Tag Archives: Torah

#10 Post of 2015 – Gay Marriage Is Forcing Us to Get Straight on the Old Testament

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Recently I wrote a blog post on why Christians don’t stone people to death. I then wrote a 4-part series on how Christians should apply the Torah (first five books of the Old Testament). What do these posts have to do with gay marriage?

In a nutshell, Christians are quoting from Leviticus to prove that homosexual behavior is sinful and gay marriage proponents are quoting from Leviticus and other books of the Torah to prove that those books contain outdated moral commands that nobody follows any more.

Both groups are confused about how the Old Testament (the Torah in particular) is supposed to be applied to Christians.

Christians cannot just quote from Leviticus to show that homosexual behavior is wrong and leave it at that. As I showed in this blog post, the Law (aka the Torah) does not apply to Christians. Jesus fulfilled the Law. We are no longer under the direction of the Law. The Law was written to the Israelites as they traveled to the Promised Land, not to us.

The only legitimate means for applying the Law to our lives today is by identifying the timeless truths that were taught in the Law and correlate with New Testament teachings. I covered that in the 4-part series entitled “How Should Christians Apply the Law?

So, we don’t say that homosexual behavior is wrong because Leviticus says so. We say it is wrong because the teachings in Leviticus on homosexual behavior are timeless truths that are reiterated in the New Testament. Then we point to the New Testament passages that speak to homosexual behavior.

Now, to address the proponents of gay marriage who quote from the Torah to show that its teachings are outdated. Your quotations have no force with Christians. We are not arguing that every single command found in the Torah is to be applied today. In fact, to say that the Law applies directly to Christians today is to flatly contradict the New Testament writers!

This approach by proponents of gay marriage only works on Christians who are arguing that the Law can be applied to us today, and who never offer any evidence showing that the teaching is timeless and reiterated in the New Testament.

I have had two Christian teenagers in the last week tell me that proponents of gay marriage in their schools constantly use this illegitimate argument to prove that the Christian position against gay marriage is wrong. Both of them were confused about how to answer these charges because they had never been taught why Christians don’t stone people to death, as is commanded in the Law.

Pastors, teachers, apologists – we need to get straight on the Old Testament. Our brothers and sisters are not prepared to defend the real Christian position.

Was the Mosaic Law Meant to Be Permanent?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

No, it wasn’t.  Not only does the New Testament book of Hebrews make clear that it was temporary, but the Old Testament itself promises a new covenant in Jer. 31 and Ezek. 36.  Should we completely ignore the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament where the Law is found, as hopelessly irrelevant for Christians today?

Not exactly.  The Torah does contain timeless commands that reflect God’s nature, but it also contains temporary laws that are directed at a deeply sinful people living in a flawed culture during a specific period of time in history.

Philosopher Paul Copan describes the situation in his book Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God:

When we journey back over the millennia into the ancient Near East, we enter a world that is foreign to us in many ways.  Life in the ancient Near East wouldn’t just be alien to us – with all of its strange ways and assumptions.  We would see a culture whose social structures were badly damaged by the fall.  Within this context, God raised up a covenant nation and gave the people laws to live by; he helped to create a culture for them.  In doing so, he adapted his ideals to a people whose attitudes and actions were influenced by deeply flawed structures.

At the beginning of the Torah, God lays down the ideals for mankind in Gen. 1 and 2.  According to Copan, those first two chapters “make clear that all humans are God’s image-bearers; they have dignity, worth, and moral responsibility.  And God’s ideal for marriage is a one-flesh monogamous union between husband and wife.”  But the subsequent historical narrative, as recorded in the remainder of Genesis, and then Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, is characterized by humanity’s precipitous fall into moral degeneracy.

How did God choose to move Abraham and his flawed descendants in the right direction?  After all, they had moved far away from the ideals laid down by God in the Garden.  We find in the Torah that God decided to meet them where they were, to accommodate imperfect, human-created social structures in order to move his people in the right moral direction.  Thus, the Mosaic Law (starting in Ex. 20) ends up being focused on a specific people living at a specific time.

Copan elaborates on God’s plans:

We know that many products on the market have a built-in, planned obsolescence.  They’re designed for the short-term; they’re not intended to be long-lasting and permanent.  The same goes for the the law of Moses: it was never intended to be enduring.  It looked forward to a new covenant (Jer. 31; Ezek. 36).

Copan quotes biblical scholar N. T. Wright: “The Torah is given for a specific period of time, and is then set aside – not because it was a bad thing now happily abolished, but because it was a good thing whose purpose had now been accomplished.”

Does God Condone Slavery in the Old Testament? Part 1

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Someone recently asked me about slavery in the Bible, and I decided it was time to take this topic on.  In order to stay focused, I want to answer a very specific question: does God support the institution of slavery in the Torah (first five books of the Old Testament)?

The Torah, also called the Law, is where God gave Israel detailed instructions about how to conduct their affairs as a nation.   How did slavery fit into the instructions God gave Israel?

Before I begin, I want to explain my source for this material.  I have relied on the Christian Thinktank.  In fact, my posts will be an attempt at compacting and summarizing the 29,000 word article written on this topic on the Thinktank.  If you would like to read the article and skip my summary, please do so, for it is a truly excellent treatment.  For those who want the summary, read on.

The first requisite step is to consider what the word slavery means.  Most of us, when we hear the word slavery, think of the institution that existed in the southern United States before the Civil War brought it to an end.   However, it turns out that the word slavery is a slippery one, for there have been many different kinds of slavery throughout world history.

Here is a quote from the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology:

Scholars do not agree on a definition of “slavery.” The term has been used at various times for a wide range of institutions, including plantation slavery, forced labor, the drudgery of factories and sweatshops, child labor, semi-voluntary prostitution, bride-price marriage, child adoption for payment, and paid-for surrogate motherhood. Somewhere within this range, the literal meaning of “slavery” shifts into metaphorical meaning, but it is not entirely clear at what point. A similar problem arises when we look at other cultures. The reason is that the term “Slavery” is evocative rather than analytical, calling to mind a loose bundle of diagnostic features. These features are mainly derived from the most recent direct Western experience with slavery, that of the southern United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. The present Western image of slavery has been haphazardly constructed out of the representations of that experience in nineteenth-century abolitionist literature, and later novels, textbooks, and films. . . From a global cross-cultural and historical perspective, however, New World slavery was a unique conjunction of features. . . In brief, most varieties of slavery did not exhibit the three elements that were dominant in the New World: slaves as property and commodities; their use exclusively as labor; and their lack of freedom.

What I will do in the next few posts is lay out what New World slavery was like, and then contrast that type of slavery with the kind found in the Torah.  You will discover that there are profound differences, so please come back for the rest of the series.