For Parts 1 and 2 of the series on the Law of Moses, go here.

Philo of Alexandria lived to be 75 years old, nearly twice the age of his contemporary Jesus of Nazareth. The Jewish philosopher was born 20 years before him and lived another 17 years after his death (and resurrection). As the famed Nazarene and Peter and Paul were articulating the limits of the Law of Moses in Palestine, Asia Minor, and the northern Mediterranean, Philo took the opposite tact. He was preaching the brilliance of the law to the Greeks, Egyptians, and his fellow Jews in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the ancient world. The law, according to Philo, was a sort of philosophical ideal, a way of living life in alignment with the natural laws God instituted in creation. As the Roman nobility sought to educate their young men with the skills and mindset needed to be good citizens-leaders, a practice they called humanitas and the Greeks called paidia, Philo argued that the Law of Moses not only formed the best kind of citizen, but also helped shape the soul in preparation for immortal life.

Within his lifetime, Philo principally wrote as a defender of Judaism to the Romans (‘we can be peaceable subjects who won’t revolt!’), justifying the Jewish religion to his Hellenistic peers. But Philo’s enmeshing of the law with good citizenship would lay the groundwork for the Law of Moses to become the standard for a secular world. Everyone would be better off, argued Philo, if they just followed the Law of Moses, regardless of their primary religious observance.

Even if the Law of Moses has been “abrogated,” a legal word meaning “repealed” or “done away with,” the thorny question of how the law should be read remains. Since the God who crafted the Law of Moses is the same God responsible for Jesus’s death and resurrection, then the Law of Moses is still “required reading.” This much is rarely up for debate. The matter has been considered settled since the early Christians declared Marcion of Sinope, who argued that the whole of the Old Testament should simply be discarded, a heretic. So how exactly should this required reading be applied? For Philo, it meant following the stipulations of the Law of Moses completely, for its civic and eternal benefits. This is decidedly not the view of Christians, then or now, who continue to insist that the Law of Moses is a burden, but still massively important for understanding the God who dictated them.

The Law Divided

One way Christians throughout history have interpreted the law of Moses is to divide it up into categories of relevance. They recognized that many parts of the Sinai Covenant contained obvious moral truths that aren’t abrogated and wanted to explain why some sections of the law were kept but others set aside.

Augustine of Hippo, for example, had no problem separating out what he called the eternally relevant sections in the Sinai Covenant while labeling the rest as temporal. This even applied to the Ten Commandments. Augustine saw God’s command to keep the sabbath day holy as ultimately ceremonial because it was linked with so many of the other rules that came later on in the Sinai Covenant (for example, the injunction to capital punishment for those gathering firewood on the Sabbath). Instead, Augustine articulated that the living church remains in the six days of creation, and after death, we enter into our sabbath rest with God. The sabbath of the Jews, with its rigorous addendums, was a temporal law. The act of resting, however, was to Augustine an eternal law, because all the saints would eventually rest in heaven.

During the Reformation, defending against charges of lawlessness and moral anarchy for preaching a gospel of grace, some theologians reiterated the medieval distinction between the moral, civil, and ceremonial laws in the Sinai Covenant. These categories are encoded in many of the confessions and formulae of this era, including the Westminster Confession of Faith and the 39 Articles of Religion. Christians, they argued, are to keep those parts of the Sinai Covenant that are moral in nature, but are not obliged to keep the civil and ceremonial elements.

The Law Observed (Some of them, anyway)

 While some Christians divvy up the Law of Moses to explain why they shouldn’t be observed, others have selected a handful of stipulations and champion their observance. One example is the great scholastic theologian Thomas Aquinas, who makes the case that the judicial sections of the Law of Moses, the parts that outline civic liability and punishments for crimes, are ultimately defendable through reason alone. (Indeed — many scholars recognize some overlap between the Law of Moses and other ancient law codes, like Hammurabi’s infamous law code that predates the Sinai Covenant). Therefore, because God gives these sections of the law to Israel, disclosing his assent to them, and because they are reasonable political policies outside of Israel, rulers should organize their civic life around the legal principles of the Law of Moses. (Observing the ceremonial and religious parts of the law, he argues, remains a deadly sin).

