Hello dmatic,
I did not ask you to defend yourself against accusations. You are free to do so any time you think you can. What I have asked (repeatedly) is for you to defend your interpretations of various scriptures (e.g., Matt.5:17-20/Col.2:16-7/ Gal.4:10/ Heb.8:13). I am still waiting for your defense. Please don't just return with an "I-stand-by-what-I-have-said" kind of answer. We all know this, and if it is all you have to say, you can save us all a lot of time by not saying it again. What you need to come up with is an "I-have-considered-your-arguments-and-find-them-unconvincing-because-of-the-following-factors" kind of defense. That's the stuff we look for around here. We are interested in truth, and do not expect it to disagree with the best interpretation of scripture. What I am asking you for is something very specific, and I will spell it out to avoid confusion:
Instead of telling us which scriptures you use to defend your positions, please tell us WHY we should believe that those scriptures actually do support your positions, instead of meaning what they appear to mean, and what most Chritians have always understood them to mean. Throwing around a handful of proof texts can be a lot of fun, but it is no way to handle the Word of God, nor of discovering truth. One must engage in some degree of exegesis before the meaning of any text can be determined.
This will involve consideration of any combination of the following— 1) discussion of the Greek vocabulary and grammar; 2) demonstration that the context of the passage favors your interpretation; 3) evidence that your understanding of the passages agrees with the rest of the New Testament's teaching on the same subject; 4) examples of how the behavior of Christ or the apostles indicates that they shared your interpretation of the passage. This is what is meant by exegesis. It is the only responsible means of discovering the author's intended meaning.
As for the questions you asked that I have failed to answer...could you please repeat them? I didn't realize there were still some questions for which you were waiting for a response. I don't have time to go back and re-read all of your posts, so please repeat the questions that you wish for me to answer, and if I have not already done so earlier, I will gladly oblige you.
I do remember you asking me to justify my use of the word "ritual." The only reason I did not answer that is that I had already answered you on that earlier in this thread (somewhere around page 3 or 4). By the way, my answer to you ended with a question for you, which you have not yet answered. So that you will not have to go back looking for it, I will paste it in below:
You wrote:
“I'd like to ask you, Steve, why you refer to dietary instructions as "ritual practices"? Whereas I agree spiritually with your statement that ‘ritual practices have their fulfillment in Christ’ I disagree that they are not to be kept and taught. I believe that Y'shua made perfectly clear that they should be taught and kept at matt. 5:17-19. I am perplexed how anyone could disagree that He clearly made that command a part of His instruction for His Disciples to teach all nations to do and observe what He taught.”
I see a clear distinction between a matter of righteousness and a matter of ritual. The former is moral in nature. It reflects the character of God, and can be summarized by the words, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Paul said that this one sentence adequately summarizes every legal obligation of the Christian (Rom.13:8-10) and James referred to this command as “the royal law”—i.e., the King’s law (James 2:8). James probably called it this because of Jesus’ words in John 13:34—“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another…” Following the logic of Hebrews 8:13, one might even add, “In speaking of a new commandment, he has made the first obsolete.”
Any rule that could not be anticipated by this command (or by its twin command, “Love the Lord your God…) is not a matter of moral righteousness. For this reason, Christians do not murder, commit adultery, steal, dishonor their parents, bear false witness, etc. It is because these actions are innately unloving. Anyone possessing the love of God would know that these things are unacceptable behavior.
Then there are the ritual laws. It is in the nature of a religious ritual that it symbolically points to something spiritual (Heb.9:9). A ritual law could not instinctively be deduced from the royal commandment to love God or men. Such laws would have to be specially spelled-out by God in order for even a righteous and loving person to know that they should be done.
There is nothing about them that is inherently loving or unloving. They are not, in themselves, demanded by God's character. There is a certain arbitrariness in God’s commanding them, except insofar as they must be as they are in order accurately to reflect spiritual realities. Holy days, holy places, sacrificial practices and unclean foods are all clearly in this category.
A perfectly loving man would not know that he should make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year, or to cease working on the seventh day, or to abstain from eating food with blood in it, or to offer an ox as a sacrifice, instead of a horse, if not for specific commands to this effect. His love for God and for his neighbor would not instruct him in these things, because they are not aspects of love, but of ritual. They symbolically point to spiritual realities of which we otherwise would have no knowledge, and thus serve as “tutors” until those realities actually arrive. As such, they are “shadows” (Col.2:17/Heb.8:5; 10:1) that vanish when the full light of day has come, as it has in Christ (Luke 1:78-79).
This is why I refer to dietary laws as rituals. Why do you not?
P.S. dmatic, you can stop saying that I think of you as an enemy. You do not know me, and are particularly unqualified to guess at what I am thinking. I am not aware of having any theological enemies. I am interested in theological truth. I recognize error as an enemy of truth. It's nothing personal. But I do rebuke people who seem to be playing fast and loose with the truth of scripture. As far as I can deduce from your posts in this thread, that would be you.
