Jun 24 2008
Just Whose Gutter Is It, James?
James Dobson of Focus on the Family is today attacking Barack Obama for a 2006 speech in which Obama addresses the various interpretations of Christianity in the United States. “Even if we did have only Christians in our midst,” Obama stated, “If we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?”
Dobson took aim at Obama’s asking which Biblical passages should guide public policy — chapters like Leviticus, which Obama said suggests slavery is OK and eating shellfish is an abomination, or Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. “Folks haven’t been reading their Bibles,” Obama said. Dobson accuses Obama of wrongly equating Old Testament texts and dietary codes that no longer apply to Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament. “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said. ”He is dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”
Of course, Obama is hardly the first to raise the question of which Biblical principles should be applied in creating public policy. And he raises an important issue: just which principles are now antiquated and no longer need to be followed? I hardly think Dobson would agree that the Old Testament texts used to justify a Biblical injunction against same sex marriage would be antiquated.
So the question really is—and this is especially important when you look at what Jesus had to say about homosexuality (which is absolutely nothing)—how can we tell which part of the Bible is antiquated and need not be followed, and which part isn’t? Can you answer that for us, James?