In the later half of the 20th century, a revival of this thought would be called theonomy. Prominent reformed voices like R.J. Rushdooney and other Christian Reconstructionists would articulate the same idea as Aquinas, including the commandments regarding capital punishment, though the movement gained more critics than advocates. Some elements of this thought are present in current conversations around Christian Nationalism, though that movement hasn’t coalesced enough into a proper school of thought to ascribe to it any official position.

Other Christian groups have elevated specific expressions of the Law of Moses to prominence, declaring them to be important enough to be required for salvation. Among the most famous are the Seventh Day Adventists, whose resolute commitment to rest and worship on Saturdays is an expression of the sabbath commandment and the commands that are related to it. The original Seventh Day Adventists also kept kosher and observed the law’s prescribed holidays, such as Yom Kippur. One imagines St. Augustine would not approve. One important figure from this era was Herbert Armstrong, who started a radio ministry in 1933 that focused on a mix of end times prophecy and a return to Sinai observance of food laws, holidays, sabbath. A modern expression of this might be the Hebrew Roots movement, which boasts hundreds of thousands of adherents to the holidays, diet laws, and sabbath routines of the Law of Sinai, but isn’t connected to any formal Christian tradition.

While many later 1960’s and 70’s movements like Jews for Jesus find the practice of observing parts of the law to be helpful, most don’t believe they are essential for the proper worship of God. Those that do articulate a strict return to Sinai observance, however, trend toward other Christian heresies as well. The first fathers of the Seventh Day Adventists, Armstrong, and some practitioners of the modern-day Hebrew Roots movement have, for example, questioned or denied the historic orthodox understanding of the Trinity. The theonomy movement was so soundly discredited in the Reformed tradition by the exploration of scripture that the movement has lost most of its steam.

The Undivided Law

At the risk of critiquing some of the greatest minds in the church, dividing up the law into different categories has significant drawbacks.

First, the Jewish practitioners of the law (or God, for that matter) did not divide up the moral, civil, and ceremonial aspects of the Law of Moses. Take, for example, the tragic tale of Uzzah, who was struck dead for touching the arc of the covenant when it was about to tip off of an ox drawn wagon. Also: consider Aaron’s two eldest sons, who were killed for goofing off and going “off book” with strange fire while making sacrifices. The people of Israel would not have categorized these as “ceremonial” offenses, but they would also have been moral offenses too. A violation of the Sabbath rules was both moral and ceremonial, as would be taking God’s name in vain. The civil laws all had moral and ceremonial foundations, and the ceremonial laws were acted out in moral dramas and defined civic life. Every law was, ultimately, moral, civil, and ceremonial.

Second, not all laws fit easily into one of those three categories. Take, for example, the mother bird command from Deuteronomy 22:

If you come across a bird’s nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go, so that it may go well with you and you may have a long life.

Some scholars argue that this is a civil law dealing with proper ecology. Eating the mother bird ends egg production, depriving the community of a food source. Other scholars point to another inscrutable law that forbids followers from cooking an animal in the milk of its mother. Perhaps there is something spiritually and ceremonially important about the relationship between mother animals, baby animals, and human appetite? There are many laws like these in the Sinai Covenant that elude easy categorization, but this is only a problem if the laws must be categorized to be followed. For the ancient Israelites, no such categories were needed.

Third, as outlined in the previous post, to uphold only the “moral” law ignores the fact that Jesus and the New Testament writers distinguish between the Sinai Covenant’s moral focus and Jesus’s quest for perfection. If there is a moral law that is higher and more stringent than the law of Moses, then simply following the moral edicts of the law are not enough to make someone a moral person. This is one of the points of emphasis that Jesus makes in John’s gospel. During this last dinner with his friends, Jesus says: “a new command I give to you: love each other as I have loved you.” This is not a moral law that can be discerned from the Law of Moses (which obviously never mentions Jesus as the basis of its ethical injunctions). Instead, Jesus places his own self-emptying sacrifice at the heart of what it means to love. Jesus’s standard exceeds Moses, calling his disciples to a higher moral vision (more on this next week).

How, then, should the Christian read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Sinai Covenant? Next week we’ll look at the positive answer to this question, but this week, let’s answer in the negative. Attempts to divide up the Law of Moses and follow only parts of it will backfire. It goes against the original intent of its stipulations, it isn’t fully clear which commands should and shouldn’t be observed, and Jesus calls his followers to a higher moral standard than the ‘moral’ elements of the Law of Moses outline.

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