The Nature of a Commandment – Initial Thoughts

But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.  Galatians 3:25 NASB

Under – Paul’s view of the Law is probably the most controversial element of all his writings.  It certainly separated Christianity from Judaism and it contributed to replacement theology and anti-Judaism, perhaps even to pogroms.  When the Church interpreted Paul as if he taught the Law was no longer applicable to those who were “in Christ,” it didn’t become antinomian.  It became Greek.  It simply shifted from divine commandments to divine reason.  The Church still has ethical expectations and moral rules.  They just aren’t based on the revelation of a divine Lawgiver.  They are based on an alignment with the order of the created cosmos, that is, what any rational man would discover.  Once this shift occurred, sin was no longer a violation of a religious commandment.  It was, as Plato proposed, a mistake in reasoning, a matter of ignorance, a miscalculation of moral benefit.  What was needed was education and right thinking, not punishment.  Without recognizing the lethal consequences of this shift, the Church converted sin into a mental disease instead of a moral choice.  And two thousand years later, our civilization reaps the results.  We don’t need criminal incarceration.  We need a more complete DSM-5.

How did this happen?

Well, first we had to remove Paul’s Jewish thinking.  Michael Morrison’s article is a typical example:

We are no longer under the supervision of the law, writes Paul (Galatians 3:25). But the same apostle also writes, “the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good” (Romans 7:12). He even writes that the old covenant came “with glory” (2 Corinthians 3:7). (However, he says in the next verse that the new covenant is “even more glorious.” We’ll examine 2 Corinthians 3 in chapter 17.)

The old covenant — including its sacrifices, rituals, and circumcision — was good. It was exactly what Israel needed. But once Christ came, the old covenant became obsolete. The sacrifices and circumcision are no longer a standard of righteousness. It would be wrong to pull out an obsolete law and command it for Christians today.

Which laws?

Romans 7:12 tells us that the law is good — but does this mean the law requiring physical circumcision is still in force? Of course not. This verse does not tell us which laws are good. It does not tell us which laws apply to us today. We can’t just quote the Old Testament for the laws we like, and ignore it for the laws we don’t like. That would be a misuse of the Bible. But Romans 7:12 does tell us to be cautious. Any law that God gave is a good law — but it is not necessarily good for us today. Paul says that we “uphold” the law by our faith in Christ. We are not a lawless people. But again, we must ask, which laws? The verse does not tell us.[1]

Morrison’s conclusion that the verse doesn’t tell us which laws we should keep and which we should jettison raises a red flag.  If Paul really believed that the Mosaic Law was no longer applicable, then all of those commandments should be tossed on the trash pile.  But, of course, that means chaos; complete antinomianism makes society impossible.  Some “laws” must be kept.  Which ones?  The ones all reasonable, rational men accept, of course.  In other words, the laws Socrates “discovers.”  But this is to adopt a Hellenistic view of law, divorced from any sense of law in the Tanakh.  We shouldn’t be too surprised.  “Christianity would fully embrace natural law [the “laws” of reason] as the ontologically primary mode by which God communicates his will for universal humankind.  As a result, the conceptual distinction between the universal law of nature and human conventional law has been a fixture of Western civilization ever since.”[2]

The difference between the rabbinic and the Greco-Roman discourses of law and truth could not be more stark.  In Greco-Roman discourse, the disjunction between law and truth holds only in the case of human law, not divine law.  Divine law is self-identical with truth.  But for the rabbis, the disjunction between law and truth as measured by the standard of formal logic holds even in the case of divine law.  While divine law may align with the formally or logically correct law, this alignment is accidental, not essential.  The authority of divine law is not undermined by its lack of conformity to a formal or logical standard.  For the rabbis, the formally or logically correct law does not obligate; God’s divine law obligates and not because it is truth but because of its origin in the divine will.[3]

Unfortunately, Hellenistic Jews like Philo didn’t help much.  Hays notes:

“In the Hellenistic period, Jews, whose sacred writings contained a very different set of discourses about divine law, experienced a cognitive dissonance arising from the encounter with a conception of divine law so different from the representation of divine law in biblical tradition.  Attempts by adherents of biblical tradition to make sense of biblical divine law in light of the very different classical discourses of divine law gave rise to processes of negotiation, accommodation, resistance, and revision that would forever change the way biblical cultures would read the biblical text.”[4]

We’re left with a vicious dichotomy.  If we discard Torah on the basis of its incompatibility with natural (reasoned) law, then we’re left with a multiplicity of possible reasoned ethics dependent on the current view of the structure of the universe.  Kepler’s view was not the same as Newton’s, in turn replaced by Einstein and Heisenberg.  Is the ultimate ontology of the cosmos chaotic?  Can we derive any ethical principles from the “big bang”?  And what is the moral value of entropy?  Perhaps “reason” isn’t quite as certain a guide as we hoped.  Moses, on the other hand, declares that the sovereign God wishes us to make a moral decision regardless of our rational hesitation.  Hays notes:

“The Hellenistic dichotomy of divine law and human law is a poor fit for biblical divine law.  Although the Mosaic Law is understood to be divine law, it possesses few of the features associated with divine law and many of the features of human positive law in the classical tradition.  This incongruity was likely a cause of cognitive dissonance for many Jews.  How were they to negotiate the differences between the biblical conception of divine law and the conceptions of divine law in the dominant culture?”[5]

It’s likely to cause cognitive dissonance for us too.  But what’s the alternative?

Topical Index:  Law, Moses, Plato, reason, antinomianism, Galatians 3:25

[1] https://archive.gci.org/articles/the-law-is-holy-just-and-good-a-study-of-matthew-5/

[2] Ibid., p. 164.

[3] Ibid., p. 184.

[4] Christine Hayes, What’s Divine About Divine Law?: Early Perspectives, p. 89.

[5] Ibid., p. 93.