{"id":1500,"date":"2020-10-21T11:03:03","date_gmt":"2020-10-21T16:03:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/?p=1500"},"modified":"2020-10-21T11:07:34","modified_gmt":"2020-10-21T16:07:34","slug":"who-can-keep-the-law-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2020\/10\/21\/who-can-keep-the-law-of-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Can Keep the Law of God?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"One of the most impactful translations in the transmission history of the Scriptures has been the translation of the Hebrew ‘Torah’ with the Greek ‘nomos’, the Latin ‘lex’, and finally the English ‘law.’\u00a0 The Hebrew ‘Torah’ means most immediately teaching.\u00a0 It, therefore, characterizes the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures as the teaching of God directed toward humanity through his people Israel.\u00a0 The Greek term chosen to translate it, ‘nomos’, describes an entire way of life.\u00a0 It includes the laws of a community or culture but also mores, folkways, traditions, and countless other elements of life that describe how that community or civilization conducts itself and lives in the world.\u00a0 The Latin translation of the Scriptures conducted systematically by St. Jerome unintentionally began a slow drift in the understanding of Torah in Western theology.\u00a0 This begins with the Latin language itself, which was already a language soaked in forensic (legal) language as the administrative language of the Roman state.\u00a0 St. Jerome chose the word ‘lex’ to translate ‘nomos’, which in the fourth century and for many centuries after was a perfectly adequate translation, though terminological drift gradually eroded its referent beyond civil and criminal law.\u00a0 Even the English word ‘law’ originally had a wider frame of reference than it does it typical modern usage.<\/p>\n

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy contain a variety of types of material.\u00a0 Genesis is primarily made up of narratives, as is the first portion of Exodus.\u00a0 The second portion of Exodus and Leviticus are primarily made up of ritual and moral instruction mingled together.\u00a0 Numbers contains both narrative stories and a wealth of genealogical material.\u00a0 Deuteronomy is essentially Moses’ final homily to the people of Israel before they enter the land and a ritual reenactment of the covenant-making in Exodus.\u00a0 It can readily be seen how all of this material can fall under the category of ‘teaching’.\u00a0 It is less clear how all of this material can be seen as ‘law’.\u00a0 When, for example, St. Paul was seen in Western translations talking about ‘the law’ and keeping it, conceptual drift took place so that rather than, as was originally the case, the apostle discussing the first five books of the Scriptures, he was seen to be discussing only the portions of those texts which could be seen to consist of commandments or ‘laws.’<\/p>\n

In the fourth and fifth centuries, Rabbinic Judaism formed following its repudiation of the elements of Second Temple tradition that constitute Christianity.\u00a0 The removal of the temple, priesthood, and sacrifice resulting from that repudiation required a certain partitioning of the Torah and its commandments.\u00a0 Rabbinic Judaism could no longer keep commandments surrounding the Jerusalem sanctuary, the sacrificial system, and the like.\u00a0 Commandments with a broadly applicable moral sense, or which could be analogically interpreted as having that sense, therefore became the sole focus.\u00a0 A constant pitfall of Western Christian theology has been the presumption by theologians in various times and places that the Orthodox Rabbis of their time and place are identical in belief and practice with the Judean people of the first century AD.\u00a0 This distinction thereby found its way into Western Christian theology in the centuries surrounding the Protestant Reformation, such that the ‘law’ was now seen to consist purely of commandments and those commandments were divided into ceremonial, civil, and moral realms.\u00a0 This distinction, of course, is not found in the Torah itself.\u00a0 Isolating these three elements requires, in many cases, splitting one verse from the verse before it and the verse after it.\u00a0 Nothing in the text implies any change of subject, application, sphere, or applicability.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the same period in Western theology, the development of atonement doctrine takes place.\u00a0 Through the contributions of Lombard and Anselm, chiefly, atonement conceived of as Christ satisfying divine justice over sin came to predominance.\u00a0 Rather than human and spiritual evil presenting obstacles to God’s original plan of salvation for humanity which God then acts in Christ to overcome, the obstacle to salvation is moved to be something within God himself, usually the “divine attribute” of justice.\u00a0 This, in turn, distorts the entire way that salvation “works.”\u00a0 Because universalism had been firmly condemned as heresy, there needed to be an intermediate substance that conveys the benefit of Christ’s atonement to some people and not others.\u00a0 This was conceived of as ‘grace’ or ‘merit’ though there is a great conceptual overlap in the way these terms were classically used in Western thought. Christ’s life and death are meritorious. That merit earned by Christ was then thought to be given to the faithful and not the faithless.\u00a0 Merit requires a standard of judgment.\u00a0 For actions to be worthy of credit or demerit, they must be compared to some standard.\u00a0 Once the Torah had been reduced to a series of moral commandments, that list of moral rules could be used to fulfill that purpose.<\/p>\n

