I agree!

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when you say:

“Let’s just leave it here: Jesus summarizes the law as “love God, and love others” and the whole rest of Scripture tells us what that means.”

I agree with you completely, with one addition:

“love your enemy”.

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Am I right that you make no claims to be under the Bible’s authority? So your interest here is purely theoretical, and barely even that? Well, I have no interest in drawing out this line of discussion (my original post was to Anlir, and I came back here to see if he had responded), nor do I have the time to do so. I firmly believe that the Bible holds together, that it reveals God, and that it can be understood by those who believe it. But whole books have been written on the subject, and I simply don’t have the time to get into this.

Let’s just leave it here: Jesus summarizes the law as “love God, and love others” and the whole rest of Scripture tells us what that means. Once a person starts justifying mistreatment of another or rebellion against God, the details of which law he has broken can be debated forever, but he has clearly broken the law. For instance, the Bible clearly speaks out against fornication–but that’s clearer when you go into it with the understanding of what the Bible says overall about how we’re to treat other people and the importance of family relationships. There simply is no place in the Bible anywhere for the idea of singles going from one sexual relationship to another, or even having ongoing sex with just one person that didn’t lead to marriage. But then Paul brings it home and makes it explicit, perhaps because he was the one who was writing to a wider culture than the Jewish world where that simply wasn’t done. But the whole Bible is a unit, and if you discard the Bible’s authority, there’s no point whatsoever in going into details of this verse says this and that verse says that.

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The laws that are spelled out in Exodus and Leviticus and elsewhere in the Pentateuch are the only clearly stated code of laws anywhere in the Bible. In appealing to any other part, you have to tease out a principle here, a statement there, much of which is open to interpretation.

The fact that Ecclesiastes, Paul, etc, demonstrate a good grasp of human nature has nothing to do with an unchanging absolute moral code. Ecclesiastes doesn’t set out laws. Proverbs contains a lot of wisdom, none of it couched as absolute moral right and wrong (and either of those would also have been superseded by Jesus, no?)

And Paul writes to individual churches to resolve their arguments and answer their questions. Does the Bible’s unchanging moral code come from Paul?

So just what is the code to which you refer?

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Musing, I’ve seen you “debate” on here before, and I’m not interested. I’ve been clear enough. Take what I’ve said or leave it.

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Steve G., anyone who thinks that the Bible is “the relic of a primitive culture no longer applicable” has probably never read it, because it is startlingly applicable today.

Oh yeah?

Know anybody who practices Levirate marriage today?

Stoned any disrespectful teenagers lately?

Do you require menstruating women to go through ritual purification to become clean again?

Do you refuse entry into the church to men who’ve had their testicles damaged?

Sacrificed any animals this year?

All of that, and a lot more, was part of the Bible’s “unchanging moral code” for thousands of years … until it changed. And before you give me the standard “age of grace, age of law” answer, bear in mind that the Law WAS the Law, as YHVH decreed it. You may say he later repealed it in favor of grace through Christ, but nevertheless, those were the “unchanging” moral standards He gave to his people for many centuries. Jesus himself said the Law was in effect and that he had come to change “not one jot or tittle.”

The immoral didn’t suddenly become moral and the moral immoral with Jesus’s death. In Christian theology, all that happened was that God agreed not to count sin against those who accepted the grace offered in Christ.

And as I said, even many modern Christians would not argue that the Bible has an unchanging moral standard. As we’ve discussed before, slavery was quite acceptable to the ancient Israelites, less widespread but still practiced in the age of Jesus, and really only rejected among Christians in the 19th century AD.

Likewise, the Bible decrees something like 44 specific sexual rules, of which most Christians today observe only seven or eight. (Ironically, the Bible does NOT forbid premarital sex or require that marriage be one man, one woman, but many modern Christians add those in.)

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noting that once we establish the constancy argument of your psitied Christian moral comapss, then we can explore why it should be considered correct.

Just be cause it is constant does not mean it is right.

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so lets look at some of the apparent difficulties with your statement:

1) when you say Christian, what form of Christian are you discussing

- since the Pew Survey shows a wide variety of Christian:

http://religions.pewforum.org/reports

we need to know how generally you use this term

2) there is a wide variety of perspectives within Christianity on how to understand the Bible:

http://www.usccb.org/seia/southernbaptist.shtml

- if we have wide variety of interpretation of the text, it seems difficult to argue that this would provide a constant “moral compass”

I have demonstrated what appear to be two root flaws in your argument which possibly refute it completely.

You keep repeating your assertion without evidence.

My sense then is that you have no evidence and further, based on the data I have provided, your argument is in fact incorrect.

I suggest that a classic responses would be to admit your error OR demonstrate where my understanding is in error, providing evidence to support your position.

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yes you said:

“Musing, I said Christians are “about the only people,” not that there is absolutely no one else who has a moral compass. ”

but you still have notprovided any evidence to supprot this assertion.

I specifically noted that within the construct of a constnt moral compass (as opposed to one you agreed with) it seemed Islam for example also possibly has a constant moral commpass.

So if you are to make your asertion what is the evidence for your assertion?

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