Reply to Why do some care about rules about gay people but ignore rule about shrimp, rape, and stoning women?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Why would you listen to anything Paul wrote if you think he was only coming up with everything he wrote based on his own experience?

Supposedly Paul has a relationship with God, was inspired by God, and was listening to God when he wrote.  If you don’t believe this, I don’t understand what your authority would be.  It seems like a slippery slope to just throw away anything in the New Testament that does not mesh with modern social mores.

We live in the modern world.  There’s no knife to your neck if you want to do your own thing and ignore the Bible.  But I don’t understand this washing out the Bible and saying “oh Paul was a product of his time.”  Why bother with the Bible at all then?  And if so what authority do you follow?[/quote]

Do you think the Old Testament was equally inspired? So God was inspiring and agreeing with the passages promoting slavery or the human sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter?

Did God change his mind, or is it that we are supposed to take the Old Testament in context of the times  -- but not the New Testament?[/quote]

This discrepancy of taking the New Testament over the Old- is addressed multiple times in the New Testament, starting with Jesus’ own statements.  [/quote]

Yeah. But was the Old Testament also divinely inspired and not to be taken as a product of its times -- i.e., was everything attributed to God and his commandments actually true?

Whether it was later superseded by a new testament does not answer that question.[/quote]

I am the pp you are responding to, and [b]I never actually said that the Old Testament was inaccurate or not divinely inspired.  You just assumed I made that argument.[/b]  At least be specific. What parts of the Old Testament do you think are a "product of their time."  The Old Testament, however, was "superceded" by the New Testament, as you said.  It was not wrong, but incomplete.  The New Testament completes the message.

By saying that the New Testament was a product of its time, and now we know better, you are superceding it with your own logic and morality.  You consider yourself the one to "complete" any confusion about God's word.  But YOU are also a "product of your time."  Thousands of years from now, your perception of what is moral and right may be met with disgust by your descendants.  Supposedly the Bible is supposed to anchor us to some fundamental truths.  Otherwise it seems sort of useless.  Your understanding is incomplete, and if you discard the Bible, you are basically on your own.

I don't think that's right.  I think if you discard something in the Bible, you need a much better reason than "well now we know better."  I don't know what particular issues you have with the Old Testament, but if you pointed them out, you may find many historical writings by Church Fathers addressing them, or the New Testament itself.  But no one authoritative has ever contradicted the Bible's theology on homosexuality.  No one in this long thread has provided any authoritative basis for homosexual actions to be ok, other than "Paul didn't know better."  This is an extremely unconvincing argument.  I am not saying homosexual people are somehow evil, or that same-sex attraction is unnatural or evil.  I am saying that the Bible appears to clearly indicate that same-sex intercourse is not ok, just like divorce is not ok or sex outside of marriage is not ok or "lust" is not ok.  All of these are a natural product of human sexuality.  Most people ignore these verses or consider them minor issues.  I don't.  YMMV.

[/quote]

No, I didn't. I just asked if you believed that all the passages in the OT -- including the ones supporting slavery and the human sacrifice of Jephtaph's daughter --were the divinely inspired and accurate translation of God's communication.

I still don't know if you believe the OT to be rightly taken as the literal word of God, rather than a text to be interpreted in context.

Do you? [/quote]

I think I’m not being clear.  I think that the Old Testament is accurate and divinely inspired, but not literal. To me there is a difference, in that I take all of the commands in the OT seriously, and I think all of the events described happened.  However, there are points of conflict and ambiguity in the text.  Genesis says the Earth was created in 6 days but then later in the text it is written that God’s Day is 1,000 to men.  What does this mean?  My point is not that you have to take the Bible literally, but that you need to have an authoritative source in order to abandon something consistently condemned in the Bible, or forbidden in the New Testament.  The New Testament explains that since the word of God has been fulfilled the dietary restrictions of the Old Testament no longer apply.  The New Testament says that we are no longer Jew or Gentile.  Things like that supercede OT authority.  For example you may find conflicting answers in the Bible, you may have historical writings from the Early Church, etc.

Ambiguity is not what we come across when we look at homosexuality in the Bible.  Why?  I don’t know.  The Christian concept of sexuality as described in the Bible is to limit sexual fulfillment or abandon it altogether.  We find that homosexual acts are explicitly condemned from the beginning of the Bible until the end.  We find that the historical Church has never accepted homosexual acts and that there is no deviation until very, very recently.  I take this seriously, and I try to read the Bible seriously.  Your assertion that for example “Paul was a product of his time”l so he didn’t know that loving homosexual couples are a thing is a fairly weak one that I cannot take more seriously than Biblical authority.  You could use similar superficial reasoning to throw out  everything in the Bible.

And if that’s what you want to do- do it!  Live your Christianity as you see fit.  However, don’t act like there is any authoritative support for your position if there is none.

As far as OT:

I am on my phone but as far as I recall the story of Jephtaph is absolutely not an endorsement of human sacrifice- it’s in fact quite the opposite.  I’m not sure how you are reading the text.  Jesus even forbids those kinds of crazy oaths directly when he says “let your yes be yes and your no be no.”  So even your own  example is showing how the New Testament completes the Old Testament and clarifies it.  Nor does the Bible support slavery (especially our American understanding of it), as far as I know.  I would need a specific reference to understand what you are talking about.[/quote]

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