The Old Testament is filled with rules and regulations – reams of them scattered through Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, and then fleshed out further in Deuteronomy. And Jesus said that He didn’t come to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them.
But not so fast. Even though Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that nothing would be struck from the the law until “all was accomplished,” elsewhere, He said the law and the prophets were proclaimed – past tense – until John, and since then the Gospel has been proclaimed, and everyone’s trying to get in.
What’s this mean? And how do we fit this in with the fact that Jesus reinterpreted the law all the time? The key comes from this comment by the Apostle Paul: “All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.”
This phrase is part of a longer explanation by Paul of principles that Jesus demonstrates by example. Both Paul’s arguments in Corinthians, and Jesus’s frequent rebuttals of the Pharisees, both reject strict applications of the law in favor of appeals to focus on what’s good for everyone involved.
I’ve argued before that Jesus’s approach to the law is surprisingly modern and scientific, focusing not on whether someone is strictly obedient to the letter of the law but instead on what various acts do to people. Food passes through the body, and so doesn’t make us unclean; but bad thoughts do.
Paul’s approach is similar, suggesting that believers resolve disputes not with lawsuits but by arbitration by fellow Christians, and that people who are hurting themselves or others with greed, theft, idolatry, lust, or betrayal are committing sins against their own bodies, which should be sanctified for God.
While both Paul and Jesus condemn various behaviors, we shouldn’t take those as an exhaustive list. That’s the whole point of the passages: just because something isn’t listed on that list doesn’t make it right, and conversely, treating Paul or Jesus’s examples as Pharisaical commands misses the point.
In Catholic theology, this kind of thinking is called having a “scrupulous conscience” – taking the law as a very literal set of rules which we should follow to the letter, like a roleplayer in a D&D game trying to argue with the gamemaster about whether a given spell would or would not slay a crystal dragon.
But what’s printed in the rules of D&D – no matter how specific, regardless of edition – takes second place to what the gamemaster wants to run in his campaign. Similarly, Jesus and Paul want us to develop our own moral imagination, so we can decide, as Jesus did, that it’s okay to rescue an ox on the Sabbath.
To unpack this, the laws of the Old Testament are ceremonial, civil and moral. Ceremonial law had to do with Israel’s worship, which Christians think pointed ahead to Jesus’s coming, became obsolete with his Resurrection, and were arguably – though disputedly – set aside in the Incident at Antioch.
The civil laws of the Old Testament, like the declaration of a jubilee year or the rules for managing slaves, had to do with a society which is very different from the one we have today, and even though they’re described as being eternal laws, few Christians think we should apply them all strictly.
Moral laws, like the Ten Commandments and the Great Commandment (which is normally associated with Jesus, but is also present in the Old Testament) retain their force. Not coveting, lying, cheating, stealing, or murdering remain as problematic for us today as they were back in the day.
Jesus’s ministry, especially the Sermons of the Mount and the Plain, both adds to and takes away from our understanding of these Old Testament laws. He reinforces some old laws, reinterprets laws like divorce, and provides new examples that set a higher standard.
And yet, He still says the law wasn’t going to pass away until everything is fulfilled – a fulfillment which many people take to mean His Resurrection. But I think there’s more to it than that. Jesus was God, and taught with authority, so for him to emphasize the law, even as he went beyond it, meant something.
Paul again provides us the key. Perhaps it is true that all things are lawful now, but not everything’s good for us. And on the principle that things are not good because the law says so, but that the law says so because things are good for us – we should study the law and use it to guide our understanding.
Yes, we no longer celebrate a jubilee year. Yes, the Jewish dietary restrictions are no longer relevant. Yes, the Biblical attitude to homosexuality is grounded in the prejudices of the cultures at the time, and shows neither a correct understanding of human sexuality nor a Christian respect for individual persons.
But it’s worth understanding why these were laws in the first place. It’s worthwhile to consider canceling debts. It’s worthwhile to consider whether our diets are healthy. It’s worthwhile to consider our expression of our sexuality and ask whether it is building up our tearing down our lives and the lives of our partners.
All things may be lawful in the Christian faith if the most important point of Christianity is believing in Jesus and choosing to follow Him – but that can be a difficult path, so it’s worth reviewing our lives and asking whether we’re making it easy to follow Him, or throwing stumbling blocks down for ourselves.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the Apostle Paul, interpolated from three early paintings and the only physical description of him that I know of: of middling size, with scanty hair, large eyes, a long nose, and eyebrows that met.
