Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!usc!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: gilham@csl.sri.com (Fred Gilham) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: False prophets Message-ID: Date: 20 Sep 90 07:37:20 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 87 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Frank Farkas writes: ---------------------------------------- I guess that I am confused with the various responses. There was nothing in the prophesy which said that they were not going to be destroyed if they don't repent. The prohesy said that they will be destroyed in 40 days, period. this is the reason why Jonah went outside of the city and waited patiently for the word of God to come true. The issue is not if Jonah was a true or a false prophet, but our defination of a prophet. The problem is that the man made definations are not perfect. And when we apply them to prophets in the Bible, they fall apart. Normally, the man made definations are used to try to descredit modern day prophets, by those who no longer believe that there are any more revelations. ---------------------------------------- This seems to me to be clutching at straws. It is obvious in both the case of Jonah and the case of Isaiah's prophecy to Hezekiah that the prophet was speaking the word of God. The issue in these passages is not the criteria for being a prophet, rather it is the mercy of God who is willing to ``change his mind'' in the face of repentence or prayer. The true issue at hand is rather that of how we know if someone claims to have a revelation from God really has such a revelation. The bible (e.g. the inspired scriptures....or do they consist of man-made definitions?) talks about prophets as if a mistake discredited them. I don't think we have any question of a mistake in the above examples. (In fact Jonah didn't want to speak the word of God because he knew that if he spoke it, it wouldn't come true. He knew what God's intent was.) There are lots of people out there who claim to have a direct line to God. Some of them are in mental institutions, others are on TV, others write books and start new religions (there's a line from a musical I saw once that goes, ``I'll bet there are a million pigeons looking for a new religion.'') I've had enough bad experiences with this kind of thing that I don't want to have anything to do with it if I can avoid it. Of course Christ was another who made such a claim. So why am I convinced by him (in the face of my innate skepticism)? Because 1) He doesn't sound like someone who was running a scam, and 2) He backed up his claims and statements by being resurrected (in a historically verifiable manner!). On this basis, I follow him. I take the scriptures as true because they witness to him. I reject other scriptures because they do not fit in with the scriptures that witness to Christ; they either contradict them, or miss the point, or whatever. I reject founders of other religions because they do not have the credentials of Christ. For example, I have been somewhat involved in a group that claims to be ``the Lord's recovery'' of his church. The leader of this group sued another group of Christians who published a book about him that attempted to discredit him. To me, this was a blatant refusal to walk in the steps of Christ. Not only that, an earlier leader in the group this person was part of had been kicked out of his church, but refused to fight over the issue. He was later reinstated. So this current leader did not even follow the example of someone he professed to be the disciple of. It seems to me that I can look at this person's life and make a judgement about his claims to be speaking for God. I think the bible asks us to do this. We are to reject false prophets. (For example, Revelation 2.2 says, ``I know your works, your toil, and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear evil men, but have tested those who call themselves apostles but are not, and have found them to be false.'') So we are to test people claiming to speak for God. We aren't to be credulous simpletons, ``tossed about by every wind of doctrine.'' One of the things that bothers me about the more speculative heresies is that they make true Christianity seem less credible. Not only is there a sort of guilt by association (``Oh, you're one of THOSE....''), but the epistemological question arises--``They claim to have the truth, and so do you, so how can you decide which one is right?'' (usually followed by ``It's all a matter of interpretation.'') What has happened is that people have come to believe that it's not even possible to come to the truth any more. This is the damage, above and beyond that done to the people that actually get involved, that these kinds of teachings do. -- Fred Gilham gilham@csl.sri.com The emotional quality of what we moderns call our thought produces an extreme violence of conviction combined with extreme incoherence in our arguments. --Jacques Ellul