Edward Ball reflects on ‘The Law’

There’s a well-known story, often heard in Christian preaching, that goes something like this:

• By the time of Jesus, the Jewish people had become enslaved to their law as a mass of nit-picking regulations (especially as taught and enforced by the self-righteous, hypocritical Pharisees). This imposed a terrible and oppressive burden on their lives; but they had to accept it, because they believed that by obeying these laws down to their last detail they could earn God’s favour. It was the way of earning salvation.
• Jesus, though, taught that it was the great central principles of the law that alone really mattered – love of God and of neighbour – and that true relationship with God was not a matter of merit or deserving, but a free response of trust in a loving, welcoming Father. By contrast, the Jewish fixation on outward, ritual requirements did not touch the heart of the matter.
• Paul, as a Jew and a Pharisee, suffered from that same struggle to earn God’s favour by obedience to a law he knew he could not fully keep. His labouring conscience was only set free when he met the risen Christ, and found by faith in him alone a gracious, unmerited salvation.
• Through all the following generations Jews have, in refusing to acknowledge Christ, stuck with their practice of detailed obedience to a burdensome, pettifogging law as the way to earn salvation.’

The story may be told with variations in detail, but its main lines have deep historical roots in the Christian tradition. Behind it lies the long and complex history of relations between Christianity and Judaism from the first century onwards – a history which has so often been desperately painful and tragic. Whether we are conscious of it or not, that fraught, tangled history influences the way we perceive Judaism as it is variously portrayed in the New Testament – and so also the ways in which the meaning and implications of the Gospel are presented there (and now). It’s important, therefore, that we try to understand clearly the ways in which the story above is a flawed and distorted one; for that is what in many respects it is, a stereotype, a caricature. We haven’t space to look at every aspect of this, but we can consider a central, dominant component in the story: the nature and significance of ‘the law’ as it is presented in the Bible.

Here, I mean especially ‘the law’ as presented in the scriptures of Israel, the Jewish people – which Christians, like their Lord, treasured from the beginning, and would eventually come to call (the writings of) the ‘Old Covenant’, the ‘Old Testament’. It can’t be too strongly stated that the New Testament makes no theological sense without the Old, and without the God to whose character, acts, and purposes it bears witness. In terms of Christian faith and theology, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is none other than the Lord, the God of Israel. With that understanding, it seems impossible from the start to make any simple contrast between ‘Old Covenant’ and ‘New Covenant’, or between ‘Old Testament law’ and ‘New Testament gospel’, in the way that is sometimes done.
But doesn’t the New Testament often seem quite clearly to have a negative view of ‘the law’?  Is the story we began with completely without foundation? 

Doesn’t Paul say that ‘Christ is the end of the law’ (Romans 10: 4), that Christians ‘are not under law but under grace’ (Romans 6: 14), and John that ‘the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’ (John 1: 17)? And doesn’t Jesus, in his own words and actions, appear to oppose key features of scriptural law (for example, Mark 7: 14-23), or to set himself above it (famously in Matthew 5: 21-48)? 

Well, plenty more could be added along these lines, but there are big questions of interpretation here, as well as much that seems to point in a different direction. For instance, what about Jesus’ sayings in Matthew 5: 17-20, or Paul’s comment that ‘the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good’ (Romans 7: 12)?  Here, too, there are major questions about the overall thrust and the detailed interpretation of such statements, but at the very least it’s clear that New Testament understandings of ‘the law’ are far from simple and straightforward!
Could it be that a distinction is being made between ‘moral law’ and ‘ceremonial law’, with the latter abolished and only the ‘moral law’ (especially the ‘Ten Commandments’) being maintained in Christ?  Or between ‘underlying principles’ of continuing importance, and ‘worked examples’ that are now of only historical interest?  (That is, between the foundation emphasis on ‘love of God and neighbour’ and the kind of detailed laws found in, say, Exodus 21-23.)  Or is it that ‘the law’ regarded negatively in the New Testament is not so much the scriptural law in itself as the developing mass of detailed ‘applications’, the ‘oral law’ later put into written, codified form in the Jewish Mishnah? 

Distinctions of these kinds have frequently been made, but it’s doubtful whether they resolve the problem that the New Testament appears to present us with. In any case, they are usually presented as aspects of the larger question about whether the Old Testament ‘law’ itself does have any kind of continuing validity and role for Christians, and if so, what?  (I will leave aside here distinctively modern, ‘liberal’ views which evaluate much on the Old Testament, including ‘the law’, as reflecting a primitive, harsh, barbaric stage of religious history which we ought to have outgrown – a view then seen as confirmed in the supposedly negative attitude of Jesus towards ‘the law’.)         

So how does the Old Testament itself understand ‘the law’?  Up to now, I have put the term in inverted commas: what do we mean by it?  The term in the Greek New Testament so translated, ho nomos, sometimes refers specifically to what we know as the first five books of the Old, Genesis to Deuteronomy (‘the Pentateuch’), and sometimes more generally to the scriptures of Israel (‘the Old Testament’) as a whole. This corresponds to the Jewish usage, then and now, of the Hebrew term torah in both senses. Above all, however, ‘the Torah’ refers to that first section of the Hebrew Bible, in relation to which its other sections, ‘the Prophets’ and ‘the Writings’, have a kind of derivative and secondary status. (Note that the arrangement of the books in the Christian Old Testament is in some striking respects rather different.) 

