Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?” (Quotes are from CNN.com.)
“So before we get carried away, let’s read our Bible now,” the candidate said to the crowd. “Folks haven’t been reading their Bible.” The candidate also called Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount “a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our Defense Department would survive its application.”
The presidential candidate quoted above is simply using the standard revisionist method of portraying the Bible to be too wildly and hopelessly diverse to provide us a moral or ethical guide. I would argue instead that the chorus of different voices in the Bible does provide a consistent and comprehensible ethic.
It is claimed that the Old Testament’s ethical teaching is hopelessly contradictory. But are these contradictions fundamental, or only apparent? In his book Theological Diversity and the Authority of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), John Goldingay identifies at least four possible forms of contradiction in the Bible: formal, contextual, substantial, and fundamental. All of the first three types of contradiction may coexist in one consistent Biblical message. The first two types are only apparent contradictions; the third allows for contrasting positions that do not necessarily rule each other out. Only the fourth category (cases such as Yahweh versus Baal) cannot allow for two or more options to be simultaneously true.
In my current dissertation research, I have found that each Torah command that carries a death penalty is reaffirmed by the New Testament as a binding moral principle. For example, the New Testament does not command us to execute incorrigible teenagers, but it does affirm the command, “Honor your father and mother.”
Commands in the Torah that do not carry a death penalty (such as the kosher food laws) are not reaffirmed in the New Testament, and appear to be commands that are just for Israel. (One exception: “Do not steal” is reaffirmed in the New Testament, but carries no death penalty in the Torah. The Torah’s penalties for stealing hit the perpetrator entirely in the pocketbook. We in 21st century society throw the book at property crime, but decriminalize most sexual immorality. The Torah, reaffirmed by the New Testament, does the reverse.)
It is bad Torah exegesis to lump together offenses that carry a death penalty, which appear to teach principles that are timeless and universal, with offenses that call for the offender to be “cut off from his/her people,” which are mostly offenses against elements of Jewish identity, such as failure to be circumcised (Genesis 17:14) and eating leavened bread during Passover (Exodus 12:19). Opinion is divided about what is meant by the “cut off” penalty, but I am gathering evidence to support Gerhard Von Rad’s position that to be “cut off from one’s people” was expulsion from the faith community. Most are agreed, however, that this penalty was not execution.
It is also bad exegesis to mix both death penalty and “cut off” offenses together with the large number of Torah offenses for which there is no stated penalty whatsoever (the kosher food laws being one such example). A huge minority of the Torah’s legal provisions are purely didactic. All who claim their consciences to be held captive to Scripture should avoid treating all three categories of laws in the Torah as being of equal weight. A better approach to Christian moral teaching is to look for legal provisions that carry a death penalty in the Old Testament and that are reaffirmed in the New Testament.
Jesus and his apostles are the authoritative interpreters of the Torah for Christians. The Sermon on the Mount may be taken not as “law,” but as Jesus’ statement of controlling values that should govern our hearts. They are like a video game that can never be mastered, because there are always higher levels to attain. Surely, both presidential candidates recognize that applying “Do not resist one who is evil” on an international scale will lead (and has led) to unspeakable bloodbaths. To apply Jesus’ words this way is almost certainly not what Jesus intended.
The presidential candidate quoted at the beginning of this article did not offer a hermeneutic of his own in his speech. His purpose seems to have been simply to question whether there is any consistent Biblical ethic to be found, certainly not one that resembles an orthodox ethic. Such an argument is common in mainline churches today. But such an argument is simplistic and mistaken. Surely, for Reformed exegetes, there is a better way to read God’s word.
Thomas Hobson has been a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister since 1983. He is a Ph.D. student (ABD) in biblical exegesis at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Mo.
