In our March issue Dr. Bockmuehl took up the question of whether the Ten Commandments have any bearing on Christian life. He dealt first with the opinion of noted theologians who hold that the Decalogue was strictly for Gods Old Testament people. As evidence against this viewpoint he presented the fact that the Decalogue was given for God's covenant people, which certainly means His church.
Dr. Bockmuehl continues his argument by pointing to the Ten Commandments' relation to natural law and Christian ethics. —Editors.
If, as we have seen, the Decalogue is given particularly to the people of God, what does it say to people in general? We find an answer in Deuteronomy 4:6: "Keep them and do them; for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, 'Surely this great nation is a wise and under standing people' " (R.S.V.). The Decalogue is described as the special property and privilege of Israel, something that they will contribute to the family of nations. It is assessed as being especially wise and worthy of praise by all nations. This verse indicates that these commandments will be considered astonishingly judicious and sensible by every nation; everyone will reckon them to be a standard definition of the good. Throughout history their value has been discovered and rediscovered. Something has been revealed to the people of Israel with which all nations agree. For all people strive after justice, and the Ten Commandments have proved to be an apt definition of it.
The apostle Paul expressed the same insight and experience in a more doctrinal manner: "When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them" (Rom. 2:14, 15, R.S.V.). To all persons the consciousness of good and evil is given so as to make them realize and acknowledge the Ten Commandments as the definition of the good.
Precisely from Romans 2:14, 15, therefore, Luther argued for the validity of the Decalogue for non-Christians as well as for Christians: "For what God has given to the Jews through Moses, He has also written into the hearts of all men: Moses is consonant with nature" (sermon of August 27, 1525, "Instruction on How Christians Are to Apply Moses"). The mute moral consciousness within every person finds its proper expression in (at least) the so-called second tablet of the Mosaic Decalogue.
Romans 2:14,15, thus, is the source of the acceptance within the Christian tradition of the idea of natural law. This concept, central to the exposition of Christian ethics for centuries, has come under strong attack only in the past two generations. Karl Barth's Gospel and Law (1935) is a milestone on the route to the rejection of natural law as a category of ethics. Even in Roman Catholic moral theology, which, unlike Protestant ethics, is built thoroughly on the notion of natural law, the concept is being disputed. But while Catholic theologians are moving away from the concept of natural law, at least partly because of the demand for situation ethics (the very opposite to an eternal, natural law), within Protestant ethics there are traces today of a reconsideration of the concept. It may be recovered as an indispensable ethical category, for there surely must be some basic and indisputable morality consisting of the norms that make possible the conservation of life.
The ecology debate, too, leads us to suspect that there must be certain fundamental rules in our relations with creation. It is this fundamentally life-preserving quality of the Decalogue that links it with natural law. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his Ethics, therefore called the Decalogue the "Law of Life," for "failure to observe the second table [of the Decalogue] destroys life. The task of protecting life will itself lead to observance of the second table [i.e., the commandments which rule inter-human relationships]." —Ethics (Huntington, N.Y.: Fontana, 1964), p. 341. Goodness or righteousness is what is right and fit for creation; the good is what will correspond to the laws in creation and so will preserve and promote life.
The life-sustaining quality of the natural law expressed in the Decalogue brings us full circle, for this is exactly what was said of the Ten Commandments when they were originally revealed: Keep them, so that you may live. The commandments are God's principles for sustaining His creation. With these commandments God articulates the law of life of His creatures. Because they define what will promote life, the commandments are an extraordinary blessing for every living creature. They lay out, as it were, the space in which human life will blossom. What ever action is taken beyond these borders will—sooner or later—destroy life.
So the Sabbath commandment, for instance, is a great gift: You may rest on the seventh day. "Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy" is at the same time liberation from the burden of the working day and freedom from urge and anxiety. After liberation from the cease less toil in Egypt, after the liberation from foreign rule, Israel (and we all) shall not again fall prey to our own or others' wrong and destructive desires and ambitions.
