> At 05:27 PM 10/26/1999 EDT, PHSEELY@aol.com wrote:
>
> >According to Jesus (Matt 19:8/Mark 10:5) God did make concessions in
> >Scripture to man-and that in the realm of faith and morals. But, the
> >rationalistic philosophy that informs and underlies the doctrine of the
> >absolute inerrancy of Scripture would agree with you that once God makes a
> >concession, "there is no legitimate end to it." The question is: Which is
> >ultimate for you, the teaching of Jesus or the demands of human Reason for a
> >rationally coherent philosophical system which must rationalize away some of
> >his teachings in order to remain intact?
>
> I disagree that that is the question for me or anyone. The question is do
> we worship a God who concedes things to sinful man, who is logically
> inconsistent, and maybe morally capricious in his concessions to sinful man?
>
> And as to God making the concessions to the sinful desires for divorce, I
> don't see Matthew 19:8 saying that God made that concession. Jesus clearly
> says it was Moses. Since when is Moses God? And in Mark 10:5, Jesus clearly
> says it was Moses who wrote the law. Maybe it wasn't God who made the
> concessions you say He made after all! Maybe it was Moses--which is what
> the Scripture says.
> [snip]
Hi Glenn,
Moses, as you point out, was never God. But he functioned as God's mouthpiece.
Hence the phrase "I am the LORD" which appears liberally throughout the law, as
it was related in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. And there are things I find
far more unsettling than God permitting divorce because the people's hearts were
hard: for example, the section (in Exodus, I think, though I'm not sure; I can
look it up if you want the reference) which says that it's perfectly OK for a
man to beat the living daylights out of his (non-hebrew) slave (my paraphrase),
so long as the slave doesn't die, but gets up after a few days, because the
slave is his property. As property, a slave can be passed by will from father to
son...
I am the LORD.
(The rules were somewhat different for Hebrew slaves.)
I haven't yet reached a satisfactory (to my mind) conclusion about verses like
this - they bother me. At least in the NT, slave traders are condemned - though
concessions are still made to slave owners, of course.
/Gary
--(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)nfluence with large hammer?