let me say up front that my intent here is not to troll or belittle folks that subscribe to a faith-based belief system. As a self-described agnostic, I don’t pretend to be a better person for my own (lack of) convictions. But the question I have for the Christians out there is - how do you reconcile the apparent conflicts between some of the things that seem to be arbitrary, or even stretch credulity in the Old Testament, with the overarching messages of love, and forgiveness found throughout the New Testament? You know, like bears mauling 42 kids for calling a prophet ‘baldy’, or denying folks of God’s love for having the poor sense to be born out of wedlock, or missing genitals, or sins like planting two different types of seeds in a field, or having garments made with more than one kind of fabric…I’m sure you’ve heard most of these before and get the idea.
I’ve encountered some very intelligent and articulate Christian folks in my time, and have always wondered how they could explain such apparent conflicts to their own satisfaction. I mean should one’s reasoning be ‘It is wrong to question God, best not to ask those kind of questions. After all, He’s omniscient/omnipotent, and what do YOU, a mere mortal, know…’. Or do you subscribe to the view that *‘yeah, parts of the Old Testament are pretty much balderdash, but He finally got it right with the New Testament’ *or can such things be explained as being simply the result of bad translations? Help me out here. Like I said, how do intelligent and well-educated modern Christians look upon this paradox between the very different messages being sent? I don’t intend to question or belittle whatever reasoning you may have, I just want to know what it is you think. Thanks in advance.
I haven’t seen much of a problem here with the believers. God changed things up in the New Testament (The Bible 2.0), so anything in the first release that contradicts the new is to be ignored, unless of course it supports your opinion better. And then for any unresolvable difference there’s just the mysterious ways.
The laws of god in the old testament were the laws we needed then. When Jesus was incarnated, our needs had changed so he brought a new covenant to reflect that.
Yep. There’s a reason Christians call it the Old Testament, or Old Covenant. The idea is that the covenant with Jesus overrides the old covenant. The laws back then were established for Israel only, and required a functioning Temple. This no longer exists, and God has “grafted in” the Gentiles.
That’s not to say the Old Testament is without merit. Just that the laws in it are no longer in effect unless replicated in the New. The New Covenant, according to Paul, allows us to die to the old law, and instead be under “grace.”
In fact, some study of Scripture involves looking at the Old Testament, seeing what did and didn’t carry over, and thus determining what God really thought was important. We can then have ideas of what God would say about more modern things.
I like what the theologian Karl Barth said about scripture (paraphrasing), that it is not revelation itself, it’s a record of revelation. That combined with John Calvin’s concept of Accommodation which says that God speaks to people in ways they can understand (so he referred to Genesis as God’s babytalk).
Anyways in that respect the writers of the Old Testament were relating to God in ways they could understand and comprehend and the Holy Spirit continues to work to make our understanding better, so… it was a process.
As was mentioned by BigT, Christians should never ignore the OT, but should seek to understand the entirety of the word God gave to mankind. But as was also mentioned, the OT was specificially about God’s relationship with His people (the Jews). He set up certain laws that they should follow and those laws were meant to help them stay focused on Him.
Then there are things that we should learn about the nature of God. I don’t believe the ones mauled by bears happened because they called him baldy, but because they were disrespecting a prophet of God. Which is basically them showing contempt for God. And the fact that 42 were mauled, leads one to believe that it was quite a large crowd (much larger than 42), so it could have been that they would have done something horrible to him. What that shows us is that God is to be respected.
Under the NT, we are under grace. Christians do spend more of their time in the NT due to this. But we ignore the OT at our peril.
I have always seen any “discrepancies” as being not fully understanding the times, translation issues, and just not fully understanding God’s words, more than anything implying that God’s nature changed or anything like that.
I heard a lovely lecture once on how the Bible is an account of God’s accommodation to agriculture.
Early on, Cain’s offering of grain is rejected by God, and Adam is cursed to eat bread in the sweat of his brow. But by the end, not only does Jesus produce miraculous loaves of bread, but (symbolically or literally) becomes the bread of the offering.
Essentially, you have to take the Old and New Testaments as reflecting different times in the developing civilization of the era. King David personalizes the transition, starting as a shepherd, but becoming King of an agricultural land. Nomadic tribes became sessile cities.
This is, in part, why the hyper-strict commandments given by Moses to the nomadic Children of Israel might have made sense for them, but stopped making sense for city-living Jews. It simply was no longer practical to take all animals to the Temple for slaughtering.
Nor are these approaches modern, in the sense of just now trying to talk away the OT. This very issue was one of the key points of discussion amongst the early church.
Paul contested this issue with James the brother of Jesus (traditionally James was considered the first Bishop of Jerusalem).
Peter also grappled with this issue, until he had his vision of God telling him that the dietary laws had been done away with by Jesus.
So Christians do not believe that the Mosaic dietary and other laws (mixing fabrics etc) continue to have any validity, because of the New Covenant.
