You said (to Kevin I think)

So you wouldn’t follow God if he stopped sending Prophets or issuing miracles, but you would follow a God who would torture billions of people for all eternity simply because they believed the wrong things about Jesus?

I think you need to give Kevin D. some credit. He wrote earlier in this thread

Which is why I’m not so sure about the Christian doctrine of hell. I’m not willing to throw it out, neither am I’m willing to embrace it wholly.

Incidently, Maimonides has some interesting things to say about the nature of prophecy in his Guide to the Perplexed.

Anyway, by citing scripture and nothing but, you can easily come to the conclusion that God stopped sending prophets after the book of Revelation was written. Quite a few–almost all Protestant–Christians believe that wholeheartedly. It was quite common among the Reformationists. Here is a lengthy article on the subject, with ample scriptural citations.

Mind you, I do not actually take this position, nor is it the position of the majority of the world’s orthodox Christians. Although anyone claiming to be a prophet should be held to the highest and most rigorous possible standards.

It continues on for a bit, but the general idea is, the Messiah comes, he is ‘cut off’ for our sakes, our sins our forgiven, and then prophecy ceases. So I always assumed that once the early Church was founded and the New Testament was written in its completion, prophecy would slowly die out.

But when does prophecy cease? With the death and resurrection of Jesus? It seems like if ever there was a time it would be then. But it’s not. John wasn’t exiled to Patmos until about 60 years after Jesus’ ascension. What we have is 60 years after Jesus is gone His followers are still receiving prophecy.

About 200-300 years after Jesus’ ascension is when the canon is first compiled.

So, are you telling me that the sealing up of vision and prophecy that was supposed to coincide with the Messiah didn’t really come until some century and a half after He already left? I can’t buy that.

After that the dramatic gifts of the Spirit like prophecy or miracles could die out.

To believe this you have to ignore Jesus’ own words about the greater works His followers would do. And never did He say that those works we’re contained to His Apostles alone.

John 14:12 states very clearly:

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father.

Never did Jesus ever say that miracles would stop. In fact He said His followers would be doing the exact opposite. Indeed, the Church has no problems believing in John 14:13-14 but somehow you say the preceding verse no longer applies? If so why doesn’t verses 13 and 14 fade away as well?

However believes in Messiah and His works will be able to do that same works and greater. That’s what Jesus taught.

Perhaps the Church can no longer do those works because the Church has left Messiah? You know, the whole, “form of Godliness but denying its power,” bit? If anything that is a picture perfect image of the Church today. It has the form of Godliness, it looks very important and powerful on the outside, but it has come up with some very interesting doctrines to explain why it doesn’t have the power Jesus said it should.

Miracles served a purpose as important today as it was 2000+ years ago. It showed people that God was in control. That he could lift them from their troubles and heal their iniquities. Are you honestly telling me there is no need for God to heal the sick, the blind, and the lame today? Are you really saying that? Because if you are, you and I do not worship the same God. My God is a God of mercy and love and delights in taking pain away from His children.

A God that would stop doing that for His children in no God I could follow.

Its really totally incredible that several thousands of years of written (oral) wisdom teachings can be relegated as fable/myth to the second law of thermodynamics (entropy).

Frithjof Schuon suggests:

“One of the keys to the understanding of our true nature and of our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world never measure up to the real range of our intelligence”.

Shallow is not a virtue,

24 “Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, TO SEAL UP VISION AND PROPHECY and to anoint the most holy.

25 “Know and understand this: From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’

It continues on for a bit, but the general idea is, the Messiah comes, he is ‘cut off’ for our sakes, our sins our forgiven, and then prophecy ceases. So I always assumed that once the early Church was founded and the New Testament was written in its completion, prophecy would slowly die out.

That’s why he said “It is finished” as he died on the cross–God’s great plan for redemption was finally at an end. It’s the climax of the Biblical story. All that was left was the conclusion: tying up a few loose ends, setting up the Church, leaving behind an accurate historical record for later generations, etc. After that the dramatic gifts of the Spirit like prophecy or miracles could die out.

well, I guess that’s my point. You think he’s perfectly aligned with the OT. Jews have a different opinion. Who is right? Who is qualified to judge the truth of that matter? Presumably both you and, say, Ron have similar knowledge of the OT, but you have both come to pretty startlingly different conclusions.

