Texas triumphs with new law banning abortsions after 6-weeks, child w/ heart beat

I’ll try. Christians often cite this verse, but then turn around around and interpret what follows it as though “fulfill” really is just another synonym for “abolish”. Just in case we didn’t get the picture, he says “not one jot or tittle”, i.e., not the slightest written feature, will pass away before heaven and earth pass away. The Mosaic Covenant is an everlasting covenant, and the Mosaic Law is 100% still in full force (for Jews), if we take the Gospel of Matthew at its word.

The lex talionis imposes the same obligations on both the victim and the violator. If you violate it, you have to compensate the victim (remember, the lex talionis refers to monetary compensation…it’s not relevant to a discussion of the death penalty); if you’re the victim, you better make 100% certain you’ve accused the right person, otherwise you’ve violated it yourself. Jesus is saying, “if you’ve been wronged, don’t sue people” (lest you violate God’s law by causing another person to suffer an injustice). That is the correct meaning of the passage. Thus a follower of Jesus who strictly adhered to what he said here would never be guilty of violating the lex talionis. The whole passage assumes that it remains in force. In no sense is it an annulment. And righteousness achieved by those who followed these counsels would indeed exceed even those of the Pharisees, a very high standard. And all this would have made immediate perfect sense to a Jewish hearer at the time. So, there it is.

 

...I don't mean any personal offence when I say this, but that's utterly absurd. I can't even fathom how someone could come to that conclusion with any open reading of Matthew 5. I'd beg you to read it (again), in full, it only takes about 10 minutes. Your interpretation comes off like someone reading Matthew 5.17 on its own, and not in the context of the full sermon. If it was true that Mosaic Law is 100% in full force, that there are no changes, then Jesus would contradict himself multiple times in the next two and a half chapters. Your reading simply cannot be correct.

The Gospel most certainly does not separate a "Mosaic Law for Jews, Mosaic Law for Christians". Jesus doesn't see a difference between Jews and Christians, that comes much later, post-bible. There is nothing in scripture that splits a Jew from a Christian, and Acts 15 splitting Jew from Gentile doesn't apply to what we are talking about here. Mosaic Law (in part) applies to Christians too. If Mosaic Law is only for Jews, then this whole discussion is useless, nothing in the OT, including the ten commandments, and including any moral implications of an eye for an eye applies to us. You can't support positions dependent on OT scripture and then say it's only for Jews.

The Anglican church states that the old covenant holds completely to all Christians, but the new covenant replaces the old covenant in all ceremonial and civil law matters, and only the moral laws of Moses were not fulfilled (Article 7). That's why we are still bound by the ten commandments but not kosher law. This is consistent with what Aquinas teaches us.

Moses's ceremonial law served to deal with a period of worship that foreshadowed Christ. Once Christ had come those ceremonial laws were fulfilled - which is why our church ceremonies, holidays and traditions are different from Jewish ones. Jewish born Christians do not need to hold the Sedar, Mosaic Law is not 100% still in full force. In fact, Aquinas went further. He said not only is it no longer necessary, but that if you continue to hold the old Jewish ceremonial traditions Mosaic Law demands you to, that is akin to saying Christ had not yet come - which is a sin.

Aquinas argues the same with Mosaic judicial law, but that laws are functional so continuing to implement them for non-religious reasons is not a sin. But, that the Mosaic judicial law has also been fulfilled by Christ's first coming and so it equally still holds that none of them need to be followed any longer.

Aquinas then argues Mosaic moral law comes from natural law, that it relates to human nature, and humans are still fallen, so it is still necessary. This applies to all Jews as well as Gentiles, this applies to all Jews as well as Christians, there is no difference. Jews do not need to keep the old law any more than we do. Mosaic Law is not 100% still in full force.

So, if Mosaic law does apply to us, the question then is; did Jesus alter any of the old Mosaic moral laws, or do they all remain precisely as they were written?

Okay then explain how this makes any sense whatsoever:

‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
~ Matthew 5.43-44​

Follow the old law to the letter and "Hate your enemy", but then also do exactly as I say and "Love your enemy" otherwise you won't make it into heaven? Jesus says don't be a pharisee, be better than a pharisee. Don't follow the letter of the old law, follow the purpose of it. Do what I tell you instead.

Clearly some elements of the moral law have changed. This is why the Christian church opposes no-fault divorce and the Jewish church does not. This is why the Christian church circumcises of the heart, and the Jewish church circumcises the flesh. This is why we are saved through faith in Christ alone and the Jewish church has more requirements. Because Jesus changed the spoken standard (although not the spiritual one, that has always been), to better achieve the purpose of the law in a new era. It is untenable to say these reforms abolish the law. Change in practice to effect purpose is an amendment not a repeal.

That is true today, not in the time of Jesus. That's one of the battles between the pharisees and the sadducees. The pharisees said it needed to adapt to a modern standard, and be limited to exclusively tort law. The sadducees said they should conserve the traditional interpretation that also applied to physical pain and even death.

