Dear Mark:
I am a Jew who is a member of an e-mail discussion group that discusses religion. Members include Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and other Christian denominations.
Recently one of the Catholic members submitted for discussion your article, On “Personal” Faith which I read with interest. The reason for this e-mail is the quote from Romans chapter 10 where the author (my guess Paul) paraphrases Deuteronomy 30:11-14.
These verses has G-d explaining to the children of Israel that it is not too difficult to observe the commandments.
Yet, Romans makes the reader think that you don't need the commandments anymore. Faith in Jesus is all that is required.
Now your personal belief is not my concern, but I view this as tampering with my holy scriptures and gives a completely distorted meaning to the words of G-d.
I look forward to your response.
Gerald Fry
Hi Gerald:
Thanks for writing. Your notion of Paul's teaching is a common misconception since the Reformation and the subsequent rise (in some Christian circles) of antinomianism (the notion that the Law is completely unnecessary). However, Paul's teaching is not nearly that simplistic. Proof of that is seen in Romans itself, where Paul begins the letter by praising what he calls “the obedience of faith.” (Romans 1:5). Precisely what Paul means by this is “obedience to the Law.” In the same way, both in Romans and in other letters, he sternly condemns the “whoopee!” crowd that tries to take his teachings and turn it into a rejection of the Law. As he tells the Romans:
What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I should not have known sin. I should not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, wrought in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died; the very commandment which promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, finding opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and by it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good. (Romans 7:7-12).The problem with the Law, according to Paul, is not the Law. It's us. The Law is perfect, as far as it goes, but we are sinners in bondage to sin. The problem is that the Law can't help us obey itself. It can tell us what we should do and how we should be, but it cannot enable us to do and be these good things. In short, it's like an X-ray machine. It's given by God to us as part of the healing process, but it cannot itself heal us. It can only offer the diagnosis of the sickness. So Paul's attitude toward the Law is necessarily paradoxical. He regards it as “holy and just and good” but he also regards it as pointing to Christ and our need for him, who enables us to obey and transcend the Law (never to simply reject it).
It's for this reason that Paul (following the decision of the Church recorded in Acts 15) tells Gentile Christians that they are not bound by things like kosher laws or circumcision. For Paul, such ceremonial aspects of the Law are signs pointing to Christ. Therefore, since Christ has come, the goal is to follow the signs and go to him. At the same time, Pauls know that Jewish Christians while also not bound by the ceremonial law nevertheless often regard such matters as bound up with their worship of God. He does not command them to cease and desist, much less tell them that they don't have to obey the commandments. Instead, his advice to the ethnically-mixed Gentile and Jewish community at Rome is found in Romans 14. It essentially boils down to “Don't pass judgment on each other. Each of you is honoring the Lord in your way.” Paul does not regard himself or any other Christian as bound by the ceremonial aspects of the Mosaic law, but is willing to honor the ceremonial law to keep from giving offense (as when he discusses the problem of eating meat sacrificed to idols in 1 Corinthians 8). He is also willing to fight ferociously to keep devotees of the ceremonial law from imposing their devotion on Gentiles who were never bound by it (see, for instance, Galatians). His basic point is “In essential matters, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity.” But all this involves only the ceremonial aspects of the law. At no point do you find Paul ever saying that we are free of the commandments not to blaspheme, commit adultery, murder or steal (i.e., the moral law).
All this is to say that it is simply not the case that the Pauline gospel is “You don't need the commandments anymore. Faith in Jesus is all that is required.” For Paul, the whole point of faith in Jesus is what enables a person to obey the commandments: the heart of which is “love God” and “love your neighbor.” When he speaks of not being “under law” he is not saying the law is disposable. He is saying that “the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” (Galatians 3:24-26). When we leave off being pupils in order to come into our inheritance, this does not mean we spit on our schoolmaster and turn our back on our training. It means we are equipped to act as good sons. Therefore, various attempts to turn faith in Christ's grace into an opportunity to disobey the commandments are regarded with horror by Paul.
What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Do you not know that if you yield yourselves to any one as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once yielded your members to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now yield your members to righteousness for sanctification. When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But then what return did you get from the things of which you are now ashamed? The end of those things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the return you get is sanctification and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:15-23)Finally, as to Paul's paraphrasing Scripture: It is, of course, a common phenomenon throughout both Jewish and Christian history for readers to play with a text in order to make a point. The midrash is, after all, a Jewish invention. Paul is writing to an audience that knows Deuteronomy as well as he does and he expects them to know that he is departing from the exact text of Moses in order to make a point. Paul believes (because he and the other apostles were taught to believe, both by rabbinic authorities) that Scripture has deeper senses than the literal. According to Luke 24, the Risen Christ revealed to the apostles just what that hidden spiritual sense of Scripture is:
These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled.”And so, not just Paul, but every New Testament author approaches the Tanakh with the assumption that Jesus is the God who inspired it and that he did so with the ultimate purpose of directing its revelation to himself. Paul makes it clear that he believes this when he tells the Corinthians (after a brief discussion of some of the events of the Exodus), “Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.” In short, the Exodus is, for Paul, a foreshadow of Christ.Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:44-47)
That's the background of Paul's paraphrase of Deuteronomy. Paul (and his readers) know the original background of Moses' words and take them for granted as having an application to Moses' time, just as they know the story of the Exodus and take it for granted as having an application to Moses' time. But Paul's point is that these passages also are looking forward to their ultimate fulfillment in Christ.
So it seems to me the charge that Paul is “distorting” Scripture can only be maintained if it can be shown that Paul is somehow trying to persuade his readers that his paraphrase of Moses is, in fact, the actual text of Moses. Clearly, Paul is claiming no such thing. He's making a rather pointed rhetorical statement to the effect that the grace of Christ — like the grace shown Israel — isn't complicated and arduous. That's because he is convinced that the same God is revealing himself in both cases.
Oh, one last note: it may be tempting to suppose that the New Testament typically arrives at the “spiritual sense” of the Tanakh by simply altering the text of the Tanakh. Actually, that's not very common. Paul's playing with this passage is fairly atypical for him. Usually, he just cites the passage, whether from the Hebrew or the Septuagint. Far more frequently, he uses passages in allusive ways, expecting his reader to know the entire context (much as a modern writer might make a passing reference to “using the Force” and expect you to instantly call to mind the whole Star Wars saga without laboriously citing large chunks of dialogue).
I hope this helps. Please do write back if you have further things you'd like to discuss. If you are interested in further discussion of the New Testament's habit of looking for the “spiritual sense of Scripture” (a habit the early Christians acquired from rabbis and the earliest Jewish commentators on books like the Song of Songs — who interpret it as allegory on the relationship between God and the Daughter of Zion), I recommend my book Making Senses Out of Scripture: Reading the Bible as the First Christians Did.
Mark Shea
Senior Content Editor
Catholic Exchange
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