I greatly appreciated Josh Sande’s call for Christianity to be less dogmatic in last Friday’s Weekly (“A Lutheran Love Letter to Atheism”), but I was disappointed in his contrast between “the teachings of Jesus” and the “hating, burning, stabbing, pillaging and arbitrary restrictions . . . in the Old Testament.” By accepting this common stereotype, Mr. Sande has failed to practice the critical inquiry that he otherwise endorses so effectively in his column.
The Old Testament/Hebrew Bible does not have a monopoly on culturally conditioned, ethically problematic texts. You might be surprised to learn, for instance, that the Hebrew Bible prohibits sending escaped slaves back to their masters (Deuteronomy 23:15), but Paul ignores this commandment and does just that in the New Testament (Philemon 12). Even Jesus? Words can be troubling; after all, he once referred to members of a different ethnic group as “dogs” (Mark 7:27)! At the same time, the Hebrew Bible contains many of Christianity’s most cherished ideals. “Love your neighbor as yourself” first appears in Leviticus 19:18, and prophets like Amos, Micah and Isaiah insisted that religious rituals should be accompanied by concern for the poor and oppressed long before the New Testament was written (Micah 6:8).
Sadly, Christians have sometimes used the supposed moral inferiority of the Hebrew Bible as an excuse to demean Jews. That’s obviously not what Mr. Sande had in mind at all. But in light of the often-violent history between the two faiths, we should be very careful about how we characterize the part of the Bible that Christianity shares with Judaism.
Jared thanks for tiankg the time to respond. What I was trying to get at in terms of the experience of the average christian and the relationship of converts to elders, is that the average 1st century new convert never met anybody who actually knew Jesus.Sure, Paul certainly thought out his theology to a fairly large degree. The people he directly mentored were probably fairly well-trained. However, if you grew up in a suburb of Cairo and became a Christian in the year 60, would you have ever met any of those people? What percentage of Christians ever met an apostle, or heard a letter from one of them read to them in their lifetime?I think that when we read the Bible there is a natural tendency to think that the people who wrote it and read it were typical Christians. However, I suspect that this may not have been the case. Additionally, the Bible really gives the clearest picture of those who were discipled by Paul or his close followers. I’m not trying to imply that the NT isn’t representative of Christianity or anything like that. I just think that many of the things we most value in modern Christianity may not have been as highly valued in the first century. I’m sure the NT would have been highly valued if it existed for most believers, but many Christians managed to get by without having access to much of it.As far as modern services go I tend to agree with you that it is hard to break with tradition. I’ve tried to think of how church could work differently, although I think one difficulty I run into is that my picture of an ideal church service might be enjoyed by about 0.001% of the christian population. Sometimes I envision a choose your own service kind of setting where you have a few rooms with various types of worship going on for the full duration of the service, various rooms with various kinds of fellowship activities, various rooms with various kinds of teaching activities (from lecture/sermon-style presentations to small interactive classrooms), etc. Then people could essentially build their own service by walking into and out of various rooms. For this to work you’d probably need a really large church that could support all these redundant activities. You would also need lots of small/medium rooms and less of the big/large room that you find in a typical church. However, you would still want to have church-wide gatherings at times. You would also want to try to promote fellowship across the body as much as possible. I’m not sure how well it would actually work. If nothing else I could see endless battles between spouses about which parts of the service to attend.