The accuracy of prophecy presupposes either a deterministic universe where events are fore-ordained or else a directed universe where the free will of ordinary people is superseded by divine will.

That’s not prophecy at all in my opinion.

A prophecy for example can be accurate on many levels and the seeming apparent expression of the prophecy (the one it seems to overtly imply) can often occur in a manner which was totally unlooked for.

That is to say that a thing can be prophesied and seem to imply one thing at the time it occurs and in actuality will unfold differently than expected and that is because over time things will have changed to such a degree that future circumstances will have made the implications clear in a totally previously unforeseen way.

One might say this about technology for instance. One could prophesy, before it occurs, that a day will come when everyone is able to talk to anyone else anywhere in the world as if they were standing next to one another. Make this prophecy in the era before the telephone, or even the telegraph has been invented and it implies one thing. (We foresee, oh that means the telephone, but only because it has already happened. The telephone did not have to be the one or only expression of that form of communications before it occurred.) Make it in the days right after the invention of the telephone and it implies another thing. Make it in the day of the communicator in Star Trek and it implies the possibility of the cell phone. Make it today and it implies something as yet unforeseen but could very well imply devices, maybe even within our clothes that allow us to discern and transceive signals from people who possess any number of congruent and aligned devices or capabilities, or who are simply entrained to us by common frequency. So a prophecy is never static, it is conditional, both upon the time it is generated, and of the capabilities inherent in the way it can be made real in both the present, and the future. The prophecy has a deterministic element, which may or may not have been grasped from or even received from Divine sources, but the way in which it unfolds is a human matter, or sometimes I conclude form evidence of history a sort of cooperative and mutual set of interactions between God and man.

So in divine prophecy there is always the element of God and the receiving of information and data which is beyond traditional sensory means of gathering intelligence, or at least the intuitive understanding of the implication of what a thing might mean (Divinely speaking, what God might possibly be implying) and yet the way in which that data and information is received and acted upon, and the ways in which that intelligence is interpreted and put into effect depend very much upon the receiver and what his or her capabilities are, in this case, man. I do not want to limit prophecy to linear signal progressions because to a great extent prophecy is one means of shattering linear progressions of information flow, but it is very similar to giving a book to a young child, giving the same book to a teen, then a young adult, then a thirty year old man, and so forth. At each age the book and the information in the book has a different effect depending upon what the reader can grasp (and at ten a reader may, or may not be, less, or more, wise than at some other age), and what capacities they have in making effective use of that information. So the author of the book or the information source (in this case God) determines what information is transmitted, but the reader (in this case man) determines what it received, what that implies, and what, if any, use will be made of that information. Prophecy is a very complex and interactive spiritual, as well as psychological, mental, cultural and historical discipline which has many different implications and is mutlilayered in both intention, and effect. And prophesies, really good ones, can and do often have several different implications all of which can be right to some extent or another, all of which can also have covert implications to one degree or another of things yet to become apparent, or about things that have already occurred and been forgotten. the idea that every prophecy has one fixed and unalterable expression, fixed at only one point in time and space, is I suspect often wrong, and I also suspect that many prophecies have cyclical expressions, perhaps implying one thing in one age and another in another. Or perhaps implying that the same thing might occur over and over with different expression of detail with each new recurrence.

True, and I think I understand your point, simple predictions and simply minded interpretations of what prophesy implies are all too common and often, I think, wrong in the conclusions they draw. Because they limit the parameters by which prophecy often operates. But real prophesy is far from mechanically deterministic in many cases, it is far closer to being quantumly interactive. And one example of this, even in Biblical prophecy can be seen in the fact that almost every prophet, without exception, tended to make the point, somewhere in their writings or along the course of their prophetic career, in speaking to their target audience, or even a larger audience, “change your behavior and you will change the nature of the way events unfold. Keep to your current course, and you will fix events by your own actions.”

