Signs and miracles
Submitted by F.O.D. on April 26 2000 00:57:06
In reply to Re: Be Fruitful and Multiply submitted by Rex Infinity on April 25 2000 18:22:33
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There's a handful of verses at the end of the gospel of Mark, where Jesus says "these signs will follow those who believe: in my name they shall cast out demons, they shall speak with new tongues, they shall handle serpents, and poison shall not harm them, they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." Now this passage may not actually belong to Mark, it may have been added later, but that's beside the point. Certain Pentecostal groups interpret this to mean that all believers must be speaking in tongues and doing all these other things. (I've even heard of one group that literally collects poisonous snakes for handling.) If you're not speaking in tongues, you're not really a Christian. What they are doing is taking Jesus' phrase "these signs will follow those who believe", and making it to mean that all of these signs must be found in each and every single believer. That is, all of the miraculous acts will be manifest in each individual Christian. To my thinking, a far more reasonable interpretation is that all these signs will follow those who believe, following them collectively and found amongst Christians together taken as a whole. So, one believer will be found speaking in tongues, another healed someone sick, another still got rid of a poisonous snake without perishing from the snake's bite. So, amongst Christians all together, "all these signs follow them". In my opinion the same is true of God's command to "go forth and multiply". Like Andy said, it's a command to all mankind. "humans, go forth, fill the world, bear children, tend the earth". But that doesn't mean any one human individual is obliged to bear children. Altogether, we grow and multiply, but a single person is breaking no command if he does not procreate. The command is to the community as a whole. Breaking it could be done only by forbidding couple to marry and bear children, as in the anti-sex propaganda of Orwell's 1984. (Or perhaps in China today with the one-child laws? But then you can understand their motivation there, and might excuse them by saying "in China, the world is filled") By the way, a small technical point. The command "go forth and multiply" was given in Chapter 1, where God "male and female he created them". I get the impression the idea is that God is talking about the creation of all mankind, many men and many women in his image, rather than the one man and one woman, Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve aren't mentioned in Chapter 1, but in Chapter 2 where they do appear, there is no mention of procreation and bearing children at all. The sex in Chapter 2 refers only to the two becoming "one flesh". That's why I see the command "go forth and multiply" to be one given collectively to mankind, not to Adam and Eve individually. Cheers, Fod |
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