One of the main points of contention between Paul and James was circumcision. James was of the view that circumcision continued to be necessary. Paul argued that it was not, because arguing for rituals of purity undercut the significance of Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection.
Paul’s views won out on that issue, which is one of the reasons he was nicknamed the “Apostle to the Gentiles.” He did not disregard the Jewish roots of Christianity, but repeatedly emphasised the primacy of Jesus, for example in the Epistle to the Romans, one of his most detailed exposition of his theology. That approach made his evangelism more successful with the Gentiles.
I recall studying (several taped lectures and books) why the Jewish Priests and The Pharisees rejected Jesus as the Messiah. It’s far to lengthy for a casual post.
TheJewish religious leaders had developed a complex and rigid methodology for recognizing the Messiah. It was based on generations of theological study. The Jewish people have waited for the Messiah for a long time. There are inconsistencies in the Old and New Testaments. They lead to Jesus’ betrayal and death at the hands of the Romans.
The rejection of Jesus is a warning against any church’s entrenched theology. Sometimes, it can blind them to new ideas.
Actually, it was fairly simple. If he does what the Messiah is supposed to do - free Israel, defeat its enemies, bring world peace, have the world worship God - then he’s the Messiah. If he doesn’t, then he isn’t.
I never did understand the idea that the “old testament,” or what I call the Tanakh, is supposed to be bloodthirsty, and the “new testament,” or what I call “that stuff about Jesus” is supposed to be all sweetness and rainbows. The Tanakh covers many, many centuries of a people, and documents the missteps they’ve taken, and corrective action prophets have called for. It’s full of cautionary tales. It’s like a book of case law. It’s not supposed to be full of the best things people have ever done, because you learn from your mistakes. In the so-called “nice” books, there are four variant stories of a guy being crucified on the order of this supposedly benevolent deity, and the Book of Revelation, which is one of the scariest things I ever read.
If you read the “old testament” the way Jews read it, there’s nothing wrong with it.
Even in the OT, the way of God was the same, seek and you shall find. God does not change, nor does the rules. The NT was the original testament and forever testament, and you can see it acting in a select few people who have found the way and have overcome the OT ‘rules’ and religion to walk with God (Enoch is the first one mentioned in the Bible to walk with God excluding Adam and Eve).
The OT and NT are two different states of our faith. First is blind obedience/group think religion, the second is knowing God and receiving His spirit and doing God’s work on earth. Or to put it the way it is defined in Won Buddhism scriptures - but paraphrased, a monk practiced and was given 10 rules to follow, which he did. After some time he was given another 10 as he advanced in his practice, finally he was given another 10 which he also followed diligently as part of his study. After achieving awaking he asked about the rules as it seemed contrary to achieving enlightenment. He was told that he never needed any of them, but many others who practice need them as they are not at the point that they can understand that they don’t.
I also play with the idea that the Bible as states of our physical and spiritual life:
Pre-conception - Before the Fall, we are with God in Paradise - Ourselves
Conception - - Eating the fruit, conception and us also joining our godself with the world and it’s problems
In the womb - Time after the fall but before the flood, in a different place/realm, time and things work differently (such as people live for 100’s of years.
Birth - The flood, welcome to the earth we know and love, starting out in a new place.
The OT ‘jewish’ times is when we are told of God, and see leaders, some of God, some claim to be so.
We stumble in and out of trouble and are rescued time and time again by leaders, we really have no clue but follow rules because we think that is the way
The Gospels - Jesus comes into our lives, We usually meet Jesus though a person with His spirit (The holy Spirit), We are mentored and we see the result of our faith, faith becomes sight. We also re-learn of our God self and we share in that inheritance because of who we are. We are walking with God now.
Penticost - Our mentor must go away and we get the Holy Spirit and do and continue His work. As part of this we start being Jesus for others to walk with God.
---- Letters, we see a questioning and refining of faith as we do the work of Jesus
---- Revelation - the secrets of heaven are made know to us.
As for men wrote and put together the Bible, leaving out stuff, doesn’t matter, God is in control and above all man’s efforts. And God created everything, so even though men wrote it down the inspiration was God’s gifted to men.
(Also as I used masculine terms it also includes women equally)
The OT is a record of God’s relationship with a people, the Israelites. The NT is a record of God extending that relationship to everybody. There are three types of law in the OT, civil, ceremonial, and moral. The civil law was for a place and time but is illustrative or the moral law, the ceremonial law was rendered unnecessary by the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the moral law still stands unchanged.
My take is that the OT is important because it is the tradition out of which Jesus came. Therefore, if you want to understand Him and what He said, you need to know what He learned growing up and what it would mean to His followers, who were Jews to begin with.
My pea brain reconciled it as…God made man, gave man free will, some of humanity (the Israelites) got the plan (Old Testament) and followed it, the rest of us turned out to be terrible at following the plan, Jesus came around to help better understand how man became so fucked, God re-jiggered the plan to better suit what man had become and to give us a heaping helping of forgiveness. New Testament.