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The Ten Commandments, How Deep Our
Debt The words of the Decalogue
run like a river through not only the church but also English
and American history. By Chris Armstrong | posted 08/22/2003
No matter where they stand on Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's fight to keep his
Ten Commandments monument on display at the Alabama Judicial Building,
Americans agree that it is symbolic. But symbolic of what?
I will not try to prove Moore's claim that
the Decalogue is "the moral foundation of law in this nation."
But, without question, it is central to Jewish and Christian
morality. And, also without question, it is deeply embedded in
Western—especially Anglo-American—culture.
We've all heard these ten commands many
times. As familiarity may breed contempt, it's worth hearing
them once more, a little differently. The following is a
summary of the version that appears in Deuteronomy 5 (the other, slightly different
version is found in Exodus 20):
God identifies himself by what he
has done. He brought his people out of Egypt. They are to
have no other gods. He is invisible. They must not try to
make an image of God or express him in terms of heavenly
bodies or earthly creatures. Any idol of God would be
pitifully inadequate and dangerously misleading. Instead,
God wishes to be known by his passion for his people: his
jealousy for their love, his hatred of their wickedness and
his lasting commitment to their well being.
God's name is utterly holy. It
sums up his personality and purpose. It is a serious thing
to abuse God's name, by taking it lightly or using it to
endorse empty promises.
The Sabbath day is to be kept
holy. It is a day when the whole community—including
servants, animals, visitors and strangers—has time and space
to rest and reflect.
Children are to honor their
parents. Families are to be bonded by obedience as well as
affection. Elderly parents are to be provided for by their
children. Soundly built families make a strong and stable
society.
Human life, marriage, possessions
and reputations are all to be respected. In particular,
jealousy is to be tackled at source—in the heart. A neighbor
is any fellow human being—not just a person who lives
nearby. Another person's partner and possessions are not
negotiable. Don't even think it! (Andrew Knowles, The Bible Guide: An All-in-one Introduction to
the Book of Books [Augsburg: 2001], 95-96.)
These are, above all, the commandments of a
God who loves his people. He makes a covenant with them,
freely, on his own initiative. To live by these commandments
is to respond rightly to God's prior grace. It is to live as
part of a covenant community with that loving God.
Long before it became, through the mediation
of Christianity, the moral property of Gentiles, the Decalogue
was the law code and constitutional center of a theocratic
state—the Hebrew nation formed at Sinai. Long before Christian
theologians grappled with its relationship, as the "old
covenant," with the "new covenant" in Christ, the rabbis
treasured, interpreted, and applied it in a kaleidoscope of
ways.
Because it represents the responsibilities of
a covenant, the Decalogue was probably not divided (as some
imagine) into two tablets, each containing five commandments.
Rather, there would have been one complete record for each
partner in the covenant—symbolizing that this is a mutual
relationship. Not only did the commandments come from a loving
God, they enjoined love in return. Jesus made this clear when,
faced by the Pharisees' question, he summarized all the
commandments in two: Love to God and love to neighbor (Matt
22:34-40).
Not that Christians have somehow risen above
the need to keep the Ten Commandments. This is clear from
Jesus' response to another questioner—the rich young ruler
(Matt. 19:17). "Because of His advent in the flesh," as the
second-century teacher Irenaeus said, the Ten Commandments
"have received extension and increase, but not abrogation." In
plain language, they have been amplified, in the Sermon on the
Mount and others of Jesus' teaching; they have not been set
aside.
Though the Ten Commandments may not be
popular with everyone in pluralist America, few would go so
far in their criticism as the ancient Manicheans, who believed
them to be the work of an evil principle. In part because of
such extreme views, the church had, by Augustine's day, placed
the Decalogue at the heart of the instruction received by
catechumens preparing for baptism.
The commandments were always taught in the
church, but they took on a weightier authority at several
points in history.
The "Ten
Reminders" For example, in the thirteenth century,
the "schoolmen" or scholastics—including the great Thomas
Aquinas—picked up the argument of Irenaeus's younger
contemporary, Tertullian, that the commandments had been
engraved on the hearts of all humanity before they were ever
engraved on stone. They treated the Decalogue part of the
"natural law"—part of the very nature of things, accessible to
the reason of all people. For such teachers (and for most
Christians ever since), God gave this central pillar of the
Law not as a news flash, but as a reminder of what would be
common knowledge, were it not for sin's obscuring
influence.
At the sixteenth-century Council of Trent,
the Roman Catholic Church made the Decalogue one of the "four
pillars of catechesis," (that is, of the church's teaching
office) along with the Creed, the liturgy, and the Lord's
Prayer. Today's Catechism of the Catholic
Church reaffirms its centrality, adding a reaffirmation
of Augustine's words: "Every commandment concerns charity
[that is, love]."
Among the sixteenth-century Reformers, Luther
commented on the commandments fully in his Catechisms. Calvin
prescribed their regular reading in worship, in order to
"bring our consciences into subjection to his Law." He also
insisted, as had few before him, that the fourth
commandment—to keep the Sabbath holy—be strictly observed.
It was this heightened Reformation attention
to the commandments that influenced Queen Elizabeth to order
that the Decalogue be painted over the communion table in all
the land's churches—often over existing altar paintings.
During her time, the official sermons appointed to be read
from Church of England pulpits included messages on the
second, third, seventh, eight, ninth, and tenth
commandments.
England soon found itself divided over how
much Christians, living in Christ's grace, needed to observe
literally all the law's requirements. The Puritans tended to
take Calvin's stronger view (though some wondered, in light of
their well-known successes in the world of business, whether
the Puritans took the eighth commandment as seriously as some
of the others).
The accomplished but troubled Calvinist poet
William Cowper (making a cameo appearance in our Winter 2004
issue on John Newton) saw the Decalogue as a code handed down
in a way calculated to arouse fear, which still held fearful
power over hapless humanity:
Marshalling all his terrors as he
came; Thunder, and earthquake, and devouring
flame; From Sinai's top Jehovah gave the law— Life for
obedience—death for ev'ry flaw. When the great Sov'rein
would his will express, He gives a perfect rule; what can
he less? ('Truth,' 547-52)
Cowper wrote that those who persisted in
breaking commandments, such as that to keep the Sabbath, would
find "mercy cast away" (Bill of Mortality, 1793). John
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress
reflects the same stern vision: when Moses finds Christian, he
treats him harshly on account of his sins, saying, "I know not
how to show mercy."
The Ten Commandments were central to English
law from the beginning. King Alfred the Great (849-99), King
of Wessex from 871, a deeply pious promoter of Christian
learning and ecclesiastical reform, placed the Decalogue as a
prefix to his own legal code. This was no mere nod in God's
direction, as at that time the moral and the civil law stood
together as one. Hundreds of years later, William Tyndale (c.
1494-1536) would argue that the "law of the kynge is Gods
lawe" (Obedience of a Christian Man, 79).
It should not surprise us, then, to find at
the roots of America a concern to govern the new nation
according to the dictates of the Decalogue. The most radical
example of this concern was the theocratic state of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony, which wove into its laws much of the
Old Testament law.
The jury is still out on the question of to
what degree this concern animated the founding fathers. But
the older tradition of English and American legal and moral
thought was undergirded by these commandments. Are we that
much smarter than our forebears? Time will tell.
Chris Armstrong is managing editor of
Christian History magazine. This
article is indebted to David Lyle Jeffrey's excellent essay on
the Ten Commandments in his Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English
Literature (Eerdmans, 1992). Copyright © 2003 Christianity Today. Click
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