I understand your dilemma. One of the problems of the Noahide movement in Orthodoxy is the fine balancing act they play between not inventing a new religion and not violating rabbinic standards of what they can/not do.

Is there a particular reason / set of reasons why you don’t look view the Church and its life as a source for the sanctification you seek? Genuine curiosity, I promise.

I think the quote refers mostly to living a balanced life and think it is a valid principle in many areas.

Daniel

Thanks for your comment.

I agree that one in practice might easily take out commandments like tzitzit, kashrut, Shabbat but don’t you think that these commandments have a great role in sanctifying one’s life on levels that ethics won’t do? And in a sense are used to set apart a community from the world around them?

Kind regards,

Dear Geert,

When I referred to an invitation, I did not refer to an invitation to take on The Yoke, but an invitation within that yoke to pick and choose. While there certainly were God-fearers that were doing so, I do not think that failing to observe a commandment was deemed a transgression by the Sages z”l.

Be that as it may, I maintain that a non-binding invitation (also after one starts observing the commandment) makes the idea of transgressing a commandment impossible. This would be different were the commandment to become binding when one takes up the invitation, but as this isn’t the case (under the Divine Invitation approach), it simply is not a commandment.

There is a verse in Romans that may be of interest to this: “But whoever has doubts is condemned if he eats, because the eating is not from faith. For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin” (14:23)

We might be able to reason from this, that there is a realm of individual responsibility to commandments, but again, this thesis fails when a commandment does not become binding after the invitation is accepted.

Would you agree with this?

As for the focus on Paul, this seems quite natural, as his writings mostly are concerned with this problem but for the sake of argument I would include the rest of the NT as well (since this question is less concerned with extracting the diverse perspectives as it is with understanding the result of a non-Jewish inclusion in the disciples of Yeshua, that seems to be a unified thread through the NT).

Looking forward to your answer,

Daniel

Plantinga errs when he asserts that naturalism holds that our senses are reliable. In fact, I would argue the opposite to be the case. Naturalism holds that the human senses are inherently flawed, and proposes that we resort to a more objective process when attempting to ascertain truth about the universe. That more objective process is, of course, the scientific process.

Science enables us to transcend our personal biases and flawed, unreliable senses by requiring rigorous, repeated testing. While some may argue that we’re still relying on human senses, and that all people have perceptual flaws, I would counter by saying that not everyone suffers from these flaws to the same degree. We can approach objectivity more closely via intersubjective methods, meaning anyone with the relevant skills can replicate the method and achieve the same or very similar results. We will never do so perfectly, but that hardly translates into self-defeat.

In any case, if this argument holds for naturalism, how much worse is it for supernaturalism, which proposes no epistemology at all; no means of overcoming our flawed perceptions. Moreover, it would necessarily suffer from the same limitations Plantinga asserts for naturalism, because no one – not even Plantinga – argues that our senses give us supernatural capabilities. Thus, we are stuck with these imperfect perceptions irrespective of supernaturalism or naturalism.

In the end, Plantinga has not helped anyone come closer to the truth, and to be perfectly blunt (perhaps offensively so), (site-owner: yes offensively so, hence deleted). I felt so when I first read it a couple years ago.

This is naturally an incomplete argument, so consider it merely food for thought (or fuel for the fire). The bottom line is simply that naturalism is not self-defeating, and is, in fact, more viable than his personal favorite. I believe Plantinga knows this (he’s very smart – usually), but he merely cannot countenance the idea because he finds it too uncomfortable.

-Position A and B are two extreme positions.
-C is a position that rests in the middle of A and B.
-Therefore C is the correct position.

It is true that the Torah knows of no invitation to observe it for those who are formally enclosed within its legal framework, i.e. the members of the Jewish nation. That doesn’t exclude, however, the possibility of there being such an invitation for those who are outside this framework. At the outset, all that can be said is that, while for Jews an invitation to observe the Torah would be clearly superfluous, as well as contradictory to the very nature of the commandment, yet this is not so for those who are not members of the Jewish nation. This doesn’t prove that in fact there exists such an invitation for non-Jews. It only proves that the idea of an invitation is not self-contradictory.

An explicit invitation to outsiders is actually not found in the Torah itself, as is well known. The Torah doesn’t contain a missionary program, although it welcomes “foreigners” who want to join Israel. This accords with your historic observation that in Second Temple Judaism non-Jews were not expected to attain to the standard of the Jewish Torah, but weren’t prevented from doing so either. They were only held accountable for a minimum level of moral observance that was considered a requirement for all mankind.

I don’t know whether this historic historic observation is entirely correct. There seem to be indications that some of the authorities in those days considered conversion to Judaism the only way — or at least the only safe way — for a Gentile to gain a part in the World to Come.

However that may be, you say that Paul had a different attitude, and that he held the non-Jews to a higher standard. I must say that I don’t understand your particular focus on Paul here. Therefore I would ask: Is this “higher standard” in your opinion only characteristic for Paul’s letters or do all the Apostolic Writings hold to it? If the latter, the problem you notice would be a general problem of the AW, and the question should thus be: What do the AW say about the Gentile believer’s relation to the Torah? The answer to it is of course dependent on the answer to the preliminary question whether Gentiles by their faith in Yeshua are included in Israel and, if so, what the exact nature of their inclusion is. This theme doesn’t seem to be limited to Paul, but to be present in allmost all the AW. And this fact evokes my further question: Do you ascribe to all the AW the same unclarity about the Gentiles’ relation to the Torah as you detect in Paul, or is this unclarity in your view limited to Paul’s letters? And do they all hold the Gentile believers accountable to a higher standard than the basic moral level mentioned above? If the unclarity about the standard of behaviour specifically belongs to Paul’s letters, then the problem as you view it is located in Paul. If it is a general feature of the AW, the problem might be related to the nature of the Gospel itself.

When Paul saw Yeshua on the Damascus road, his whole paradigm changed. He knew the kingdom had arrived. He knew the many scriptures about inclusion of Gentiles. In his early years it would seem Paul developed his theology of Torah for Gentiles without requiring Gentiles to become Jews.

It is not terribly difficult to read Torah and separate out the sign commandments from the universal commandments. Paul drank deeply from this well and his ethical sections in his letter reflect this. Another source for Paul would be the sayings of Yeshua.

This would be a fruitful study and I would love to read someone write on it: the background of Paul’s ethical sections.

Derek Leman