Thanks to “sam” for this guest post which he created based on one of his comments the other day:
In Jonathan’s post titled, “Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism,” a hypothetical exchange between an atheist and an Xian highlights the morally relativistic nature of a fundamentalist worldview that defends the idea that executing a man for picking up sticks on a Saturday is obligatory at time T, but morally impermissible at T+1. In the exchange, the snarky hypothetical atheist wants to know exactly when T occurred in order to know exactly when people became morally obliged to refrain from executing Sabbath breakers.
In order to properly hold accountable those subject to a new ethic, one should identify what these subjects knew and when they knew it. These thought experiments only further highlight the absurdity of the worldview, however. Imagine a 7th century CE Chinese man, a man whose ancestors were never under YHWH’s Torah, being instructed that he can now eat shellfish but he must first accept the missionary’s Xian orthodoxy. It brings to mind the famous anecdote (I believe attributed to author Annie Dillard) of the Inuit hunter asking the local missionary priest, “If I did not know about the Xian message, would I go to Hell?” “No, not if you did not know,” says the priest. “Then why did you tell me?” replies the hunter.
Clearly, ignorance truly is preferable to the spatially and temporally arbitrary and relativistic moral system known as fundamentalist Xianity. What might surprise you is that some of the Biblical authors, if taken at face value, would agree. What they cannot seem to agree on is exactly when a person could live and die in ignorance and not be held accountable and sent to Hell.
The author of Luke/Acts seems to believe that as long as a person died before the Resurrection, before YHWH gave proof of his future judgment, then he would overlook ignorance of YHWH (Acts 17:30).
The author of John seems to think that one would have to die a few years earlier, before Jesus came, spoke to men and performed works, in order to not be guilty of sin (John 15:22,24).
Paul seems to believe that one would have to die centuries before Jesus, before Moses gave the Law, when no account of sins was kept (Romans 5:13).
Of course, maybe it is preferable that a person not be born at all (Ecclesiastes 4:2-3) and thus risk betraying the ‘son of man’ (Mark 15:20). At least one early Church Father, Origen, believed that human souls exist prior to conception. His excuse for why YHWH would ensoul human flesh and thus open them to the risk of betraying the ‘son of man’ remains deeply unsatisfying.
Finally, for those of us who are unfortunately born and conceived well after these events were said to have occurred, it might be preferable that we not escape the corruption of the world by knowing Jesus, and thus risk crucifying him all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace (Hebrews 6:4-6) by falling away, as we would be worse off at the end than we were at the beginning (before knowing Jesus). It would have been better for us not to have known the way of righteousness, than to have known it and then to turn our backs on the sacred command that was passed on to us (2 Peter 2:20).
Unfortunately for many of us, due to parental, cultural and environmental pressures out of our control, we fail to qualify for those safeguards as well.