But to translate the term by ‘the law’ can be misleading: 
•    The word itself is better rendered by terms like ‘teaching, instruction, guidance’.
•    Furthermore, as applied to the whole of Genesis to Deuteronomy, the word clearly includes much more than what we would normally recognise as ‘law’, for ‘the law’ there is set within the context of a much larger narrative – the story of God’s dealings with the world from creation to his establishing of Israel in a special, ‘covenant’ relationship with himself.

So what is torah here? Especially as used in Deuteronomy (see, for example, 1: 5, 4: 44), it is a comprehensive, all-embracing term for the revelation of God’s will to guide and shape the life of Israel as his people. Israel’s response is to be one of loving and obedient faithfulness, the response of gratitude to the God who has liberated Israel from slavery in Egypt, and given his people a history and a hope. Yes, Israel has to remain faithful; disobedience, and God’s judgement, are real possibilities, as in historical experience (especially as interpreted through the prophets) Israel discovered. But the liberation and the covenant are brought about by God’s own saving initiative. Israel does not ‘earn’ this freedom and relationship with God, but responds to them, by obedience. To use later theological terms, ‘grace’ and ‘law’ are not contrasted here; rather, torah is itself a gift and expression of God’s grace, the means by which he makes faithfulness to him possible.

The mass of ‘instruction’ given to Israel in the narrative of the Sinai covenant-making (in Exodus 19 – Numbers 10) and in Deuteronomy did not all originate historically at Sinai (most Old Testament scholars agree), but comes variously from different periods of Israel’s later history. (How far it may actually have operated in the legal practice of ancient Israelite society is a much-studied question, not easily answered.)  Yet what is striking is that, as the Pentateuch has been composed, all this material has been linked back with Sinai. This emphasises that every aspect of Israel’s life is to be moulded and guided by instructions seen as flowing from – and expressive of – the character and will of the gracious, liberating, God of the covenant. ‘Every aspect’?   A careful reading of, say, Leviticus 19 shows this very strikingly, perhaps problematically, to modern Christian readers.

Three other important points should be made:

• Implicitly within the Old Testament itself, and more explicitly in developing Judaism (see especially Ecclesiasticus 24), torah came to be identified with that great and mysterious wisdom through which God created the world (as portrayed especially in Proverbs 8: 22-31). This means that for Judaism to this day, and already for scripture itself, torah is no trivial collection of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’, not even just good instructions for the ordering of society, but somehow participates in the transcendent, holy Reality of God himself. Torah has universal significance – a kind of key to the meaning of the world and all life. We will not feel the force of the New Testament’s wrestling with ‘the law’, and of Christ’s work in relation to it, until we grasp this.

• As we’ve noted, the Old Testament is all too painfully aware that Israel, by its unfaithfulness, can and does bring God’s judgement upon itself – seen above all in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile. Yet the prophets who thus interpreted the events spoke also of God’s loving will to restore his people – and miraculously to transform them, making possible a new life of future faithfulness. So Jeremiah 31: 31-34 speaks of a ‘new covenant’ to renew or replace the old, broken relationship. Yet note that torah is not done away with – far from it. Now God will ‘write it on their hearts’ (verse 33; a similar point is made using different imagery in Ezekiel 36: 25-27). Any Christian thinking about the meaning of the new covenant will have to reflect seriously on the implications of this, while rejoicing in its wonder.

• In several of the Psalms, torah has become a matter for continuous meditation. Here we have moved far beyond any understanding of it as (simply) a ‘law code’, a body of legal prescriptions. Rather, it is the basis of Israel’s (and now also the individual Israelite’s) ‘spirituality’, the sacrament of intimate communion with God, the Word that permeates and shapes life in every dimension. ‘I delight to do your will, O my God; your torah is within my heart’ (Psalm 40: 8). Does that mean that the new covenant has already begun to be realised?  The delight is expressed in Psalms 1 and 19, but above all in Psalm 119, filled as it is with praise and petition, all related to, and focused in, luxuriant joy in torah, ‘the law’ which is the gift of God’s very word, and so of himself.

‘Your statutes have been my songs wherever I make my home’ (Psalm 119: 54). When torah becomes song – in every scene and experience of life: this is not the language of someone oppressed by a cold, harsh, unbending, unforgiving religious legalism. There’s no reason to suppose that this attitude had somehow all but disappeared by the New Testament period; hence the need for an informed and critical attitude towards the all too glibly repeated caricatures with which we started – and, for that matter, a sympathetic desire to understand contemporary Jewish attitudes towards torah.

‘Oh, how I love your torah!’ (Psalm 119: 97). How do Christians sing that now?

Edward Ball is a Methodist Local Preacher, and Lecturer in Old Testament in the University of Nottingham.