and they were written to serve an interpretive process, rather than to be simply supernatural acts. They were saying that in the person of Jesus we have met a presence of God even greater than the one our ancestors encountered in Moses, the holiest life Jewish people have ever known. It was their attempt to make their words big enough to embrace the wonder and mystery that they encountered in Jesus.

If that is true, and I believe it is, the narratives about nature miracles in the gospels are not historical events in which supernatural power was demonstrated at all, they are interpretive Moses stories raised to the 'nth' power by Jesus' disciples and retold about Jesus of Nazareth. When Western people, who did not know how to read these essentially Jewish stories, they simply misinterpreted these stories as descriptive accounts of literal events that had occurred in real time. Western people only seemed able to ask the typical objective question: "Did this event really happen?" Those who answer this question with a "Yes," asserting that it really happened because Jesus did it with his divine power and all we must do is to believe the Bible, become the uncritical traditionalists, the unthinking fundamentals, and thus the purveyors of a religion of certainty. Those who answer that question with a "No," asserting that such miracles cannot really happen, become the skeptics, the church dropouts, the citizens of the "Secular City" and the members of the Church Alumni Association. Both answers, however, miss the point because they do not understand the Jewish tradition of story telling.

The nature miracles in the gospel are not descriptions of events that ever happened, they are expanded Moses stories designed to help people interpret the power of the Jesus experience. This insight opens us to a new way to look at the miracles. Could this idea also illumine the healing miracles and those miracles purporting to say that Jesus had the power to raise the dead back to life? That becomes the question crying out for an answer.
quote]

In my seriously considered opinion (IMSCO) believing the miracles attributed to Jesus to be factual is absolutely non-essential to practicing the Universal truths of justice and 'charity' contained in His, "Two New Commandments"... Know the truth to be free... Thoughts, comments... Warm regards, Roger

[_truth dancer]

Hi Roger...

I totally completely absolutely agree with you!

I know of few, if any, miracles attributed to Jesus that were not a part of some earlier myth.

To my way of thinking... LIFE is a miracle.

No need for made up, pretend, or silly stories!

~dancer~

Thanks for sharing this with us!

[_Roger Morrison]

Hi TD, thanks for your response AND thought:

To my way of thinking... LIFE is a miracle.

No need for made up, pretend, or silly stories!

Dancin' with truth again! Yeah, what could be more "Miraculous" than the 'sperm-and-egg-dance'? Even though it is now no mystery it is absolutely amazing to experience this order-of-things! Order out of chaous...knowledge out of ignorance...truth over fiction...

As humanity works more with truth--to benefit the human aggregate--the more is experienced the fullness-of-life as sages have promised... "LIKE WOW!" Warm regards, Roger

[_paulhadik]

Roger:

the deeper meaning of the miracles being factual is that they are a proof of authority. Certainly they are grouped in Scripture especially in the historical books
Moses, Elijah and Elisha's authority were proved by God's power being manifest in their works.
Jesus raising Himself from the dead was the ultimate proof that He was Emmanuel

Toss out the miracles (and why would you want to?) and you are back to a nice guy, deluded though, who tossed around some interesting ideas
and that's all

[_truth dancer]

Toss out the miracles (and why would you want to?) and you are back to a nice guy, deluded though, who tossed around some interesting ideas
and that's all

Hey Paul... :-)

I very respectfully disagree! (smile)

We have plenty of folks who claim they can perform miracles... going way back. Because we hear of miracles performed by someone doesn't mean that person is "the" God does it?

Personally, I think the basic teachings of Jesus (at least what I see as the actual teachings - love God, love others; the golden rule; the beatitudes, etc), are amazing and speak of enlightenment rarely undersood or embraced by humans.

I think we could take the basic teachings of Jesus... get rid of everything else regarding religions made from men, and we would have a better chance of healing our world and our lives.

~dancer~

[_Roger Morrison]

Roger:

the deeper meaning of the miracles being factual is that they are a proof of authority. Certainly they are grouped in Scripture especially in the historical books
Moses, Elijah and Elisha's authority were proved by God's power being manifest in their works.
Jesus raising Himself from the dead was the ultimate proof that He was Emmanuel

Toss out the miracles (and why would you want to?) and you are back to a nice guy, deluded though, who tossed around some interesting ideas
and that's all

Hi Paul, nice to exchange with you again... But, i see we will still be bouncing off of each other :-) OK, so "...a nice, deluded guy who tosed around some interestng ideas..." is made into what when (imagined) "miracles" are added to his legend? Re-read TD...

