noun
definition
A supernatural being
definition
Supernatural beings and events collectively (when used with definite article: "the supernatural")
adjective
definition
Above nature; beyond or added to nature, often so considered because it is given by a deity or some force beyond that which humans are born with.
example
Stephen King's first novel is about a girl named Carrie dealing with supernatural powers.
definition
Not of the usual; not natural; altered by forces that are not understood fully if at all.
example
The house is haunted by supernatural forces.
Examples of supernatural in a Sentence
Some humans are born with unique, supernatural talents.
Accredited with the possession of supernatural powers he gathered around him a strong following.
It is true that he denies the doctrines of a supernatural government of the world and of a future life.
The supernatural element in religion can only be the divine character of the moral law.
He is the leader of a host of monkeys who aid in these supernatural deeds.
The supernatural element that is prominent in the Old Testament is God's providential guidance and guardianship of His people, and His teaching and training of them by His prophets.
The religiosity of the Quakers, with their doctrines of the " inner light " and the influence of, the Spirit, has decided affinities with mysticism; and the autobiography of George Fox (1624-1691), the founder of the sect, proceeds throughout on the assumption of supernatural guidance.
The term is particularly associated with the supernatural factors in Christianity.
It must be noted that the processes described by the alchemists of the 13th century are not put forward as being miraculous or supernatural; they rather represent the methods employed by nature, which it is the end of the alchemist's art to reproduce artificially in the laboratory.
On the other hand, there may be a Christianity which seeks to extricate the " spiritual " from the" supernatural " (Arnold Toynbee, characterizing T.H.Green).
Of the miracles of Jesus, Bushnell says, " The character of Jesus is ever shining with and through them, in clear self-evidence leaving them never to stand as raw wonders only of might, but covering them with glory as tokens of a heavenly love, and acts that only suit the proportions of His personal greatness and majesty " (Nature and the Supernatural, p. 364).
He heard supernatural voices proclaiming mercy to the faithful, vengeance on the guilty, and mighty cries that the wrath of God was at hand.
In the writings of the pre-exilian period we have frequent references to supernatural personalities good and bad.
They differ from the older writers in practically ignoring the physical supernatural - that is, though they regard the miracles of the ancient times (referred to particularly in Wisdom xvi.-xix.) as historical facts, they say nothing of a miraculous element in the life of their own time.
The miracles connected with the beginnings of the national history - the period of the Exodus - appear on closer inspection to have been ordinarily natural phenomena, to which a supernatural character was given by their connexion with the prophetic word of Moses.
The identity and personality of this "Friend of God," who bulks so largely in the great collection of mystical literature, and is everywhere treated as a half supernatural character, is one of the most difficult problems -in the history of mysticism.
Tradition centres rather upon the fox (kitsune) and the badger (mujina), which are credited with supernatural powers, the former being worshipped as the messenger of the harvest god, while the latter is regarded as a mischievous rollicker.
All is supernatural, wakan.
Like Plato, he believed in real Universals, real essences, real causes; he believed in the unity of the universal, and in the immateriality of essences; he believed in the good, and that there is a good of the universe; he believed that God is a living being, eternal and best, who is a supernatural cause of the motions and changes of the natural world, and that essences and matter are also necessary causes; he believed in the divine intelligence and in the immortality of our intelligent souls; he believed in knowledge going from sense to reason, that science requires ascent to principles and is descent from principles, and that dialectic is useful to science; he believed in happiness involving virtue, and in moral virtue being a control of passions by reason, while the highest happiness is speculative wisdom.
It follows that no revealed religion, so far as matter or substance is concerned, can contain anything beyond this law; nor can any fact in the world of experience be recognized by us as supernatural.
The same idea pervades old medical treatises; for a drug was not a chemical substance taking effect naturally on the human system, but something into which a supernatural virtue had been magically introduced, in order the more easily and efficaciously to be brought to bear upon the patient.
While Protestants, he thinks, have undermined it by a deeper conception of faith,' Roman Catholics have come to attach more value to obedience and " implicit belief " than to knowledge; and even the Eastern Church lives to-day by the cultus more than by the vision of supernatural truth.
