You’re wrong. The Church adopts the “OT” as part of its scripture. It calls for the death of those who practice idolatry. Now you will rightly say the Church does not follow that. But it is in your holy book.
How is that different from a muslim responding that the way a passage is written is not the way it is followed?
The Chruch interprets scripture, including the OT, by first acknowledging that there are many different forms of writing used by the authors. It is not correct to interpret scripture using only a literal view at all times.
Christians do indeed revere the OT as part of God’s revelation, inspired by God, and it contains many truths and foreshadowing of God’s plan for man. It is still a useful and inspiring book, but many of its passages no longer apply to us today because God ushered in a new era of salvation, a final redeeming of mankind through Jesus Christ, who you can read about in the NT.
Catholics like to say, “The NT is hidden in the OT, and the OT is revealed in the NT” The themes you find in the OT you’ll see reflected, though in a different way, in the New.
In the OT, God had to lay down a set of laws that seem very rigid and forceful to us now. But mankind in that time was very wild and without any sort of moral guide that we have today. God wanted to wage war in order to cleanse the area of paganistic worship and tendencies, ways that are contrary to God’s image of mankind.
Those OT themes are still relevant in the NT, and while St. Paul sometimes talks in the NT in militaristic terms, the difference in the NT is that Jesus speaks of spiritual warfare, dying to Christ, instead of literally waging war against infidels.
God commands the execution of adulterers in the OT in order to cleanse the “tribe” of “bad seeds” whose ways could taint the whole community. This is symbolic of how we are taught in the NT that one’s individual sin can destroy the whole body of believers, as we are all interconnected.
It’s also symbolic of how St. Paul tells us that once there were adulterers in the Church, but now they have the opportunity to cleanse themselves through the sacrifice made by Jesus Christ, rather than getting stoned to death.
This is an important difference - in the days of the OT, sinners would be stoned to death, but now with the ushering in of the new covenant in the NT, we can see that we can convert ourselves to Christ, and be washed clean of our sins and be eternally saved.
But this is only done by using our own free will. It is not compelled.
Those Christians who use the bible to condone the killing of other Christians for conversion or for anything sinful aren’t correctly interpreting scripture.
We Catholics can be sure of that because we have the fullness of Truth. We can definitively know the correct interpretation because of our hierarchical structure and teaching authority handed to St. Peter by Jesus Christ and going on from there. The Church is protected from making doctrinal errors in faith and morals through God’s protection and promise that the “gates of Hell would not prevail” against it.
There is no likewise central authority in Islam, nor in most other non-Catholic religions.
I hope I made that logical and correct. I ask anyone to add or correct if needed please!!
Especially Cestus as he’s an authority.
