If anybody should be equipped to address the topic of biblical law, it’s Jonathan Burnside, to my knowledge the only Professor of Biblical Law in the world, and certainly the only one at a secular law school. Jonathan‘s scholarship has been consistent and insistent, well-conceived, -researched and -documented, a rebuke to the antinomian spirit of our age, both in secular culture and in a compromised church.
I’ve been privileged to know Jonathan as a friend for six or seven years. We’re both faculty at the Runner Academy of the Ezra Institute, and I’ve greatly benefited both from our warm, personal discussions as well as from his thoughtful, well-organized lectures and writings.
I’m in substantial agreement with his Theopolis article, with one quibble, which I’ll mention below. I’ll use this space mostly to enumerate several interesting points that arise from Jonathan’s excellent thesis.
First, it’s important to know that Jonathan doesn’t operate within the paradigm I expect most readers assume when they think of biblical law. The sector of Christianity traditionally most occupied with this topic is the Calvinistic (or Reformed or Presbyterian). It was baked in from the start: John Calvin was a lawyer before he was a theologian. Calvinism’s view of the law in its regulative character has always stamped historic Calvinism. Jonathan, too, is interested in biblical law as regulation, but the Reformed tradition of biblical law is not his theological starting point.
In fact, in discussions with him and in reading his scholarship, I detect virtually no discernible influence of any of this on his thinking. This might come as a surprise. His views, rather, are funded primarily by traditional Jewish reverence for the Hebrew Scriptures — all interpreted, of course, through his eyes of a devout Christian.
This implies several things. For one thing, conventional Calvinistic categories like the three-fold division of the law (civil-ceremonial-moral), the Law-Gospel distinction, and the more recent theonomy debate provide no help in interpreting his work. He’s operating within a different theological paradigm, and it would be a mistake to interpret his argument from within any popular Reformed paradigm.
Second, Jonathan perceives biblical law not so much as a discrete canonical (much less theological) category as a revelational component pervading and marinating the entire Bible. It wouldn’t be wrong to say Jonathan advocates a Torahic Christianity. Since Jesus himself is the fulfillment and confirmation of Torah, and since the NT writers everywhere assume its validity, “[B]iblical law is something that is tightly woven into the rich tapestry of the Bible. Accordingly, we find biblical law everywhere we look and, always, it is given a place of honour.” The NT writers didn’t Christianize Torah. Torah was in essence Christian all along.
In fact, and third, the canon itself is a kind of expanded Torah. This is why Gospel and Law, while not identical, are much more similar than most Christians assume. A chief reason modern conservative Protestants find this suggestion mistaken, even dangerous, is that they’ve wrongly seen Torah as bereft of salvific grace. The author(s) of Hebrews certainly did not. The old covenant sacrificial system was intentionally temporary, with a “built-in expiration date” (Walter Kaiser), but salvation by grace was at its heart. When Paul inveighed against legalism, he was lashing out at a perversion of Torah and seeking to restore the gracious character of biblical law come to its zenith in the blood of Jesus Christ. Torah is the charter gospel of the Church of Jesus Christ.
“For some,” writes Jonathan, with perhaps understatement, “this will take a bit of unlearning and relearning.” Well, yes.
Fourth, Jonathan won’t permit even Christians wishing to exalt biblical law to skate past the details to focus on “the big picture.” Details matter, and God placed them in the text for a reason. Theopolis readers, well acquainted with the theological program of Peter Leithart and James Jordan, will see in Jonathan something akin to a Torahic “interpretive maximalism”:
Paul [Jonathan writes] presents Deuteronomy 25:4 as covering the obligations owed to an apostle (1 Corinthians 9:7-11). I daresay this law on animal husbandry is exactly the sort we would nowadays be inclined to write off, if it wasn’t for the New Testament’s habit of always taking us back to biblical law, in one form or another.
Finally, Jonathan notes that biblical law must inform what we moderns call “public” life. The call to love our neighbor is basic to biblical faith, and we can’t do that properly if we limit our love to “private” matters. (Our popular public/private distinction is a modern development.) It’s precisely biblical law that shows us what love looks like, so it must shape “public” life as much as “private.”
