Practicing what is forbidden in Scripture?

First of all Lutherans do not teach that the wine is changed into blood. We believe the blood is present with the wine. Second, we don't even think about it, because we trust that Christ being God knows what he is doing.

 

You are mixing apples and oranges. Those are two different matters.

 

I'd be more concerned about people eating blood sausage, hagis, Batak 'saksang', meat slaughtered before the animal was dead, improperly slaughtered meat, and things of that nature, since that seems to be what the passage is talking about, rather than beliefs on communion.

Clearly, communion does not violate the Acts 15 teaching since Christ and the apostles taught the practice of taking communion.

 

Isaiah 8 forbids praying to the dead - but the RCC teaches that this is a good thing to do "anyway".

Mark 7:8-12 forbids "Teaching for doctrine the commandments of men" but the RCC engages in that willingly

So - nothing really new here.

 

The passage you refer to in Acts was a letter from the council at Jerusalem providing guidance to gentile believers related to whether or not conversion to Christianity required conversion to Judaism first. The council made it clear that it was not required. They included four requirements which, in the cultural setting of the day were not specifically instituted as universal requirements for all believers for all time, but were things that the church council felt it was important for new gentile believers to avoid because they were associated with pagan rituals that were popular at the time. The reasons for abstaining from food sacrificed to idols and sexual immorality are obvious to us today, since they involve issues related to the testimony and witness of a Christian. Blood and the meat of strangled animals fall into the same category, but the reasoning is not as obvious to us today as it was in the time period when this took place. There was a blood cult in existence at the time, related to a piece of writing called the (sp) Tarobolium. In making accusations against Christians, their belief in the blood sacrifice of Christ was often linked to the practices of this cult, which mainly used cattle or oxen, in their rituals. They would strangle the animals, then cut their throats and turn them upside down, while a priest would stand underneath and literally "shower" in the blood. Later critics of Christianity claimed that the blood sacrifice of Christ and the ritual of baptism were borrowed from this cult, something that is obviously refuted by the passage in the book of Acts.

The general principle in this passage of scripture is not the literal avoidance of food which contains blood, or eating the meat of strangled animals, it is for Christians to avoid practices that are associated with other religions which would damage or destroy our witness and testimony as a believer in Christ.

 

Jack Matthews wrote

Where was this blood cult located? Since Gentile Christianity was relatively new at this time, I doubt they were just reacting to a pagan cult. It makes much more sense that they were commenting on the teaching of Scripture. If you study the developments in Judaism in how Jews viewed the Gentiles, that sheds a lot of light on the subject. The Jews' 'rabbis', since before Christ, and after, debated whether or not to be righteous, a Gentile had to become a Jew through prosetylization (incl. circumcision) or if he could stay a regular uncircumcised Gentile and be righteous.

Non Christian Judaism came up with 7 Noachide principle sthat Gentiles had to follow to be rightoues. One of them involved not eating a piece cut from a live animal. Others were no idolatry, sexual immorality, the need for courts of law, etc. Basically, in theory, these things were supposedly extracted from the covenant with Noah, though they rely on other passages of the Old Testament as well.

It makes sense to view this passage as interpreting Old Testament teachings on Gentiles. James interprets 'DM to refer to 'Adam' instead of Edom when he quotes Amos. Since there were no vowel points, that makes sense. He interpreted the passage to show that in the end times, there would be 'man', i.e. nations of man, on whom the Lord's name was called, not just Hebrews.

From Old Testament times Gentiles were not allowed to eat blood. God made a covenant with the ancestor of Jews and Gentiles alike, Noah which gave mankind all kinds of meat to eat, but not the blood.

Leviticus shows that God drove Gentiles out of the land for immorality. So not only Israelites had to abstain from sexual immorality.

So James argued from what was revealed in scripture. Then he, and the elders, the 12 apostles, Paul, and Barnabas, wrote what is probably one of the earliest pieces of New Testament scripture we have, this letter from the apostles and elders. This is an apostolic command to abstain from things strangled and from blood. We can't just discount it because some cult somewhere drank blood.

 

Here is how I see the matter brought up in the opening post.

The Catholic church teaches the error of transubstantiation. The teaching is that the bread becomes Jesus' flesh once eaten, and that the wine becomes Jesus' blood.

Never mind that when Jesus, before death, instituted the Lord's Supper, He indicated that the bread was already His body and that the grape-based drink was already His blood: He used present tense, not future tense. Hence, He was speaking a picture.

The Lord commanded ALL to partake of both the bread and the grape-based drink -- it could be wine or it could be a non-alcholic grape-based drink. Catholic practice is to withhold the drink from most.

Now, the Lord commanded the Lord's Supper to be observed. I would rather the Catholic church obey the part they do while believing an error, than to not obey at all because of their error.