T. Peter Park
Mon, 31 Jan 2005 10:55:48 -0800
Friends, colleagues, listmates!
Many people confuse prophecy in the strictly religious
sense, especially Biblical prophecy, with the seeming knowledge of
future events allegedly displayed by fortune-tellers, in precognitive
dreams of accidents and disasters, or in the predictions of Nostradamus,
Edgar Cayce, or Jeanne Dixon. However, many Protestant and Catholic
theologians and Bible scholars (and I believe many Jewish ones, too)
have pointed out that the point of Biblical prophecy--as in Isaiah or
Jeremiah--is NOT prediction but warning. The purpose of Biblical
prophecies not to show or tell what WILL happen, in the manner of a
Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce, or Jeanne Dixon prediction or a dream about a
plane crash, but rather what WOULD happen IF God's people do not repent
and mend their ways. Catholic theologians say the same thing about the
prophecies allegesly given by the Virgin Mary to the visionaries in
Marian apparitions like those at Lourdes, Fátima, or Medjugorje. As has
often been remarked, a Biblical prophet is not one who "foretells" but
rather one who "tells forth," or who "tells for" God. The Greek word
_prophetes_ itself is derived from _pro_ "for" + _phemi_ "to speak, to
say, to tell." The Biblical Hebrew text distinguishes between the _nabi_
"prophet" and the _ro'eh_ "seer, fortune-teller." By contrast, it's been
pointed out, the typical precognitive dream about a plane crash, fire,
or landslide is just an isolated, essentially meaningless random
snapshot of a future event with no moral or spiritual significance, in
no way connected with God's plan.
One of the best discussions I’ve seen of the difference
between religious prophecy and ordinary precognition appeared about a
year ago in a book called _Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas:
Christianity and the Paranormal_ (New York/Mahwah NJ: Paulist Press,
2004; vii, 209 pp.; ISBN # 0-8091-4223-6; $16.95) by Lisa J. Schwebel.
Ms. Schwebel has a PhD in Theology from Fordham University, and is an.
Assistant Professor in the Religion program at Hunter College of the
City University of New York. Dr. Schwebel basically reiterated and
developed the views of the eminent German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner
(1904-1984), as set forth in Rahner’s book _Visions and Prophcies_
(1958, English trans. 1963).
She relies heavily on Fr. Rahner’s views throughout her
discussion of miracles (or alleged miracles), healings, visions, and
prophecies in_Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas_., frequently
citing Rahner’s observations on mysticism and parapsychology. Like
Rahner, she sees mystical and miraculous phenomena as
religious-oriented, God-focused manifestations of “psi,”the
parapsychologists’ collective term for paranormal mental powers like
telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. I see Dr.
Schwebel’s endorsement and explanation of Rahner’s views on religious
prophecy and secular precognition as particularly interesting and
worth-while. I particularly like Schwebel’s critique of “precognitive
visions of the future” as being “like random snapshots of a more or less
unavoidable destiny.”
Karl Rahner, she notes( _Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping
Madonnas_, pp. 92-93), calls “fundamentally irreligious” all forms of
soothsaying or divination that “claim to possess a technique for
wrestling God’s secrets from him,” or that seek a “magical” knowledge of
the future. Rahner lists such practices as astrology, chiromancy
(palm-reading), oracular practices, tarot-card reading, necromancy, and
so on, “which claim to be able to foretell details which depend on
future free decision.” In such cases the diviner (astrologer, oracle, or
medium) is concerned with predicting specific, discrete, often personal
future events. “An authentic prophet on the other hand, is concerned
with a transcendent vision of the universal future” (_Apparitions,
Healings, and Weeping Madonnas_, p. 93, citing Karl Rahner’s _Visions
and Prophcies_ ) Rahner concludes by saying that “where prophecy is
irreligious (in the attitude from which it arises, in the belief that
one has a sure technique for prophecy that can always be applied, etc.)
