SKL
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I'm working on a long discussion of the Binding of Isaac in response to some of the questions raised here. It's long enough that it will have to span multiple vBulletin posts. So I started out discussing reading the Old Testament, and have a bit of a rough draft for that discussion here, which I'll throw up here. More to follow. We're soon getting to the Binding of Isaac, don't worry, perhaps eventually with a detour for the Cities of the Plain, but I am skipping that for now. I hope this interests though.
It is rather easy to find things in the Old Testament which offend our modern sensibilities, and in fact, it is not only our modern sensibilities that are challenged, but the Old Testament and it's seeming infelicities has posed an exegetical challenge for Christianity since it's inception. The Bible, taken together, composes the Holy Scripture of the Church, but it is composed of different books written in different contexts split most generally, of course, into the Old Testament (Covenant) and the New, i.e. those parts dealing with the Old Covenant between God and Man and the New Covenant between God and Man through Christ.
Pointing out difficult Old Testament Bible passages to the Christian is not merely a modern way to try to cast aspersions on the goodness of God or raise questions of theodicy. Christian faith and Christian theology have lived with and interacted with these texts since their origins. It is not as if the character of some of these texts only now offends, it has been a difficulty since the very primeval times of Christianity.
Attempts have been made to do away with these difficulties from very early on. From it's inception, the Christian church has been beset by challenges to it's doctrine. In fact, the history of first few centuries of the history of the Church is written largely in controversies between orthodoxy and heresy, but really is about the development of orthodoxy in dilaectic fashion, set up by extremes on one end or the other, e.g. movements which wanted Christians to convert first to Judiasm, circumcise, and observe all the rituals of Jews, versus movements which rejcted Judiasm entirely; those which thought Christ a man, albeit the wisest and most sinless man, versus those which held that Christ had no human element and the Jesus of history was no more than a sort of 'avatar' of God, and many more questions.
Quite a few such movements struggled variously with interpreting some of the seeming infelicities of the Old Testament, most of which movements fall under the general heading of gnosticism, which is not a single movement or set of teachings but rather a very large and diverse umbrella. Gnosticism comes in both Christian and non-Christian variants but in general is a heady mix of Eastern mysticism and neo-Platonism, believing in salvation through gnosis, superficially translated as "knowledge" but more properly indicating a specific sort of religious understanding, or even "enlightenment," to appropriate a term from different traditions that have some parallels.
Anyway, the Gnostics, or at least the Gnostics sects that I'm referencing here, originating from certain points of neo-Platonic philosophy, believed that a perfect God could not come into contact with matter, which had an inherently evil nature (thus these sects had very austere practices regarding sexual continence, vegetarianism, and such.) To connect from Man to God, there is a dizzying hierearchy of syzygies, or antitheses, allegorically interpreted as male and female elements which give rise to one another, beginning with the perfect God, and then meandering it's way somewhere to Christ, who, in most of these systems, lacks a human element, or His apparent human element was illusory and did not, e.g. eat or drink, perform bodily functions, much less die on the cross: these were all illusions meant for the enlightenment of man, but were not realities because the perfect God could not "touch" our world, an imperfect material world, tainted with sin.
In order to explain this imperfection in a system centered upon an almost impossibly distant perfect and often wholly abstract deity, these systems invented (or rather, appropriated from neo-Platonic philosophy) the idea of the demiurge (in Greek, a hired craftsman) who created the world: a villain in their narrative, as he trapped perfect human souls in imperfect material bodies. Some Gnostic systems identified the demiurge with Yahweh of the Old Testament. One of the very early heresies to emerge along these lines was Marcionism, who rejected the Old Testament and the Jewish character of much of the New. He could not reconcile the provincialism and particularism of Yahweh's relationship with Israel (from whence a lot of that in the OT which is unpleasant for us to hear) with the universalism of Christianity, and thus rejected Yahweh entirely as an evil counterpart to the true God (who was immaterial and unknowable but who transmitted His energy eventually to Christ.)
While some of the elements of this interpretation of Scripture seem bizarre, it, in the philosophical-religious milieux of the time in Eastern empire, they fit in well. The overriding zeitgeist was a fusion of Eastern and Western thought that fused such abstractions as referenced above with the more esoteric belief-systems and practicies of Eastern mystery-cults, from whence he we have the Manicheans (of whom St. Augustine was once a devotee), the Eleusian and Dionysian mysteries, Mithraism, and many more. This is indeed the intelletuctual milieu from which Christianity sprung, and it had many competitors at the time. Being connected to Judaism and the Jews, who engendered in the authorities of the day the reaction that they so often have with their enclavism, sectarianism, and particular rituals and taboos which set them apart from the host societies, was hardly in favor of Christianity. From the Roman perspective the Israelitish national war-God Yahweh would seem an unlikely father to a universal saviour. So it is not surprising that counter-currents would arise at this time diminishing or even attempting to wholly eliminate the Jewish origin and character of Christ and His teachings. What is more surprising is that these attempts were not successful. It is surprising, then, that the Old Testament comes down to us as being identical with the Tanakh of the Jews, and that Jewish sacred history is of interest to Christian believers the world over who have no connection to Jews or Judaism. There could have been and even today can be little, at least at the outset, to endear this aspect of the faith to Gentiles wholly unfamiliar with Christianity. So why was it not abandoned entirely?
