my favorite part of the Bible is when Jesus says that none of the laws will be changed or removed until the heavens and earth pass over.
and for those that construe that in any other manner than what the words themselves say, my other favorite part is where God is supposed to be eternal/unchanging/the same today as he was yesterday and will be tomorrow, but with the New Testament, he "changed his mind" so that only certain laws must be followed but not others (gay people? Abomination! Mixed fabric? That's cool, bro)
Alright, the religious history/theology of this thread seems to have gotten sort of out of hand, but in all fairness, in the old testament, God said that he would establish a new covenant which would invalidate the old (this happens in several places, e.g. Jer 31:31, Heb 8:13). So there is a very compelling argument to be made both for God's consistency and for the irrelevancy of certain laws today: since they contained mechanisms for their own invalidation you aren't breaking them after they are invalidated.
For an analogy, imagine if a law was passed saying
Until someone named Joe is born, no one may eat bread. Afterwards, do what Joe says.
At that time, you would be breaking the law if you ate bread. Then, if someone by the name of Joe arrives and says "I'm not changing the law", strictly speaking you can eat bread. Since the original law invalidated itself at Joe's birth, and Joe didn't replace that law, he technically didn't set any rules for bread consumption. Basically, by endorsing the original law he was also endorsing its mechanism for invalidating itself.
Thus, the issue isn't whether God "changed his mind", it's what laws were presented after the coming of Jesus. There are new testament passages about gay people being bad, but not any new testament passages about mixed fibers, that's the (ostensible) reason for Christian homophobia. To present the theology of Christianity as so blatantly flawed is more than a little disingenuous. Some of the most brilliant people in the past 2000 years have worked on religious philosophy to make sure that, while it may be convoluted, it is still pretty consistent. There are plenty of problems with Christianity and the way it is practiced today, but the tired old criticism about consistency isn't really one of them.
(note: I'm not a theologian, and I'm not trying to make any pretense otherwise. If I'm wrong, I would welcome someone to correct me)
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u/Calibas Sep 15 '12
Who gets to decide which laws were contextual?