Pusey takes the verses aspredictive of Nebuchadrezzar’s siege.
Joel’s figures are too vivid, too actual, to be predictive or mystical.
Their predictive power has been exaggerated, chiefly because it was thought that this was the only office of the Prophet.
Moreover, the hypothesis of prediction does not fit the facts, for while some parts of the prophecy have predictive form, others have not.
Both in the Book of the Acts and St. Paul's Epistles the historical and predictive portions of the Jewish Scriptures are constantly appealed to, and used as the basis of argument.
It is in the first place one of the most definitely predictive of all the prophetic utterances of the Epistles.
He lived and died in the light and power of predictive Scripture.
It is gained without pressing their claim to predictive power, at least beyond the horizons of their own period.
Modern criticism, though it may quarrel with the inspiration or predictive power of the prophets, has given fresh and unbiassed witness to their importance as an historical phenomenon.
No doubt their predictive knowledge is general, it is of the issue to which things tend.
In the Apocalypse, as in every predictive prophecy, there is a double element, one part derived from the circumstances of the present and another pointing forwards to the future.
But in predictive prophecy, even when most closely verified, the essence lies less in the prediction than in the eternal laws of moral and religious truth which the fact predicted reveals or exemplifies.
Professor Ladd therefore pares down all predictive prophecy, and regards Isaiah 53, not as directly and solely, but only as typically, Messianic.
The prediction of the existence and place of the planet Neptune from the perturbations of Uranus is an excellent example of the predictive quality of a true philosophical theory.
This prediction and its verification have been justly regarded as of great importance in the history of the dynamical theory of heat; and they afford an excellent example of the predictive character of a true scientific theory.
But if one ceases to look among these symbols for a predictive outline of modern history, "a sort of anticipated Gibbon," and begins to read it in the light of the apocalyptic method, it may have rich and large meanings for him.
No such carefully elaborated programme as this is found in any other predictive utterance.
The predictive function of the prophet is not, then, the only, nor the prominent feature of his work.
Up to a time then very recent, the early authorship and predictive character of the book of Daniel were things which no one was allowed for a moment to dispute.
The passages which seem to our eyes, looking through orthodox spectacles, to have this predictive character, lose it in a more exact translation.
How lofty and enduring are the lessons to be learnt alike from its historic and predictive sections we shall have abundant opportunities of seeing in the following pages.
At any rate, on any other grounds it would have been strange indeed of the Talmudists to decide that the most minutely predictive of the prophets--if indeed this were a prophecy--wrote without the gift of prophecy.
Hence, the strenuous effort is made to destroy predictive prophecy concerning the person of the Son of God.
This is in accordance with the form of predictive prophecy, as in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, where the atoning work of Christ is spoken of as already accomplished, though it remained to be achieved in the future.
Shall is simply predictive; will is predictiveand promissive as well.
The second and third persons are expressed by the predictive verb shall.
Thus the belief in the late date of the book is reached by a study of the book itself, and is not due to any prejudice against the possibility of miracle or predictive prophecy.
It contains an unparelleled instance of predictive prophecy: Josiah is foretold by name three centuries before he appears, v.
Thus, after repudiating all the directly Messianic or predictive qualities of Jeremiah's prophecies, he says (p.