I do find it--groping for a word???--that folks in 2007 are expected to believe what folks of 2500 BC to 100 AD believed!!?? When things in the sciences have advanced as they obviously have, why is religious fabalism still ruling the thinking of religious types who enjoy the progress of scientific initiatives?? I ask for a rational answer beyond faith tradition... Warm regards, Roger

[_huckelberry]

Hi Roger, I cannot stop a couple questions. I am not the least bit disconcerted using science. I am in fact all for scientific inquiry, am after all a fundamentalist(a Juliann joke).

So what has been discovered scienfically about death that people in the first century didn't know which would change the story of the resurection? Do you think people in the first century didn't understand the same scientific difficulties with bread and fish multipication that we know about now. I am asking about scientific discoveries.

I am willing to notice that Jewish tradition may use fabulous story to express an abstract or spiritual understanding. I just do not see reason to think such stories may also be about real events. I do see a reason to conclude from the observation that therefore miracles did not happen. It seems as if a rigid assumption is being made that real history and mythical story expression do not mix. I think the Bible shows they mix regularly.

[_richardMdBorn]

Roger Morrison Following is a paste from Spong re "Miracles". That they are more than ever difficult to believe, I think his explaination gives credibility to their origin while recognizing they are not to be believed as historical. As I suggested to Rory in another thread:

Much, indeed most, of the Bible is miracle free. In those portions of the Torah which fundamentalist religion claims to be the laws of God recorded directly from God's dictation, there are in fact no miracle narratives. In the writing of the prophets from Isaiah to Malachi, there are no miracle stories except in the Book of Daniel which was not composed until 160 B.C.E., clearly the last book in the Old Testament to be written.

I suggest that Spong read Isa 37:36. His "scholarship" again is very sloppy. And if he hides behind the 1st and 2nd Isaiah (and 3rd) theories and claims that the later part of the book was written by a different person, let's examine:

In the New Testament Paul records no miracles in any of his epistles.

I Cor 15 deals at length with the Resurrection. I would guess that Spong thinks that it was a miracle.

[_Roger Morrison]

Hi Richard, long time between posts ;-) However, i think you might too completely discredit Spong. i.e. Might it be, Spong doesn't consider "resurection" &/or an "after-life" to be miracles such as are found in the four gospels--walking on water, commanding the elements, etc??

Spong still clings to the idea of Christ over coming death, as i understand from his writings. It is at that point that i leave his "theology", "sloppy" or otherwise. I guess in that respect i might be more Saducee that Pharasee, which we must remember Paul/Saul was. A millenealist... if i have my terminology correct??

IMSCO, Jesus of Nazareth taught the people of his time--and of all times--how to live day-by-day, with each other, cooperatively. Without envy, malice, prejudice or hate, for he tells us: we are ALL children of "God" who favours non AND blesses anyone who puts energy & effort successfully to the correct intention/law. Jesus' concern was for this life. He just assumed a next one--rightly or wrongly--yet to be proven...

I respectfully suggest that is THE principle upon which all science is dependent: cause & effect. One that many religious types have yet to learn: there are no miracles; there is no magic. Including blood-atonement, redemption and an after-life--as theologians of most religions imagine and teach--as reward or punishment for sinning/being-stupid or doing-good/being-smart.

We receive the fruits of our labour/efforts here...now or never. Soooo, procrastinate not your moment of service, goodness, wisdom or happiness.

Side-bar: 1 Cor: 29, is the one single most important verse in the whole Bible, in Mormon theology upon which they base vicarious-baptism, (work for the dead). Talk about, "the power of one"!? Now there's a 'topic' Richard :-) Warm regards, Roger

[_richardMdBorn]

]Hi Richard, long time between posts ;-)

I was on vacation for the last week and a half. I visited my folks and spent some time with the people who built the first cesium atomic clock launched into orbit.

However, I think you might too completely discredit Spong. I.e. Might it be, Spong doesn't consider "resurection" &/or an "after-life" to be miracles such as are found in the four gospels--walking on water, commanding the elements, etc??

People bodily resurrect all the time. Yea, right.

I respectfully suggest that is THE principle upon which all science is dependent: cause & effect. One that many religious types have yet to learn: there are no miracles; there is no magic.

You clearly know science better than Newton, Faraday and Maxwell.