A lecture from my Christianity and Tyranny class

Here's an example of what I'm doing in my "Christianity and Tyranny" class, in case it interests anyone. Comments welcome. J H-W

The Old Testament, Jesus, and Moral Reasoning

I. The Bible as Repository of Divine Precepts

Some hold that the Bible should be approached as containing a series of absolute laws that can straightforwardly settle what to do in many situations.

1. The Bible says not to commit adultery (Exodus 20:14)
2. The Bible is the word of God.
3. One ought to obey the word of God.
So, 4. One must not commit adultery.

There are two problems with this view of moral reasoning.

1. Unless this is supplemented with something else, it leaves a great deal underdetermined. Specifically, it leaves undetermined what counts as ‘adultery.’ Recall that polygamy was widely held to be permissible in ancient Israel. Yet, for most of us, it would count as adulterous.

One might think this problem could be fixed with a direct specification of what counts as marriage, and what things would count as transgressing marriage, but this proves not only difficult to do, but probably impossible.

I will argue below that this is one reason Jesus rejects this mode of moral reasoning.

2. Surveying the body of laws in the Old Testament, there are laws that presently seem to us important and laws that don’t, and even laws that strike us as repugnant. Yet, if we are really committed to premises (2) and (3) above, then there seems to be no grounds for making a distinction among them and refusing to act on some of them. There is some temptation to look to Jesus for help here, but Jesus did not revise the text of the Old Testament, and he even says, “I did not come to abolish the law, but to complete” (Mat. 5:17)

This leads us to a dilemma: either we accept that we ought (for example) to give rebellious children the death penalty (Deut. 21:18-21) or we reject the Bible as the word of God. There is, on this view of the law, no middle ground for picking and choosing which laws we want. But I suggest that it is the model of reasoning above that leads to this dilemma, and we ought to reject it, and, indeed I think Jesus is teaching us a different way of looking at the law.

II. The Bible as Source of Moral Exemplars

Instead of looking at the Bible as a source of moral precepts, we might look at the Bible as providing us with moral exemplars. In fact, I think it provides us with examples of good AND bad or misguided action. Obviously we are not supposed to imitate Adam and Eve as they take the fruit from the tree of knowledge. But we do see ourselves in them, we reflect on temptation and how hard it is to be obedient to God. We are to feel sympathy with them, and to follow the story that is unleashed by the fact that humans have this (constant?) possibility of temptation away from their duties. This is what good literature does: it represents us to ourselves realistically; it picks out stories and characters that reveal the human drama poignantly. In the case of the Bible (as with much ancient and medieval literature), the human drama is wrapped up intimately with a divine story. Some of the Bible’s most moving moments occur when people do something misguided out of love for God or their people, as when Jephthah pledges his daughter to God (Judges 11:29), as well as when God reaches out with his mighty hand and leads his people powerfully (Exodus).

What is it to be a moral exemplar? In the case of a positive moral exemplar, someone that is presented as admirable, we not simply to do what they do. Obviously, few of us are in a position literally to lead a nation out of oppression (Moses) or to abandon our families to go about itinerant preaching (Jesus). A moral exemplar is someone we are to see as acting on the right reasons and having the proper motivations; we are to follow those reasons and motivations so far as our lives yield opportunities for doing so. We are to try to follow the shape or the form of the life, though we cannot live the life of Moses or of Jesus. We are to take the opportunities presented to us and to attempt to act (for example) benevolently in them, allowing Jesus to shape our conception of benevolence.

The difficult question is: how does this understanding of the Bible, as a source of moral exemplars rather than moral precepts, affect our understanding of the Law?

I think we are to see Moses as using the law as an instrument to bring the nation of Israel to the love of God. In other words, the law is not the goal; rather, the goal is moral perfection. Jesus can be read as making the claim that people are confusing the law with the moral perfection that it is supposed to help them achieve. The law, which points in the direction of moral perfection, cannot bring about that moral perfection for the reason I pointed to earlier: by itself it is indeterminate. Indeed, Jesus’s claim, I think, is that the law is only properly understood and read by a person who is virtuous, that is, by a person whose soul is shaped in response to God, who strives at every moment to be in accordance with his will. Of course, if that’s the case, then how does the law point to moral perfection in the first place? This paradox (that we need the law to achieve perfection, but need perfection to read the law) is precisely why we need Jesus. The Jesus is to bridge the gap and bring us, through His supernatural intervention, simultaneously to a proper understanding of the law, and to moral perfection.

Jesus speaks of respecting every letter and dot of the law, but then, he himself seems to break the Sabbath law. Matthew here has Jesus claiming priestly dispensation for doing so; Mark has Jesus make a more interesting claim (Mark 3:4), “Is it permitted to do good or to do evil on the Sabbath?” This is supposed to strike us as absurd, I think. It is always permitted to do good and never permitted to do evil; those who read the law as ruling out doing good, or permitting doing an evil, have thoroughly missed the point.