Monday, May 3, 2010

The Council of Jerusalem

"Since we have heard that certain persons who have gone out from us, though with no instructions from us, have said things to disturb you and have unsettled your minds, we have decided unanimously to choose representatives and send them to you... who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.’" -Acts 15:24-29

If Dogma doesn't develop, then really, we should consider the 'essentials' of Christianity: food regulations and no pre-marital sex. I wonder if Catholics agree whether this was a church council or not.

I mean it's a great prooftext, and as long as you make the dogma/discipline divide (distinction) then you can get around their dietary rulings, and say it was a council.

No one can really win though, because it seems like Petrine supremacy from "Peter stood up" (15:7), but also congregationalism as "the apostles and the elders, with the consent of the whole church, decided".

Hurray, 2 more polemic readings that anachronistically interpret the text in light of later ideas. I would make a terrible exegete, I should stick to Anglo-American History.

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