Wasn't Jesus refering to the Jonah STORY? Jesus can refer to a fictional charecter as well as I can refer to a comic strip charecter. Can't I say something like "Did you see how Dilbert made fun of that engineer?" Does that mean that Dilbert existed?
If you believe the Virgin Birth as a miracle than why not creation? Science can prove that a virgin can't give birth under EMPIRICAL means.
Science can only observe nature. They make the basis of their hypothesis on this datum. They cannot ABSOLUTELY tell us that something will happen, only that based on past observable data, we can infer with a high probability that a woman cannot give birth to a child without male sexual interaction. Of course, technically speaking, women CAN give birth while remaining a virgin today, through artificial means! Thus, science can only give us its conclusions on ordinary observations, and thus, cannot take into account a divine intervention. Anyone who disagrees with that has philosphical presumptions at the heart of their so-called science.
Science HAS NO PROOF that the world was formed over billions of years.
Science does have a fair amount of evidence. It has fairly good evidence that the earth is older than 6000 years. Again, this is from observation of nature. And in this case, we are proving a positively observable phenomenom, the existence of million year old rocks, not whether NO WOMAN can give birth without having sex, a negative. Logically, it is impossible to disprove a negative. All it means is that we haven't observed one such event yet. That doesn't make it impossible.
God is a God of nature but that God can also make the sun stand still, part the Red Sea and cause an iron ax head to float. People can look at a rock and believe it to be far older but they cannot duplicate it in laboratory conditions. I will say I have my own personal take on this but it is unorthodox to say the least.
Are you saying that God is "fooling" scientific study regarding the age of the world? Science dates rocks through a well-known and reasonable manner. Could it be wrong? Sure. But for us, there is a reasonable amount of information available, scientifically, to question whether God intended Genesis 1-2 to be scientifically accurate. THEOLOGICALLY, it is inerrant. Astronomically, I question it. Perhaps you are aware of the Church's high respect for scientific study that predates the Reformation. Even these men had their doubts about the "newness" of the earth. Men such as St. Augustine. They realized that nature came into being SOLELY by God - but that HOW He did it is not necessarily stated in Scriptures.
They did. They're called Christians.
Relatively few converted during the time of Paul.
bruised for our transgressions
That CAN be taken to mean the NATION of Israel OR a servant of God - but it is not necessary to take that to mean THE Messiah. Isaiah does not state that this man would be the Messiah. And very few people understood him in that manner among the Jews. Thus, the stumbling block of Deuteronomy.
Our Lord Jesus stated Jonah was this type but it was concealed from even the apostles.
So how would you expect the Jews to pick up on this if the men who followed Jesus around for three years couldn't figure it out? Read the end of Mark's Gospel. Even AFTER the resurrection, they still had "doubts"... I find this quite amazing and indicative of how Christian interpretation of the OT is a novel spin on Hebrew Scriptures - one that very few Jews admitted to.
King David - I said to my Lord
Again, this is subject to interpretation. A Jew reading his scripture does NOT have to read it that way.
Or that during their communion feast, the followers would eat the body of their savior???" Nowhere-that's Catholic doctrine. Thought you throw me a curve, eh? ;O)
Well, I wasn't trying to! I am merely relating the first ancient witnesses of Christianity, St. Ignatius, St. Justin the Martyr, and even Roman writers, such as Pliny. They all realized that Christians were doing something out of the ordinary with bread and wine. It should be quite clear that a reader of John 6, say, a Jew, would be offended by such writings, just as the first hearers. The Romans often accused Christians of being cannabalistic... Ask yourself, "why?" Why do Christians insist that they are eating the Body of their savior when pressed by the Roman interrogators? Seems like they actually believed it - your interpretation 1900 years later notwithstanding.
Not to Paul. He understood it very clearly. Not to the Bereans. They searched the scriptures.
