People pray and the Lourdes or Trevor Daring type miracles do not happen. Then very often the 'miracle' worker blames the one who wasn't healed. I WANT those miracles but the world ain't like that. I've ahd to grow up.

Yes, the more we pray, meditate, enter analysis, use the I Ching etc the more coincidences happen. I have experienced this. CG Jung has written of it, calling it synchronicity.  It is an extraordinary phenonenon----             but it is unlikely to take my cancer away or deliver the pooor poor people of Darfur from those who harrass and murder them  with impunity ........

I would gladly (I hope) say "dear God don't heal me ---save them-- Thy little ones in Darfur"

William Temple said that coinidences happen more often when we pray. John Wimber asked why the church is not doing the stuff. He did not claim a 100% sucess rate or even a 10% sucess rate but he did find that God heals more often when his people pray.

David

I can see no problem with miracles and am not happy with USER974 making all a miracle,

My favorite peice on miracles is William Temple in Nature Man and God lecture XI, where he empahsises that miracles are the consequence of beleiving in a God who is immanent as well as transcendant. He regards the absolute uniforlity of nature as a dogma and I agree. Uniformity is the normal pattern but the immanent God may at times do otherwise.

Arthur Peacocke did not like Temple's argument as he wanted immanence without miracles

Michael

"holding the whole cosmos together" IS a God of the gaps statement. The cosmos is itself for the time being - in fact it is accelerating outward so that in time it will be so spaced out that it will just die, and so will time.

I have no problem at all with miracles. How I'd love to see some. Bith for the dear old earth but also for indiviudals in dire need of one. I would love to see an internetionist God doing miracles here, there and everywhere.

Sadly, I have not seen this happening after a lifetime seeking them (for others). I have had to stop holding my breath, as well.

I know that breathing is a miracle and the body is a miracle; and altrusim and good will are all 'miracles' but I don't think this is what Jody and others meant by that.  I would ahve loved the church to be the body of Chrsit too ---but it is nt.

yes, but Adrian, my God isn't about that either - that's a God of the gaps, 'God' is brought in to explain the oddity or the big stuff.  It's a slight movement from the Deism which has God as the big watchmaker in the sky who has wound us up and lets us get on with it in indifference, but only a slight movement.

liberal theologians and Christians tend to be offended by the idea of miracles (the other end of the spectrum of divine judgment) because it is about God stepping into and changing the natural order which he himself has set up.  In this scenario the 'natural order' is the end and purpose of Creation and so it is offensive that the God who created that natural order would fiddle about with it in order to walk on water and other such things.  However, my God is a God who is always present, holding the whole cosmos together, without and within his Creation and for whom Creation is enjoyed.  In this scenario the enjoyment and glory of God is the end and purpose of Creation and so it is perfectly logical to say that whatever is for God's glory in that circumstance is fitting for Creation.

I'll move onto the other thread to discuss how this might effect our understanding of God's hand in natural disasters.

Jody

OK - I'll engage with explanations that are not gap explanations. See, my view of God is more about signals of transcendence: values, art, empathy, attitude, meaning - reflective, contemplative, about one's own and community directions, and reconsidering. No gaps involved. Not about tweaking evolution, or creating something some other way, or shifting the weather about, or stopping the asteroid...

ha ha, ha ha ha, aha ha ha, ha ha. ha.

okay pluralist, now engage with those of us who don't believe in a God of the gaps.  whose God isn't absent and isn't only occasionally found in human history, but whose God is always present, always active and in whom the whole of Creation finds its purpose.

:-) Jody

The Bishop of Carlisle's comments show that those who fill their head with supposed biblical explanations for this, that and everything have forgotten that the world has moved on and the God gaps have been filled with alternative more practical and direct explanations and debates. If you want science, look to science, if you want history, look to history, indeed if you want ethics, see some philosophy. Tough isn't it, when the sacred canopy has long gone.

Hi Tony

yes, I'd seen this piece, it has been commented on by Maggi at her blog, which is very good, and I think that the general feeling is that those bishops were either misquoted or badly left themselves open to being misquoted.

I don't think that this is the general worldview of open evangelicals (feel free to disagree).  I would say that the judgement is upon ourselves for the way that we treat the world.  I might even say that our orientation away from God (however some might define that - up for debate) causes us to have a general bad judgement about how we go about our lives and this has effect on all of Creation.

I would tend to veer away from the 'God sitting up there with a thunderbolt' idea of God.  However, I would also want to say that the OT has images of God using his Creation as a way of turning people back to Him.  God is the God of all nations, animals, the wind, sea and mountains.  For the OT writers, there was only one source of good and bad - God.  And yet, having said that, there is another 'entity' which is spoken of - chaos - which is always on the periphery of this worldview of God's sovereignty, something which threatens the fecundity of God's blessing to us.

God offers blessing to us, in the form of covenant - if we choose not to live in that covenant, if we step out of obedience, then the covenant still stands, but we have chosen not to stand in its blessing, we are liable to the consequences - as individuals and as communities.

But God, big thunderbolt - no.

Jody

Here's another comment about earthquakes and tsunamis;

What then about the tsunami? There is of course no straightforward answer. But there are small clues.

We are not to suppose that the world as it currently is, is the way God intends it to be at the last. Some serious thinkers, including some contemporary physicists, would actually link the convulsions which still happen in the world to evil perpetrated by humans; and it is indeed fair enough to probe for deeper connections than modernist science has imagined between human behavior and the total environment of our world, including tectonic plates. But I find it somewhat easier to suppose that the project of creation, the good world which God made at the beginning, was supposed to go forward under the wise stewardship of the human race, Gods vice-gerents, Gods image-bearers; and that, when the human race turned to worship creation instead of God, the project could not proceed in the intended manner, but instead bore thorns and thistles, volcanoes and tsunamis, the terrifying wrath of the creation which we humans had treated as if it were divine.

Michael says consider this comment - does this mean that there were no earthquakes before Adam's Fall (tsunamis are casued by quakes) so that the evidence I found of 600 million year old crustal movements was wrong?

The same writer argues that the seasons of the year are because God subjected the creation to futility as in Romans 8.

What think ye of all this?

Michael

Tony yes !  The good bishop's represenative -- a  Dr. Pratt -- ws on the radio on Monday saying taht the words ahd been taken out of context, and that, in fact all that was meant, is that our irrisponsible behaviour has led to global climate change.  I love the back-tracking and redfaced fibbing even more than the original superstitious twaddle!  Which book of the Bible  describes the decline of Rome, btw ?

Tony Grayling, the philopher, was also on and spoke very well indeed. His love of humanity,good sense and simple wisdon shone through.  Now he would maeke a terrific bishop !