Every other commandment similarly represents liberation from a dangerous and destructive temptation: In each instance I learn that I no longer need to search for the truth and fulfillment of my life. The fullness of life will certainly not be found in theft or with the wife or husband of someone else.
The Ten Commandments, then, are to the field of ethics what an area code is to telephoning: They spare us the trouble and anguish of experimenting endlessly among the whole "keyboard" of human possibilities, most of which do not promote life and community at all.
Sociologists seem to confirm the "wisdom" (Deut. 4:6) of the pre-or advance-ordering of morality by God. Individuals would be overwhelmed by the effort to decide their actions each time from scratch, from the full range of what is conceivable or physically possible. The field or "area code" defined by the commandments is the place where life will prosper. That is why he who has received the commandments can be so joyful about them (Psalm 119), why he can sing, "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures" (Ps. 23:2).
What, after all, is the aim of those who declare the Decalogue out-of-date? Do they wish to give freedom to gossip and theft? Do they expect by this to serve progress and further life? Is adultery ever good? For whom? Also for the deceived party? Of course those who consider the Decalogue out-of-date do not wish to promote evil. But where the Decalogue is not, there also the other good things bestowed by God are not. This goes both for creation and for redemption, and is true for all people—not just for Christians or Jews. This is how Luther is said to have put it: "He who breaks one of the commandments is like a man who bows too far out of a fourth-floor window: He'll fall down and surely break his neck, be he Turk, Jew, Gentile, or Christian."
For all humankind, then, the commandments are the proper ground where the house must be built and nowhere else. This the Creator has decided. And this lot will prove a sound place. There is no morass beneath it that cannot be fathomed, and no shifting sands, only firm ground and solid rock. A house built on these foundations will weather the crises of history. From other foundations one will have to move again and again, for they will not stand firm.
God's commandments, then, pro mote life. This is what Deuteronomy says and experience confirms. However, we must not think of this truth as an impersonal law that functions independently of God. Rather, we should understand that it is the Lord who makes you live. You cannot grasp life with your own hands; it is in the hands of the living God. Godless, immanent ethical solutions, however well-intentioned, always are prey to the will of humans, which can quickly become evil. Independent of God's commandments, people may—even tomorrow—act and argue quite differently from today.
This means, moreover, that God's commandments must determine what is beneficial. The opinion often heard today that we ought to keep the Decalogue not as commandments from God but as rules pertaining to the benefit of man is already the door to corruption of ethics. It is God's authority that says, "This is good." Human insight in the end will come to the same conclusion, but often, before the final result of an action is evident, great damage is done. Therefore, we must reject the fashion able demand today for an experimental ethics ("inductive approach," as J.A.T. Robinson calls it in Christian Freedom in a Permissive Society [Philadelphia: West minster, 1970], p. 31) that claims the right for everyone to discover his own ethics by trial and error. Against this it has to be remembered that often it is the other person who suffers the damage brought about by my deviation from the Decalogue. Consequently, / may learn nothing, unless the other person, victim of my experiment in ethics, takes revenge. In this way I may come to learn painfully what God's commandment sought to teach me without the rod, namely the contents of the golden rule: "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them" (Matt. 7:12). The Decalogue is nothing other than an exposition of the golden rule. As such, it belongs as much to the town hall as to the pulpit.
The framework of Christian ethics
We have stated before that the Ten Commandments are surpassed by Christian ethics on the road to righteousness. The Ten Commandments are like the guardrails of a road through a swamp or along a precipice. The rail itself is not the aim of the journey. And no one would wish to approach his destination with steering wheel locked, directed only by the painful scraping of the car along the rail. What you need instead is inside control—a steering wheel. The Ten Commandments are standards, but they are not the aim. They are the framework but by no means the realization of God's plan in the world.
