Subject:
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Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Tue, 17 Oct 2006 23:01:13 GMT
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Viewed:
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3968 times
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Hi, John.
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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Do you mean “to have been kept”?
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I’ve seen you draw this distinction in other posts here, and meant to ask you
how exactly you derive this idea that the Old Testament is “contextual to the
time” while the New Testament (presumably in your mind) is not merely so.
Your decription of the Old Testament as containing “a lot of historical
information, including ancient worship practices, which have changed over time
as cultures have changed/evolved” seems to fly in the face of how the Old
Testament presents itself, and I would argue, how Jesus seems to have regarded
the Old Testament (which, of course, to fellow Jews of his time was simply
thought of as “the Bible”).
Do you contend that Jesus thought of the Old Testament in the same terms you do?
If so, is this idea gleaned from a reading of Jesus’s words in the Gospels? Or
do you have some other source of info on the matter (direct revelation? another
reliable source of what Jesus thought)? Or does your estimation of the Old
Testament profoundly differ from Jesus’s own?
It is abundantly clear that the Old Testament does not present itself in
anything like the manner you describe it. Nowhere in the Old Testament is there
the merest hint of “this is simply our best understanding of God and to be taken
with a grain of salt”. Far from it. It purports to tell you *exactly* what God
has said and done, what God is like, and what God wants and doesn’t want from
humans.
When you turn to the Gospels, do you find Jesus portraying the Old Testament in
anything like the terms you present it? Again, I would say far from it. Jesus
was quite specific in Matthew 5:17-18
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law of Moses or the Prophets. I
have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. In truth I tell you, until
heaven and earth pass away, not even the smallest stroke of a letter will pass
away from The Law.
He was talking to a crowd of fellow Jews who certainly did not share your views
on the significance of the Old Testament. To Jesus’s audience, The Law was as
valid as the day it was revealed to Moses. Jesus seemingly had every
opportunity to clear up this major misunderstanding of the Old Testament if he
believed there to be such a misunderstanding. But the only misunderstanding he
is guarding against here is that some people might think he’s come to abolish
The Law, and so he specifies that that is not the case at all, and that The Law
of Moses will remain valid and unchanged until heaven and earth pass away.
This is about as unambiguous as Jesus (or the Bible in general) gets, so I don’t
really see how there is much wiggle room to derive some contrary interpretation
out of this.
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(and we are talking 4,000 to 5,000 years ago). That
is a loooong time ago.
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If you are talking about when The Law was given to Moses, even most religious
estimates put this date at 3,300 and 3,500 years ago, which for Jesus and the
Jews of his time would have been a mere 1,300 to 1,800 years ago.
Think about that for a second. You are arguing (if I understand you correctly)
that Jesus shared your view that the Old Testament was simply an ancient record
of how ancient people understood God and their relationship to him and that it
is not reliable as a source for religious truths. And you support your argument
by pointing to the old age of the Old Testament. But compare: to Jesus and
Jews of his time, the giving of The Law was something that happened 1,300 to
1,800 years ago. To you living now, Jesus’s words and actions are even older
than that!
So my question is: why do you take the New Testament as a source for unchanging
religious truths that aren’t simply “ancient worship practices, which have
changed over time as cultures have changed/evolved”, but refuse to take the Old
Testament in the same way? This is especially confounding when it is quite
clear from the (reliable in your mind) Gospels, where Jesus shows every sign of
himself taking the Old Testament as seriously as you take the New Testament.
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Well, the only human immolating that went on that among the Israelites that I
know of is the call for the sacrifice of Isaac (which was recanted anyway).
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Leviticus 18:14
If a man marries a woman and her mother, that is wicked. All three shall be
burnt to death.
Presumably this was rare, but happened on occasion. And since in this case
immolation is the prescribed manner of death, that would seem to make immolation
a possible recourse for the many places in The Law where death is called for,
but the manner of killing the sinner is not specified.
Samson immolates his girlfriend and her father in Judges 15:6.
There are also several cases in which whole cities were burnt to the ground by
the Israelites, presumably with a few last survivors to become immolated. If
that’s too speculative for you, there is the clear cut case of Abimelech, the
king of Israel locking 1,000 men and women of Schechem into a room and setting
fire to it, burning them all to death.
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Still, I would explain such interpretations of God’s will as just that--
contextual to the time
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Again I ask what makes “Do unto others”, “I am the way, and the truth, and the
life” or anything else from the New Testament any less contextual to the time
than “I Yahweh your god am a jealous god, visiting the iniquity of the fathers
upon the children unto the third and fourth generation” or “If a man has sex
with a man in same way as with a woman, they have committed an abomination. They
are certainly to be put to death” or any other quote from the Old Testament?
If it’s simply a matter of blind faith on your part, feel free to say so. That
would clear things up in a jiff. But if you believe you have rational reasons
for making this profound and yet seemingly arbitrary distinction, I am genuinely
curious to hear them.
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So my point to you was that we can read how the Israelites understood how
they related to their God, not necessary how one can for all time.
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At the risk of sounding like a broekn record, I again ask: why do you not
therefore similarly view the New Testament as simply a record of how ancient
Christians understood how they related to their God, not necessarily how one
can for all time?
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The important part to glean is that God never changes.
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And where exactly do you glean this bit of information from? The Bible, whether
Old Testament or New does not seem to support it. Again, if it’s simply a
matter of faith on your part, or if you view it as a revelation you received,
that’s fine. But don’t be too surprised if others don’t see it with the same
clarity or think that the Bible supports that view.
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It’s true that “God is good” is a faith statement, but God is immutable by
definition.
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Well, you can (and people certainly do) define God in all sorts of ways. One of
the biggest troubles when people get together to talk about God is that each
participant may have a subtly or profoundly different conception of God.
Bizarrely (to me at least), people often assume that their own conception of God
is the same one others share, and this assumption leads to all kinds of
fruitless and time-wasting debate that could have been avoided if people simply
recognized from the start that people conceive of God quite differently and this
needs to be dealt with first in any God discussion.
I think it’s quite safe to posit that the majority of people who have lived on
earth have not conceived of a God who has “immutable” as a necessary
characteristic. I would guess not even a majority of Christians hold that view,
so I think it is quite presumptous of you to assert that “God is immutable by
definition” as if this is some widely-accepted definition and not merely your
own (and perhaps that of a relatively tiny number of theologians).
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I think that the Christian understanding of God as revealed
by Jesus is about as much as we are going to learn about God
(in this lifetime anyway).
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And what makes Jesus’s “revelations” about God trustworthy to the point where
you seem to have supreme confidence in that trustworthiness?
I suppose we could also have a debate about how exactly an “immutable” God can
take any actions at all (such as sending his son--or himself in human form? to
live on earth), but I’m much less interested in that subject to be honest.
-Brendan
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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| (...) Of course I believe the NT is as well. For example, Paul writes letters to specific communities with specific issues. Even the Gospels have specific audiences. Yeah, lots of the issues addressed are of the universal type, but some aren't. One (...) (18 years ago, 18-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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| (...) Well, the only human immolating that went on that among the Israelites that I know of is the call for the sacrifice of Isaac (which was recanted anyway). Still, I would explain such interpretations of God's will as just that-- contextual to (...) (18 years ago, 17-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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