Luther’s Law (2)

For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under ^[a^]the Law but under grace.  Romans 6:14  NASB

But – Yesterday we discovered that there is an alternative way of reading this text that preserves Paul’s Jewish orthodoxy.  This fact is critically important because it shows us that the Christian assumption that Paul left Judaism and invented Christian theology cannot be supported by any “definitive” reading of this text.  What we learned is that the paradigm interprets the text, and if I come to this verse with a Christian, anti-Torah paradigm, I will read it according to the paradigm, not necessarily according to the semantics.  Perhaps you might wonder how this could happen.  If virtually all the first believers who recognized Yeshua as the Jewish Messiah were Jews, how is it possible that such a massive shift in thinking could have taken place in the community so that within a century or so, Augustine viewed Paul and the disciples as “Christians”?   Part of the answer is political/philosophical.  Hellenism reshaped Western human thinking.

Let’s consider just one element of the influence of Hellenism.  In Greek thought, freedom is the true goal of humankind, but freedom is not defined as the ability to do whatever you wish.  In Greek thought, the individual is always a part of society, and it is society that provides the framework of freedom’s operations.  Because the Greeks believed that the cosmos was the product of rational order, they held that there was “ . . . a connection between the rational order that governs the cosmos and the rational order that should govern human society.”[1]  Freedom consisted of acting in concert with rationality which was reflected in the natural order of things.  But because freedom was based on the natural order of things, it was ubiquitous and unwritten.  Rationality itself was all that was needed to determine the proper behavior, and once determined any rational man would concur.  Hellenism essentially embraced an unwritten, universal, eternal, rational law, a set of principles that guided all correct societal and personal behavior.

What this means is that a written, flexible, contingent, and temporal system of behavioral rules cannot be an expression of the true order of the cosmos.  It must be of human origin and therefore inferior to the truth of the cosmos.  Of course, for Greek Hellenists, the Torah was precisely this—the invention of human agents who, nevertheless, claimed it came from God.  But because the Torah was situational, cultural, ethnically particular, temporally dependent, and codified, it could not be the real truth, and therefore must be rejected by any truly rational person.  For the Greeks, as well as for the Church, the Torah was Jewish, and therefore disqualified as a legitimate cosmic rational guide.

Of course, Judaism did not share this cosmological/rational perspective.  In Jewish thought, the Torah was the expression of God because its origin was God Himself.  It didn’t matter if at some points it appeared ethnically particular, temporal, or culturally conditioned.  What mattered is where it came from, not whether it was essentially rational.

Western Man is the product of Hellenism.  As a result, Western Man’s idea of freedom is essentially Greek.  Like the Greeks, freedom is not the ability to do whatever one wants to do.  Freedom is the ability to choose the rationally correct action when it is understood.  Those who act inappropriately from society’s perspective are not moral reprobates but rather misinformed or uneducated.  Once they become rational, they will act in ways that uphold the natural order for themselves and society.  The Western substitute for sin is ignorance.  We see this fundamental principle in operation constantly in our educational system where “correction” is about re-education rather than punishment.  Not so with the biblical model which believes that people deliberately and with conscious forethought act in opposition to the divine will.

When Hellenists read Paul, they read this idea into the text.  Therefore, to be “under law” means to be constrained by a set of written, human rules that are not necessarily rational, certainly culturally dependent, and temporally conditioned.  It takes very little investigation to attribute these qualities to things like dietary restrictions, circumcision, religious rituals, Shabbat, and a host of “tribal” rules.  Torah qualifies in every regard.  Therefore, Torah cannot be the ultimate standard of freedom.  It is, in fact, a sophisticated form of slavery.  Grace (cháris) must remove this mistaken, irrational code and offer true freedom, that is, the ability to live in accordance with the natural order of the universe, reflected in the true rational nature of a human being.

This is the reason why Christians can claim they do not need Torah but they do not collapse into societal chaos.  They believe in a rationally developed ethics, based entirely on what is rationally true, without the need for a divine authoring agent.  The fact that Christians claim God is the author of their ethics is a convenient accommodation, but such a claim is not necessary for the justification of Christian ethics.  That should be abundantly obvious since Christianity dismisses Torah as antiquated and irrelevant.  Divine origin is a footnote to Christian rationalism.

What’s the bottom line?  If you think Paul was a Hellenist, a convert to Christian rationalism, then you must reject Torah because Torah is precisely the opposite of rational ethics.  Paul cannot be a Torah-observant Jew and a Christian rationalist at the same time.  One or the other has to go.  The Christians determined to follow ethical rationalism and took Paul with them.  They needed Paul in order to make a bridge to the Bible.  If they had left Paul in the Jewish world, then Christianity would have been exposed for what it really is—a new religion invented by Greek philosophers with religious/political interests.

Topical Index: Torah, ethics, Hellenism, rationalism, Romans 6:14

[1] Christine Hayes, What’s Divine About Divine Law?: Early Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 55.