IS THE DECALOGUE A LAW FOR CHRISTIANS?
By Leonard Bacon
I FIND, of late, among divines of good repute for learning and soundness in the faith, a new way—or what seems to me a new way—of talking about the Old Testament, and especially about the Decalogue. Perhaps I misunderstand the talk, but if I do there is some danger that others may misunderstand it also, and be led astray. It seems to be implied that those ancient Scriptures, though "given by inspiration of God," and authoritative before the coming of Christ, are now obsolete; and that no precept or principle which they hold forth is to be regarded as a rule of duty for Christians, unless it is distinctly reaffirmed by Christ or his apostles. The opinion which I have in view is something like this: Law characterizes the Old Testament; but the New Testament is love and liberty. The one is mandatory and condemnatory, the other is evangelical. The Old Testament prohibits and restrains, it has to do with overt actions, its tone is, Thou shalt not; while the New Testament is spirit and life, requiring positive love to God and to man, and leaving every disciple to work out, by his own judgment under divine guidance, all the details of duty. The Old Testament is Shemitic, national, temporary; while the New Testament is cosmopolitan and enduring—a revelation for the human race as needing to be redeemed. I have not intentionally exaggerated the opinion which I have been trying to represent; though, for the sake of making my argument impersonal, I have abstained from attempting to quote anybody's language. Be it that nobody has expressed, be it that nobody holds exactly the opinion which I have stated, I may nevertheless express my own views of the Old Testament by setting them in contrast with views which seem to be coming into vogue, and against which I desire to protest. I have certain things to say concerning one distinctive and pre-eminent feature of the Old Testament religion; namely, the ten commandments; and I begin with a fundamental proposition. 1. The Old Testament Scriptures are the record of a revelation from God to men. I raise no question here concerning the nature or the extent of the inspiration which the New Testament ascribes to the Old. I do not undertake to whether certain narratives in those ancient books are to be regarded as history, or as apologue and parable. Take even the lowest ground consistent with our Lord's affirmation that "salvation is of the Jews," or with the common belief of Christians through all the centuries that the sacred books of the Israelitish nation are better and richer than the Vedas, or the Zendavesta—take the lowest ground consistent with the reverent esteem in which the church of Christ has always held these Scriptures—and my proposition will stand: The Old Testament is, in some honest meaning of words, the record of a revelation from God to men. Not to the Jews only, or the Hebrew tribes, but to all to whom it comes, it reveals God as a creative intelligence, and will. Not for one nation only, but for all nations, it recognizes and illuminates the fact of sin, and tells how sin comes into the world. Not for the Israelite only, but for Gentiles also—for the Greek, the German, the Chinese, the Zulu—it reveals God's hatred of sin, and his persistent designs of mercy to mankind. In Eden, in the story of the deluge, in the story of the fire that fell on Sodom, in the story of Abraham, in the story of Egypt, and of Israel's deliverance, there is a revelation of God not for Shemitic people only in the dawn of history, but for all people in all ages. The revelation is for us in the broad light of this nineteenth century, as well as for those who lived and died in the centuries before Christ's coming. 2. One characteristic of the Old Testament revelation is that it is Law, a revelation of duty. Long ago it was said by a Jewish defender of Moses against a scoffing Gentile (I quote from memory), "Other lawgivers have represented religion as one of the virtues; our lawgiver has taught us to include all virtue in religion." The revelation given to the chosen people was designed not merely to distinguish and separate them from all other people, but also to make them morally better than other nations. While it gave them the grand conception of a holy God, loving all that is right, and hating all evil, it was designed also to make them morally intelligent, discerning between the evil and the good. The Israelite "made his boast in the law;" God had given him a law to be obeyed, and obedience to that law was his religion. He could sing, "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul, . . . the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes." To him the ecstasy of devout affection was: "Oh, how love I thy law!" Doubtless there is an evangelical element in that ancient revelation—many an intimation of divine forgiveness—many a prelusive beam of the light which streams from the cross of Christ, but law preparatory to the Gospel is distinctive of the Old Testament, even as Gospel, God reconciling the world to himself, is distinctive of the New Testament. 