First of all, let me say that I’m delighted to have been asked to participate in the present Theopolis conversation.  I’ve read, enjoyed, been challenged, and been encouraged by Jonathan’s post (aka “Conversation Starter”), and I look forward to thinking about it more carefully in the days and perhaps years to come.

Jonathan says that his post consists (for the most part) of “a series of propositions about biblical law, all of which could, and should, be embraced by contemporary Christians.”  Well, I’m a Christian, and am contemporary, and I do embrace them.  In fact, I’m struggling to find much to disagree with in Jonathan’s post.  So, in what follows, I’ll simply try to work my way through the post’s main points, on the one hand highlighting aspects of it which I found particularly helpful and on the other raising potential issues, which I hope Jonathan will be able to expand on in his response (Conversation Ender?).

At the outset of his post, Jonathan discusses how Christians have approached Torah historically.  On the whole, he says, they’ve valued it, cherished it, and been guided by its creative application--which was a helpful thing for me to find out.  When the Church is out of kilter with its historical foundations, it’s a good thing to be aware of and wonder why.

Next, Jonathan talks about the high view that the Bible takes in respect to the law.  “We find biblical law everywhere we look,” Jonathan says, “and, always, it is given a place of honor.”  The thrust of Jonathan’s statement is hard to disagree with.  I do, however, have a couple of questions I’d like to raise.

The first is why the law of Moses isn’t referenced more explicitly in pre-exilic prophets.  Daniel tells his people that they ended up in exile “just as it was written in the law of Moses” (i.e., as prophesied), and both Ezra and Nehemiah confront the people about the fact they’ve disobeyed “the law of Moses.”  It’s not easy, however, to locate similar statements in the pre-exilic prophets.  To be sure, their exhortations are saturated with the themes and logic of Torah, but they never seem to take the form, “Moses told you to do such-and-such a thing, and yet you’ve done the very opposite” (and rarely quote the Pentateuch), and I wonder why not.  Of course, questions of the form “Why doesn’t the Bible. . . ?” are hard to answer, but I’d be interested to know if Jonathan has any suggestions.

My second question concerns Ezekiel 20.  YHWH says he gave Israel “statutes that were not good and rules by which they could not have life,” which he seems to have done while Israel were in the wilderness.  Again, I’d be interested to know what Jonathan makes of this.

The rest of Jonathan’s post is organized under six broad headings, which I’ll adopt in what follows.

1. Jesus took Torah seriously and He expects us to as well.

Jesus takes Torah seriously.  The Sermon on the Mount is not an abstract address.  It is Jesus’ teaching on Torah, and is presented as contrasting with popular understandings of Torah in Jesus’ day, as is confirmed by contemporary reactions to the Sermon (Matt. 7.28-29).  So far, so good.  I’d like to raise a question, however, about the scope of Jesus’ teachings.  According to Jonathan, “Jesus’ teaching, and understanding of Torah, is normative not only for His disciples, but for everyone. ...It is applied to the whole world, for everyone is called to repent and to become His disciple.” 

On the one hand, I agree with this claim.  At the same time, however, it makes me wonder about the differences between Jesus’ and Moses’s commands.  Jesus tells us that Moses allowed divorce (under certain circumstances) “because of Israel’s hardness of heart,” yet Jesus takes a more restrictive view of the permissibility of divorce (Matt. 19.8-9).  Why?  Are the nations of the present age not quite as hard hearted as the ancient Israelites (so they can handle more restrictions on divorce)?  Doesn’t the law of Moses (like Jesus) call everyone to obedience?  To get to the bottom of the differences between Moses’s and Jesus’ teaching, I think we might have to view them as fulfilling slightly different purposes or as aimed at slightly different audiences.  Jonathan touches on this issue later on when he talks about “how Jesus would act if He had our job as a judge,” which, Jonathan says, “we might not work out simply from Jesus’ teaching on turning the other cheek.”

2. Biblical law helps us to understand better who Jesus is.

Here, I found the following comment of Jonathan’s particularly helpful. “[When we talk about Jesus], we are talking about one Person and one life that is so cosmically and eternally significant we need the entire history of God’s dealings with humanity and with His people, just to understand who He is.”  This strikes me as a remarkably helpful way to think about why we read Torah (and the OT more generally), and one which is implicit in, for instance, the way Matthew opens his gospel (and hence the whole NT) with a long genealogy.  Only reading the NT is like only watching the second half of a film. 

3. The New Testament shows that there is a right use and a wrong use of Torah.

I have no fundamental objections to what Jonathan says here.  I do, however, want to probe his claim that the law must have a correct use/application today because “Torah is still Torah.”  On the one hand, of course, Jonathan is right.  Torah is still Torah.  (It’s hard to disagree with such claims.)  Nevertheless, Scripture does appear to make a distinction between the duration and nature of different covenants.  For instance, God’s covenants with Noah and Abraham are said to be “remembered” by him (e.g., Gen. 9.15, Exod. 2.24, Lev. 26.42, Psa. 105.7-9) and never “broken” (apart from when an individual excludes himself from it: Gen. 17.14); by contrast, God’s covenant with Moses is never said to be “remembered” by God and is “broken” by Israel as a nation (Lev. 26.15, 44, Deut. 31.16, Jer. 11.10, 31.32). 

