• freewhirl
    7
    Our faith in Christ was/is/probably will be based on a certain set of miracles Christ performed - feeding five thousand with nothing but a loaf of bread, walking on water, restoring sight to a blind man, and resurrecting from the dead, etc. A good mix of miracles in my humble opinion but it needs mentioning that they wouldn't have convinced a modern person who's got just that right amount of scientific knowledge under faer belt to prevent or delay an inference of divinity.TheMadFool

    I do not think faith in Christ is dictated merely by the miracles Jesus Christ (well, aside from the resurrection from the cross). Jesus’ interpretation and fulfillment of the Torah is just as good as a reason to believe he is the Messiah. He was responsible for sharing revolutionary ideas about faith and allowed a once considered “unclean” nation to be able to receive salvation from sin. During the passion narrative, Jesus’ words spoken at the Passover dinner are just as important to base faith off of than the miracles he performed. As he shared bread and wine with his close followers, Jesus subverted the remembrance of deliverance from Egypt to the mark of the New Covenant (Mark 14:22). In this act, he predicted that his death would bring a new deliverance to the Gentile nations. That point alone is probably good enough reason to believe that Jesus was not an ordinary person, though it would be difficult to argue Jesus’ divinity without mentioning faith.
    It would be curious to look at the other miracles of Jesus’ ministry logically to see if they would still communicate the same message of Jesus’ divinity. Take the feeding of the five thousand for example: It is clearly impossible for any sort of human to duplicate five loaves of bread and two fish to feed an entire mountainside of people. But what if we looked at this scene logically instead of literally? Perhaps the kid who had the food was moved by Jesus’ teaching and prompted him to share his food with others who did not have any. Maybe this could have inspired the other people listening to Jesus’ message to share their own food with others too. In the end, five thousand people would have been fed on that mountainside. Instead of some act of magic performed by Jesus, the people heard the words from Jesus and saw the action of that one faithful kid, which sparked a huge act of kindness and generosity from the others around them. That image of this “miracle” seems a lot more powerful that way to me at least and it still would be able to validate the faith that people had in Jesus, the messiah.
  • David Mo
    960


    I do not believe that the interpretation of the Torah, nor the extension of faith to the Gentiles, nor the "rationalistic" interpretation of miracles serve to convince anyone of Christ's divinity who is not convinced beforehand. Moreover, it will not even convince anyone that Jesus was an exceptional being. He will first have to convince that Jesus existed and that the facts and sayings attributed to him were not invented by the early Christians. Secondly, he will have to show that these sayings were really original. I think this is an impossible mission. That is why, in discussions with non-believers, Christians always end up showing their faith off, which is something that does not convince anyone.
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