Christianity,  Politics

President Obama rejects the Bible?

Lawrence O’Donnell is predictably liberal. That may actually be an understatement. He’s not only a liberal, he’s stridently anti-conservative. His liberalism primarily consists in his political views, but a recent monologue reveals that he is liberal theologically as well.

The video above is O’Donnell’s commentary on Louie Giglio’s removal from the President’s inaugural program. In the course of his commentary, he sets off some rhetorical bombs. He holds up a copy of the Bible and says that nobody really believes what’s written in it, much less President Obama. O’Donnell then argues that it is absurd for the President to swear an oath on a book that he doesn’t even believe.

This video is riddled with a fair amount of theological naiveté. O’Donnell has too high a concentration of error to respond to each and every point, so I’ll just leave it at one observation.

Notice that O’Donnell agrees with Giglio about the aims of the gay rights movement. In essence, the gay rights movement does not merely seek equal rights. It seeks for every citizen in the country to recognize that “gay is good.” It’s making a fundamentally moral claim—a claim that requires consent. Those who refuse to consent to the new morality must be marginalized and set outside the bounds of rational discourse.

O’Donnell is not alone in this opinion. Even though he sounds fairly strident and angry, his thesis is moving into the cultural mainstream. More and more people are buying into the idea that gay is good, and that gay relationships should have equal moral standing with heterosexual marriage.

7 Comments

  • Keith Kraska

    Wow, some refreshing honesty from the left. His comically ignorant understanding of the Bible aside, gotta respect his candor in hating it.

  • Bob Wheeler

    I’ve always taken issue with people taking selective quotes from the Bible (Leviticus as an example) while ignoring other portions (such as stoning like O’Donnell mentioned). I know this forum has some scholarly individuals, to include the author. Is there any official/unofficial position that any one knows of regarding the discrepancies?

    Bob Wheeler

    • Keith Kraska

      Here’s a helpful summary by Tim Keller on why we observe some Old Testament laws and not others:

      Old Testament Law and The Charge of Inconsistency
      June 2012
      by Tim Keller

      I find it frustrating when I read or hear columnists, pundits, or journalists dismiss Christians as inconsistent because “they pick and choose which of the rules in the Bible to obey.” What I hear most often is “Christians ignore lots of Old Testament texts—about not eating raw meat or pork or shellfish, not executing people for breaking the Sabbath, not wearing garments woven with two kinds of material and so on. Then they condemn homosexuality. Aren’t you just picking and choosing what they want to believe from the Bible?”
      It is not that I expect everyone to have the capability of understanding that the whole Bible is about Jesus and God’s plan to redeem his people, but I vainly hope that one day someone will access their common sense (or at least talk to an informed theological advisor) before leveling the charge of inconsistency.
      First of all, let’s be clear that it’s not only the Old Testament that has proscriptions about homosexuality. The New Testament has plenty to say about it, as well. Even Jesus says, in his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19:3-12 that the original design of God was for one man and one woman to be united as one flesh, and failing that, (v. 12) persons should abstain from marriage and from sex.
      However, let’s get back to considering the larger issue of inconsistency regarding things mentioned in the OT that are no longer practiced by the New Testament people of God. Most Christians don’t know what to say when confronted about this. Here’s a short course on the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament:
      The Old Testament devotes a good amount of space to describing the various sacrifices that were to be offered in the tabernacle (and later temple) to atone for sin so that worshippers could approach a holy God. As part of that sacrificial system there was also a complex set of rules for ceremonial purity and cleanness. You could only approach God in worship if you ate certain foods and not others, wore certain forms of dress, refrained from touching a variety of objects, and so on. This vividly conveyed, over and over, that human beings are spiritually unclean and can’t go into God’s presence without purification.
      But even in the Old Testament, many writers hinted that the sacrifices and the temple worship regulations pointed forward to something beyond them. (cf. 1 Samuel 15:21-22; Psalm 50:12-15; 51:17; Hosea 6:6). When Christ appeared he declared all foods ‘clean’ (Mark 7:19) and he ignored the Old Testament clean laws in other ways, touching lepers and dead bodies.
      But the reason is made clear. When he died on the cross the veil in the temple was ripped through, showing that the need for the entire sacrificial system with all its clean laws had been done away with. Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice for sin, and now Jesus makes us “clean.”
      The entire book of Hebrews explains that the Old Testament ceremonial laws were not so much abolished as fulfilled by Christ. Whenever we pray ‘in Jesus name’, we ‘have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus’ (Hebrews 10:19). It would, therefore, be deeply inconsistent with the teaching of the Bible as a whole if we were to continue to follow the ceremonial laws.
      The New Testament gives us further guidance about how to read the Old Testament. Paul makes it clear in places like Romans 13:8ff that the apostles understood the Old Testament moral law to still be binding on us. In short, the coming of Christ changed how we worship but not how we live. The moral law is an outline of God’s own character—his integrity, love, and faithfulness. And so all the Old Testament says about loving our neighbor, caring for the poor, generosity with our possessions, social relationships, and commitment to our family is still in force. The New Testament continues to forbid killing or committing adultery, and all the sex ethic of the Old Testament is re-stated throughout the New Testament (Matthew 5:27-30; 1 Corinthians 6:9-20; 1 Timothy 1:8-11.) If the New Testament has reaffirmed a commandment, then it is still in force for us today.
      Further, the New Testament explains another change between the Testaments. Sins continue to be sins—but the penalties change. In the Old Testament things like adultery or incest were punishable with civil sanctions like execution. This is because at that time God’s people existed in the form of a nation-state and so all sins had civil penalties.
      But in the New Testament the people of God are an assembly of churches all over the world, living under many different governments. The church is not a civil government, and so sins are dealt with by exhortation and, at worst, exclusion from membership. This is how a case of incest in the Corinthian church is dealt with by Paul (1 Corinthians 5:1ff. and 2 Corinthians 2:7-11.) Why this change? Under Christ, the gospel is not confined to a single nation—it has been released to go into all cultures and peoples.
      Once you grant the main premise of the Bible—about the surpassing significance of Christ and his salvation—then all the various parts of the Bible make sense. Because of Christ, the ceremonial law is repealed. Because of Christ the church is no longer a nation-state imposing civil penalties. It all falls into place. However, if you reject the idea of Christ as Son of God and Savior, then, of course, the Bible is at best a mish-mash containing some inspiration and wisdom, but most of it would have to be rejected as foolish or erroneous.
      So where does this leave us? There are only two possibilities. If Christ is God, then this way of reading the Bible makes sense and is perfectly consistent with its premise. The other possibility is that you reject Christianity’s basic thesis—you don’t believe Jesus was the resurrected Son of God—and then the Bible is no sure guide for you about much of anything. But the one thing you can’t really say in fairness is that Christians are being inconsistent with their beliefs to accept the moral statements in the Old Testament while not practicing other ones.
      One way to respond to the charge of inconsistency may be to ask a counter-question—“Are you asking me to deny the very heart of my Christian beliefs?” If you are asked, “Why do you say that?” you could respond, “If I believe Jesus is the the resurrected Son of God, I can’t follow all the ‘clean laws’ of diet and practice, and I can’t offer animal sacrifices. All that would be to deny the power of Christ’s death on the cross. And so those who really believe in Christ must follow some Old Testament texts and not others.”

