Posted by Bill Engle, et al on 12/30/2001, 4:37 pm
Message modified by board administrator 4/16/2006, 6:33 am

Posted by Bill Engle on 11/10/2001, 2:22 pm About two years ago when I was brand new to this board, a discussion came up about clean and unclean meats. At that time, Dave said the subject had come up about two years before that, when the board had first started, and I guess with those two discussions, the subject of whether or not to keep following that Chapel doctrine has been all talked out. I was in favor of continuing with the prohibition on unclean meats, and the point I made was that I thought God had intended it not only as a health law, as Don Barnett used to teach (though it was that, certainly), but when God comes flat out and gives us a clear-cut commandment in his Word forbidding us from doing something, whether there may be health factors involved in it or not, there is a spiritual element behind it that he expects us to follow—regardless of whether his Word says why or not. And I made a comparison between it and the law forbidding adultery: diseases and other physical hazards may result, but that's not the central reason why it's forbidden. It's a spiritual thing in the spiritual realm, and if God says something, our job is to do it, period. So it was with consuming foods forbidden in the Scripture, I contended. Anyway, that whole discussion aside, there was one thing that was only briefly mentioned back then on that thread, that nobody said much about. And I don't know why, but though I went through my whole time at Chapel and most of the years afterwards never giving it a second thought, recently it has been coming up in my mind. That's about eating mushrooms. The little bit I ever heard on the subject was once in the late seventies when I was visiting Mark D. & co. at their apartment one day, and he and a friend of his had just come back from Grant's Pass, I think it was, with this huge black plastic bag full of exotic mushrooms they had picked when they were up there. He told me how when a fly flew into the kitchen with that big bag of mushrooms present, it started flying slowly, then fell from the air to the floor, dead. (Good stuff, those mushrooms!) They were cooking some on the stove and sitting around on the couch in the living room eating them, and when I came over, Mark said to me, "Go ahead and have the ones that are cooking now, if you like." When I smelled them, I said, "Hmm, smells like pork or some kind of unclean meat." He nodded and said casually, "Some people at Chapel consider mushrooms unclean." He told me about some verse in the Levitical Law I only vaguely remember now, saying something about plants with spores or something being forbidden, and he said some people interpreted that as meaning mushrooms. He said he didn't interpret it that way though, and most Chapelites he knew didn't either. I remembered when I went through the "Clean and Unclean Meats" class we had been given at the beginning of Bible college, I wasn't able to recall anything at all having been said at that time on the subject of mushrooms. I shrugged my shoulders and left it at that. (After all, Mark had attended Chapel since 1971—that was a long time back—and I figured he must have known what he was talking about. He had studied a lot of subjects in a lot more depth than I had.) The next decade, in the eighties, when I finally left Chapel and moved to a new residence over 10,000 kilometers from Seattle, I took lots and lots of copies of Chapel tapes with me that I had been making, and I made sure I took along a sermon-series both about unclean meats and about alcohol, because I wanted to learn how to give people better answers than I had been giving, when they asked me why I didn't eat pork or shellfish or drink alcohol. I took with me what was back then the most recent sermon series by Don Barnett on the subject, but I don't remember one thing being said in it about mushrooms. Come to think of it, all through Bible college years, we often used to go to pizzerias in groups and order pizzas, and when we'd select what we wanted on them, the people sitting around the table would be suggesting cheese, ground beef, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, olives..., lots of things excluding pepperoni and sausage, etc., and if I remember right, we almost always had mushrooms on our pizzas, and I don't remember anybody in any of the different groups we went out with ever objecting to it—I remember everybody always wolfing them down heartily. Nowadays, nearly every morning I'm having this breakfast special at a local pizza chain where they offer an omelet breakfast with your choice of cheese, mushrooms, onions or Mexicali, and each morning I alternate between them, and then on the days when I get to the mushroom omelet, I find myself thinking about that person's post in that thread on the old board where he said, "I don't eat mushrooms," and Mark D. telling me about it in the late seventies—and sometimes I find myself wondering, subsequent to all these years of never giving it a second thought, Could it be that we shouldn't be eating them after all? It's a thought in the back of my mind that has popped up from time to time. I know it was common at Chapel for people to eat them regularly, and I never met anyone there who ever voiced any opposition to it. The only person I've ever actually heard it from was that person who posted that one little comment on the old board about two years ago. There was another thought that was always in the back of my mind too, and that's that mushrooms bear one possible characteristic of a food that would have been forbidden in Scripture, namely, that some of them are mortally poisonous and others aren't, and I'm not aware of there being any absolute criteria for being able to tell the difference between poisonous ones and non-poisonous ones, other than just knowing, by their outward appearance (color, etc.), which ones happen to be which. (Some mushrooms also have hallucinogenic effects.) I've heard of a case of an entire family being rushed to the hospital and not being able to be saved from dying, after eating a dinner of mushrooms a member of the family had picked and brought home, which turned out to be mortally poisonous. Yet as for the ones that aren't poisonous, here I am going on eating them and loving it. I've never really heard from anybody the argument against it expounded in any great detail. Now, after all these years, I find that I would like to at least hear what it is. Does anybody know the argument? --------- Posted by Gordy on 11/11/2001, 9:55 am , in reply to "Mushrooms unclean?" My position on eating mushrooms doesn't have anything to do with the old position of the Chapel or Levitical Law. To me, just my opinion, anything that can grow without sunlight and smells as bad as mushrooms do can't be fit for human consumption. Personally, I would rather stick my head in a bucket of runny cow manure than eat mushrooms!!!! :>) On a strictly practical note, I can hardly breathe when raw mushrooms are being cut up in my presence. I don't have allergies in general or asthma in particular but I have the symptoms of an asthma attack by just getting a whiff of those foul disgusting things. Another note, I can hardly imagine who would have originally looked at one of things growing and even considered trying to eat it. They must have been blind with no sense of smell, or any other kind of sense for that matter!!!!! As you may have discerned, I don't like them. Bring that bucket over here. Gordy ---------- Posted by lanny on 11/11/2001, 5:03 pm , in reply to "Mushrooms unclean?" Since I was the teacher of the class on "Clean & Unclean Meats" I can say exactly what I taught. First the prohibition on mushrooms comes from Genesis: "Every herb bearing seed have I given you...." This is thus interpreted as a ban on mushrooms as they bear spores and not seeds. I taught that that was more of a technicality than a ban. Also God did not ban any vegetation although poison ivy, oak, and lots of poisonous plants exist. The passage on "bearing seed" only says what God has given. It doesn't say anything else. I taught that the ban on mushrooms was more assumption than any actual statement from Scripture. I still hold that position although I understand why some might have an aversion to them. Lanny