Austin C Archer (archau@saturn.wwc.edu) wrote: > >I am interested in views about the non-event of May 3. Seriously, how can a  >Christian discriminate between "messages from God" which are to be taken  >seriously, and those which are spurious?  Is there a useful heuristic which  >would help us avoid embracing messages which, by their non-fulfillment are  >proven to be false, thus causing the name of Christ to be placed in  >disrepute? Is this a problem at all?  It is possible that the individual saw a true prophetic vision, but that he interpreted the scale of time and space according to his material con- sciousness, translating the supersensible perceptions of a plane above that of time and space into an immediate worldly context -- and getting it wrong.  Not that he did it rationally, but rather that unconsciously the perceptions became clothed in material images, instead of remaining in the realm of the potential and not-yet-time-space-bound.  This difficulty of translating prophetic vision into a concrete when and where has always been difficult, even for the prophets of old.  That is why their prophecies are so often subject to multiple interpretations.  Likewise, the Apostles seemed to feel that the return of the Lord was to be "very soon" in the sense of perhaps the same generation. Yet the meaning of "very soon" has proven to be different than they could grasp.  Prophetic vision tends to telescope time, so that things that are far off appear to be very close.  Another possibility is that the vision was one of a real event preparing to happen, again in the realm of the potential-but-not-yet-manifest and which was thwarted by other forces, including possibly an act of divine mercy.  There are many concrete prophecies being made these days by devout and sincere and sober Christians (and others too).  It seems that great coming  events are really casting their shadow before their arrival in these  "apocalyptic" times.  The various predictions (I'm talking about those that appear to be sincere and sober) are hard to accept, yet hard to ignore com- pletely.  One has the feeling "something is about to start to get ready to  begin to commence to happen".  We are living, as the Chinese saying goes, in interesting times.  As for how to discriminate, the Bible doesn't help much.  There is an Old Testament passage (I forget where it is) that says you will know whether a prophet is true by whether or not his prophecy comes to pass.  That helps eliminate the failures after the fact, but in the case of an earth- quake it is small comfort.  It seems to me that all prophecies that give specific times and places and events should be suspect, not in that they are necessarily false, but in the sense stated above, that all such visions are subject to mistranslation from the plane of prophetic vision to the plane of earthly time and space.  For what it is worth, Rudolf Steiner once was asked whether a modern initiate  could see into the future and predict coming events.  His answer was that  it would be possible but then he would have to withdraw from active parti- cipation in them, including proclaiming what he saw.  If this is in fact a spiritual law, then the answer to your question about how to discriminate is that the one who makes such prophecies is probably violating that law, knowingly or unknowingly, and as such his message should be considered a priori to be dubious.  I.e. I would expect that those capable of making true predictions and giving accurate expression to them would not do so in  the way that the prophet of the Oregon earthquake did.  However, I can sympathize with the person who published the prophecy. Given the same overwhelming experience that he apparently had,  I too might feel impelled,  and even commissioned by God to tell my fellow human beings about what  I had seen.  Gerry Palo (73237.2006@compuserve.com)