Tag: Jews

Do Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Mormons and Protestants worship the same God or not?

They all claim that they worship the Creator God and that there is one Creator God but they ascribe different characteristics to this God. Even different names. The Islamic faith is like Mormonism for the seventh century, while Joseph Smith wanted to make a religion based around a biblical topic based on phoney texts that made the Americans the chosen people, Mohammed did that for the Arabs. While Smith was not much of a one for leading people into battle he did make a lot of parallels with Mohammed, including the multiple wives thing.  In the case of Mormonism you have texts which are supposed to have been written in a language called Reformed Egyptian, although nobody can see this language and Joseph Smith is supposed to have had something called the Urim and Thummim (a Biblical idea but we’re not sure what they are) to interpret this text, and the original is in golden plates given by the angel Moroni which nobody else was allowed to look at. They ask anyone willing to talk to them to pray and ask God whether these things are true,  but when I did so the answer that came to my head was that whenever before God has spoken, he has protected the language of these revelations so that Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek are still spoken or understood at least almost natively today in the face of overwhelming enemies and opposition. Even the Qur’an was in a language kept until today but in their case, they were the overwhelming proposition, so to speak, so I am not counting that.

Muslims

The Muslims claimed that Moses and others were all good Muslims but others had twisted their words and only the Qur’an (plus the Hadith and Sunna, as in fact you don’t get most of the doctrines in practice from the Quran alone) is a copy of the Umm al Kutub or Mother of all Books (if I got that bit of Arabic wrong excuse my memory) and is a copy of the Book which is with Allah in heaven. On the one hand they say that these texts are a revelation for the Arabs and have to be kept in Arabic, but on the other if taken all together you see they contain an expansionist statecraft which adds up to a political exceptionalism for Muslims, and especially for Arab Muslims. Unlike the Bible or other texts for that matter, the holy texts make demands on Muslims which basically prove it was intended initially only for one time and place. The Feast of Ramadan can’t be kept in the polar regions as you would never get to your iftar for half the times Ramadan is kept.  The Hajj can only be kept physically by a tiny proportion of Muslims if you look at the logistics, whereas the religion says every Muslim is supposed to do it at least once in their lives. I will leave you to to your own maths and if you can see a way to actually enable this to happen, by all means use the comment section. I don’t censor for disagreement as long as it is civilised and not spammy or vulgar or satanic.

Jews

Jews have developed their views in a rather complex way, adding layers of complexity with each additional text so that in essence you have a Talmud sitting there much much bigger than the Old Testament and taking certain ideas from Torah and Tanakh in very different directions than the New Testament takes them, but still they seem rather a lot closer to Christianity than Islam in that they do at least have three quarters of the same Bible as we do, pages wise, anyway.  And there are many flavours of Judaism so that in a sense talking generally about Judaism is nearly as prone to be misleading as talking in generic terms about Christianity. There are Jews on both sides of very big fences both in politics and in ethics, as well as in questions of our origins in Creation and our destiny in the afterlife. There’s nothing new in this really – Pharisees and Sadducees as well as other sects of Judaism where in deep disagreement about some of the most fundamental questions even at the time of the New Testament, as can be seen from the life of Jesus as well as the Acts of the Apostles and some of Paul’s letters, among others.

Christians differ from most Jews over the person of Jesus Christ and the authority of the New Testament. We believe in the Trinitarian formula which makes Jesus absolutely unique and the Bridge between God and Man. Son of God and Son of Man are titles used of Him almost interchangeably. John 17 shows an amazing secret about who Jesus is and who He is also before He was born of Mary.  Jews have not accepted this in the main however there have always been some who have indeed accepted this and come to know Jesus in a Christian way. There are then two opinions on whether they are still Jews if they do. Many will say that they are not, but others will say they are except only in the sense that Talmudic Judaism has gone its own way and defines Judaism around itself, whereas in fact there are many ways of being a Jew, and always have been, at least for a couple of thousand years at any rate.

Roman Catholics

Roman Catholicism is one of the Christian churches, but has the problem that it holds particularly closely to ecclesiastical traditions and structures and derives as much authority from them as from the apostolic writings to the extent that they consider themselves to be in a straight line from the apostles and that the protestants have gone off at a tangent. The fact that they still have larger numbers than the rest seems to confirm them in this view, despite Jesus’ warning that it isn’t about numbers. Protestants however see themselves as having abandoned a lot of medieval entropy and gone back to the very text of the New Testament. Along with this, we focus back on the central role of Jesus in saving us and applying this salvation to us via faith.  Apostolic succession seems to Protestants to be a self-serving doctrine wrung from a handful of verses by those who would be served by thinking thus. And in practice, when  we consider via what kinds of people this line of succession has gone and how many of them put carnal, earthly considerations before those of God’s kingdom, the doctrine seems to ring very hollow indeed.

