Author encourages believers to follow the dietary laws set forth in Old Testament

 
Shortly after Hope Egan was baptized five years ago, she confronted an unsettling contradiction. She could not reconcile a God that had opinions on marriage, money and idolatry but did not care about what she ate.
 
Authentic Christians should live by the laws of the Old Testament as well as the New, Egan believed, including the prohibitions on pork and shellfish.
 
Christians, she thought, should honor God by keeping kosher.
 
"Leviticus 11 plainly forbids us to eat pork, so why did most Bible-believing Christians eat it?" she recalls asking herself. "I couldn't get the Christian theology that explains why we're supposed to ignore it. I could not make sense of the mainstream theology that 95 percent of your average Christians either consciously or unconsciously are comfortable with."
 
Those culinary convictions have evolved into an unconventional ministry. Each month a half-dozen members of Egan's Lincoln Park church congregate in a kitchen to prepare dishes that incorporate the proper meats and fish, as well as whole-grain and organic ingredients with minimal processing and preservatives, "as close to God's original form as possible."
 
Now a magazine editor, Egan has also co-authored a book titled "Holy Cow!" in which she makes the case that, while Christians are not obligated to follow laws not found in the New Testament, such as separating milk and meat, they should fulfill their faith in the kitchen by keeping biblically kosher.
 
"God cares what you eat," said Egan, of Chicago. "He cares because he cares about you. He cares about the wonderful creation that he made for us to eat."
 
It was in Overeaters Anonymous where Egan first found a way to conquer what she now calls her idolatry of food. There she summoned the strength to make healthy dietary choices and for the first time in her life encountered God.
 
"For a long time that was sort of my focus, learning to submit my life to God, my food choices to God, to change the way I thought about food," Egan said.
 
As part of her spiritual quest, Egan, who had been a nonobservant Jew, delved into her Jewish roots with an Orthodox community that lived its faith each day from sunrise to sundown rather than talking about it at church. The experience left a lasting impression.
 
In 2000 she was baptized. Today she calls herself a Jewish believer in Jesus--a controversial concept among most Jews--and attends the evangelical Park Community Church.
 
When Egan lunched with a friend who also calls herself a Messianic Jew and follows a kosher diet, all of her quests converged. She had finally found the way by which faith could inform her food choices.
 
"Because of my history with food, I had an underlying yearning for where is God in my food," Egan said. "I was lacking information where I usually get it--through the church."
 
According to the Old Testament, which lays out God's covenant with the Jews, mammals to be eaten must have split hooves and chew their cud. Fish must have fins and scales. The rules on birds and insects are not as defined, although vultures and buzzards are prohibited, while grasshoppers, locusts and crickets are acceptable.
 
Christians believe that the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament. Most Christians who are aware of the Old Testament laws that Jesus preached and practiced believe they are guidelines instead of laws. They believe other laws were either revoked or voided by omission from the New Testament.
 
In Acts 10 of the New Testament, God commands Peter in a dream to partake of clean and unclean animals: "What God has cleansed, nolonger consider unholy."
 
Egan interprets Peter's vision as a metaphor for people, not food, and therefore views the dietary laws as still binding. In her view, they are not justified again in the New Testament because they are simply non-negotiable.
 
Her philosophy on following Old Testament rules has challenged members of Park Community Church to examine their diets from a biblical perspective.
 
"Meeting Hope, seeing where science and the Bible collide, was very compelling to me," said Amy Cataldo, a co-founder of the church's Creator's Cooking Club. "It was the science part that was compelling enough to look back on my Bible and reconsider."
 
A small number of Messianic Jews and evangelical Christians have embraced the Christian kosher movement in an effort to restore the practices of early Christianity, said Rev. Daniel Lancaster, a pastor with First Fruits of Zion, the Christian ministry that published Egan's book.
 
First Fruits of Zion also advocates that Christians observe the Sabbath on Saturday and celebrate Easter in the context of Passover. The New Testament records that Jesus came to Jerusalem for Judaism's spring holiday and that the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples was a Passover seder.
 
"It's ironic to us that Easter is traditionally celebrated with ham and hot cross buns whereas the festival is supposed to be celebrated with unleavened bread and bitter herbs," said Lancaster, who also contributed to Egan's book.
 
On a recent Sunday, Rev. Jackson Crum, pastor at Park Community in Lincoln Park, brandished a copy of Egan's book and told the congregation that he was rethinking his own path.
 
"If I truly seek to be obedient, if I truly seek all that God desires to give me, am I willing to make choices that will bring a fullness and abundance in my life?" Crum explained later. "God is not the cosmic killjoy. Instead what he says is here is what it means to have a rich, full and abundant relationship with him."
 
For Egan, obeying the laws is a way to honor God. After all, the laws were created by God out of love for her.
 
"He's the one who designed my body and he's the one who designed all these ingredients that are really intelligent," she said. "It's just so obvious. He's the wisdom behind all those things."

By Manya A. Brachear
Chicago Tribune staff reporter
Published July 8, 2005