That being said though I can see a few reasons for prophets not being readily apparent these days. To be a prophet took a lot of study and effort. Most old testament prophets came out of the judges, the temple, the priesthood (or in rebellion against both) or later from schools of prophecy which were very similar to the later monastic system. People had to study intensely and be aware of many things, most were literate and many were traveled. Moses was apparently highly educated, (in Egypt I might add) many others were as well, almost all from their writings were well aware of both ancient history in their regions and of immediate political and military and historical situations. Even the minor prophets seem to be exceptional men for their era and population groups. Literate, in touch with foreigners or had lived among foreigners (Joseph and Daniel), had extensive networks of contacts, had obviously studied medicine (such as Elijah) and other proto-sciences (in many ways the prophets were a kind of proto-scientist, as later monks and priests in the West would be, though that wasn’t really the intent of their mission, my point is that they were often the Renaissance men of their age) had carefully studied scriptures, and so forth and so on. So it wasn’t a necessarily easy life and most did not just sort of pop up one day and say, “Hey, I’ll be a prophet.” (This does not preclude the case of instantaneous conversion, or the singular precipitating event, but I am saying that with most prophets, like Moses, things had been building through a chain of events, often unnoticed til later, for a very long time.) Many were extremely reluctant to become prophets. Wisdom was a highly prized trait among the prophets and well encouraged, but every wise man knows that telling others what they don’t want to hear is not always a wise ploy, though it may be a very necessary one. Think about it, you’re wise enough to see disaster and damnation coming, but you also know why it is coming, because people are stupid enough either not to care, or because they are intentionally steering themselves in that direction. Interfere and you could get laughed at, ridiculed, run out of town (or your job nowadays) or just as likely, run over. Your wisdom makes you both wise about why things are the way they are, and why that is not likely to change, but you feel compelled to try and do something anyways. That is why so many of the prophets spent so much ink and breath bitching at God, saying such things as, “When for God’s sake is this gonna change,” or “You let this crap go on and what do you expect me to do about it?” or “How long will my people suffer, and how long will I?” and “Come on now, you expect these fools to listen to me of all people?” Not to mention the bitching they did about, “I did what you said and now they’re trying to hang me. Tell me again why I’m doing this?” And I think they had good reason to batch about their current circumstances, just as God, looking at the big picture had good reason to say, this is gonna hurt my little friend but in the end everything is gonna be okay and this isn’t really about you anyhow. So tough it out already. I know the score better than you do kid.

And that is another reason prophets are rare, in any time period. Proclaiming the way things may very well be in the future is not generally, certainly had not been in the past, a popular job, as Kev pointed out. It can piss off all kinds of people, both those who know exactly what you are implying and decided you’re against them, and those who misunderstand what you are saying, and think you’re saying something you’re not. Men generally speaking, no matter what the arena of activity; political, social, cultural, religious, scientific, etc, do not like certain kinds of change, especially when they are not ready for it. It is not like being an entertainer, it is very much like being the opposite of popular in many cases. It’s not high pay, it offers little in the way of job security, it won’t make you the toast of the town, and sometimes you have to fear for your life or the lives of those around you.

I think a third reason, and not one much discussed, is that prophesy has not really disappeared, it has fractured, and infiltrated the secular world as well. Now all kinds of people prophesy about all kinds of things, not just about religious and spiritual matters, but about world affirms of all kinds. My old man asked me a question once, which was, “Why do you think you see so few Einstein’s these days?” Being young I thought it was because they only come around so rarely, which is partially right. But he said, “No, there are so many of them that you hardly notice anyone standing out anymore.” And he was right. In a small pond with few fish the twelve pound catfish is King of all Catches. In an ocean with billions of fish, even the marlin is just one among many.

