So one of the main things I see posted by atheists or agnostics is that they attempt to disprove the Bible by citing the “Old Testament laws”. You know, the whole kill people for being gay, stone them, etc. I think most of these are found in Leviticus (not positive though)?
How can I explain to them that us Catholics don’t believe such things anymore? And how can I justify not believing them if they’re in the Bible? Obviously we don’t stone people anymore, but… How do we know that those laws were only intended for the Jews of those times? What were their purposes?
Thanks!
Well, if you looked into any of several Jewish commentaries you’d find exactly what you said, that the Jews believe that these laws were given to them and nobody else, and that they consider it wrong for anybody else to even think of trying to obey them or live by them.
In Catholic commentaries, you’re only going to get discussed what the author wants to talk about. So, they’re not going to talk about covenant laws in exactly this context, of who they apply to. They won’t get around to that until they get to the “new covenant” or “new testament” that Jesus Christ established. but, it didn’t and you can find “prooftexts” that God talks to Israel as his chosen people, etc. So, it’s fairly clear that Israel is alone in view, in a literal sense.
It’s also clear that the Sinai covenant applied only to the Israelites, in a practical context. It would be impossible for all people on earth to travel to Jerusalem for the three high feast days whose celebration is required, such as Passover.
That is a critical insight to understand how the New Covenant (Testament), is a sacrament, not a book, as Dr. Scott Hahn points out in his book Consuming the Word. That is to say, how it supercedes the Old Covenant (Testament).
The old saying goes, you have to believe, in order to understand. So, atheists will have a hard time accepting anything about the Bible. They will criticize that as assuming that which they want you to prove, a circular argument, to them.
Modern Jewish scholars (last 2000 years) assume that the Noahide covenant is what applies to us gentiles – and that’s it. If you did a
bing.com search on Noahide covenant you’d see that these are the divine laws that mankind are presumed to have broken, to cause God to destroy all living things on the earth by a flood. To them, it’s not just evil in general that God was reacting to, but to specific covenant laws, which, by the way, are not specified in scripture. (That will be a tough sell to the atheists.)
There are thought to be seven commands in the Noahide covenant, that’s it, obey those and gentiles get to heaven.
If you read the writings of the New Testament (I choose those words critically) – that’s what they were called originally – only later were the writings simply called the New Testament.
But, to get some closure here, St. Paul, for example, calls the OT laws the covenant of death – because nobody could obey them and they brought death (see Second Corinthians, in particular). . See? That’s a woo-hoo moment for gay advocates, because they will say, see those OT laws against homosexuality were impossible, to begin with,
like all the other commandments.
Adultery, fornication, homosexuality were all lumped together by Paul as immorality, and condemned. This is how Biblical inspiration works. In Second Corinthians Paul tells them that they are temples of the Holy Spirit. And, immorality is incompatible with the presence of Christ within us.