So did the Thessalonians (who rejected Paul) whom Paul compares the Bereans to! Paul considered them more worthy because they believed Paul. I would think that Paul was able to convince the Bereans based on the power of the Spirit, not the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures. They searched the Scriptures with open hearts, perhaps heard Paul's teachings on the Suffering Servant, and, by the Spirit's indwelling, were able to overcome the obstacle that every Jew faced - that Jesus' Messiahship, according to them - had failed. The Messiah was suppposed to make things better and would free them from captivity. Jesus flaunted the commonly-held interpretation of the Law, the Romans still were in control, and Jesus was ultimately condemned to hang on a tree. AS A JEW, the Scripture is not very convincing as a tool for conversion...It is only through the Power of the Holy Spirit that Paul would be able to convince ANY Jews.
I wrote : But notice how few Jews actually buy into it!"
You responded :"This is your synergistic Arminian view rearing its ugly head. Where is the grace of God or God will have mercy on those who He will have mercy?
Ah, the old fall-back. It's all God's omniscence, His plan. When all else fails, fall back on "it's God's will". Well, doesn't this go against the idea you have that "God only died for the elect?" What was Christ's purpose of coming and teaching to the Jews who would largely ignore Him? Using your theology, wouldn't it had been more proper for God to teach the Gentiles? That He would spread His Word to those Gentiles who He had foreknowledge about?
My point was not to get into God's manners and ways. The point was that Christianity WAS an INNOVATION, one that the typical Jew would have been hard-pressed to accept, simply because their was a cognitive dissonance between Scriptures and what the Christians were claiming - a crucified Savior! WHERE in Jewish tradition do we see such an expectation? IF Isaiah's suffering servant was part of mainstream Judaism (interpreting these passages as we do today), Jesus would have certainly been more understood and accepted by other Jews. Even Peter tried to convince the Lord NOT to undergo suffering. They had no clue about any such suffering servant and the Messiah being the same person.
The church doesn't rest on our shoulders but God's.
Why do you think I am Catholic still? I'd be out the door to some easy-going Protestant fluff if I didn't believe that Christ established His Church among the people who would later be called "Catholic" by St. Ignatius less than eighty years later. I'd sure love to have a nice big thick steak today! Fasting? HA! Why bother, if I could just find a nice "health and wealth" community that bought into the "once saved - always saved" garbage. Then I could do whatever I wanted, because I had declared that God has already chosen me, no matter what I do...
I remain Catholic because I believe it has the fullness of God's revelation, not because it has the best human explanations of a book.
Regards
I will try to be brief, since I made my views on these subjects pretty clear in my lengthy exchange with Kosta.
Kosta perceptively pointed out in one of his posts that he and I agree on the basic premise that the Bible cannot be used as a scientific textbook or infallible source of historical details. The other half of his perceptive comment was that he disagreed with most of his Orthodox brethren on where to draw the line with regard to what he is willing to believe as factually true in the Bible.
As I have reflected on this thread, one of the things that struck me was that the "argument" that Kosta and I were having is a very rare one within Orthodoxy. In fact, I'm not sure that I've witnessed in print or person any similar discussion of note. It is the kind of discussion that we tend only to have when we are in a situation like this, with non-Orthodox participants.
As with so many things in Orthodoxy, we seem simultaneously to hold to mutually exclusive positions. On the one hand, we know good and well that at least some of what we believe to be true in the Bible, the lives of saints, etc... has to be not quite true, or not true at all. On the other hand, Orthodox Christians tends to take a stance of belief toward the entire body of Tradition, including the entire Bible.
jo kus stated that the Fathers of the Church do not always take a literalist view of the Scriptures, and pointed out the Alexandrian school. This is very true. But I would point out that the Antiochian school took a different emphasis: one of rather literal interpretation. Both are reflecting means of exegesis that we see in the Scriptures themselves.
Origen himself, in what I have read of him, didn't take the view that the literal stories weren't true in Scripture -- as I mentioned before, look at his famous defense of the literal truth of the story of Daniel and Suzannah in the Apocrypha against the smirking attacks of Julius Africanus. It is an exchange that could be right out of a "liberal vs. conservative" Biblical scholar argument today -- and Origen is the conservative.
What Origen and the Alexandrian school wanted to make sure of was that the Church not take *only* the literal meaning of Scripture. They also wanted to make the point that the spiritual meaning is the most important meaning of every passage of Scripture. In the process, they emphasized the allegorical aspect to the point of making the Antiochians (again I'm painting broadly) feel that they were casting the literal meanings into doubt, which for the most part, I don't think they were.