Roman Catholicism uses certain terms in quite different ways to the way Protestants use them, for example they use the term “sacraments” to cover quite a lot of things while for us there are only two: baptism and the lord’s supper. They say that the lord’s supper, which they call the Eucharist, is a “means of grace”, a term also used by Protestants but with the meaning of praying and reading the Bible. They think that the bread and wine turn literally into the body and blood of Jesus but as a Passover meal, but what these things do is show that Christ is the Passover, it was because of Him being that Lamb that would take away the sin of the world that in the first Passover the blood on the lintel and the lamb eaten by all who were to be saved turned away the avenging angel and got them through the Red Sea which fell on their pursuing enemies. The Passover Lambs did not need to turn into the blood and body of the the future Messiah for this purpose but it got them through the Red Sea.

Protestants

And then within Protestantism also we have various disagreements as to who should be baptised, how often the Lord’s supper should be taken, predestination versus a total volitional approach, as if these were contradictory, which in fact they are not (unless you have the mind of a child who also cannot understand how Quantum mechanics can be true and Newton’s or Einstein’s physics also true) and questions of Church governance, end-times prophesies and worship styles.

Same name, different God

So in a sense we have the same God but at the point at which we ascribe to God varying characteristics and varying expectations from us, in a sense we have a different God. Just as Paul warned the Galatians against accepting “another Jesus”. He didn’t mean a different person coming along claiming to be Jesus (the NT warns about that also, in other places, but this isn’t what Paul has in mind when talking to the Galatians) but another view of what Jesus did and what it meant, and how to apply it for our salvation. It was tantamount to having another Jesus and thereby, another God.

Pdfcast: 2011 Report of the Moses Schorr Foundation

English: Moses Schorr (Mojżesza Schorr, 1874 -...
English: Moses Schorr (Mojżesza Schorr, 1874 – d. in 1941) Jewish rabbi and historian, born in Przemysl, died in Soviet forced labour camp in Uzbekistan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a guest pdf-cast, I am making the topic of today’s post here on Huliganov TV  the Prof. Moses Schorr Foundation, a unique non-profit organization in Poland, which runs an educational centre for secular and religious Jewish studies and the country’s largest Hebrew language school.

Using a wide range of professional tools, as well as social media, they educate both Jews and Poles about the enormous presence of Jews in the Polish society before the Holocaust, their contribution to culture, political thought and community life, all in a contemporary context, but respectful of tradition. What makes them distinctive is their flexible programming, which allows them to participate in the public debate in Poland, while remaining inclusive for students of all backgrounds and viewpoints.

Their overarching objective is to support the development of an open society in Poland and help counter the rise of xenophobia and isolationism in Europe by using documentary material and scholarly work to re-create the past and bring back to life links between communities that were brutally destroyed by the Holocaust.

Here is the annual report of the Foundation. Hopefully it will spark the interest of some of my readers.

Report 2011 Moses Schorr

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Why do Christians eat pork?

Pot bellied pig at Lisbon Zoo
Image via Wikipedia

I received a question on Christianity, which is a welcome change from receiving all linguistic questions, from YouTube viewer JInks232, who writes:

I viewed your “Basket case” video and an old question came to mind. How is that Christians eat pork despite the injunction in the bible against its consumption?

We traditional eat a nice ham for Easter Sunday. I am just curious and you seem to be knowledgeable.

Many thanks for that compliment, friend.

The fact is not all Christians eat pork – Seventh Day Adventists do not, I believe most Messianic Jews do not and there may well be others who do not. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Gentile Christians do not observe the shunning of pork, even though hopefully most of us are aware that Jesus Christ himself certainly must have refused to eat it, by way of His living out the whole Law.

The placing of pigs, and with them a whole series of other animals, on the list of unclean animals takes place in the context of Levitical law. This comes from when Israel was called aside as a nation after arriving in Israel and the priesthood of the Levites was instituted.

When Noah lands the Ark after the Flood, God gives an instruction in Genesis 9 v 3, that he can eat any of the animals, just as before he could have eaten any of the plants.

There is mention in Genesis 7, before Noah goes into the Ark, of taking seven pairs of clean animals, one pair of unclean, but this has nothing to do with not eating them, as mankind was not allowed to eat animals at all until Genesis 9, after the Flood. So it presumably refers to some animals being regarded as sacrificial animals even before people consumed the animals.

Nothing more is said about some animals not being eaten or being regarded as dirty until we get to Levitical law. Especially Leviticus chapter 11. In the meantime we have had Abraham, Isaac and Jacob needing to be circumcised in order to be in the covenant, but no word about them shunning pork.

