Torah and ageless moral goodness
I'm one of the countless who believe that salvation and life with God begins with, is nourished and completed by the sheer grace of God. Any aspects of Pelagianism or Arminianism that promote notions of self-salvation should be decisively rejected.I'm also one of many who thinks that evangelicals tend to undermine the ethical element in God's redeeming and blessing activity. There's too much talk about "God's free forgiveness" (there isn't too much of "God's free forgiveness," just too much talk about it) and too little about the character of the life God brings and means to bring. The bottom line with God is life and not simply forgiveness when we sin or a pain-free post-mortem existence; it's life together with God and one another he has in mind; life that is lived in the image of God; life that is characterized in us by a love of truth, joy, goodness, kindness and holiness.
Moral richness and uprightness isn't something tacked on to life with God it's a constituent element of life itself.
I for one am desperately in need of that and feel in my bones that an unceasing diet of "sugar" has hurt me. Self-righteous and hard-hearted moralists haven't helped me either, but I'm sure that a more balanced message down the years about God's holistic work of blessing and redemption would have resulted in my being a better man than I am today.
F.W. Robertson was on target when he said, "The sacrifice of Christ does not alter God's Will: it does not make sin a trifle: it does not make it safer to commit offenses. It does not abrogate, but declares God's law." I think the "Sermon on the Mount" will support that view.
The Sermon on the Mount can and should be read at several levels. There is Christ sitting on a mountainside instructing his followers. The thought of mount Sinai with its Torah (instruction, law, guidance, profiling of God's people) is probably in the background. And so is mount Gerizim with its "blesseds" (see Deuteronomy 11:29 with 28:1-14). The Master profiles the people of God in new (but not unknown) terms and pronounces blessings on them that stand in contrast to the blessings that rang out from Gerizim.
His followers are made distinct from the crowds (5:1) as Israel was made distinct from the crowd of nations that also belonged to God (Exodus 19:5). As Israel was to be a kingdom of priests (thus serving God by serving the nations) so the followers of Christ were the salt of the earth and the light of the world (Matthew 5:13,14). Their response to God and their good deeds were to have a salutary effect on the world and bring their Father glory (5:13-16) so that the world might be blessed.
Who they were and how they were to live their lives out before God was of critical importance. The Torah was not being abolished nor was its goal to be jettisoned. (Compare Matthew 23:2.)
Whatever else it might include, Matthew 5:17-20 dealt with ethical response and Jesus said he hadn't come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets. In a later discussion dealing with ethical response the Master again made use of the "law and the prophets" phrase when he insisted that loving God and our neighbor as ourselves was the core of "the torah" and the prophets (Matthew 22:37-40).
The Master had no intention of undermining the moral foundations of life with God; he uncovered them rather than burying them (as his, "But I say unto you..." in Matthew 5:21-48 indicates). The Master nowhere gives the impression that life with God is without ethical and moral content, or is the result of some mechanical transfer of our sins to Christ's personal credit and the transfer of Christ's personal righteousness to our own credit. Because God's holy grace could have it no other way, there is no life between him and sinners unless homage is paid to his holiness and righteousness. There can no no fellowship between light and darkness and no agreement between Christ and Belial. This means there can be, in fact, no reconciliation between a human and God if that human will not acknowledge what the cross insists on. Those who have life with God in Jesus Christ are those who pay homage to the righteousness and holiness of God manifested in Jesus Christ. They pay homage to that cross-work by entering into union with the now-living Christ.
Atonement theories and stresses which minimize or hide the Bible's full-blooded call for that homage are not helpful. So seriously did Christ take the moral authority of the Torah that he had stern things to say of those who minimize "even the least" of it's commands (5:19). Rather than set the cross of Christ against the Torah's moral authority we ought to be fully aware that the cross highlights it. All this he said to his own disciples.
The moral content of the Jewish Torah was the furthering of God's agenda in Genesis 18:19 (see below) which means moral transformation is part and parcel of the redeeming process rather than merely some grateful response to what God had already completed.