A fourth reason I think is this. As time progresses and society becomes far, far more complex, culturally, politically, in what it knows and can do, scientifically, technologically, time and events become compressed. Things become so complicated that it is not easy, even among the wisest, to discern movements and likely outcomes or even overall themes in human action and behavior. Prophetic implications could take centuries,even millennia, to unfold in the past, and that was just accepted. Time moved that way for most of human history and still does in some respects. (We are not gods after all, though some think we are, but really we are just super-capable men for our age. But one of our capabilities is to play with time in some respects. through science and technology. Extending it here, but mainly compressing it most places.) People read new things into every prophecy with each new age, and that is only natural. But in our age it is harder and harder to foresee around the curve ahead because we are moving at such an extreme velocity that visions become blurred, and because our trajectories are fluid and unfixed. Sometimes we are moving so fast we cannot make the turn, we’re moving to fast to change course effectively, sometimes so fast that by the time the implications sinks in upon us, we’re already there. Therefore the job of the prophet is harder today, even though most people know far more than at any other point in human history. (Because real prophecy is not about seeing what is obvious, but in seeing what has been overlooked.) But because we are moving so fast, and because there are so many of us, implications become fractured, data becomes scattered, and meaningful information gets lost in the immense pile of intelligence constantly building up around us. Think of how often you go on the internet to gather information and how many sources you are forced to overlook simply because there is so much to take account of, and then think about, in a serious fashion, how much valuable information you probably failed to note because you just didn’t have the time. You probably discounted far more good Intel than you absorbed, not simply because there is so much of it, but because you simply can’t look everywhere. Live in a society where relatively few sources of information exist and it is easy to keep up and to project forward, live in a society of god-like information flow and it’s very hard to keep up much less project forwards, even when you want to and even with God as your ally. There is an inverse relationship in a God technology society, between the speed and efficiency of technological development and information flow, and what can be known and what useful purpose can be put to that information flow by any single individual.

Let me put it this way, if you are receiving information at the Speed of God, then your ability to process and make useful work of that knowledge begins to move in the opposite direction. The closer you get to the Speed at which God can naturally and easily utilize data and information and intelligence, due to your technological sophistication and progress, the less any given individual is able to take utilitarian advantage of that flow. That includes the way prophets could take advantage of what they experience and grasp. (this does not even address the very real concern that it is simply possible to tap into so many sources of information nowadays, that so much data is available on such a wide range of subjects, that the individual human mind is often at a state of bolster effective capacity if not beyond capacity. – Now I’m not degrading prophecy to a mere mental exercise, I’m not, I’m saying the mind has to make use of what it gains and has to have a way of collating and making sense of what it receives, wisdom is not just what we know, but what sense we can make of what we know and how can we use what we know effectively, so whereas prophecy is not an exercise of the mind, the mind helps determine how prophecy can be effectively utilized – So not only is data speed greater, but the sheer bulk and quantity of information is immense, and those two things don’t address quality and utility of information either. Speed. size, and value are immense in our present world, and that is hard on anyone’s capabilities.) And of course if your really moving at the Speed of God then there really wouldn’t be any future would there, because you’d be either moving so fast, or so slow, that there would be no past, present, or future. If you could predict it then it would already be, and already have been by the time you could make the prediction. So at the very highest end of God Technology societies there are no prophets, because time and events have a totally different relationship to each other than a linear progression of unfolding. Of course that is what prophecy is all about anyways, shattering that preconceived method of motion and interpretation for information.

Sorry I talked for so long. Didn’t mean to. The subject just interests me.

Gotta go. Some missionaries are coming to visit our church and it’s my job to shepherd them around.

See you guys later.

Interesting discussion.

What brings me a sense of comfort, Kevin, is the certainty I have that the Bible is just another creation-myth that just happens to have grabbed hold of a significant chunk of humanity. Just as has Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism.

I see no significant difference between the God of the Bible and Odin of the Norse myths. I see no significant difference between Satan (Lucifer) and Prometheus. All are wonderful myths that make it easier for people to confront the cold, hard reality of life.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

Hope so for your sake.

But then, I have to ask, why are you even commenting on this thread? What did you hope to achieve? Obviously I wrote the thread to believers for believers. Do you get off on telling everyone how much smarter you are than them? Is your ego really so fragile?

If you have northing constructive to contribute to this thread other than, “You all believe in fairy tales” then be an adult and keep your mouth shut. This thread has nothing to do with the existence or non-existence of the biblical God.

Otherwise, I will delete all your posts to this thread as being off topic (because they are) and look at them as an attempt to threadjack (because you are).

This is your only warning.

I don’t think “prophecy” is limited to future-telling. In Islam, at least, a prophet is simply one who carries a message from God, whether relating to the future or not. I can’t speak for Judaism or Christianity, but I did not think they had such a limited definition of prophecy either, though I could be wrong.

Anyway, while certain forms of future prediction, such as “x will happen,” may require an assumption of determinism, others do not, such as “if you choose x, then y will be your fate.” It is my understanding that many biblical prophecies related to the future came in that latter form.