\n

Within the medieval Roman system, merit was understood to be graciously infused into the faithful through faithfulness as well as good deeds (prayers, almsgiving, pilgrimage, etc.). This merit countered demerit reckoned based on human sin. The Protestant Reformers did not object to the presuppositions already enumerated but only to the proposed mode of reception of the merits of Christ.\u00a0 The Reformers argued, rather, that Christ’s merit was imputed to every believer wholesale at the moment of faith.\u00a0 It was still, for them, merit that Christ earned through law-keeping.\u00a0 Not only did Protestantism not question the basic Western presuppositions, they took these conceptions several steps further in the form of penal substitutionary atonement, arguing that Christ didn’t only satisfy God’s justice in general, but actually took the punishment for specific sins of specific people.<\/p>\n

At the foundation of the Western soteriological edifice, then, is the idea that the keeping of this boiled down kernel of the Torah in moral obedience grants eternal life, that it is not possible for any human person to do it, and that Christ has lived this life of moral obedience, thereby earning eternal life for human persons who receive it by diverse means.\u00a0 The problem is that these ideas are not only not to be found in Scripture, but actually contradict the Scriptures at several points.\u00a0 While the historical road of Western theology that has brought it to its present place and condition can be clearly seen, that road has taken the thought of Western Christians afield of the teaching of the apostles in general and St. Paul in particular.\u00a0 This presents a certain irony, as the recovery of St. Paul, in particular, was one of the chief aims of the discussions which produced these theological distortions.<\/p>\n

It must first be noted that the Scriptures themselves state that several human persons kept the whole Torah perfectly.\u00a0 As already mentioned, there is no basis within the text of the Torah for dividing out certain portions as opposed to others as more or less important or applicable.\u00a0 Therefore, when the Scriptures describe someone as having kept the commandments of the Torah, it is referring to the whole Torah, the first five books of the Scriptures.\u00a0 When St. Paul refers to the ‘nomos’, he likewise refers to the entirety of these texts, not only certain moral commandments that would later be extracted.\u00a0 A prominent Old Testament example is King David, who is said to have walked in obedience to God and done what is right in his eyes by keeping his decrees and commands (1 Kgs\/3 Kgdms 11:38).\u00a0 This is stated in the comparative to Jeroboam, son of Nebat, who would live a life of sin and rebellion.\u00a0 In the New Testament, St. Paul himself says that he was “blameless according to the Torah,” and this while murdering early Christians (Phil 3:6).\u00a0 In another place, St. Paul even implies that there were Gentiles, those of the nations outside Israel who had not received the Torah, but who had done the righteous deeds required by the Torah nonetheless, thereby serving as their own instructors (Rom 2:14).<\/p>\n

Anyone even passingly familiar with the life of David the Prophet and King, however, knows that he didn’t live a life of sinless perfection.\u00a0 Likewise, St. Paul speaks of his blamelessness according to Torah immediately after talking about persecuting the Church of Christ.\u00a0 Again, it is doubtful that St. Paul is really speaking in his epistle to the Romans about a group of pagans who never sinned.\u00a0 This is a statement of those who have kept the whole Torah, not those who never violated certain subsections.\u00a0 When an Israelite sinned, repented of that sin, offered the required sin offering, and then participated in the annual Day of Atonement, he had kept the Torah.\u00a0 The worship of Israel including the sacrificial system was not some sort of add-on or appendix to the “law” because God knew people couldn’t follow it.\u00a0 Rather, the worship commanded by the Torah is the core of the Torah.\u00a0 All of the other commandments of the Torah, governing moral life, the cleansing of mildew, and agricultural practices are all based around the establishment and maintenance of the purity and holiness necessary for Yahweh the God of Israel to remain present with his people for worship.\u00a0 The Torah does not “include” a system for managing the sins of the people, the Torah is a system for managing the sins<\/a> of the people to allow for the transformative worship of the true God.\u00a0 Christ, in fulfilling perfectly the Torah, not only kept the so-called “moral law” but all of the Torah, including the sacrificial worship of the temple and the feasts despite not having sins of which to repent.\u00a0 Christ was not baptized for the remission of his non-existent sins, but to fulfill all righteousness (Matt 3:15).<\/p>\n

This understanding from Scripture is problematic from the perspective of the other Western presuppositions described above because it would imply that these persons “earned” eternal life through the Torah apart from Christ.\u00a0 But the misunderstanding of the law is not the only faulty presupposition.\u00a0 Even more major is the unbiblical idea that the keeping of the Torah (or any portion of it) is meritorious and earns eternal life.\u00a0 The third chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians is a frontal assault on this entire idea.\u00a0 The promise of theosis, of eternal divine life, is a promise which was made to Abraham<\/a> based on Abraham’s faithfulness, his walking before God in righteousness (Gal 3:6-8).\u00a0 The Torah is not a long list of added conditions interpolated into the covenant with Abraham (v. 15-18).\u00a0 The Torah, says St. Paul, never had anything to do with eternal life and the kingdom of God.\u00a0 It has another purpose, as described above.\u00a0 But in the midst of the chapter, St. Paul puts a very fine point on it.\u00a0 “If a law had been given which could give life, then righteousness would be by the law” (v. 21).\u00a0 St. Paul’s conditional statement presents a counter-factual.\u00a0 The Torah which was given can not give life.\u00a0 The apostle does not say that it can, but that man isn’t up to the task.\u00a0 He doesn’t say that it can, but only through Christ keeping it in our stead.\u00a0 He says it cannot.\u00a0 Rather, the promises given to Abraham of eternal divine life are inherited by Christ and those baptized into Christ become co-heirs of that salvation (v. 27-29).<\/p>\n

