Stump the Pastor 9: Why Don't We Follow the Dietary Laws of the Old Testament?

If you've ever eaten bacon at a church potluck, you've broken Leviticus 11:7-8. If you've had a cheeseburger, you've technically ignored a law rooted in Exodus 23:19. So why do we faithful New Testament Christians sail past pages and pages of God's own commands about clean and unclean animals, and never think twice about it? Is that just convenient? Did the church quietly decide certain parts of the Bible don't count anymore?

Let's take this one seriously, because the question deserves more than "that was the Old Testament, this is the New." It deserves an answer rooted in Scripture, tested by the earliest Christians, and settled (sometimes painfully) by the apostles themselves.

And here's the Gospel thread to hold onto as we go: the reason you don't need to check a label for cloven hooves before dinner isn't that God stopped caring about holiness. It's that Christ became your holiness. Every law that pointed forward to him has already reached its destination. You're not free from the dietary laws because God relaxed his standards. You're free because Jesus met them completely, in your place.

Not All "Law" Is the Same Kind of Law

The first mistake we make is treating "the Law" as one flat, undifferentiated block of 613 commandments, all equally binding or equally optional. Scripture itself doesn't work that way, and neither has the church's best theology across the centuries. It's helpful to distinguish three kinds of law given to Israel:

1. The Moral Law. This is the law written into creation itself and summarized in the Ten Commandments, love God, love your neighbor. It doesn't expire, because it reflects God's own unchanging character. You didn't stop needing to avoid murder, theft, or idolatry just because Christ came. Luther himself insisted that the moral law "was in force before Moses and before it was given on Sinai". It belongs to natural law, written on the human conscience (Romans 2:14-15), and God, through Moses, only restated what was already true for all people everywhere.

2. The Ceremonial Law. This includes the sacrificial system, temple worship, circumcision, the priesthood, festival calendars, and, yes, the dietary regulations. These laws were given specifically and exclusively to Israel, and they functioned as types and shadows pointing forward to Christ. They were teaching tools, object lessons written into daily life, meant to form a people set apart until the One they anticipated arrived.

3. The Civil (or Judicial) Law. These were the specific laws governing Israel as a political nation; property disputes, criminal penalties, agricultural regulations. They applied to Israel's life together in the Promised Land, under the old covenant.

Luther laid this out clearly in his 1525 treatise How Christians Should Regard Moses, distinguishing what belongs to Israel as a nation from what belongs to all people as God's moral law. This is not a modern workaround invented to dodge inconvenient verses, it's the church catching what the New Testament itself teaches about how these categories function differently under Christ.

The dietary laws belong to category two. And category two is precisely the category the New Testament tells us has reached its fulfillment.

What the Church Fathers Saw

This wasn't a Reformation-era invention, either. The earliest Christian writers wrestled with exactly this question, often in direct debate with Jewish critics who asked, essentially, "If your God gave these laws, why do you ignore them?"

Justin Martyr, writing in the mid-second century, addressed this head-on in his Dialogue with Trypho. Engaging a Jewish interlocutor, Justin argued that circumcision, Sabbath observance, and dietary restrictions were given because of Israel's "hardness of heart" and served a temporary, pedagogical purpose — not because God valued the physical acts themselves, but because he was training a people and pointing them toward the righteousness that would come through faith.

Irenaeus of Lyons, in Against Heresies, made a similar move, describing the ceremonial precepts as suited to a particular time and a particular stage in God's unfolding plan of salvation; necessary then, unnecessary now that the reality they anticipated has arrived.

Augustine distinguished between precepts that reflect eternal moral truth and those that were "figurative" signs pointing beyond themselves. He argued that these figurative laws were never meant to be permanently binding in their literal form; their entire purpose was to signify something that, once present, renders the sign unnecessary. You don't need the road sign once you've arrived.

What's striking is the consistency here. From the earliest post-apostolic generation onward, Christians did not treat the abandonment of dietary law as an embarrassing rupture with the Old Testament. They treated it as the Old Testament working exactly as designed… shadows giving way to substance (a phrase Paul himself uses in Colossians 2:17).

Jesus Declares All Foods Clean

Now to the heart of it, because ultimately, this isn't a question the church invented an answer to. It's a question Jesus himself answered directly.

In Mark 7, the Pharisees confront Jesus because his disciples eat without the ritual hand-washing tradition demanded. Jesus uses the moment to go much further than a comment on hygiene customs. He teaches that nothing entering a person from outside can defile them. What defiles a person comes from within, out of the heart. And then Mark adds a stunning editorial note, one every reader should sit with:

"Thus he declared all foods clean" (Mark 7:19).