If it is not relevant to the death penalty then that's great for me. Then what's the argument to say the bible permits the death penalty? An eye-for-an-eye is the traditional way to counter the countless verses saying don't kill people. They say an eye-for-an-eye gives an out, that if you kill someone else you forfeit your life's protections. Now all we're left with is verses saying don't kill people, and no verses saying it's okay to kill people if they kill someone.

So Jesus is putting an indefinite moratorium on an eye for an eye, without annulling it? What's the difference between saying "Jesus annulled lex talionis" and saying "Jesus said don't practice lex talionis"? That's the same thing.

I'm also not convinced we should take this as Jesus saying something so mundane as "don't sue people". All the other beatitudes have massive ethical implications, I doubt Jesus wants us to take this so literally. In Luke he says the same thing again on the plain without the reference to litigation. He's saying don't respond to injury with revenge. You can sue people, just don't do it in vengeance. Don't do it in the interests of taking your neighbours eye just because they took yours. Justice will be done by God, vengeance is his. If your neighbour takes your coat don't take his coat, give him your cloak. If your neighbour forces you to go a mile, don't force him to go a mile, instead go two.

"for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their head" (Romans 12.20).​

 

No offense taken. With respect however, it’s not absurd at all. What Jesus is doing with each of these passages in Matthew 5 is perfectly normal Jewish exegesis. One has to be familiar with the latter to recognize some of the patterns at work, and when read according to its Jewish context, it’s clear as day that the lex talionis is not being annulled.

Whether the lex talionis applied to individual cases or not was left to individual jurists; Jesus is, in effect, expanding that responsibility to include the individual litigants, which is basically the same kind of thing the Pharisees were doing, in an effort to give the Torah more practical value to ordinary people rather than strictly be the domain of scholars. (FWIW, I’ve studied the Sermon on the Mount enough over the years that at one point I actually had it memorized word for word. It - the full sermon - remains to this day my favorite passage in all of the New Testament.)

We also have to bear mind that this is a pericope. It only occurs in the M source, and thus fails the criterion of multiple attestation but meets the criterion of embarrassment: it, like much of what is attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, is not something the later Church would have invented. We don’t know that all of the sayings in the Sermon on the Mount occurred together at one time historically. Some of the same pericopes in the Sermon on the Mount occur in the Gospel of Luke (ch. 6), but in a different setting and form. If we assume the pericopes are nonetheless genuine, all we can really know is that, whenever and wherever they were uttered, they were probably addressed to 1st century Palestinian Jews in Aramaic, and that turns out to be our best clue in interpreting them.

We also have to remember the apocalyptic context of Jesus’ preaching. Refusing to make use of the law courts is not a way to maintain a healthy society over the long term, and, if applied rigorously, may just as easily lead back to the practice of private revenge that the lex talionis was meant to prevent, and which Jesus hoped to avoid as well. Not everything in the sermon thus has a clear application outside of the original apocalyptic message within which it would’ve been understood. The debate in that sense is “academic”.

The bottom line is that I don’t recognize anything in the passage that would indicate that the lex talionis has been annulled (and I’m not sure, it being a basic principle of justice and God being immutable, that it is the kind of thing that God could choose to un-will). I also think it’s clear that the lex talionis refers to monetary compensation, so it’s not relevant to a discussion of the death penalty anyway. Anyone looking for a definitive statement from Jesus on that subject will have to look elsewhere.

 

A minor quibble perhaps, but I think it preferable to say that we are not 'bound' but rather 'called' to obey the 10 Commandments, and that we are called to obey in the spirit rather than the letter of that Law. For example, the Commandment says to honor the Sabbath, but we don't obey the letter of that law by keeping Saturday. Instead we obey the spirit of the law by keeping the Lord's Day, Sunday.

And when we sin by disobeying one of the Commandments, thankfully we have been redeemed by Christ from the penalty.

 

“Bound” is the appropriate word. Redemption is effective only to the extent that we sincerely and actually repent of our disobedience.

 

Superior claim to what? Her body is no longer hers if you admit that it’s a human being who is alive. I think this is a hard belief, but if you actually believe a fetus is a human being with a soul then rape, as tragic as it is, doesn’t warrant its murder.two wrongs don’t make a right, like you said.

 

It’s only “murder” (a) if we’re really talking about a “person”, and more importantly (b) if certain conditions of justice are not met. I’m not going to rehash the whole argument now. Read the whole thread, read well-constructed arguments both pro and con, and come to your own conclusions, based on where the facts and principles actually lead (and which side has the better argument), not merely where you want them to lead. Outside the lunatic fringe, nobody wants abortion to be a reality, and representations to the contrary are a Straw Man. That fact doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to deal with the subject in an objective, unemotional, and just manner.

