âBecause of Christ, the ceremonial law is repealed,â Tim Keller writes â a sentence that would have baffled Moses, Isaiah, Paul, Luke, and Jesus of Nazareth.
This idea of a distinction between âceremonial lawâ and âmoral lawâ isnât something any of those biblical figures or biblical authors would have recognized. Itâs not a distinction that can be found in the Bible, only one that can be imposed on it.
Itâs folklore, not theology. And itâs dangerous folklore, at that â one that correlates with and contributes to all kinds of supercessionist business that, in turn, correlates with and contributes to our rather nasty history of Christian anti-Semitism.
And that, as we discussed here recently, is tangled up with what Willie James Jennings calls âGentile forgetfulnessâ â a major reason why, as he says, ârace has a Christian architecture, and Christianity in the West has a racial architecture.â
(A data point in support of Jenningsâ argument: Kellerâs post is on the âGospel Coalitionâ site â a group that provides an eager platform for white supremacist âtheologianâ Douglas Wilson. OK, then.)
Kellerâs post invokes two-out-of-three of the folkloric responses to the âGod hates shrimpâ objection that we discussed here last fall. Hereâs what I wrote then about this âceremonial lawâ business:
The problem is that this distinction between ceremonial and moral law in Leviticus isnât actually a thing. It doesnât come from Leviticus, but can only be retroactively imposed back onto it. And the text itself doesnât welcome such an imposition.
The people who first wrote and compiled and read the Hebrew scriptures didnât make such a distinction. Nor did first-century Jews, such as Jesus and Paul. The categories of âcleanâ and âuncleanâ in the Hebrew scriptures donât really allow for this distinction either. It wonât let us treat those categories as merely âceremonialâ and somehow divorced from the matter of morality.
This problem becomes more acute when we actually try to apply this anachronistic distinction. The first step is, of course, to classify all the dietary stuff as âceremonialâ law and all the sex stuff as âmoralâ law. (Thus, shrimp is OK, but butt-secks is still bad.) But then it turns out we donât want to keep all of the sex stuff, just some of it. So we have to sift through the sex bits, reclassifying the laws involving menstruation as âceremonialâ while still keeping many of the adjoining sex laws as moral.
It gets complicated. One has to read the Hebrew scriptures with a bunch of different-colored highlighters in hand â pink for non-binding âceremonialâ laws that can be ignored, yellow for âmoralâ laws that we can still condemn others for violating, etc. But how can we know which passages to highlight with which colors? The text itself wasnât written in a way that would suggest â or allow â for such separate categories.
Keller takes another stab at how to make this distinction: âChrist changed how we worship,â he writes, âbut not how we live.â
So, OK, biblical rules for âhow we liveâ are unchanging and binding for all of time. Biblical rules for âhow we worshipâ are simply âceremonialâ and, thus, were ârepealedâ by Christ.
That seems promising â until you start to look at the laws he consigns to the realm of worship rather than âhow we live.â Eating shrimp? Thatâs worship. Menstruation? Worship. Promoting the welfare and prosperity of ethnic outsiders? Worship.
This distinction, as applied, does not seem obviously intuitive. Itâs also just as anachronistic and absent from the text as the folklore about âceremonialâ law. Hereâs Keller again: â The coming of Christ changed how we worship, but not how we live. The moral law outlines Godâs own character â his integrity, love, and faithfulness. And so everything the Old Testament says about loving our neighbor, caring for the poor, generosity with our possessions, social relationships, and commitment to our family is still in force.â
All that stuff â including all the sex stuff, and especially the sex stuff, thatâs the prompt driving Kellerâs post â is âmoral lawâ involving âhow we live,â not âceremonial lawâ involving âhow we worship.â
Contrast that with this passage from Isaiah 1 (the same passage we read Frederick Douglass quoting the other day):
What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.
When you come to appear before me,
who asked this from your hand?
Trample my courts no more;
bringing offerings is futile;
incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and sabbath and calling of convocationâ
I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
Your new moons and your appointed festivals
my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.
That passage â like the parallel rant in Isaiah 58 â isnât asking us to distinguish between worship and morality. Itâs telling us â both begging and warning us â not to distinguish between them. Itâs telling us that how we live is how we worship:
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?⌠If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
This, Isaiah says the Lord God says, is what keeping the Sabbath means. This is worship.
Inconveniently for Keller, this is right there in the âOld Testamentâ â preceding the coming of Christ. That monkey-wrenches the other favorite piece of folklore he repeats in his post: âIf the New Testament has reaffirmed a commandment, then it is still in force for us today.â
That was item No. 3 in our discussion of non-responses to the âGod hates shrimpâ objection. Hereâs a bit more of that discussion:
This principle seems to account for the particular matter of the shrimp/gay disparity, but Iâm afraid it doesnât fit quite so neatly when it comes to many of the other commandments from the Hebrew scriptures that we would need for it to explain away.
Consider, for example, the prohibition against lending at interest and the commandment that all debts be forgiven every seven years. These are explicit, unambiguous commandments in the Hebrew scriptures, both repeated many times over. They are also, inconveniently, both reaffirmed in the New Testament. Jesus himself upped the stakes on these commandments â not only must we not lend at interest, he said, but we must lend without the expectation of repayment. âŚ
The initial promise of this whole approach begins to falter once we recognize that the Sermon on the Mount is part of the New Testament. Thatâs three solid chapters of commandments and teachings that most Christians disregard as thoroughly as the dietary laws of Leviticus. None of what Jesus teaches there about money and possessions shapes our behavior as Christians today. (Even the early churchâs teaching that âsuperfluity is theftâ greatly liberalizes Jesusâ teaching there.) That New Testament passage also gives clear commandments about violence, retaliation, and public prayer that most Christians do not treat as binding. The only part of the Sermon on the Mount that most white evangelicals treat as mandatory is the bit about divorce â so once again, rules for your sex life are binding, rules for my possessions are not.
This whole business about New Testament reaffirmation might be more plausible if it were coming from some Dorothy Day-type who clearly lived and worshiped as though the New Testamentâs Sermon on the Mount were âstill in force for us today.â But, interestingly, those types of Christians donât usually cite this bit of folklore-in-lieu-of-hermeneutic as an explanation for why or how they pick and choose among what parts of the Bible they regard as binding. Theyâre much more likely to say â along with Jesus and Paul â that âlove is the fulfillment of the law.â