A similar distinction is implicit in the text of the NT, where those of faith are granted to participate in the blessings of God’s covenant with Abraham (Gal. 3) while the old covenant “grows old” and is in fact “about to pass away” (Heb. 8).  What is it, then, that makes Torah relevant to us today?  Is it relevant to us merely in the sense that it is a divinely authored lexicon, e.g., that it explains what sexual immorality looks like so we can make sure we avoid it?  Or is Torah relevant to us (and binding on us) in some deeper way?

4.  The right use of Torah negates Christian concerns about “legalism.”

Jonathan’s section on legalism is a helpful corrective to many commonly held views of Torah.  When Christians target biblical legalism, Jonathan says, they are not targeting a system which underlies and underpins the Mosaic law; rather, they are targeting a wrongful use of the law.  “‘Legalism’ is the wrong use of Torah because it is using biblical law for a purpose for which it is not intended. . . a misguided attempt to use the law to secure a person’s status before God.” Precisely.

5.  Torah enables us to be specific about what it means to “love God” and “love our neighbor.”

Again, the fifth section of Jonathan’s post is hugely helpful.  Unless the command to love our neighbor is anchored in an objective standard (which Torah provides), it can amount to anything we want it to.  As Jonathan continues to develop his point, however, he refers to Paul’s use of Deuteronomy 25.4, which raises an interesting question.  When Paul explicitly quotes the ‘legal/juridical’ sections of Torah (e.g., Exod. 20-23, etc.), he invariably applies them to how local churches should be governed rather than to how states (and the like) should be governed.  On the one hand, that’s only to be expected.  (Paul’s writing to churches after all.) 

Nevertheless, I wonder what we’re meant to make of this fact?  That we should set our own house in order before we worry about the wider world (cp. 1 Pet. 4.17-18)?  In part no doubt.  But Paul’s restricted application of the legal/juridical sections of Torah still deserves consideration.  Perhaps we could say that Paul’s references of Torah are examples of its application, but aren’t intended to exhaust its application, which is a position I would personally be very comfortable with.  It does, however, raise other possibilities, which some people might not be so comfortable with.  Perhaps, for instance, the events of AD 70 were an example of the fulfilment of various OT prophecies (as well as of Jesus’ prophecies), but did not exhaust them.

6. ...so we can be a force for good (and for God!) in public life.

Here, Jonathan helpfully frames our call to engage with the wider world as an outworking of Christian compassion.  “If we are serious about loving our neighbor,” he says, “then sooner or later we have to be concerned with public life and the organization of our society.  It’s not enough simply to be concerned with the victims of, say, people trafficking.  We also have to be concerned with the causes of people trafficking and the way our society is organized which allows it to happen.”  And “because Torah has a public dimension, . . . we can find out what structures and priorities God values in society as a whole.”  I second these claims without reservation.  I’d like, however, to consider some of Jonathan’s specific applications of Torah to see whether they can withstand scrutiny.

Jonathan mentions a floor of the Jubilee Centre which organized the Keep Sunday Special campaign.  I wonder what the exegetical steps were which prompted the Jubilee Centre to run this particular campaign.  Why not a Keep Saturday Special campaign, or at the very least a Keep Saturday Night Through to Sunday Afternoon Special campaign?  I’d also like to know which floor of the Jubilee Centre organized a Reinstate a Six Day Working Week campaign and how far it got.  These comments are of course slightly tongue in cheek, but the general point, I hope, is clear.  How do we know which bits of the law can be reinterpreted (or to use Jonathan’s terminology “creatively applied”) and which bits can’t? 

True, the Church met on the first day of the week in the book of Acts, but why does that mean that the first day of week is the day on which we’re supposed to observe a Sabbath rest (despite the fact Jesus rested on Saturday in the grave)?  And why does the word “Sabbath” continue to denote a Saturday throughout the NT?  Furthermore, how exactly are we supposed to view the observance of a Sunday Sabbath in NT times?  Is it a fulfilment of Torah--a practice in keeping with the true spirit of Torah?  If so, would it have been acceptable for, say, an OT Israelite to opt to observe Wednesday Sabbaths instead of Saturday Sabbaths?  And, if not, why is it acceptable for us to?  If Paul is happy for Christians to “esteem all days alike,” then why should we be unhappy if society at large wants to esteem all days alike (Rom. 14)?  Isn’t Romans 14’s Sabbath-keeper is “the weaker brother” in Paul’s argument, since he’s the counterpart of the vegetables-only brother earlier in the chapter?  (One brother sees all food alike, the other sees all days alike.)  And didn’t the Acts 15 council decide not to lay any burdens on Gentile converts other than abstaining from certain types of food and from sexual immorality?

In summary, then, let me repeat my initial statement.  I’ve read, enjoyed, been challenged, and been encouraged by Jonathan’s post.  I look forward to thinking about it more carefully in the days and perhaps years to come, and the issues I’ve raised above should be seen as invitations to Jonathan to clarify his position rather than fundamental objections to his claims.  One point which (I hope) will stick with me is Jonathan’s emphasis on the need for us to be creative in our application of Torah.  Scripture is sufficient for our needs, but it may not be superabundant to our needs; that is to say, Scripture may be sufficient only when we make the most out of it (rather than dismiss large swathes of it as irrelevant) and, as Jonathan says, mine it for its full treasure.

No doubt I’ve raised more questions than Jonathan will have time to answer (especially given the other responses he’ll have to engage with), but I hope they’ll be helpful for him and readers to chew over.

James Bejon attends a church in Romford, London, where he fellowships, is taught, and teaches.  He presently works at Tyndale House in Cambridge (https://academic.tyndalehouse.com), whose aim is to make high-quality biblical scholarship available as widely as possible.