The Torah & God's Ethical Agenda
In G.K. Chesterton's "Father Brown" story The Blue Cross, the priest-detective is talking to Flambeau, a famous thief, who is pretending to be a fellow-priest because he means to steal the silver cross with the blue sapphire which Father Brown has in his care. They're sitting on an old wooden bench on a lonely heath. The sun is just disappearing and the starlit sky is bathed in the blue and green of evening while they debate about reason and the nature of things. The sham priest thinks there might be other worlds where reason and truth are not as reason and truth are in this world, but Brown insists that truth is always truth and concludes with this: "Reason and justice grip the remotest and loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don't they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the slightest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, 'Thou shalt not steal.' "
I'd like to make the point that what the Torah was after, what all "moral law" is and was after, remains the same--the alignment of the heart with God. It doesn't matter if we're nomads living in tents or ancient Scythians living in wagons; it doesn't matter if we live in rain-forests or an artic wilderness, whether we're 21st century moderns or 6,000 B.C. dwellers on the Tiber--what is grand in living, what we call "real life" has always been and will continue to be the same. Of course it will be fleshed out differently in each individual but it will still be recognizable as the will of the one God for the one human family. We still recognize moral grandeur as the true greatness, as distinct from political, economic or military greatness. We allow the term "great" to the applied to Herod or Alexander or Cyrus but we know we're using it in a seriously limited way.
The truths of moral goodness didn't begin with the Mosaic covenant and they didn't end with it. Whatever the newness or peculiarities of the Mosaic covenant, it's ethical thrust was simply furthering God's ethical goals of earlier days and it does the same to this day.
In a passage that is rich in theological content we hear what God had in mind for Israel's future. "Then the Lord said, 'Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him. For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.' " (Genesis 18:17-19)
The prime mover in the text, of course, is God. It is what he is about to do. It is God who has chosen Abraham, it is God who has promised and will bring about what he has promised. To deny that is to violate the very words of the text.
But Abraham himself is involved in the fulfillment of the world-wide blessing. God's doing requires from Abraham a creative response. Abraham has been chosen by God "so that" he will direct his descendants "to keep the way of the Lord". There is an ethical element in the purposes of God. That "way of the Lord" is seen in Abraham's children "doing what is right and just". And that is where the Torah comes in. What we see at Sinai is no brand new ethical program; it is the "way of the Lord" being fleshed out in the doing of righeousness and justice.
This text connects that keeping of "the way of the Lord" in righteousness and justice with God's fulfilling his purpose of universal blessing and salvation. The first "so that" relates to God's choice of Abraham ("so that he will direct his children...") and the closing "so that" relates to the fulfillment of what God promised Abraham (multitudes of descendants in world-wide salvation). Other texts look in other directions but this text says God chose Abraham so that he will shape the ethical life of his descendants in righteousness so that world redemption will be brought about.
The life that God's offers humans is a relationship with himself --no relationship, no life. Because God is who and what he is that life cannot be one in which darkness is loved and cherished and light is despised. God doesn't say, "I will give you life with me as a reward if you will only live uprightly." As if to say one is to some degree distinct from the other. Light can't have fellowship with darkness, Christ and Belial cannot live in union. There can be no life with God unless the heart is willing to pay homage to the righteousness which is in God.
This is what "moral law" has always been about. At it's highest and richest, to live morally is to live in the image of God and that's what the Torah was about. What is true in the Torah was true before the Torah came along and is true to this moment.
It's no surprise then to hear Christ affirm the continuing validity of the Torah (and the exposition of it given by the prophets). Nor does it surprise us to hear the whole New Testament corpus use the Torah to call Christians to live morally upright. New Testament writers followed their Master in this.
Paul had been accused of undermining the moral aspect of life by his preaching of justification by faith in Jesus Christ (note Romans 3:8; 6:1). He strenuously denies this and insists that his teaching upholds the Torah (Romans 3:31) and brings about the "righteous requirement" (NJKV) of the Torah (Romans 8:4). He insisted that the ethical thrust embodied in the Torah was of central importance to Christians. Notice this in Romans 13:8-10.
"Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love on another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law." Note the reason he gives for the continued debt to love each other, for he who loves...has fulfilled the Torah. What has this for to do with Christians? Love one another because that's how you fulfill the Torah, he teaches. Why should they be concerned about fulfilling the Torah? Obviously it must have moral authority to which Christians are to submit themselves. Paul would have thought us more than a little naive if we had said to him, "Since Gentiles aren't under the law of Moses, you can't connect them with the Jewish Torah in this way."
If we should say that "law" in this text doesn't have the Old Testament Torah in mind, but has some general moral law in view, we'd need to pay attention to 13:9, where Paul quotes three commandments directly from the Decalogue, and as a summary, Leviticus 19:18.
I think it's important for reasons I'll make clear later that we allow the "law" throughout Romans to be the Jewish Torah, but at this point it doesn't really matter since Paul has earlier insisted (Romans 2:14-15, 26) that true morality is the same whether in the form of the Jewish covenantal Torah or not. Some Gentiles who didn't, of course, have the Torah were doing the works of Torah and even had the things of the Torah "written on their hearts."
This means that when Paul quotes the Jewish Torah he is quoting something that is relevant to the entire human family. Of course the Torah had a covenantal form and that covenant was made with no people but Israel,but that's not the same as saying the moral truth inscribed in the Torah was relevant only to Israel. The New Testament use of this moral truth shows that it speaks to us all. Even in the prophets, when the nations are addressed (see sections in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and places in Daniel), the moral teaching of the Torah is laid on them. We have abundant teaching in Genesis that moral truth written into the Torah was known and binding long before Sinai.
The book of James (written to both Christian and non-Christian Jews) is saturated with the moral truths of the Torah; and it insists that a man can't pick his way through the Torah's moral authority, obeying what he likes and ignoring the rest. That, says James (2:8-11), would be to make yourself a judge over the whole moral law (he quotes from the Jewish Torah). Peter writes to Jewish Christians ("the Diaspora" in numerous provinces) and opens this ethical call with Leviticus (see 1:16) and supplements it from Old Testament writings as he moves on through the book.
Let me repeat, the moral content of the Jewish Torah was the furthering of God's agenda in Genesis 18:19. That agenda had as part of the saving work of God the moral shaping and transforming of Abraham's decendants into God's image . If that's true, it means that the Torah was not a moral code that stood over against people as an obstacle.
God's ethical agenda was the creation of a redeemed people. Whom he foreknew he foreordained to be "conformed to the image of his Son" (Romans 8:29). Restoring them to the image of God was part of the saving process. To have people reconciled to God at that moment back at the cross misses the point. It has people at-one with God whose hearts are not realigned with God. It's to make reconciliation something bank clerks do when they transfer one column of figures over to another. The grace of God that saves comes transforming, initially and continuously (Titus 2:11-15).
Life With God As An Alignment of the Heart
To remove the moral and ethical element from life with God as if it were something added on, something expected "now that we have life" is to miss the nature of life. To make it merely a "condition" to be met so that we might have life is to miss the point from another end. Of course it's legitimate to say that moral uprightness is to be expected in response to God's gift of life and it's correct to say, "If you don't pursue holiness you won't see God." But to say these things as if they were the whole story leaves out too much truth.
To "know" God is eternal life. To have our hearts in tune with God's heart is life and not merely a response to it or a condition to be met to get it. To be at-one with God, to be related to him is to live. Not to love, not to be reidentified with God is not to live. It is to be away from home.
