Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Miracles Alone, Without Prophecy, an Insufficient Evidence of Christ's Mission.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter
III.—Miracles Alone, Without Prophecy, an Insufficient Evidence
of Christ’s Mission.
A procedure3116
of this kind,
you say, was not necessary, because He was forthwith to prove Himself
the Son and the Sent One, and the Christ of God in very deed, by means
of the evidence of His wonderful works.3117
On
my side, however, I have to deny that evidence simply of this sort was
sufficient as a testimony to Him. He Himself afterwards deprived it of
its authority,3118
because when He
declared that many would come and “show great signs and
wonders,”3119
so as to turn aside
the very elect, and yet for all that were not to be received, He showed
how rash was belief in signs and wonders, which were so very easy of
accomplishment by even false christs. Else how happens it, if He meant
Himself to be approved and understood, and received on a certain
evidence—I mean that of miracles—that He forbade the
recognition of those others who had the very same sort of proof to
show, and whose coming was to be quite as sudden and unannounced by any
authority?3120
If, because He came
before them, and was beforehand with them in displaying the signs of
His mighty deeds, He therefore seized the first right to men’s
faith,—just as the firstcomers do the first place in the
baths,—and so forestalled all who came after Him in that right,
take care that He, too, be not caught in the condition of the later
comers, if He be found to be behindhand with the Creator, who had
already been made known, and had already worked miracles like
Him,3121
and like Him had forewarned men not to
believe in others, even such as should come after Him. If, therefore,
to have been the first to come and utter this warning, is to bar and
limit faith,3122
| 3122 Cludet,
quasi claudet. | He will Himself
have to be condemned, because He was later in being acknowledged; and
authority to prescribe such a rule about later comers will belong to
the Creator alone, who could have been posterior to none. And now, when
I am about to prove that the Creator sometimes displayed by His
servants of old, and in other cases reserved for His Christ to display,
the self-same miracles which you claim as solely due to faith in your
Christ, I may fairly even from this maintain that there was so much the
greater reason wherefore Christ should not be believed in simply on
account of His miracles, inasmuch as these would have shown Him to
belong to none other (God) than the Creator, because answering to the
mighty deeds of the Creator, both as performed by His servants and
reserved for3123
His Christ;
although, even if some other proofs should be found in your
Christ—new ones, to wit—we should more readily believe that
they, too, belong to the same God as do the old ones, rather than to
him who has no other
than new3124
proofs, such as are
wanting in the evidences of that antiquity which wins the assent of
faith,3125
| 3125 Egentia experimentis
fidei victricis vetustatis. | so that even on
this ground he ought to have come announced as much by prophecies of
his own building up faith in him, as by miracles, especially in
opposition to the Creator’s Christ who was to come fortified by
signs and prophets of His own, in order that he might shine forth as
the rival of Christ by help of evidence of different kinds. But
how was his Christ to be foretold by a god who was himself never
predicted? This, therefore, is the unavoidable inference, that neither
your god nor your Christ is an object of faith, because God ought not
to have been unknown, and Christ ought to have been made known through
God.3126
| 3126 i.e., through
God’s announcement by prophecy. | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