Once more, Christian orthodoxy tends to emerge in dialectic fashion from religious controversies of the day. The Jewish origins of Christianity form the basis of many if not most or practically all of the earliest religious controversies, and hence the first delineations between orthodoxy and heresy (the story of the development of doctrine is a dialectic one, often with the orthodox position being the middle ground between two others condemned as heretical.) The first Church council of which we hae record is the Council of Jerusalem of around 50 AD (our source for which is Acts 15), coming not long after believers in Christ were "first called Christians" (Acts 11:26), and was held between the Paul, the great expounder of the Gospel to the Gentiles, and James and Peter, who were at that time prominent in a community which cleaved closer to Jewish tradition. The issue at hand was primarily that of the Jewish Law and it's 613 mitzvot or commandments, and it's applicability to Gentile converts to Christianity, or, in it's most extreme form, whether Gentile believers in Christ must become religiously Jewish as Judaism existed before Christ.
Specific controversies regarded circumcision and dietary restrictions: circumcision being particularly objectionable to Gentiles for obvious reasons, and the eating of forbidden food products a particular offense to Jews. The result, promulgated by the Apostle James, reads "we should not cause difficulty for those from among the Gentiles who turn to God, but we should write a letter to them to abstain from the pollution of idols and from sexual immorality and from what has been strangled and from [eating and drinking] blood" (Acts 15:19-20.) This, for practical purposes to the average Gentile Christian, made a large portion of the Pentateuch or Torah, of historical interest only and no longer binding.
The literary works of Job, the Psalms, and Proverbs are of clear use in spiritual and moral instruction and comfort. The prophets contain much specifics about the lachrymose history of the Israelites from the Babylonian captivity onward, but also much beautiful and theologically significant material about God and his relationship to Man, as well as, in Christian exegesis, a great deal of material prefiguring Christ.
What then, of the rest of the Old Testament, the historical books (Judges, Kings, Chronicles, etc. much of which make rather dry reading in large portions being military histories - often replete with atrocitiy - interminable geneaologies and such) and the laws of Moses?
Without denying the inspiration or infallability of Scripture, there are a number of important points that need to be made with regards to interpreting these Scriptures. First, Biblical inspiration is not dictation. The Qu'ran and the Mormon scriptures (one of many similarities between these two faiths which were born out of unusual and heterodox Christian contexts, something which is worthy of discussion at some length but not here.) Judiasm has different views of different texts and between different sects but in all greatly reveres the text in and of itself. But, in the mainstream Catholic approach to exegesis, those parts of Scripture which are not explicitly written as being the word of God (viz. the Ten Commandments, large swaths of the Prophetic literature and Job, etc.) are inspired by God (as is all scripture) but this interpretation is not necessarily "plenary and verbal" (contrary to the fundamentalist Protestant approach.)
God inspired the writers to create texts which held religious truth as well as literal truth, but with an emphasis on the former, such that we can have 6 days of Creation without demanding that Creation be a 144 hour process, and that our faith is not shaken by an incorrect definition of π in a discussion of sculpture in the first book of Kings. But also, more generally and more importantly, we need to realize that we are reading texts that are written by human authors, in human literary genres. while also acting under Divine inspiration to communicate religious truths. This is one reason why much of the text is alien to us; it is written by people in a specific cultural context for their peers, not for people such as ourselves in a vastly different cultural context. This is one of the reasons why we need some authoritative interpretations of Scripture: not that the purpose of the Church is just to regurgitate interpretation of scripture as a mother bird to it's young (although there is a place for this, this approach may be necessry in the catechesis of the young or of those utterly unfamiliar with religion, just like Paul, I Cor 13:11, "When I was a child, etc.")
But in any event, we read these [Old Testament] texts across a great chasm of cultural difference. It is not only cultural difference alon which puts us at such great a remove, but a removal of several millenia in terms of the progress of civilization, and in the OT, a civilization or type of civilization very much more alien to our own than the Judaeo–Roman milieu of the NT.
... more ...
I'm working on a long discussion of the Binding of Isaac in response to some of the questions raised here. It's long enough that it will have to span multiple vBulletin posts. So I started out discussing reading the Old Testament, and have a bit of a rough draft for that discussion here, which I'll throw up here. More to follow. We're soon getting to the Binding of Isaac, don't worry, perhaps eventually with a detour for the Cities of the Plain, but I am skipping that for now. I hope this interests though.