and profane (i.e., at the service of worldly ambitions, of financial and
similar advantages), then the case is one of divination and must be
rejected.” In other words, if the “prophet” claims to have a “can’t
lose” system to make us rich, we can be sure it’s not God talking
(_Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas_, p. 93)
The “coming to pass of a prediction is no proof of its
divine origin,” she feels with Rahner. “ In fact,” she continues,
“whatever genuine prophecy is and however it works, the one thing that
is clear is that genuine prophecy is not mystical gossip, a heavenly,
‘Hear it here first,’ news service.”(_Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping
Madonnas_, p. 97) She describes Rahner’s view of predictions arising
from parapsychological abilities, through telepathy and precognition, as
“straightforward and succinct.”(_Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping
Madonnas_, p. 98) “They do not imply a special intervention of God,”
she quotes Rahner, “because, though extraordinary, they derive from
natural faculties...and must be attributed to natural powers.” This
view--a reaffirmation of the tradition established in the eighteenth
century by Pope Benedict XIV, she points out--applies even when these
powers manifest in mystics, saints, and religious people,
notwithstanding that “in them they may serve some religious
purpose.”(_Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas_, p. 98, quoting
Rahner’s _Visions and Prophcies_ )
There are “three principal distinctions between natural
precognitive knowledge and prophetic revelation of divine origin,” she
points out following Rahner. First, the content of the former, she
quotes Rahner, lacks “any real religious purpose and integration into a
theological interpretation of history.” Precognitive “visions,” she
feels, are “just that--more or less clear images of an event--and no
more.” They “provide no insight into God’s purposes.” Prophetic visions,
on the other hand, are “rooted in a God-centered view of history, and
their intent is a value-laden commentary on that history.” In what
Schwebel calls a revealing passage in her Fátima recollections, Lucia,
the principal Fátima seer, “admits that the visions did not contain any
theological interpretation.” (_Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping
Madonnas_, p. 99, quoting Rahner’s _Visions and Prophcies_ )
Secondly, she quotes Rahner, “the parapsychological vision
of the future is just a vision.” It merely provides a “small,” “random,”
“isolated,” “impersonal,” “shred” of the future. A parapsychological
vision manages to capture only a glimpse of the future, “like an
incident cut from a long film,” taken out of context “without reference
to any larger, coherent event, without any interpretation, any
accompanying person to impart the revelation and personally address the
visionary,” claims Rahner. What is seen is what will be, a preview of
some future concrete event. Hence, the seer is like “a reporter
miraculously transported into the future who then narrates what he
experiences on the spot.” Insofar as what is experienced is a mere
fragment, “all attempts at interpretation remain
unintelligible.”(_Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas_, p. 99,
quoting Rahner’s _Visions and Prophcies_ )
By contrast Rahner explained, “when the Lord of the world
and history, transcendent over time, imparts information about the
future, this is not a “vision” (at least essentially) but a ‘word.’”
Divine prophecy, she argues following Rahner,” involves communication,
not merely representation; interpretation, not narration; integration,
not fragmentation; moral direction in the present, not manipulation of
the future”. It “preserves freedom,” she notes, and “does not bind
people to a predetermined fate.” It “builds confidence and hope,” she
feels, “not insecurity and despair,” as I myself see Nostradamus-type
predictions and the Jenkins/LaHaye “Left Behind” books on the
“Rapture”doing (_Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas_, p. 100,
quoting Rahner’s _Visions and Prophcies_ )
Whereas “precognitive visions of the future are like random
snapshots of a more or less unavoidable destiny,” Schwebel argues, “ the
prophetic future, intertwined as it is with moral transformation, is
conditional, based on human behavior”.In the “overwhelming majority of
cases,” she notes, “people who have had precognitive visions of the
future are unable to prevent their coming to pass.” In “genuine
religious prophecy,” however, “ the future is open, disaster is
avoidable through moral conversion.” What is “essential in a prophetic
word but not in a parapsychological vision of the future,” she finds, is
“precisely this quality of divine outrage.”(_Apparitions, Healings, and
Weeping Madonnas_, p. 101) A “genuine divine prophecy is judged by its
moral acuity--not by its predictive accuracy,” Dr. Schwebel concludes
(_Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas_, p. 102).
Peace,
T. Peter
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