Some people talk about pork being regarded as unclean because of tapeworms. In this case people simply would have not kept pigs at all, and yet we know that pigs were kept in the region because of the Gadarean swine and also the fact that the prodigal son in Jesus’ parable ends up in a pigsty.

So circumcision was earlier by some generations in the Old Testament than dietary laws. Anyway Jesus kept all of the Levitical laws perfectly.

The Levitical law was a law for a special holy nation to be set aside to see if they could follow a set of precepts reflecting the perfection of God, and was there as Paul says as a schoolmaster, to lead us to the doctrine of grace. If righteousness comes by the law, he wrote, then Christ is dead in vain. Only Christ, out of all the men who sought to keep the law, actually managed it in thought, word and deed, despite being subjected to all temptations that man is prone to. This level of holiness is inconceivable to anyone who was normally conceived. The heritage from Adam through the male line precludes any such righteousness by works as we have a flesh that is in bondage to sin. So the only claim to such a righteousness we can have is for that man Jesus to have died on our behalf and to have offered himself as propitiation on the basis of simple belief in Him, repentance and calling on Him for salvation.

The experiment that the human can achieve righteousness by the law was done by God with the Jews as the chosen nation. It failed. Christ was the answer.

The experiment that the human can achieve political fairness and equality by communism was done by men with the Soviet peoples and some others as the chosen ones for that, but it was something God had never asked them to do. Still Christ is the answer.

Jesus Christ sent his disciples to the lost sheep of the house of Israel and ministered to Israel almost exclsuively. He did however respond in kindness to those coming who recognised that they were outside and ready to pick up crumbs that fell from the masters’ table.

Even after His resurrection, when at the end of Matthew’s Gospel He finally instructs the disciples to go into the whole world, not just Israel, He himself still gives one more chance to Israel. Look how the Acts of Apostles is structured, It is very important, these first few chapters tell a lot of how Gentiles started to be included.

in Acts 2 we have Pentecost, and the tongues enabling the message to go out into the whole world.

In Acts 3, we still have Peter addressing the men of Israel, though, and in Acts 4, and Stephen in Acts 7 addresses also the Jews.

Stephen the Martyr sees Christ in His resurrected state above the Jews to whom he offers the Gospel, and when they stone him it s like the final rejection. The garments already go to Saul, shortly to become Paul and the one who will be the apostle to the gentiles. Peter receives his vision in Acts 10 vv 14-15 where God commands him to eat of the unclean beasts, he says he has never eaten anything unclean, and God says “what God hath cleansed, that call not thou common”. The chapter goes on to show how now God has opened the way for the gentiles to join the covenant of Christ, and Paul to be the Apostle to them.

Later Paul deals with the issues of Jewish Christians trying to impose circumcision (as I already said above, a more core aspect of OT righteousness even than the dietary laws) on Christians and the Letter to Galatians is mainly all about that, and Christian liberty from Levitical laws. If a person sees righteousness as needing to involve one part of the law, such as circumcision, and not all by grace alone through faith, then they are a debtor to do the whole law.

So the New testament gives us every reason to understand that as we are gentiles and brought in to the grace of Christ, we are nevertheless not expected to behave like Jews. We should honour Jews and not do what the Church did to the Jews through so much of history, but we are not expected to be Jews. We are not converting to Judaism, we are experiencing an extension to pagans of the grace that at first belonged to the Jews. We are cleansed, our food is cleansed, and God is not calling is unclean. He washed us.

If we deny that washing by trying to obey works righteousness then we are outside the covenant of grace and back under the necessity to obey the whole law, because the Levitical law was not a loose leaf law, you didn’t pick or choose the things you liked. If you wanted access to the Holiest of Holies under the Levitical system, that’s how you did it. And the nation was a Theocracy, it wasn’t a secular state like today’s Israel.

We don’t have to become Jewish to by loved and included in a Saviour who was Jewish. We should certainly not be Anti-Semitic or offend Jews. I am not going to sit around without a yarmulka on if I go to a synagogue, nor am I going to sit around eating tasty food if someone in my team is eating only matzos at Passover. But that is by way of acknowledging the specialness of God’s special people, and not by way of saying that my salvation is incomplete if I don’t do these things. If I am working on a project even with Muslims then I will do them the courtesy of ensuring the pizza ordered for lunch has no pork, so how much more am I willing to accommodate the people of the Abrahamic Covenant.

Salvation is by grace, through faith, not of works, lest any man should boast. And even Abraham believed God, and it was that believing, not his act of circumcision, that was accounted to him as righteousness.

If a Christian doesn’t want to eat pork, he can shun pork. But if he thinks that he has earned any of his salvation by doing so, it would be better for him to wallow in a pigsty for a thousand years than get that wrong idea about what the following of Levitical law can do for him.

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