Jonathan acknowledges there will be disagreement about how to apply biblical law among us Torahic Christians, and he’s not proposing Torah as an uninterpreted positive legal code for society, which wouldn’t even have been possible in ancient Israel. All law must be interpreted. Since, however, “it [Torah] integrates those aspects of Scripture that are most obviously concerned with the organisation of civic society,” it’s the most suitable segment of the canon for revelation about “public” life.
Jonathan and I have a friendly disagreement on the application of biblical law to economics. He has warned elsewhere that Torah can’t be interpreted in terms of a modern libertarian ideology. I agree. But I’m also not convinced it can warrant the kind of economic interventionism popular in our world. I quibble with what seems to be Jonathan’s activist view of legal justice (“part of our [Torahic] application might include the need for constructive [civil] penalties that provide an opportunity for putting things right between the parties and giving everyone a fresh start, where that is possible”). It sounds like this tack could easily evolve into substantive due process, transcending the strictly procedural protections of the law, furnishing judges a troubling leeway for their own subjective notions of justice. I’m not sure that the Torahic stress on the impartiality and evenhandedness of the law will permit this approach, though Jonathan is far from seeing biblical law as a wax nose.
These are minor, friendly quibbles, but just the sort of discussions Christians should be having, rather than simply dismissing biblical law as outmoded and inferior, or adopting a version of natural law that takes a hasty end run around the Bible.
Jonathan is no ivory tower scholar, and his unflagging work with the Relational Justice Project in England and his commitment to real-world “public” reform evidences his deep personal devotion to Torah as intensely practical truth for the modern world.
In our cynical and nihilistic times, Jonathan’s reverence for all the Bible, including the hard and obscure parts, and those most at variance with the “enlightened” modern temper, provides a path back toward revelatory solutions that have been there all along.
P. Andrew Sandlin is Founder & President of the Center for Cultural Leadership.
If anybody should be equipped to address the topic of biblical law, it’s Jonathan Burnside, to my knowledge the only Professor of Biblical Law in the world, and certainly the only one at a secular law school. Jonathan‘s scholarship has been consistent and insistent, well-conceived, -researched and -documented, a rebuke to the antinomian spirit of our age, both in secular culture and in a compromised church.
I’ve been privileged to know Jonathan as a friend for six or seven years. We’re both faculty at the Runner Academy of the Ezra Institute, and I’ve greatly benefited both from our warm, personal discussions as well as from his thoughtful, well-organized lectures and writings.
I’m in substantial agreement with his Theopolis article, with one quibble, which I’ll mention below. I’ll use this space mostly to enumerate several interesting points that arise from Jonathan’s excellent thesis.
First, it’s important to know that Jonathan doesn’t operate within the paradigm I expect most readers assume when they think of biblical law. The sector of Christianity traditionally most occupied with this topic is the Calvinistic (or Reformed or Presbyterian). It was baked in from the start: John Calvin was a lawyer before he was a theologian. Calvinism’s view of the law in its regulative character has always stamped historic Calvinism. Jonathan, too, is interested in biblical law as regulation, but the Reformed tradition of biblical law is not his theological starting point.
In fact, in discussions with him and in reading his scholarship, I detect virtually no discernible influence of any of this on his thinking. This might come as a surprise. His views, rather, are funded primarily by traditional Jewish reverence for the Hebrew Scriptures — all interpreted, of course, through his eyes of a devout Christian.
This implies several things. For one thing, conventional Calvinistic categories like the three-fold division of the law (civil-ceremonial-moral), the Law-Gospel distinction, and the more recent theonomy debate provide no help in interpreting his work. He’s operating within a different theological paradigm, and it would be a mistake to interpret his argument from within any popular Reformed paradigm.
