Jesus is Lord, A Worshipping Christian’s Blog

A very well done post, over at Hot Air, about how atheists and secularists are never going to understand the enemy we are fighting in the guise of radical Islamst, since they are incapable of understanding abrogated religious text.
On a side not, I’ve also always found it amusing that atheist try to use the Bible to disprove the Bible and so forth. Using circular reasoning, while citing a document that holds no credence for the atheist, is highly dubious logic, at the best. Complete lunacy at worst.

The basis of the title of this post is that it’s consistently atheists and adamant secularists who understand the Islamist enemy the least, yet they’re also the quickest to slam or argue against anyone who does quote the Koran on its own terms to argue that it is animating violence. They are also the quickest to equate Christianity with the villain du jour, because Christianity is to them just one among many faiths that they may think they understand, but ultimately don’t. Here’s one example; here’s another. Follow the thread from that second link and you’ll see atheist Andrew Stuttaford missing the point that Andrew McCarthy is making, that point being that Islamists are animated to violence by their own beliefs as laid down in the Koran. And now I’m going to explain why he (and Bill over at INDC Journal) miss the point. I’m not doing this to be mean or snarky, but to illuminate one of the many difficulties we have when dealing with an enemy who’s ruthlessness is matched only by his religious zeal, a zeal that animates his ruthlessness and is based on his understanding of his faith’s holy writ.

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In the life of a religious believer, regardless of the sect, faith or creed, some writing or another or a set of writings hold some position of moral authority. The degree of authority held depends on several factors, including the degree of an individual’s belief and the position of a given writing with respect to other writings that the faith holds dear. Some writings hold more sway than others in any faith. That’s just a fact. And it’s one easily misunderstood by those who hold no faith at all, and therefore assume that all scriptures held sacred by a given faith hold equal weight.

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Leviticus forms part of what’s known as the Law (along with Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), and in the Christian way of thinking the civil and ceremonial components of the Law hold no command on our behavior today because the purpose of the Law was fulfilled in Christ. Christians are not bound by the legal commands of the Law, and we do eat pork and do lots of other things that the Law forbids, and likewise we don’t do many things the civil and ceremonial Law commands us to do. I don’t want to get too esoteric here for the non-believers to be able to follow me, but essentially, those parts of the Law are no longer authoritative over the behavior of the Christian believer. They have been abrogated by later acts and writings. That doesn’t mean those five books are without value; far from it. They’re incredibly valuable for many, many reasons. But the civil and ceremonial Law belongs to a set place and time and was abrogated by, among other things, Christ’s death and resurrection and Peter’s vision in Acts 10. The Law’s overall purpose–making humans presentable to a holy God–was fulfilled in Christ.

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The point is, in the Law there are moral, civil and ceremonial commands, but through the work of Christ the latter two have been abrogated while the first remains in force. So Leviticus is no weapon useful for smiting a Christian, something secularists are ill-equipped to understand. They should look for violent language in the New Testament if they want to argue that Christianity promotes violence. They will look in vain if they do that, though. The most common misunderstanding of the New Testament is to read it as pacifist, not violent.

By contrast, the Islamic Suras quoted by Robert Spencer and others that promote violence by Muslims against non-Muslims come from the second half of the Koran. They have not been abrogated by later scripture, because there is no later scripture. Spencer’s argument is that if any Koranic verses have abrogated any others, then the weight has to be given to the later verses–and they’re the violent ones. But if you don’t understand the principle of abrogation or the fact that not all scriptures hold equal weight in any faith, and it’s clear those who don’t hold to any faith at all probably don’t since they keep quoting Old Testament civil Law to slam Christians, then you’re ill-equipped to make the distinctions that mark Leviticus less authoritative on behavior than the Gospels for the Christian, and earlier verses less authoritative than later ones for the Muslim. The position of the violent Suras in the Koran is both a fact and a problem, one Spencer attempts to engage on its own terms, and one secularists consistently misunderstand because they don’t understand how a given text relates to a given faith and to other texts within that faith.

Original Link.

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