2 Responses to Discussing Adventism on the Time & Place Podcast

1. Maria Demetriou says:

   May 17, 2021 at 3:04 pm

   Dear Anthony,

   Thank you for your website, it has helped me a lot in understanding scriptures regarding Sabbath, The Law and The Covenants.

   I am at the moment looking again at the 7th post of the series New Covenant. Can you please have a look again, or maybe you already have and I missed it. I have a bit of a challenged in understanding this below:

   John makes a clear distinction between the two words. For example, “For the law (“nomos”) was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:17 ESV). “Has not Moses given you the law (“nomos”)? Yet none of you keeps the law (“nomos”). Why do you seek to kill me?” (John 7:19 ESV). When John writes of the New Testament laws he uses “entole”. For example, “A new commandment (“entole”) I give you, that you love one another, even as I loved you, that you also love one another” (John 13:34) “A new commandment (“entole”) I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 13:34 ESV). So when John says, “commandments” he never means the Ten Commandments, but always means the teachings of Jesus especially faith (John 14:1 & 1 John 3:23a) or love (John 13:34; 14:15; 15:12-17 & 1 John 3:23b). Further John underlines this by writing that we are to obey “his commandments” not just “the commandments” which shows that John wςas not referring to the Ten Commandments, but to the New Covenant teachings of Jesus, “his commandments”.

   In Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 The Ten Commandments are refered to as ” Οι Δεκα Εντολες” (plural of εντολη)

   which will make it the Law of Christ but also since it is part of the Torah it is also “νομος” nomos.

   What do you think about this? Youversion bible has different translations in Greek.

   Looking forward hearing from you whenever you find the time, I have been thinking about this for quite sometime.

   I appreciate your work and those of others who have shared their knowledge of the scriptures to help others come out of SDAism, I am a new former, I am glad I’m out, I have no regrets but I really miss my friends and family.

   Best Regards Teresa

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   • ACTheologian says:

     May 19, 2021 at 6:05 pm

     The distinction between nomos and entole is only consistent in Matt 5 when Jesus speaks of it and in John’s writings. Throughout the rest of scripture you’re going to see a back and forth. My understanding is that the words are synonyms. So we would expect the words to interchange. Is that not the same in english? When I saw law and say commandments both evoke a very similar idea. I could flip back or forth on it, the thing that matters is what do I mean by it? And to discern that you’re going to look at the broader context.

     The point I’m making by brining it up is that there is this idea of old covenant law and the law of Christ as two separate things. The evidence for it is that John makes a very clear distinction between two separate words and so does Jesus when he says

     “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets”

     and

     “Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven”

     I think its significant based on the context here that we see Jesus switch words in the same breath and I think it’s significant that John makes such an obvious distinction in his books. That said, this is not the foundation of the argument this is a supporting argument.

     There are very clear passages that teach that the old covenant is obsolete (Heb 8:13). That taken with the fact that the apostles still taught law in a prescriptive sense after the cross gives us a clear notion that we have a difference between old covenant and new covenant law.

     How SDA deal with this is they try to surgically remove the ten commandments from the old covenant but we know it’s not that clean of a cut because the apostles never prescriptively teach sabbath keeping at all. The whole old covenant is obsolete, what we have after that is what we have. If you assemble apostolic teaching on law you will end up with 9 1/2 of the ten commandments basically. We have a command to assemble together regularly but it doesn’t have to be on a certain day of the week. The distinction between nomos and entole helps I think but as you point out it only comes out of a few areas where a distinction enough to convey different meaning is apparent. In other places of scripture you’re gonna have to lean on the context you wont have that clean a cut between entole and nomos.

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