It is rather easy to find things in the Old Testament which offend our modern sensibilities, and in fact, it is not only our modern sensibilities that are challenged, but the Old Testament and it's seeming infelicities has posed an exegetical challenge for Christianity since it's inception. The Bible, taken together, composes the Holy Scripture of the Church, but it is composed of different books written in different contexts split most generally, of course, into the Old Testament (Covenant) and the New, i.e. those parts dealing with the Old Covenant between God and Man and the New Covenant between God and Man through Christ.
Pointing out difficult Old Testament Bible passages to the Christian is not merely a modern way to try to cast aspersions on the goodness of God or raise questions of theodicy. Christian faith and Christian theology have lived with and interacted with these texts since their origins. It is not as if the character of some of these texts only now offends, it has been a difficulty since the very primeval times of Christianity.
Attempts have been made to do away with these difficulties from very early on. From it's inception, the Christian church has been beset by challenges to it's doctrine. In fact, the history of first few centuries of the history of the Church is written largely in controversies between orthodoxy and heresy, but really is about the development of orthodoxy in dilaectic fashion, set up by extremes on one end or the other, e.g. movements which wanted Christians to convert first to Judiasm, circumcise, and observe all the rituals of Jews, versus movements which rejcted Judiasm entirely; those which thought Christ a man, albeit the wisest and most sinless man, versus those which held that Christ had no human element and the Jesus of history was no more than a sort of 'avatar' of God, and many more questions.
Quite a few such movements struggled variously with interpreting some of the seeming infelicities of the Old Testament, most of which movements fall under the general heading of gnosticism, which is not a single movement or set of teachings but rather a very large and diverse umbrella. Gnosticism comes in both Christian and non-Christian variants but in general is a heady mix of Eastern mysticism and neo-Platonism, believing in salvation through gnosis, superficially translated as "knowledge" but more properly indicating a specific sort of religious understanding, or even "enlightenment," to appropriate a term from different traditions that have some parallels.
Anyway, the Gnostics, or at least the Gnostics sects that I'm referencing here, originating from certain points of neo-Platonic philosophy, believed that a perfect God could not come into contact with matter, which had an inherently evil nature (thus these sects had very austere practices regarding sexual continence, vegetarianism, and such.) To connect from Man to God, there is a dizzying hierearchy of syzygies, or antitheses, allegorically interpreted as male and female elements which give rise to one another, beginning with the perfect God, and then meandering it's way somewhere to Christ, who, in most of these systems, lacks a human element, or His apparent human element was illusory and did not, e.g. eat or drink, perform bodily functions, much less die on the cross: these were all illusions meant for the enlightenment of man, but were not realities because the perfect God could not "touch" our world, an imperfect material world, tainted with sin.
In order to explain this imperfection in a system centered upon an almost impossibly distant perfect and often wholly abstract deity, these systems invented (or rather, appropriated from neo-Platonic philosophy) the idea of the demiurge (in Greek, a hired craftsman) who created the world: a villain in their narrative, as he trapped perfect human souls in imperfect material bodies. Some Gnostic systems identified the demiurge with Yahweh of the Old Testament. One of the very early heresies to emerge along these lines was Marcionism, who rejected the Old Testament and the Jewish character of much of the New. He could not reconcile the provincialism and particularism of Yahweh's relationship with Israel (from whence a lot of that in the OT which is unpleasant for us to hear) with the universalism of Christianity, and thus rejected Yahweh entirely as an evil counterpart to the true God (who was immaterial and unknowable but who transmitted His energy eventually to Christ.)
While some of the elements of this interpretation of Scripture seem bizarre, it, in the philosophical-religious milieux of the time in Eastern empire, they fit in well. The overriding zeitgeist was a fusion of Eastern and Western thought that fused such abstractions as referenced above with the more esoteric belief-systems and practicies of Eastern mystery-cults, from whence he we have the Manicheans (of whom St. Augustine was once a devotee), the Eleusian and Dionysian mysteries, Mithraism, and many more. This is indeed the intelletuctual milieu from which Christianity sprung, and it had many competitors at the time. Being connected to Judaism and the Jews, who engendered in the authorities of the day the reaction that they so often have with their enclavism, sectarianism, and particular rituals and taboos which set them apart from the host societies, was hardly in favor of Christianity. From the Roman perspective the Israelitish national war-God Yahweh would seem an unlikely father to a universal saviour. So it is not surprising that counter-currents would arise at this time diminishing or even attempting to wholly eliminate the Jewish origin and character of Christ and His teachings. What is more surprising is that these attempts were not successful. It is surprising, then, that the Old Testament comes down to us as being identical with the Tanakh of the Jews, and that Jewish sacred history is of interest to Christian believers the world over who have no connection to Jews or Judaism. There could have been and even today can be little, at least at the outset, to endear this aspect of the faith to Gentiles wholly unfamiliar with Christianity. So why was it not abandoned entirely?