      • Don Johnson

        There are quite a few things wrong with Keller’s analysis.

        For one, Jesus did not “ignore” Torah by touching lepers and dead bodies, this is a total misunderstanding of Torah by Keller and evidence that Keller really does not know what he is talking about. There is no prohibition in Torah about touching a leper or a dead body, how would a Jew have buried their dead otherwise? What doing those things did was make a person ritually unclean and meant they could not participate in temple activities until they went thru a proscribed process to become ritually clean; if Jesus had violated this, then he would have sinned, but since he never sinned, we can figure out that he always did what was needed when it was specified in Torah, and that this was considered so obvious to the gospel authors that it was simply left out of Scripture.

        On Mark 7:19, I claim that Keller is simply making a very common mistake and reading the text as if it was written to him and not to the original audience, that many others do this is not really an excuse to do it. The point is that a Jew reading the text would understand that if something was called food, this meant it was kosher, simply because if something was not kosher it was not classified as food to a Jew. That is, Jesus is saying something important, but it is not what Keller misreads it to be.

        I could continue, but these examples demostrate my thesis, that Keller should not be relied upon to know what he is talking about in this area.

        • Will Cunningham

          I respect your understanding of Torah, Don, but I believe Tim’s premise that Christ’s atonement changed the way we approach God and OT law is a strong and valid one– one that you appear to overlook while discrediting him.

  • dr. james willingham

    And there are those who think conspiracy advocates are nuts. About 23 years or so ago a female chaplain at the United Nations said we are going to put all you Bible believing types in Insane Asylums (she might have said mental institutions). What is coming down the pike is terrible to behold: It is the agonizing struggle for the very soul of the world, a battle already fought 2000 years ago on a hill brazenly signifying death, and it is for that reason that we shall win the whole earth in one generation, beginning hopefully in this one, and continuing for a 1000 generations and a million billion planets until the number of the redeemed in Heaven is such that no one can number them, a matter of humor with God as He laughs to cheer His disheartened sufferers in order that they might laugh at such idiocies as that manifested on MSNBC’s self-declared enemy of the Bible.

  • Robert I Masters

    And once again Christians have failed to obey the Cultural Mandate.
    When we disobey the Bible ;the results are predictable.

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