Text: Acts 9:32-43
How do you like your Christianity? Spectacular, or ordinary?
The gospel has been moving out in ever increasing circles.
Peter and John have been sent from Jerusalem to Samaria, 8:14ff. Now Peter is moving to the outer regions of Judea. Visiting the ‘saints’ in Lydda.
First, the healing of Eeneas.
Then 10 miles away, in Joppa, Tabitha/Dorcas has died.
They send for Peter – what did they expect him to do? …
We have no reason to think that God will not, still less cannot, grant miracles in our own day. But before we conclude that they ought to be everyday occurrences, we might pause to consider that:-
In his book The Miracles of Exodus, physicist Sir Colin Humphreys argues that a plausible scientific basis can be found for the plagues of Egypt, as recorded in Exodus 7-11.
This is not to suggest that they can be ‘explained away’ as merely natural phenomena. Rather, accordingly to Humphreys’, the miraculous element lies in their timing and intensity, along with the fact that they were predicted.
Of course, such an interpretation assumes a rather straightforward, ‘literal’ reading of the text itself. …
I have recently returned, after a period of absence, to consider the question of miracles in general, and of divine healing in particular.
Looking again at the work of Rex Gardner (a consultant gynaecologist and an ordained minister), I found myself pretty much in agreement with his conclusions:-
After all these years, my thoughts and feelings about miracles are still a bit of a jumble. I offer the following as an attempt to ‘nail my colours to the fence’ (as it were). These are pretty much bare propositions; elaboration by way of argument or evidence may be found elsewhere:-
Readers of this blog will not expect to find much here by, or about, John Hick. However, his writings on the philosophy of religion are not without interest or value.
Hick has thought deeply about the problem of suffering. He asks us to imagine what the world would be like if there were no possibility of pain or suffering. I have always been struck by what he says about this:-
Suppose…that this world were a paradise from which all possibility of pain and suffering were excluded. …