 

Do you take the account of the genesis narrative of creation literally? I really doubt God actually performed surgery on adams rib and created eve out of it. To say that it’s the biblical way to view this is wrong in my opinion. The genesis narrative is not scientific. It’s best classed as mytho history. The writer of genesis, I believe Moses, was not trying to give a scientific account for when exactly a human being became a human being. The Old Testament talks about souls going down into Sheol and the body rotting away on earth so jews did have an idea of the existence of an immortal spirit. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the body. How can the body once again be animated if it has no soul or spirit that becomes once again United with it?
I am aware modern day Jews say they believe life starts at the first breath. But do you really know that’s what Jews believed 2000 years ago? Moreover, did Moses even believe this when he was writing the genesis narrative? It wouldn’t be the first time people misunderstand the scriptures. I don’t believe the genesis account is proof of when life starts, because it’s not meant to be taken literally. The fact many Jews afterwards did take it literally shouldn’t mean the inspired writer Moses did. Of course the genealogies are meant to be about real people and they are historical, but the way in which God created the world, and the story of Adam and Eve need not to be taken literally. I think it is very biblical to believe in an immortal soul, just like we believe we eventually will have immortal glorified bodies. If the soul isn’t separate from the body, how can we be conscious in the afterlife? You don’t need to believe in a platonic concept of life and soul to believe in an immortal spirit. You also can’t say the belief of modern day Jews is the belief of Jews 2000 years ago.

 

I beg to differ. I have seen plenty of feminists who claim it is a healthcare and the right of women to get an abortion. In fact, some of them are even proud of having multiple abortions. And a lot of these women are your average everyday office worker, not some fringe lunatic. Have you ever been inside feminist circles?

 

These women do exist, I know some of them. They're young extremists inside feminist circles on university campuses, they are not reflective of even the average radical, let alone the average pro-choice advocate.

 

I stand by my original statement. Outside the lunatic fringe (on both sides), there is a fairly broad consensus (which defies labels and party affiliations) about what the law should allow and what it should restrict, and nobody in that majority thinks a proper goal of the law is to increase the abortion rate. And in fact, abortion rates in the U.S. have been declining steadily for decades, regardless of which party has been in power. The subject is far more important in the minds of single-issue voters than it is in reality; that is, until disgruntled extremists in State legislatures start violating the legal and societal status quo for no good reason.

 

It was sort of weird to see 3 posts in a row from Jellies, seemingly debating with no one. But then I realized, it must be the individual I have on 'ignore.'

 

Anyway, I don’t think it’s necessary to rehash the whole debate. Voltaire once said something to the effect that “the longer a controversy lasts, the more likely it is that both sides are wrong.” That maxim can certainly apply to extreme positions as well. The view that a woman should be able to do whatever she wants with the pregnancy all the way up to birth, and the view that any intentional termination of a pregnancy going all the way back to the moment of conception is murder, are both almost certainly wrong. For the various moderating positions in between, there are strong arguments and weak arguments for and against each point along the spectrum. If it were 100% obvious which position was the completely right one, there wouldn’t be any disagreement over it. Moderation is a good guide here, as elsewhere. Forcing a view that’s represented by (maybe) 1/5 of the population on all the rest is the antithesis of that. That is why it will fail.

 

Just wanted to get back to this for a second, as I found an authoritative teaching from a RC pope that once officially affirmed post-birth ensoulement. Note, that this doesn’t mean that abortion at any stage is okay, only that Roman Catholics once had the same historic teaching as other Christians, and changed their doctrine (despite proclaiming they don’t change doctrine) by the mere power of the papal fiat.

Here is that older historic RC teaching, affirming that ensoulement (ie. when a fetus becomes a human) takes place after conception, not at conception:

Pope Gregory XIV, Sedes Apostolica (1591)
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/pope-gregory-xiv-1535-1591

-“Contrary to Pope Sixtus V, Pope Gregory XIV made the punishment for early abortion less severe. He believed that Sixtus V had made punishment for abortion too harsh and was even contradictory to the penitential thought and theological view of ensoulment. In his Sedes Apostolicae in 1591, he claimed that only homicide or the abortion of an animated fetus was punishable by excommunication, implementing the Aristotelian distinction between an “animated” and “unanimated” fetus. He also employed the “quickening” test, which equated the beginning of life with the time of first fetal movement. To Pope Gregory XIV quickening determined when a fetus was considered animated. Despite his leniency on punishment for abortion, the new pope still considered the procuring of an abortion in the early stages of gestation as a grave sin.”


https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/catholic-church-teaching-on-abortion-dates-from-1869-1.1449517

“In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV determined it took place at 166 days of pregnancy, almost 24 weeks. That is the current legal limit for abortion in the UK. It was Catholic Church teaching until 1869.”

Again, these secular articles try to make it say that abortion prior to ensoulement was “okay”, when it wasn’t; I’m only talking about the Christian teaching itself, of when a fetus officially becomes a human.

 

A key takeaway I glean from that article is this: "...the new pope still considered the procuring of an abortion in the early stages of gestation as a grave sin.” In other words, long before Gregory XIV the church considered abortion a serious sin even in the early stages (prior to presumed "animation" or detected movement). No one can claim that the church gave people a 'pass' for abortions performed prior to viability or (assumed) ensoulment. It was known as sin then, just as it is known as sin today.

 

For anyone who is willing to hear a Baptist pastor's sermon showing one way in which the Bible teaches against abortion, I came across one that I enjoyed listening to. His delivery is calm, not 'preachy.'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RszNGz_btEo
One thing I found really interesting: after the sermon, congregants were free to ask questions and hear answers on-the-spot.