quote:
God did not send his Son into this world weak, like the rest of us come into the world.
I have to disagree! One of the wonders of the Incarnation is that God did become weak and helpless. If He was not a real weak, helpless baby, He was not fully Man, and Christian theology is up a well-known scatological creek without a paddle.
Are you familiar with the Edward Shillito[spelling?] poem "Jesus of the Scars"
The other Gods were strong but thou wast weak
They rode but thou didst stumble to a throne.
Moving on to the "prophecies", haven't we been here before a few weeks ago? I'm sure Matthew was well aware of the original meanings of these passages. He is not claiming that Jesus is fulfilling some Old Mother Shipton prediction from ancient times, but that Jesus is the cumulative fulfilment of the national hopes of Israel from ancient times. He does not claim that Jesus
is the ruler from the clan of Bethlehem, or the Immanuel born of a "young woman" (erroneously virgin in the Septuagint). He is saying that those ancient events foreshadow the coming of Jesus. And just as those ancient passages were about deliverance, so is Jesus.
Our problem here is that we are applying a particularly modernist scientific approach to the issue of these prophecies, which would have been quite alien to the culture that produced them. I think this mistake is made by fundamentalists, who need to bend things to make them work, and extreme liberals, who just say "The Bible got it wrong", and others who extend that to "and therefore Christianity is a load of hokum".
[This message has been edited by Karl, 12-18-2002]
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