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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Wed, 18 Oct 2006 05:13:53 GMT
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Viewed:
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4124 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Brendan Powell Smith wrote:
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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.
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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 still needs to make the hermeneutical jump for sure!
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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?
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That’s funny! To answer: not at all!
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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?
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First of all, I am not a Jew (meaning I am not bound by Jewish Law). Jesus
never expected AFAIK gentiles who followed him to be bound by it, either.
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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.
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But see, revelation didn’t end with the Old Testament, either. Jesus, for
Christians, is the final revelation of God’s nature. Jesus correctly interprets
the Torah (LAW) and we find out that God is less interested in the minutia of
forms of worship than He is about human behavior, especially towards one
another. This idea even appears in the OT as well.
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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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EXCEPT for the fact that Jesus FULFILLED the Law! He didn’t abolish it, but He
completed it; His being was the Law brought to fruition. All of Judaism came to
completion with the person of Jesus Christ.
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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.
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Yeah, 5,000 was a little much. 4,000 is about correct (going back to Abraham
now)
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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!
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Well, I believe that civilization has experienced far more profound changes
from 33 AD to 2006 than it did from 2000 BC to 33 AD. YMMV
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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?
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As I answered previously; I don’t.
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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, remember, Jesus was VERY critical of the keepers of the Law (Pharisees)
He broke the Sabbath on more than one occasion to exemplify religious hypocrisy.
Jesus was far less concerned by the letter of the Law than how we treat each
other. The Law was good, but the Law became the object of Israel’s affection,
not God Himself (via the treatment of others).
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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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I think we are using different definitions of “immolate”. I was referring to it
specifically as a sacrifice to God, such as a burnt offering, not just torching
somebody.
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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?
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Because Jesus provided the definitive revelation of God’s will, even in the OT.
It is His understanding that I hold true, not the ancients’ views.
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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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Putting it glibly: Jesus was the Man and I follow His teachings and
interpretations (all the while realizing that He was a product of the Hebrew
farm system)
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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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I do.
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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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They would, if put this way: God is perfect. If God is perfect, than any change
in God would be something LESS than perfect, which ISN”T perfect, and therefore
that what God isn’t. So, God must be immutable. Logic, really.
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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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See my above argument. Everyone who believes in God believes Him to be
perfect.
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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?
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That is a revelation to me which I cannot explain.
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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.
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Oh good, I’m beat. I didn’t expect a sort of Spanish Inquisition.... ;-)
JOHN
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: The Brick Testament - More Teachings of Jesus
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| Thanks for indulging me, John. (...) OK, I guess that answers most of the questions from my post. So, if I understand you correctly, when it comes right down to it, the reason you believe wholheartedly that Jesus spoke eternal religious truths about (...) (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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| Hi, John. (...) 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. (...) (18 years ago, 17-Oct-06, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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