The doctrine of monotheism was formally expressed in the period immediately before and during the Exile, in Deuteronomy" and Isaiah; and at the same time we find angels prominent in Ezekiel who, as a prophet of the Exile, may have been influenced by the hierarchy of supernatural beings in the Babylonian religion, and perhaps even by the angelology of Zoroastrianism."
A supernatural pride was blended with a natural anxiety, and it was at this juncture that Origen brought to light again a book written in the days of Marcus Aurelius, which but for the great Alexandrian might have been lost for ever.
In the second place, and most usually, it is applied to a purely intellectual, metaphysical disbelief in the existence of any god, or of anything supernatural.
The mass of the nation, of course, was always much more struck by the "signs" and predictions of the prophets than by their spiritual ideas; we see how the idea of supernatural insight and power in everyday matters dominates the popular conception of Elijah and Elisha in the books of Kings.
There seems little in the characteristics of these fairies of romance to distinguish them from human beings, except their supernatural knowledge and power.
Barton turned out afterwards to have been an impostor, but she had duped More, who now lived in a superstitious atmosphere of convents and churches, and he had given his countenance to her supernatural pretensions.
The author seems to imply that he had received supernatural communications from the spirit of his ancestor.
The notion of a Yahweh scarcely less limited in power than man, the naïve views of supernatural beings and their nearness to man, and the persistence of features which stand relatively low in the scale of mental culture, only serve to enhance the reality of the spirit which inspired the endeavour to reform.
All natural deaths are supernatural with them.
Formally, every one in that age admitted the supernatural.
These latter, it may be remarked, are more unambiguously supernatural.
But there exists no account at first hand of the exact facts, and Swedenborg's own reference to one of these instances admits of another explanation than the supernatural one.
Again, Harnack gravely differs from Catholic dogmatists in assigning a historical origin to what in their view is essentially divine - supernatural in origin, supernatural even in its declaration by the church.
The function of the angels is that of the supernatural servants of God, His agents and representatives; the Angel of Yahweh, as we have seen, is a manifestation of God.
Supernatural Religion (1874-1877; collected 1889) are often masterly conservative interpretations of the external evidence; but they leave this evidence still inconclusive, and the formidable contrary internal evidence remains practically untouched.
The belief that the Church was a supernatural institution found expression in the Jewish notion of the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.
This did not mean that the Church ceased to regard itself as a supernatural institution, but only that its supernatural character was shown in a different way.
From both points of view Christianity is a supernatural system without which salvation is impossible, and in the Christian Church it is preserved and mediated to the world.
In natural soothsaying this frenzy is the necessary physical accompaniment of an afflatus which, though it seems supernatural to a rude people, is really akin to poetic inspiration.
The cherub-images, where such occur, represent to the imagination the supernatural bearers of Yahweh's throne or chariot, or the guardians of His abode; the cherub-carvings at least symbolize His presence, and communicate some degree of His sanctity.
There was no idea of constructing a systematic theology; Christ was still the Jewish Messiah, and His Coming was conceived of as the Jews conceived of the coming of the Messiah, as a great supernatural event transforming the face of things and inaugurating the reign of God.
We remember that the Christian preachers were preaching before all things a Person, but a Person whose interest for these new converts lay chiefly in the fact that He was about to come and establish a supernatural kingdom for which they had to fit themselves.
Throughout the apostolic age Christians were conscious of being carried forward in a great movement, the origin and motive-power of which they regarded as supernatural.
England has made many weighty contributions both to Introduction and Canon, especially Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion (collected in 1889); editions of Books of the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers; Westcott, editions; Hort, especially Romans and Ephesians (posthumous, 1895); Swete, editions; Knowling and others.
It need mean no more (Lightfoot, Essays on Supernatural Religion, 172 seq.) than narratives of (or concerning) the Lord; on the other hand, the phrase is capable of a much more definite meaning, and there are many scholars who hold that it refers to a document which contained a collection of the sayings of Jesus.
Plato's hypothesis of supernatural forms, and advance his own.
From this rare personal reminiscence we see at a glance that the mind of Plato and the mind of Aristotle were son, different, that their philosophies must diverge'; the one towards the supernatural, the abstract, the discursive, and the other towards thenatural, the substantial, the scientific.
A man then is a third kind of substance, like a natural substance in bodily matter, like a supernatural substance in divine reason or intellect.