Peter Gent refuses to back down:
You are totally and absolutely wrong. I am neither a liar or a deceiver, but I am someone who challenged you accurately on your biblical error, which is important as you stand publicly for Jesus Christ.
You are intelligent, educated, experienced, and knowledgeable in many things, but theologically and biblically you are sometimes problematic and your lack in this area sometimes shows. Everything I said was sound orthodox theology and relevant to the situation. I am sorry if it didn’t fit in with your argument or seemed to invalidate your position, but it appeared that you could not deal with the actual argument, which is too bad, since it is true both biblically and has been accepted within the Church since the beginning.
It is your blog and you do what you want. But know this. In this you are wrong. I am calling you on it. Scream at me all you want but that doesn’t change the facts. You are wrong.
To which I replied:
You are persistent in your stupidity. You simply refuse to accept that there is a difference between a FACT: Jesus broke the law, and a JUSTIFICATION: Jesus was right to do so.
All of your blathering is irrelevant, because all of your blathering is focused on the justification rather than the fact. The claim was that Jesus never broke any law. That claim is conclusively false. Whether he was justified in breaking those laws or not is totally irrelevant.
Nevertheless, he persisted:
Then there are few who are, since I am 142 and have been a Christian for 45 years, am theologically trained, and have been in the wars standing for the faith for a long time. I have never been a churchian as you put it. I am about as far the opposite from that as a professing, believing Christian can be.
Re: Theology has NOTHING to do with straightforward factual claims.
It does when informs the underlying meaning of those factual claims and there is a category error being expressed.
For example: factual claim – Jesus broke some of the prevailing Jewish religious laws of his time. True. But his argument for doing so was that the laws he broke were invalid due to the fact they where not God’s law but accretions (traditions) that had been added to God’s law that destroyed the original intent. In addition, as pertaining breaking the Sabbath, he was the Son of God and as such was Lord of the Sabbath. Those are theological argumenst. So was Peter’s argument before the Sanhedrin about who they should listen to. As a result, Jesus’ actions can only be used to justify breaking laws today if they are in opposition to or violate God’s law. Romans 12 makes this very clear. To use Jesus’ example as a pretext for the breaking of any human law without that qualification is a serious error. A theological error.
This is amusing. He just admitted what I have been pointing out all along: “Jesus broke some of the prevailing Jewish religious laws of his time.”
There is no theological error. There has never been any “biblical error”. Gent is arguing, irrelevantly, against a strawman of his own concoction. I am not saying that we are justified in breaking any laws we feel like breaking because Jesus Christ was a lawbreaker. I have never said that. I merely pointed out that the gentleman who claimed that “Jesus broke no law in his day” was absolutely, observably, and factually wrong.
I did not offer any argument on the basis of that observation.