Second, Jonathan perceives biblical law not so much as a discrete canonical (much less theological) category as a revelational component pervading and marinating the entire Bible. It wouldn’t be wrong to say Jonathan advocates a Torahic Christianity. Since Jesus himself is the fulfillment and confirmation of Torah, and since the NT writers everywhere assume its validity, “[B]iblical law is something that is tightly woven into the rich tapestry of the Bible. Accordingly, we find biblical law everywhere we look and, always, it is given a place of honour.” The NT writers didn’t Christianize Torah. Torah was in essence Christian all along.
In fact, and third, the canon itself is a kind of expanded Torah. This is why Gospel and Law, while not identical, are much more similar than most Christians assume. A chief reason modern conservative Protestants find this suggestion mistaken, even dangerous, is that they’ve wrongly seen Torah as bereft of salvific grace. The author(s) of Hebrews certainly did not. The old covenant sacrificial system was intentionally temporary, with a “built-in expiration date” (Walter Kaiser), but salvation by grace was at its heart. When Paul inveighed against legalism, he was lashing out at a perversion of Torah and seeking to restore the gracious character of biblical law come to its zenith in the blood of Jesus Christ. Torah is the charter gospel of the Church of Jesus Christ.
“For some,” writes Jonathan, with perhaps understatement, “this will take a bit of unlearning and relearning.” Well, yes.
Fourth, Jonathan won’t permit even Christians wishing to exalt biblical law to skate past the details to focus on “the big picture.” Details matter, and God placed them in the text for a reason. Theopolis readers, well acquainted with the theological program of Peter Leithart and James Jordan, will see in Jonathan something akin to a Torahic “interpretive maximalism”:
Paul [Jonathan writes] presents Deuteronomy 25:4 as covering the obligations owed to an apostle (1 Corinthians 9:7-11). I daresay this law on animal husbandry is exactly the sort we would nowadays be inclined to write off, if it wasn’t for the New Testament’s habit of always taking us back to biblical law, in one form or another.
Finally, Jonathan notes that biblical law must inform what we moderns call “public” life. The call to love our neighbor is basic to biblical faith, and we can’t do that properly if we limit our love to “private” matters. (Our popular public/private distinction is a modern development.) It’s precisely biblical law that shows us what love looks like, so it must shape “public” life as much as “private.”
Jonathan acknowledges there will be disagreement about how to apply biblical law among us Torahic Christians, and he’s not proposing Torah as an uninterpreted positive legal code for society, which wouldn’t even have been possible in ancient Israel. All law must be interpreted. Since, however, “it [Torah] integrates those aspects of Scripture that are most obviously concerned with the organisation of civic society,” it’s the most suitable segment of the canon for revelation about “public” life.
Jonathan and I have a friendly disagreement on the application of biblical law to economics. He has warned elsewhere that Torah can’t be interpreted in terms of a modern libertarian ideology. I agree. But I’m also not convinced it can warrant the kind of economic interventionism popular in our world. I quibble with what seems to be Jonathan’s activist view of legal justice (“part of our [Torahic] application might include the need for constructive [civil] penalties that provide an opportunity for putting things right between the parties and giving everyone a fresh start, where that is possible”). It sounds like this tack could easily evolve into substantive due process, transcending the strictly procedural protections of the law, furnishing judges a troubling leeway for their own subjective notions of justice. I’m not sure that the Torahic stress on the impartiality and evenhandedness of the law will permit this approach, though Jonathan is far from seeing biblical law as a wax nose.
These are minor, friendly quibbles, but just the sort of discussions Christians should be having, rather than simply dismissing biblical law as outmoded and inferior, or adopting a version of natural law that takes a hasty end run around the Bible.
Jonathan is no ivory tower scholar, and his unflagging work with the Relational Justice Project in England and his commitment to real-world “public” reform evidences his deep personal devotion to Torah as intensely practical truth for the modern world.
In our cynical and nihilistic times, Jonathan’s reverence for all the Bible, including the hard and obscure parts, and those most at variance with the “enlightened” modern temper, provides a path back toward revelatory solutions that have been there all along.
P. Andrew Sandlin is Founder & President of the Center for Cultural Leadership.
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