God created humanity to share his life with human persons.\u00a0 This would happen in the fullness of time when the Son would become incarnate uniting human nature to the divine nature in his person.\u00a0 The rebellion of hostile spiritual powers, a rebellion in which humanity joined and participated as described in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, placed obstacles between humanity and the receipt of God’s promises, though those promises were reiterated to Abraham following humanity’s falls.\u00a0 Christ, therefore, also defeats these enemies and removes these obstacles.\u00a0 Even those who have kept the whole Torah still die.\u00a0 Christ has defeated death and saved them from it.\u00a0 Even those who have kept the Torah still live in a world subjected to the power and corruption of sin, which power Christ has destroyed and which corruption has been cleansed by Christ’s blood.\u00a0 Even those who have kept the whole Torah still lived in a world dominated by hostile spiritual powers, powers and principalities in the heavenly places given dominion over humans through their sin.\u00a0 Christ has judged and defeated them, taking all power and authority in heaven and on earth for himself (Matt 28:18).\u00a0 On one hand, not only those who have kept the whole Torah, but even those who have never sinned, such as the Theotokos and St. John the Forerunner, are in need of this salvation.\u00a0 God does not save humanity from himself or one of his attributes.\u00a0 He saves humanity from itself and the consequences of its sinful rebellion.\u00a0 On the other hand, while only those who are in Christ share in his eternal divine life, the results of these victories over sin, death, and the fallen powers are experienced by all of humanity, such that St. Paul can say that “Christ is the savior of all men, especially those who believe” (1 Tim 4:10).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most impactful translations in the transmission history of the Scriptures has been the translation of the Hebrew ‘Torah’ with the Greek ‘nomos’, the Latin ‘lex’, and finally the English ‘law.’\u00a0 The Hebrew ‘Torah’ means most immediately teaching.\u00a0 It, therefore, characterizes the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures as the teaching of God directed toward humanity through his people Israel.\u00a0 The Greek term chosen to translate it, ‘nomos’, describes an entire way of life.\u00a0 It includes the laws of a community or culture but also mores, folkways, traditions, and countless other elements of life that describe how that community or civilization conducts itself and lives in the world.\u00a0 The Latin translation of the Scriptures conducted systematically by\u2026 <\/i> <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"Who Can Keep the Law of God? - The Whole Counsel Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2020\/10\/21\/who-can-keep-the-law-of-god\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Who Can Keep the Law of God? - The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"One of the most impactful translations in the transmission history of the Scriptures has been the translation of the Hebrew ‘Torah’ with the Greek ‘nomos’, the Latin ‘lex’, and finally the English ‘law.’\u00a0 The Hebrew ‘Torah’ means most immediately teaching.\u00a0 It, therefore, characterizes the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures as the teaching of God directed toward humanity through his people Israel.\u00a0 The Greek term chosen to translate it, ‘nomos’, describes an entire way of life.\u00a0 It includes the laws of a community or culture but also mores, folkways, traditions, and countless other elements of life that describe how that community or civilization conducts itself and lives in the world.\u00a0 The Latin translation of the Scriptures conducted systematically by\u2026\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/2020\/10\/21\/who-can-keep-the-law-of-god\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Whole Counsel Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-10-21T16:03:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-10-21T16:07:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2020\/09\/119adf7078462e4e5c52ba761d0b6852.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Fr. 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Stephen De Young","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/54dc899af5499978d3770526996cf817d0a8e3c9e776a06507dd686f6923d420?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/54dc899af5499978d3770526996cf817d0a8e3c9e776a06507dd686f6923d420?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Fr. Stephen De Young"},"description":"The V. Rev. Dr. Stephen De Young is Pastor of Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana. He holds Master's degrees in theology, philosophy, humanities, and social sciences, and a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Amridge University. Fr. Stephen is also the host of the Whole Counsel of God podcast from Ancient Faith and author of four books, the Religion of the Apostles, God is a Man of War, the Whole Counsel of God, Apocrypha, and Saint Paul the Pharisee. He co-hosts the live call-in show and podcast Lord of Spirits with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick.","sameAs":["http:\/\/stgabriellafayette.org"],"url":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/author\/frstevedeyoung\/"}]}},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1500"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1526,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1500\/revisions\/1526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ancientfaith.com\/wholecounsel\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}