That's not Paul writing decades later. That's not a church council. That's Mark, recording that Jesus himself (in his earthly ministry, before the cross) was already relocating the entire conversation about purity. Uncleanness was never really about pork. It was about the heart. The dietary law was a physical parable of a spiritual reality, and Jesus, the truth to which the parable pointed, was standing right there explaining what it had meant all along.

This matters for our Law/Gospel reading of the whole episode. Jesus isn't loosening a rule because rules are burdensome. He's revealing that the real problem was never on your plate… it's in your heart, and no amount of careful eating could ever fix that. Only he can.

Peter's Rooftop Vision

If Jesus said this plainly, why did it take the early church so long (and so much conflict) to actually live it out? Because old habits, even sanctified ones, die hard. Consider Peter.

In Acts 10, Peter is praying on a rooftop in Joppa when he falls into a trance and sees a sheet lowered from heaven, filled with every kind of animal, clean and unclean alike. A voice tells him, "Rise, Peter; kill and eat." Peter, ever the faithful Jew, refuses: "By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean." The voice responds with words that echo Jesus' own teaching in Mark 7: "What God has made clean, do not call common."

The vision repeats three times before the sheet is taken back up. And then — this is the key — Peter discovers the vision was never really about food at all. It was preparing him to go to the house of Cornelius, a Gentile centurion, and declare that God shows no partiality: the Gospel is for Jew and Gentile alike, and no one should be called "unclean" whom God has cleansed. The dietary vision was the object lesson; the point was the Gentile mission. The wall dividing clean from unclean animals and the wall dividing Jew from Gentile were, in God's mind, the very same wall and Christ tore both down at once.

Peter, Paul, and the Antioch Confrontation

You'd think that after a vision that dramatic, the matter would be settled forever. It wasn't. At least not in practice. Which brings us to one of the most human moments in the New Testament: Paul publicly rebuking Peter.

In Galatians 2:11-14, Paul recounts confronting Peter "to his face" in Antioch. Peter had been eating freely with Gentile believers. Living out exactly what his rooftop vision had taught him. But when certain men came "from James" (representing the more conservative Jerusalem circle, concerned about circumcision and Jewish dietary custom), Peter drew back and separated himself from the Gentiles, fearing their judgment. Even Barnabas was swept along in the hypocrisy.

Paul doesn't let it slide. He calls it out as inconsistency. Peter, a Jew, had been living like a Gentile, and now by his actions was compelling Gentiles to live like Jews. Paul's concern wasn't etiquette. It was the Gospel itself: if you require Gentile believers to adopt Jewish ceremonial practice to be fully accepted, you've quietly reintroduced law-keeping as a condition of belonging, and "the truth of the gospel" (Galatians 2:5, 14) is at stake.

This episode is a remarkable witness to something important: even an apostle who had received a direct vision from God could stumble back into old patterns under social pressure. And it took another apostle, armed with nothing but the Gospel itself, to call him back. The church has never claimed her leaders are infallible, only that the Gospel they were entrusted with is true, even when they fail to live up to it.

This same question came before the whole church at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. After real debate, the apostles and elders concluded that Gentile believers should not be burdened with the full weight of the Mosaic law, asking only that they abstain from a few practices tied to idol worship and remaining sensitivities between Jewish and Gentile believers eating together (Acts 15:19-29). Even that minimal list functioned pastorally, for the sake of unity in a mixed community, not as a reinstated ceremonial code.

So Why Doesn't It Apply to Us?

Put it together, and the answer isn't "the church decided to ignore inconvenient verses." The answer is that the entire ceremonial law (dietary regulations included) was never meant to stand forever on its own. It was a shadow. Paul says it plainly: these were "a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ" (Colossians 2:16-17). The author of Hebrews says the law "has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities" (Hebrews 10:1).

The dietary laws taught Israel, generation after generation, that they were set apart, distinct from the nations, marked out as holy, unable to simply blend in and eat whatever their neighbors ate. That lesson mattered enormously for a people who needed to be kept distinct until the Messiah came through them. But once the Messiah has come, the wall has served its purpose. Christ himself is now the marker of who belongs to God, not a diet, not a calendar, not a bloodline. Faith in him, not clean hands or clean plates, is what makes a heart clean (Acts 15:9).

That's not God relaxing his holiness. It's God fulfilling it in Jesus, for you.