Clean and unclean meat

Joe67 said:

k4c,

If I remember correctly, you told on another place that you had been an SdA for about 3 years. And that you joined the SdA church because it most closly fit your thoughts. And that the SdA church seems to be moving more toward the way you see things. I have not gone back to research this. So if I am wrong concerning these facts, please forbear.

Everything we do has its elementary phase, middle phase and mature phases. It is good to defend the integrity of the 10 commandments. It is better to see the wisdom of our personal inability. It is best to see how the grace of God, through the workings of that power whereby God subdues all things to himself, works in us adversely to fulfill the purpose of the law, that is to say, the loving of our neighbor as ourselves; through the free gift of justification unto life by the Lord, our God, whereby we love him with all our heart and mind and strength. O God, have mercy upon me a sinner. We go to our house justified and at peace with God.

When we are children we defend our father's honor. When we become adolescents we desire to go out and make a name for ourselves. When we mature we come back to our father's house to give him an honorable burial, even in the company of our brother with whom we have had differences.

As we gather around our father's burial, the old differences are put away, then we all separate and go to that place that God has prepared for each of us.

Think on these things, before too much of the past is stirred. You belong here as a member. I do not; though I joined the SdA church in 1954, and have never belonged to another, though I have attended several for various purposes. Now I am old. Zeal has consumed my house.

My father was an Amorite, and my mother was a Hittite.

Jesus, our Lord, said, "It is finished, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit."

Joe

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Joe67 said:

k4c,

Did you not hear it?

Joe

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BigRedBus said:

Clean or Unclean Meat? I think the real debate is actually now somewhere else.

When looking at the Old Testament dietary rules, it is worth keeping a number of differences in mind between modern Western society and the environment in which those rules would have first applied.

• Farming techniques were all organic
• No refrigeration was available, and the climate in the Eastern Mediterranean (then as now) was hot
• Animal protein would have been costly to produce in relation to other foodstuffs
• Pigs were used as mobile bio-waste disposal units

Under those circumstances, society needed a particular set of rules on what foods to avoid, and the ones in the Bible made a lot of sense.

Our society gets its food in very different ways. Unlike the people of Bible times:

• Our food is bought and consumed great distances away from where it is produced – this is made possible by quick international communications, refrigeration and cheap transport
• Our food is often highly processed
• Chemical additives often go onto / into the things we eat
• The consumer does not get to see what happens to his / her food before it gets to the place it is purchased
• Farming techniques are often not sustainable or environmentally friendly
• Farm animals are often not treated in a humane or respectful way
• It is possible to mass-produce animal protein very cheaply in real terms
• The low prices we pay for our food are possible because often, somebody else has been exploited further back in the production chain
• We have easy, cheap, year-round access to far more sugar, fat and protein than we actually need
• We are able to waste food without as much as a second thought

Now if you were writing a set of dietary rules today, you would probably consider those factors far more than the ones that lay behind the Biblical rules. The factors that affect our food today would have been largely irrelevant more than 150 years ago, so there would not have been much point creating explicit rules about them in a book that was written thousands of years ago in a very different society.

So…do you think that a simple debate about clean/unclean meats is actually too narrow and backward looking? As a Church, do we need any types of dietary rules at all nowadays? The information you need is all out there if you look. As adults, we are surely capable of taking personal responsibility for what we eat, aren’t we?

Shouldn’t we, as individuals, actually be looking less these days at the specifics of what types of foods we eat, and looking more at overall goals of sustainability, fair trade, compassion, avoidance of waste, and of maintaining overall balance in our diets?

Two books that really are well worth a read are “Not on the Label” by Felicity Lawrence, and “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser. You will never think about mass produced chicken or beef-burgers the same way ever again. Clean meats? Yes, they are, technically. But is it good food? Read the books and you’ll find out…

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