RSS
Home
Joel Olsteen advises against eating pork and shellfish
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Joel Olsteen is one of the most popular Protestant ministers in the world. He and his wife Victoria have a huge following, both on television and in print.
A few years he and she decided that they personally should not eat pork or shellfish.
He recently took a bold step by publicly telling people not to eat those biblically unclean animals and only to eat biblically clean ones.
There is an abbreviated YouTube, titled Joel Osteen teaches Christians about PORK! where he says that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU5kek3D-4I
This was a bold and courageous step for him to take. Teaching this may cost him followers. But it is true.
The Catholic world apparently started to eat such items after a pronouncement from a late second century bishop. Prior to this, Catholic supporters such as Irenaeus of Lyon were opposed to eating such animals:
Now the law has figuratively predicted all these, delineating man by the [various] animals: whatsoever of these, says [the Scripture], have a double hoof and ruminate, it proclaims as clean; but whatsoever of them do not possess one or other of these [properties], it sets aside by themselves as unclean...The unclean, however, are those which do neither divide the hoof nor ruminate...But as to those animals which do indeed chew the cud, but have not the double hoof, and are themselves unclean...the Lord says, "Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say to you?" For men of this stamp do indeed say that they believe in the Father and the Son, but they never meditate as they should upon the things of God, neither are they adorned with works of righteousness; but, as I have already observed, they have adopted the lives of swine and of dogs, giving themselves over to filthiness, to gluttony, and recklessness of all sorts. Justly, therefore, did the apostle call all such "carnal" (Irenaeus. Adversus haereses, Book V, Chapter 8 , Verse 4. Excerpted from Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume 1. Edited by Alexander Roberts & James Donaldson. American Edition, 1885. Online Edition Copyright © 2004 by K. Knight).
Notice that Irenaeus, in the late second century, specifically taught that certain animals are unclean.
According to the Liber Pontificalis, this was changed by Bishop Eleutherius shortly after the time the above was written:
He also decreed that no kind of food in common use should be rejected especially by the Christian faithful, inasmuch as God created it; provided it was a rational food and fit for human kind (Book of the Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis) 2nd edition. Translation by Raymond Davis. Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians, Liverpool, 2001, p.17).
The Catholic Encyclopedia states:
The "Liber Pontificalis" ascribes to Pope Eleutherius a decree that no kind of food should be despised by Christians (Et hoc iterum firmavit ut nulla esca a Christians repudiaretur, maxime fidelibus, quod Deus creavit, quæ tamen rationalis et humana est).
It should be noted that Roman bishops were not called Popes that early (that did not happen until the late fourth century). Anyway, according to Lopes book The Popes, Eleutherius was bishop of Rome from 175-189 AD. This book (which I purchased at the Vatican itself) states this about Eleutherius:
He dispensed with the obligations of Christians to follow dietary laws of Judaic origin (page 5).
The above book should have said the obligations of biblical origin as the dietary restrictions began with God and not Jews (the distinction between clean and unclean animals was known by at least Noah's time, since God so declared in Genesis 7:2-3). Perhaps it needs to be stated that no one called of God in the Old Testament is ever shown to have consumed unclean meat. Hence the Catholics (and the Protestants that follow this edict) are relying on a possible pronouncement of a bishop of Rome for justification of eating unclean meats more than they may realize.
Now, I should add that the Liber Pontificalis was composed in the fifth/sixth centuries and has a reputation, even amongst Roman Catholic scholars, for arbitrarily assigning events with certain "popes". It would seem, however, that this could not have been assigned any earlier than because of Irenaeus' writings.
Hence, it is clear that well into the second century, the laws concerning clean and unclean meats were considered to have been in force for Christians in general. And that it is due to a later Catholic tradition that unclean animals became food for Roman supporters.
Joel Olsteen appears to have taken the more original position that the first Christians held to.
To learn more about clean and unclean meats (including which animals are in which category), please study the following article: The New Testament Church and Unclean Meats