As Luke 15 tells it, the prodigal son is "dead" and "lost". This is not only his own view, we're expressly told that it is his father's view. The boy's later penitence in no way generated or earned the grace in the father's heart, in fact, it was the memory of the father and his grace that led him to "come to himself." It nevertheless remains true that the boy was dead and lost until his heart was realigned with his father. The return to the father was not simply a "condition to be met" if he wanted life nor was it the appropriate response to life already restored. Though these are truths they miss the point that life is relationship, life is reconciliation with his father. To be reconciled to his father is not simply the way to life, it is life. To have one heart with the father is to be at-one with him, it is to be at home with him, it is to be received by him and to receive him.
To "return" to the father doesn't make the father gracious, he is that while the prodigal is wallowing in selfish stupidity. To return to the father, to be reidentified with him, changes the father's judgment of the child. The always gracious father insisted that the boy was dead but is now alive; he was lost but now is found. And this is true, not simply because the son "met the condition" for life, but because life is to be with the father. There is no life without being with the father and there is no being with the father unless the heart is realigned with the father!
If the boy had returned with a swagger, heart as vicious, inwardly as hostile as ever--had he done that he wouldn't have been home. He would just have moved the location of his pig-pen. He comes home in holy penitence and life begins for him not simply because he is now behaving appropriately but because there is no life without being at-one with the father and moral realignment is part of what it means to be at-one with the father.
The Torah's Place in Spiritual Realigment with the Holy Father
Any man who thinks he has merited life with God is a fool! Any man who doesn't know that life with God is a gift of sheer grace and mercy is completely blind and has been robbed of true peace. Anyone who thinks his obedience somehow makes God his debtor or makes it easier for God to save him rather than some other knows nothing of the grandeur of the gospel. The ground of all our hope is the free, gracious, creative and redemptive work of God done on our behalf, culminating in his coming as Jesus Christ to live, die and live again. All of this I hold to be true.
Not a bit of it comes into conflict with this truth: our spiritual realignment with God is an aspect of his redeeming work and it is experienced in us and not apart from us.
Life is being related to God. It is a dynamic, continuing relationship. It is a relationship which can't exist if our hearts are aligned with Belial rather than Christ. This relationship is more than a single moment's decision--it is a life together with God. And that life is sustained and enriched by God's gift of grace, the law of God.
In Luke 10:25-37 an expert in the Torah came to Christ asking him, "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
The Master's response was, "What is written in the Torah? How do you read it?"
The teacher responds by joining Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 and the Lord says to him, "You have answered correctly. Do this and live."
The man wanted to know what he "must do" to inherit eternal life but it apparently never entered his mind that in loving God and his neighbour he would "earn" eternal life. He didn't see "doing" as part of some mathematical scheme good deeds out-weighing bad deeds=eternal life. And he wasn't alone in this.
It seems like everyone in the Bible thought there was something to "do" in order to be saved or gain eternal life. This is especially clear in Luke's writings. In 3:10-14 the people come asking John what they should "do"? In Acts 2:37 people wanted to know what they must "do". Saul wanted to know what he must "do" and the risen Christ told him he would be told what to "do". The angel told Cornelius that he would be told what he must "do" and the man repeats that to Peter. The Philippian jailer wants to know what he must "do" and the rich young ruler comes to Christ, wanting to know what he must "do". And whoever responded to such a question, whether it was the Master or an authorized representative, refused to treat it as implying a "meritorious works" mind set.
When the teacher of Torah asked what he had to "do" he didn't get a sermon saying, "Now, that's your first mistake. You can't 'do' anything to inherit eternal life. That's part of the trouble with you Torah people, you're always going on about 'doing'."
Not at all! The Christ asks him what the Torah taught he must do and the man gave the correct answer. The Master didn't contradict him; he confirmed the man's answer and insisted, "Do this and you will live." It's important that people receive assurance about their salvation with God but the way to give them assurance is not to deny their need to respond to God. They must be taught that they do not save themselves but the way to do that is not to teach them that obedience is in no way related to that salvation. They most certainly do have to obey him!
Christ does not deny that the man can inherit life with God through obedience to the Torah he insists that loving obedience that accords with the Torah is the way to life (10:28, note also 10:37b).
