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Re: penticost response
In message <9407200307.tn655261@aol.com> BLOOM2SB@aol.com writes:
> In reading your response with regard to penticost, I would like to just ask
> you if you believe that God is big enough to make the onlookers from
> throughout the world hear in their own language, or even allow those who
> spoke to miraculously speak in those many languages. Is not God capable of
> all things, and does not God transcend language?
On the contrary, I would say God is far bigger than to need to resort to
such childish tricks. The writer of Acts displays a remarkably naive
side to his character at times though - here, for example, and (also,
for example) in the miraculous freeings from prisons (Peter in chapter
12, and Paul and Silas in chapter 16). Doors open miraculously, chains
fall off, etc., but not a stone is dislodged or anyone injured by the
earthquake.
I think the author of Acts is guilty of demeaning God by attributing
this sort of childish fairy story to him (in anything more than a
symbolic sense), not me.
It seems a little odd to me that we go about to prove the reality of the
Logos, Divine Order and Rationality in the universe ("He has given them
a law which shall not be broken."), by writing up miraculous
interventions which break that order. All very well for the illiterate
peasants and slave population of the Empire, and excellent as spiritual
symbolism, but self-defeating as pretended "fact" in the scientific 20th.
century - at least for thoughtful people. To say that God's wisdom does
not NEED this sort of conjuring trick is to RECOGNISE his great wisdom,
not to diminish it. All this is superb symbolism, and atrocious "history".
In every other ancient book we discount it.
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John Richards Stackpole Elidor (UK)
jhr@elidor.demon.co.uk
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