The Law, Christians, and our Affirmation of Faith
What authority does the Mosaic Law have on Christians today?
In recent months our duly appointed Affirmation of Faith Team has been busy preparing a draft Affirmation of Faith (AoF) for our churches to prayerfully consider. The draft AoF will be sent to our churches in early September 2024.
Our AoF team have appreciated the many comments made by our constituency related to suggested changes to our current AoF (which has not been modified since 1953) via the April 2023 survey and FNC 2023 delegate comments.
Two articles that have been of particular interest and discussion are the “Church and State” and “Civil Government” articles. Our recent experience through COVID-19 and government intervention has made this issue of particular relevance. I imagine we’ll experience some discussion on the floor of FNC 2024 related to this very current issue and the proposed draft articles addressing it. It should be fun.
During the vetting process while preparing the draft AoF, our AoF Team requested that several of our Fellowship professor-theologians make comments and suggestions. One prof who offered comments was Dr. David Barker of Heritage Bible College and Seminary (Cambridge, ON). His education and teaching career have been primarily focused in the Old Testament with special interest in the Psalms. I’ve deeply appreciated brother Dave for decades.
David recently sent me a brief word on the Mosaic Law and the Christian. I thought it germane to our current conversation, at least partially, as we deliberate and decide on an article for our future Fellowship National Affirmation of Faith. I encourage you to read:
The Mosaic Law and the Christian
In my Introduction to the Old Testament class, I asked the students about how the Mosaic Law applies to the Christian today. The answers were fairly typical: we need to obey the ten commandments, some of the laws are directly fulfilled in Christ, others might give moral guidance (selective), but most are reflective of Old Testament times and have no real meaning or application to us today (e.g. What relevance does the prohibition of ploughing with an ox and donkey have for us now?).
I pushed back and asked about the sabbath commandment (commandment number four) and they admitted that in fact only nine of the ten commandments directly apply to us today. Then, I suggested that perhaps we should divide the Law into three parts – moral, civil, and ceremonial. The moral law applies, but the other two are either fulfilled in Christ (ceremonial) or is limited culturally to the Old Testament times (civil). This has been a standard approach to dealing with the Law, especially in Reformed thinking.
However, such an approach fails. No Old Testament Hebrew leader or citizen would ever have thought in these three categories. The Law was whole and one; all 613 laws. Furthermore, James says that if we break one of the laws we are guilty of violating the whole Law (2:10). This trichotomous approach is a western imposition on the sacred text to solve an applicational problem for Christians.
When I was in seminary I took a course in Leviticus where our professor talked about an approach to the Law that I have embraced, namely: form and function. In other words, all the forms of the Law are gone, fulfilled in Christ (Matthew 5:17). So, we no longer bring animal sacrifices, we are free to enjoy a rare steak, and we can wear clothes of different cloths. But every law has a function or value or principle. While we are no longer bound to performing the burnt offering, a sacrifice expressing total dedication of oneself or one’s family, we are told to present our bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God (Romans 12:1). Christ is our sin offering and our guilt offering (2 Corinthians 5:21; cf. Isaiah 53:10). Mixing cloths in clothes had some kind of connection to sympathetic magic and fertility issues (as did mixing grains in fields). The value or principle is to stay away from pagan fertility cults and practices. We are not bound to a seventh-day sabbath, but we need to be sabbath-keepers in a non-legalistic or non-law-driven form (yes, Sunday is the “new sabbath” but many of us can’t set Sunday aside so we need to look for other expressions of sabbath-keeping throughout the week).
Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard say, “All of the Old Testament applies to Christians, but none of it applies apart from its fulfillment in Christ.” They state further:
First, we believe that God intends it [the Law] to serve as a paradigm of timeless ethical, moral and theological principles. In other words, the Law is more than a temporary dispensable cultural phenomenon… Christians who dismiss it as outmoded and irrelevant deprive themselves of the teachings God conveyed through it. They miss an additional resource for understanding what it might mean to be “Christ-like”.1
1Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 3rd edition (Grand Rapids; Zondervan, 2017), 348, the textbook for my Hermeneutics course at Heritage Theological Seminary.
Join me in praying for our member churches as we continue our journey in considering modifications to our current Affirmation of Faith (written/approved 1953). Our draft AoF will be sent to churches in early September; opportunities to discuss the AoF draft will occur in September 2024 and at our upcoming Fellowship National Conference (FNC 2024) in Niagara Falls on November 11-13, 2024. Please pray.