Had the man said, "Eternal life is a gift of God and I need not do anything to inherit it true or false?" Christ would have said it was false. Had the man come saying, "I know I have to 'do enough' to make God gracious toward me and to inherit eternal life and I'm wondering what that involves?" Christ might well have taken the time to instruct him that all the obedience in the world would still leave him an unprofitable servant and in need of grace to cover his sins.
When a rich young man came asking what he had to do to get eternal life, the Christ said (Matthew 19:17), "...if you want to enter life, obey the commandments." We can speak all the truth we wish about salvation and life rising out of the sheer grace of God but we mustn't speak as if Jesus himself were ignorant of the truth we know. All the teaching of grace and God's redemptive work in Christ changes nothing of what Christ said about obeying the commandments if you want to enter life. If this young man is excluded from eternal life it is because he will not follow the Torah.
I've been assured more than once down the years that Christ was simply going along with the young man's legalism for a while in order to convict him from another angle. The story was that Christ was thinking something like, "This young man thinks he merits life by good works. The truth is, it's impossible to enter life by keeping the commandments, but I'm going to speak as if it's possible." At which point he says, "...if you want to enter life, obey the commandments."
But all of this is needless conjecture generated by certain theological perspectives. Talk about "doing enough" to have life or "earning" life is what we bring to the text; it doesn't appear to be in it. Jesus Christ believed that in the absence of obedience to God there could be no life. Nobody knew better than he that humans had life with God because of the sheer grace and generosity of the holy Father. Nevertheless, he still insists that this young man keep the Torah. "...if you want to enter life, obey the commandments." (Compare Matthew 23:2.)
But that business about "keeping the Torah" if you want life is what unsettles us. It keeps jarring us with the ring of "legalism". Well, maybe we need to allow the scriptures to shape our theology rather than have our theology to shape the biblical witness. I think I recognize that there will always be something circular about our understanding of scripture; it's nevertheless true that by God grace we need to keep our reasons in line with the obvious import of a mass of texts. A major contributor to our unease, I suspect, arises because we have misread Paul for a very long time. (More about that later.)
Briefly, then, how does the Torah fit in with the realignment of our souls with God? The Torah as we find it in the scriptures and not as some abstraction, ripped away from its biblical soil, rises out of God's saving grace; and is God's saving grace expressed in Torah form. The initial moment of rescue is not the end of the matter; it is only the beginning point of a relationship which is saving in nature. That relationship requires a heart that is reidentified with (the image of) God and that means it is a heart that pays homage to God's holiness and righteousness as reflected in the Torah.
To offset what is a plain insistence on human submission to God some make it all a matter of "trust" with obedience following when you already have life through trust. Not only is "trust" watered down to a mental concept, a theological way of seeing salvation, this approach ignores the mass of scriptures that explicitly use the word "obedience" (and synonyms) when speaking of human response to God's gracious and free gift of eternal life.
Not only is such a view of "trust" foreign to scripture (see Hebrews 11 as one long illustration of what trust entails), we New Testament people talk about "trust" as if originated in the New Testament. Just take a look at a concordance and see how unfounded this is. And see how the notion of trust occurs in critically important texts like Genesis 15:6; Isaiah 7:9; 8:17; 28:16.
Finally, obedience is not only "unto" life, it isn't only in response to life, it is life. Life is living in loyal love toward God and that's where the Torah comes in.
Notes
Expository Lectures on the Corinthians, Henry S. King & Co., London, 1876, page 156
I'm not suggesting here that obedience to moral law is a mechanical reproduction of some abstract moral concepts. Nor do I wish to suggest that "moral law" is some eternal, self-existing, independent-of-God, reality. God is the source and shape of all that we call morally grand. Without him it doesn't exist.
Chesterton: First published in 1911, published in 1950 by Penguin Books, Middlesex, England, pages 24-25
See R.W.L. Moberly's brief but really helpful discussion on "faith" in The Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, Volume 1:427-433, Paternoster Press, United Kingdom, 1997.
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