Kosher pork?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Of the readings in the Revised Common Lectionary for 3 December 2013 (Tuesday after the First Sunday in Advent) I choose to reflect on Genesis 9:1-17. (I'm filling in with reflections on that portion of the lectionary that occurred before I started doing these at the start of 2014.)

Kosher pork?

The reading chosen for this reflection is the establishment of the Noahide Covenant.  Now I already did a fairly meaty post about rainbows back in December 2010 and I have nothing new to add on that topic, so instead I'm going to reflect on the meaty portion of the covenant.  Of the various Biblical covenants, three apply to food.  The Adamic Covenant gave every every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it to man for food. The Noahide Covenant gave everything for food, except that flesh must be drained of its blood, and the Mosaic covenant gave the detailed system of rules known as kosher or kashrut.

Now Christians generally accept the dictates of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:29) if they think about this subject at all, which are but a little more stringent than the Noahide laws as beyond the prohibition on blood, there is a prohibition of eating the flesh of strangled animals, as well as partaking of the offerings to idols.  While there is little need to be concerned with those two additional restrictions since slaughterhouses don't use the slow method of strangulation and offerings to idols are not particularly common these days, other than kosher butchers it is my understanding that butchers today don't generally concern themselves too much with getting the blood out of the flesh. (If I'm wrong, let me know.)

So, does anyone know of a place to get pork that would be kosher under the Noahide laws?

[traininthedistance]

Now Christians generally accept the dictates of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:29) if they think about this subject at all, which are but a little more stringent than the Noahide laws as beyond the prohibition on blood, there is a prohibition of eating the flesh of strangled animals, as well as partaking of the offerings to idols.

I'm a little surprised to see that these restrictions do exist in Christian thinking, given the prevalence of blood sausage in European culture.  I assume they must have been widely ignored for centuries at least.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

There are those who take Peter's vision in Acts 10 as allowing the consumption of anything.  Yet as I see it, even if you take the vision as being more than a metaphor for accepting Gentiles as the equal of Jews, there's nothing in the vision that says that the consumption of blood is acceptable, just that all animals are now considered clean. Personally, I take the ruling of the Council of Jerusalem a bit more narrowly, as saying that Gentiles do not have to become Jews to become full-fledged Christians. So as I see it, the Jews still need to follow kosher, but the Mosaic dietary laws don't apply to Gentiles.  As for why we have blood sausage and the like, there is the reluctance to discard anything, especially something that is as dense in nutrients as blood.  There's also the problem of what to do with the blood if you don't use it as food.

Then there is doctrine of transubstantiation. If you hold to that, you are literally drinking the blood of Jesus each time you have communion, so why not other blood as well?  So I understand why it happens, but I don't see a Biblical basis for it and I must admit as I think on it, it is surprising that so little attention to the blood issue was paid by the Reformation fathers.

[TJ in Oregon]

Then there is doctrine of transubstantiation. If you hold to that, you are literally drinking the blood of Jesus each time you have communion, so why not other blood as well?  So I understand why it happens, but I don't see a Biblical basis for it and I must admit as I think on it, it is surprising that so little attention to the blood issue was paid by the Reformation fathers.

The reason given in Genesis for forbidding the consumption of the blood is that the blood is the "life" of the animal. The ancients considered the blood to be sacrosanct in some sense. For Christ's flesh and blood, eating the "life" because it is sacrosanct would be part of the point.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

In that respect, the blood of Christ differs from that of animals in that it is freely offered. Not only that, but the mystery of communion is supposed to enable us to grok Christ, much as the final spaghetti supper in A Stranger in a Strange Land gave the characters an opportunity to grok Mike. (Indeed, thinking back on that scene, one might wonder if Pastafarians might not consider Mike to be an avatar of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.)