Thursday, January 12, 2023

Miracles by Theophilus (God-loving) Stork - From the Lutheran Library

 

 Link here

“There has always been a secret prejudice against miracles…there is still a reluctance in many minds to admit these departures from the order of nature predicated in miracles… A modified form of this feeling may be seen in many honest believers in their disposition to overlook the miracles as the wonders of a distant age, answering an important purpose in the first introduction of Christianity, but of little use now as evidences of their religion.


But those who unite in this fervid exclamation forget that miracles are fundamental to the very existence of objective Christianity. And although in their spiritual apprehension and experience of its blessed truths, they may not feel the necessity of miracles to confirm their faith in religion, still they are, in fact, the ultimate basis upon which the whole system rests."

The rationalists of the National Council of Churches have reduced the miracles to primitive minds and faulty Scriptures. Their miracle is reducing the population of believers at an astonishing rate, with the "conservative" sects following in their wake. "What could be more full of meaning?- for the pulpit is ever this earth’s foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God’s quick wrath is first descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt." Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter 8.