3. Recognizing the Old Testament, then, as containing a revelation from God to men, and as having for its distinctive character the revelation of a Divine law, I recognize at the same time another fact equally obvious. That Hebrew Bible contains also a law, or rather an extended system of laws, which was never designed to be of universal obligation. Without detracting at all from the veneration due to those ancient Scriptures, we may freely admit that the civil laws given to that nation of which Moses was the divinely commissioned legislator, as well as the laws which established and guarded the peculiar system of national worship, were never designed to have the authority of law over any other than that peculiar people. Great mistakes have been made by attempting to interpret and enforce those laws as a rule of duty for all mankind. Looking then for the universal and the permanent in what we may distinguish as the pre-Christian revelation, I find the story of Sinai, and of the ten commandments. Standing in imagination before the awful Mount, I ask myself, is this a revelation of God for man through all the ages? Does the voice out of the thick darkness proclaim what God requires of men as human, and what all men ought therefore to know and obey? Is there any such opposition between the New Testament and the Old, that we are required or even permitted to regard these commandments as having no authority over us? Observe the place which the Decalogue holds in the pre-Christian religion, and judge whether it is not fundamental also to Christianity. There is no Gospel which does not pre-suppose a broken law; and these ten commandments, "summing up in their rugged sententiousness all human duty, and compelling every conscience to recognize them in their spirit and essence as the universal and immutable law of God," are what the distinctively Christian revelation pre-supposes. I may be permitted to repeat here what I said some years ago in another connection. "All else in the Mosaic legislation, whether civil or ritual, is auxiliary to the fundamental and central law of those ten commandments. Those 'ten words' were the great 'testimony' which God gave to his own Israel; the tablets of granite from Sinai, on which they were graven for perpetual remembrance, were the 'tables of testimony,' the ark, or coffer, in which the records, not of perishable papyrus from Egypt, but of enduring rock, were laid up as the most precious and venerable of national muniments, was 'the ark of the testimony.' It was also 'the ark of the covenant;' for 'the tables of the law were the tables of the covenant,' and 'the testimony'—the ten awful words—was itself the covenant,' . . . The one design running through every precept, and every institution of the Mosaic system, is, that the chosen people, the kingdom of priests unto God, may be guarded against corrupting and debasing influences; may feel on every side, and in every movement the pressure of God's authority, and may be trained by habits of personal purity, and by all the significant ritual of the national worship, into obedience to the immutable and universal duties of which the ten commandments are the revelation."—[Boston Lectures, 1871, pp. 178, 179. If, then, there is anything permanent and universal in the Old Testament—anything which Christianity assumes and incorporates into itself—it is the law of God in the Decalogue. Our Lord himself said to an inquirer, "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments;" and, to show that he meant the ten commandments, he recited five of them. So the apostle Paul, writing to Gentile Christians, who had been before their conversion, "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise"—writing expressly to assure them that Christ had "broken down the middle wall of partition" between Jew and Gentile, and had "abolished the law of commandments contained in ordinances"—refers them to the ten commandments by citing one of them as "the first commandment with promise." Conversion to Christ from heathenism was conversion to the Decalogue. "Christian consciousness," through all the centuries, venerates the Decalogue, incorporates it into catechisms and liturgies, inscribes it on tablets in places of worship, and prays in solemn litanies for grace to keep each and every one of these commandments. If anything in the Old Testament is a divine proclamation to all mankind, it is that "Law of the Lord" which was proclaimed from Sinai. Yet we are assured that one of the ten commandments was nothing more than the enactment of a statute for one nation, and is of no force under the Gospel. Is it so?—Rev. Leonard Bacon, D. D., in Christian Union.