Once more, Christian orthodoxy tends to emerge in dialectic fashion from religious controversies of the day. The Jewish origins of Christianity form the basis of many if not most or practically all of the earliest religious controversies, and hence the first delineations between orthodoxy and heresy (the story of the development of doctrine is a dialectic one, often with the orthodox position being the middle ground between two others condemned as heretical.) The first Church council of which we hae record is the Council of Jerusalem of around 50 AD (our source for which is Acts 15), coming not long after believers in Christ were "first called Christians" (Acts 11:26), and was held between the Paul, the great expounder of the Gospel to the Gentiles, and James and Peter, who were at that time prominent in a community which cleaved closer to Jewish tradition. The issue at hand was primarily that of the Jewish Law and it's 613 mitzvot or commandments, and it's applicability to Gentile converts to Christianity, or, in it's most extreme form, whether Gentile believers in Christ must become religiously Jewish as Judaism existed before Christ.
Specific controversies regarded circumcision and dietary restrictions: circumcision being particularly objectionable to Gentiles for obvious reasons, and the eating of forbidden food products a particular offense to Jews. The result, promulgated by the Apostle James, reads "we should not cause difficulty for those from among the Gentiles who turn to God, but we should write a letter to them to abstain from the pollution of idols and from sexual immorality and from what has been strangled and from [eating and drinking] blood" (Acts 15:19-20.) This, for practical purposes to the average Gentile Christian, made a large portion of the Pentateuch or Torah, of historical interest only and no longer binding.
The literary works of Job, the Psalms, and Proverbs are of clear use in spiritual and moral instruction and comfort. The prophets contain much specifics about the lachrymose history of the Israelites from the Babylonian captivity onward, but also much beautiful and theologically significant material about God and his relationship to Man, as well as, in Christian exegesis, a great deal of material prefiguring Christ.
What then, of the rest of the Old Testament, the historical books (Judges, Kings, Chronicles, etc. much of which make rather dry reading in large portions being military histories - often replete with atrocitiy - interminable geneaologies and such) and the laws of Moses?
Without denying the inspiration or infallability of Scripture, there are a number of important points that need to be made with regards to interpreting these Scriptures. First, Biblical inspiration is not dictation. The Qu'ran and the Mormon scriptures (one of many similarities between these two faiths which were born out of unusual and heterodox Christian contexts, something which is worthy of discussion at some length but not here.) Judiasm has different views of different texts and between different sects but in all greatly reveres the text in and of itself. But, in the mainstream Catholic approach to exegesis, those parts of Scripture which are not explicitly written as being the word of God (viz. the Ten Commandments, large swaths of the Prophetic literature and Job, etc.) are inspired by God (as is all scripture) but this interpretation is not necessarily "plenary and verbal" (contrary to the fundamentalist Protestant approach.)
God inspired the writers to create texts which held religious truth as well as literal truth, but with an emphasis on the former, such that we can have 6 days of Creation without demanding that Creation be a 144 hour process, and that our faith is not shaken by an incorrect definition of π in a discussion of sculpture in the first book of Kings. But also, more generally and more importantly, we need to realize that we are reading texts that are written by human authors, in human literary genres. while also acting under Divine inspiration to communicate religious truths. This is one reason why much of the text is alien to us; it is written by people in a specific cultural context for their peers, not for people such as ourselves in a vastly different cultural context. This is one of the reasons why we need some authoritative interpretations of Scripture: not that the purpose of the Church is just to regurgitate interpretation of scripture as a mother bird to it's young (although there is a place for this, this approach may be necessry in the catechesis of the young or of those utterly unfamiliar with religion, just like Paul, I Cor 13:11, "When I was a child, etc.")
But in any event, we read these [Old Testament] texts across a great chasm of cultural difference. It is not only cultural difference alon which puts us at such great a remove, but a removal of several millenia in terms of the progress of civilization, and in the OT, a civilization or type of civilization very much more alien to our own than the Judaeo–Roman milieu of the NT.
... more ...
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) to be an outspoken religious believer here. Diversity of opinions is good, because it shows that present and former drug users really do come from all walks of life.
Thankyou...
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
However, I respect the rights of people to believe what they wish as long as they do not force their beliefs on others. In the example here, whereby the church is actively committing people to a life of illness and suffering, the church is forcing people to do its will at figurative gunpoint. I cannot see that as anything less then utterly wrong. It is a sincere hope of mine that christianity will fade away in my lifetime- I am convinced that we can do better than that.
