Posted by BE on 12/30/2001, 4:41 pm
Message modified by board administrator 4/16/2006, 6:36 am

Thanks for the input, Lanny Posted by Bill Engle on 11/13/2001, 5:18 pm , in reply to "Re: Mushrooms unclean?" Well, I had an onion omelet this morning. Yesterday cheese, the day before, Mexicali. But I find myself hesitating before having a mushroom one again, though I’m sure I’ll be back on them again sometime. So I see from what you pointed out that the Scripture cannot be construed to mean it forbids them. Some people only assume they are forbidden because they don’t bear seed, since God said he had given man the seed-bearing plants. But if you followed that line of reasoning through, that the non-seed-bearing plants are forbidden because they aren’t included in what God said he gave man to eat, then eating animals would be forbidden too—except that the Scriptures clearly state that it is permitted to eat some kinds of animals. It was also a good point you made, that “God did not ban any vegetation, although poison ivy, oak, and lots of poisonous plants exist.” So I see that it really shouldn’t have been a reason for it to arouse suspicion in me, because, come to think of it, the Levitical law telling us what not to eat isn’t set up that way. As for the doctrine of clean and unclean meats today in post-Chapel days, as I understand it, many former Chapelites, maybe the majority, choose to continue following it. I visited New Heart a few times some years back and once when I was having some conversations with some former Chapelites there, the subject came up (I didn’t bring it up, someone else did). The people I was talking with expressed that they still believe in it. I don’t know, but I’ll bet Pastor Parker won’t have it being taught there as doctrine. He has to worry about holding his church together. Even so, with that many people from Chapel there forming a major segment of the church body and believing in something that is never taught by the church itself and probably never mentioned publicly, as people meet, become friends, date, marry and otherwise merge their lives together due to being part of the same church, I know the subject is going to have to come up sometime. I’ll wager a lot of the people there who aren’t ex-Chapelites have at least heard about it. And in the case of those who intermarry, the issue of whether or not to feed it to the children—when it goes against the conscience of one of the marriage partners—inevitably will have to come up. (Maybe the non-ex-Chapelites will wonder why their ex-Chapelite fiancées or spouses don’t want to kiss them just after they’ve had ham sandwiches and things; I once had to be discreet about how I explained that to a girlfriend I had at a UPC church I was attending some years back.) I don’t attend New Heart (because I live, shall we say, a little off the beaten path from the area) so I don’t really know what goes on there. But I imagine the issue of the difference in diet will have to come up sometime between the two different groups. I’m left to wonder how it gets handled there.