Pastoral Musings

In speaking with one about what would persuade him of the existence of God, this was said:

The right kind of prophecy would be persuasive, but I need to add a criterion to this. There are a great many prophecies in the Old Testament relating to the life of Jesus. I’ve read quite a lot of them, and I find them about as convincing as the predictions of astrology.

One of the problems common to both biblical prophecy and astology is that they will usually make very vauge and noncomittal predictions about human behavior. In the case of Jesus, a very good argument can be made that eventually, by the laws of chance, someone would have come along that fit the initial birth prophecies of the old testament. From there, it’s not too big a jump to see how such a person could then, with foresight, intentionally fulfill the prophecies with the purpose of cementing their claim, and in this way the prophecies would become self-fulfilling.

So vauge, open-ended and easily stretched prophecies are, as far as I can see, in the same category of plausibility as the horoscopes in the weekly Times. I add to this the point that the entire idea of divine prophecy is that God is meant to be giving us an authoratative reason to believe – but if that were the case, why are the prophecies so flimsy? One would expect the authorative proof of a divine creator to be… well… authoratative.

Is Biblical Prophecy Vague and Non-committal?

That is the question.

If this is so, let the one who claims that it is so present his arguments.

I would be glad to see, and critique them.

Vague, non-committal claims of ambiguity need to be bolstered by an attempt at substantiating the argument.

Personally, I am convinced that Bible prophecy is very specific.  (I plan to follow up on this in the next few weeks, Lord willing.)

Any takers?