The Church ultimately decided that both "schools" were correct (which shouldn't surprise us, since both were based on Scriptural precedents.) We basically accept the stories as all being true. We acknowledge somewhere in the backs of our minds that perhaps not every detail is true. And we have such a strong emphasis on the importance of the Spiritual meaning that it generally doesn't occur to us to argue about whether Job or Jonah existed or not.
The internal evidence that Christ treated the basic narratives of the Old Testament as historically true is, to me, overwhelming. The evidence that the Apostles treated the OT and the events in the life of Christ that were later written down in the Gospels as being literally true is also, to me, overwhelming. And the evidence that the Fathers treated all of the above as literally true is likewise overwhelming. But all of these emphasized above all the spiritual meaning.
The idea that we have to choose between the two strikes me as being grounded in some sort of Western rationalism, but I understand that some people have an easier time accepting Christianity by taking a basic stance of doubt toward the history recounted, choosing rather to look more exclusively at the spiritual meaning.
It is impossible for me to come away from the services of the Orthodox Church and the writings of the Fathers and see anything but that they simultaneously treat the stories as literally true, and that the spiritual meanings are deep and paramount. Both.
Regarding who amongst the Jewish people did and didn't accept Christianity, what I was reading last night the commentary of St. Theophylact on the reading for the Sunday of Orthodoxy from St. John.
In it, Philip comes Nathanael, and says to him, "We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.
And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth? Philip saith unto him, Come and see.
Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!
Nathanael saith unto him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.
Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel."
There are so many things here that St. Theophylact talks about. First, Philip identifies Christ as being the one spoken of in the prophets. Second, Nathaniel, knowing the Scriptures, is aware that the Christ will not come from Nazareth, so he doubts it -- as is reasonable. Next, Christ greets him before Nathaniel can even speak, and calls him a "true Israelite, in whom there is no guile." He acknowledges here that Nathaniel is an Israelite with a true understanding of the OT, and that his doubts about him are not based in craftiness or pride, but from a sincere desire to correctly recognize the Messiah.
Then, Christ demonstrates that he knew all about the conversation Philip and Nathaniel had (which was apparently under a fig tree). Nathaniel, then, like Philip, acknowledges Christ as the Son of God.
Now, it is worth noting that what convinced Nathaniel was his direct contact with Christ. All questions of whether the Christ was from Nazareth or Bethlehem disappeared in the face of direct experience of Christ's presence and omniscience. To be sure, Nathaniel would learn, as would the rest of the disciples that Christ really did come from Bethlehem and was of the seed of David. The Scriptures were true, but it wasn't through arguing about them that any of the disciples were convinced that Christ was the Messiah.
Mat 12:39-41 But He answered and said to them, "An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet;...The men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgment, and will condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.
Our Lord Jesus called Jonah a prophet, not a story. And He verified the repentance of Nineveh to the preaching of Jonah.
BTW-I'm not a creationist who believes the everything was created in six LITERAL days. The text is murky and I'm not sure it states that. However people are mistakenly to think man "evolved" and the scriptures are wrong on this because it's not "scientific". Well neither is making an iron ax head float or a Virgin Birth. You can't pick and choose which miracle to believe in.
Mat 22:43-44 He *said to them, "Then how does David in the Spirit call Him 'Lord,' saying, 'THE LORD SAID TO MY LORD, "SIT AT MY RIGHT HAND, UNTIL I PUT YOUR ENEMIES BENEATH YOUR FEET"'?
Yet you say this is "subject to interpretation."? But the ONLY doctrine that I stated doesn't have any support in scripture you defend by quoting some church father.
Let's summarize. You don't believe in the Genesis account of creation. You've argued that the Virgin Birth could possibly be done in other ways. You denied Jonah existence even when our Lord stated he was a prophet and preached to Nineveh. And you denied a string of prophetic verses including one our Lord Jesus interpreted. What you have defended was scientists, evolutionists, and flawed teachings.