Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter LVIII
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter
LVIII.
There is next to be answered the following
query: “And how is it that he repents when men become
ungrateful and wicked; and finds fault with his own handwork, and
hates, and threatens, and destroys his own offspring?” Now
Celsus here calumniates and falsities what is written in the book of
Genesis to the following effect: “And the Lord God, seeing that the wickedness of men upon the earth
was increasing, and that every one in his heart carefully meditated to
do evil continually, was grieved4575
| 4575 ἐνεθυμήθη, in all
probability a corruption for ἐθυμώθη, which Hoeschel
places in the text, and Spencer in the margin of his ed.: Heb.
סחֶנָּיִּוַ. | He had made
man upon the earth. And God meditated in His heart, and said, I
will destroy man, whom I have made, from the face of the earth, both
man and beast, and creeping thing, and fowl of the air, because I am
grieved4576
| 4576 ἐνεθυμήθην.
Cf. remark in note 2. | that I made
them;”4577
quoting words which
are not written in Scripture, as if they conveyed the meaning of what
was actually written. For there is no mention in these words of
the repentance of God, nor of His blaming and hating His own
handwork. And if there is the appearance of God threatening the
catastrophe of the deluge, and thus destroying His own children in it,
we have to answer that, as the soul of man is immortal, the supposed
threatening has for its object the conversion of the hearers, while the
destruction of men by the flood is a purification of the earth, as
certain among the Greek philosophers of no mean repute have indicated
by the expression: “When the gods purify the
earth.”4578
And with
respect to the transference to God of those anthropopathic phrases,
some remarks have been already made by us in the preceding
pages.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
