Heresy Number 2* (this will take some more time)

Do your duty to the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, to ^[a]keep His statutes, His commandments, His ordinances, and His testimonies, according to what is written in the Law of Moses, so that you may succeed in all that you do and wherever you turn,  1 Kings 2:3 NASB

What is written – Yesterday, we learned that “what is written” isn’t the issue.  The issue is how “what is written” is read, that is, how the written words are interpreted by the oral tradition.  It is the oral tradition, in both Christianity and Judaism, that provides the “orthodox” meaning of the written words.  In this regard, the “law” of Moses is really the interpreted and applied norms of the authorities in the community.  So, in the rabbinic community, what matters is not what Moses wrote but what Maimonides said about what Moses wrote.  In the Christian community, it’s not what Paul wrote but what Luther said about what Paul wrote.  The sages and the commentators are the real source of religious belief.  In fact, you could argue that getting back to the actual words of Moses (or “Jesus”) is almost impossible now after millennia of layered interpretation, in addition to the particularly Christian problem that “Jesus” never wrote anything. Perhaps we should recognize that he didn’t write anything because he was acting in the capacity of the interpreter of the text.

Nevertheless, this perspective creates another problem, a significant difference between the resulting view of divine law.  You will recall Christine Hayes’ analysis of the Jewish and Christian view of divine law.  The Christian view, adopted from Greek philosophy, sees the divine law as an expression of the universal, rational, cosmic law of creation.  As such it is unchanging, ubiquitous, and logical, just as the Greek view of the creation is.  Any perceived contradictions are just that—perceived, not real—because Truth is one.  It is the interpreter who is mistaken, not the law itself.

For Judaism, however, the divine law does not depend on alignment with the cosmos.  It is divine because it is given by God.  Period.  It doesn’t matter if it is contradictory or even illogical.  Its authority comes from its source, not its alignment with the cosmos. “The norms which the followers of such a God are required to observe are binding not because they are the expression of an eternal and uncreated natural order but because they are the commandments of God and have been deliberately enacted by Him.”[1]

This leads Western Greco-Roman believers to reject the Jewish “Law of Moses” because it violates everything the West believes about the created universe.  “To those who accept the Greco-Roman conception of divine law, the idea that divine law is not self-identical with truth, is not rational, universal, and unchanging, is shocking, indeed, laughable.”[2]

Where does that leave us, those of us who stand somewhere between the Christian West and the Jewish East?  We probably wonder how it is possible for someone to “blindly” accept whatever the rabbis say about any particular commandment, for example, the separation of meat and dairy based on a verse about an animal’s milk.  We think in rational terms and find the need for two separate sets of dishes to be “absurd.”  But we’ve forgotten that a command doesn’t have to make sense.  It is a command because it comes from God—and the rabbis have interpreted it to mean the separation of meat and dairy and the need for two sets of dishes.  We find it absurd only because we expect it to be Western!

Can I suggest that it is no different than the claim that Jesus died on the cross for your sins?  That too is an interpretation of the text, layered by centuries of church commentators.  Or perhaps we could raise an issue about the Sabbath’s conversion to Sunday, or the status of the Pope.  Aren’t those also religious applications of “absurd” exegesis?  The list goes on—on both sides.

What, then, is religious belief?  Is it simply a fundamental acceptance of a paradigm being worked out in application to the text?  Is it any less arbitrary for either religious faith?  And if so, what, then, constitutes real faith?  Does faith depend on “what is written”?

Topical Index: written, paradigm, law, 1 Kings 2:3

[1] Anthony Kronman, Max Weber (Stanford University Press, 1983), p. 152.

[2] Christine Hayes, What’s Divine About Divine Law?: Early Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 7.