God is Watching What You are Eating

Does God care about your diet? Can a Christian life lead to a better diet and better health? There are plenty of Christians who think exactly that - according to their theology, Christianity has all sorts of practical benefits when it comes to finances, jobs, and of course what you eat.

Rebecca Mead writes:

Gwen Shamblin has some unusual ideas. ... Shamblin promises followers of her diet that, in addition to losing weight, they will be granted eternal life. ... Shamblin's core contention is that the fatness of America is the symptom of a spiritual crisis: overweight people have mistaken a spiritual emptiness for a hunger for food. ... She argues that her method of renunciation can be applied to all manner of other sins, such as alcohol abuse or dependence on prescription drugs or homosexuality or the claims of wives to be on equal footing with their husbands. Having criticized the diet industry for encouraging an impious obsession with food, Shamblin has now unleashed her wrath on the church, which she views as overly permissive.

In 1999, she and a small group of like-minded believers established their own church, the Remnant Fellowship, at which they sing songs of praise and read Scripture and testify about their passionate submission to the will of God. ... "I believe God loves a chocolate brownie with extra nuts and whipped cream," she told me. She argues that diets that encourage careful planning of menus or counting of calories are actually the work of the Devil. "Look at what Satan has done with the weight-loss world," she writes in "The Weigh Down Diet." "He has encouraged dieting, and our flesh has loved it because we did not have to take our heart off food, repent, change, or obey God."

Shamblin takes every word of the Bible as divinely inspired, but she interprets it as if it were a contemporary diet manual. Thus the fatted calf that was prepared for the Prodigal Son is evidence that God approves of filet mignon. Other dietary directives from God that are found in the Good Book begin with original sin--the cardinal instance of overeating--and extend to divine refutations of low-carbohydrate diets. ... In the church that Shamblin attended as a child, women were not permitted to preach. That, she believes, is the way things should be. "How could anyone read the Bible and not see that men are meant to lead?"

She doesn't believe that women should have the authority to teach men, but she presumes to tell people how to interpret the Bible? She even goes so far as to claim that there is a "hierarchy" in the Trinity, with God being at the top while Jesus and the Holy Spirit are at the bottom. That's been a heretical view since the fourth century. It certainly seems as though she thinks that women can teach - so long as she is the woman, that is.

The Apologetics Index has an extensive critique of Shamblin from an evangelical Christian perspective, but it does include a lot of quotes from original sources.

Thanks to "Gullibility" for the link to this article...

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