God's aim and our calling and destiny is the perfection of man according to the image of Christ. The aim is a kingdom of justice in the world where God's will is being done, for the benefit of His accomplishment of this. But in a given situation, who or what will tell us what is the right thing to do out of a half dozen good and permitted possibilities? If the Decalogue resembles the area code, what, as it were, decides the individual number? Because the Ten Commandments as law only describe the scene of life negatively ("Thou shalt not..."), it still needs to be filled—we must get the particular number elsewhere. Romans 13:10 needs to be understood in this way ("Love is the fulfillment of the law" [N.I.V.]), as does Romans 8:4, which is a fascinating and very comprehensive description of the process of Christian ethics: Christ came "in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit" (N.I.V.).
Here we touch on that large chapter of Christian ethics that goes beyond the mere observance of the commandments. Here, too, it is legitimate to demand a situation ethics, because the Decalogue never will tell you positively what is to be done in a given situation. Indeed, we may constantly expect—from the Holy Spirit—a Christian "new morality," to use the notorious phrase coined by Joseph Fletcher and Bishop J.A.T. Robinson. However, these authors used the demand for ethics relevant to the situation in order to oust the Decalogue from Christian ethics. That is why Robinson in his Honest to God (London: SCM, 1963) argued that nothing was wrong in itself; all depends on the situation; nothing was prescribed except love. The Decalogue was removed from ethics because of its absolute and eternally valid demands. The so-called new morality of the sixties maneuvered itself into an antithesis of law and love that certainly does not represent the spirit and substance or the wording of the New Testament.
The new morality's replacing of the stiff commandments with a flexible ethics of the situation is a reaction against much of traditional church morality that reduces the instruction of the living God to the Ten Commandments and perhaps a few ordinances for masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. Does God still speak and guide today? "No" seems to be the answer of traditional ethics. Traditional dogmatics rightly rejected a view of God as in deism, which patterned Him after a watchmaker who has made a clock and set it in motion, and then has left it to run by itself. But in ethics, these same theologians seem to confess a God who, after having pronounced the commandments, left the scene and is now silent. Hence, there is a certain historic justification for the rebellion of the new morality.
In the New Testament, however, the Ten Commandments are not abolished; they are surpassed, and thus fulfilled. Christians must reject Fletcher's and Robinson's antithesis of law and love, and their consequent dismissal of the law. This is not compatible with Paul's phrase "Love fulfills the law." Instead, they read Paul as if he had said, "Love bypasses the law." We must not succumb to a dichotomy of law and love. Christian ethics involves not the alternative of law or freedom, but the synthesis of law and spirit.
The same idea lies behind Luther's much-quoted statement: "A Christian will create new decalogues." Within its original context, it has a meaning completely different from that which is implied by those who use it to argue that Christians are exempt from and beyond the Ten Commandments. The argument in Luther actually runs like this: "We will make new decalogues. . . . And these decalogues are clearer than the Decalogue of Moses. . . . For when the Gentiles in the very rottenness of their nature still could speak of God and were a law to themselves [Romans 2], how much more can Paul or a perfect Christian full of the Spirit design a decalogue and judge everything in the best way. . . . However, as for the time being we are unequal in the spirit, and the flesh is hostile to the spirit, it is necessary, also because of the sectarians, to stick to the certain commandments and writings of the apostles so that the church may not be torn into pieces. For we are not all apostles who by the certain providence of God have been sent to us as infallible teachers. Therefore not they, but we may go astray and fall in the faith." —Luther, in the disputation On Faith, Nov. 11, 1535.
The Spirit and Scripture are consonant because both are the Word of the same God. It is in the field defined by the Decalogue and nowhere else where God will continue to instruct, prohibit, and command in more detail. Because the Ten Commandments are the appointed place for the dialogue and communication of God and man, they remain valid for all of us.
I conclude with a quotation from a famous sermon of Martin Luther on Matthew 22:36-46: "Therefore let him learn, whoever can learn, and learn well that he may know, firstly the Ten Commandments, what we owe God, because where there is no knowledge of them people do not know and ask Christ for anything either. In addition it is needed to preach of grace, in order to find help and counsel how to arrive at obedience." —Sermon on the eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, from his Church Postil. Law and gospel must go together.
