Pointed At A Theology of the Law?

The prompt followed by my answer:

"Christians have struggled with Law at least since Paul and James. Talk about how we would construct a theology of law from biblical materials. or, asked another way, how do we appropriate the OT legal material in today's church? We cannot merely generalize about the need for norms, though that's a good start. We must try to deal with the specifics of the law in some way."

I think the debate over how to understand the Law goes to the heart of Jesus’ conflict with the religious authorities of his day, and many people have noticed this so far. Therefore, in agreement with several posters to this point, I would suggest that a Christian theological understanding of Law must start with the way Jesus uses the Law.

In Jesus there is clearly a tension between the ways he appears to flout the Law and his promise that he came to fulfill the law rather than to erase it. As far as I can tell, Jesus sees the Law as a gracious revelation of the heart of God, as Brant would put it. So for Jesus what is important is what the Law is getting at rather than the individual rules themselves.

To insert another NT interlocutor, Paul says this: “What, then, was the purpose of the law? It was added because of transgressions until the Seed to whom the promise referred had come. The law was put into effect through angels by a mediator. A mediator, however, does not represent just one party; but God is one.”

So for Paul, the Law is getting at Christ. But it takes the form that it does because of human transgressions. I’d suggest that when he talks about a mediator not just representing one party, Paul is indicating that the Law is formed both by God’s interests and by the interests of the people to whom the Law was given, so to speak. What I mean to say is, the Law is shaped for humanity embodied by Israel at the time it was given.

So what does it mean to get at the heart of the Law? I think all this implies two things. First, we have the level many people have suggested already: we must understand how the Law functioned for the people to whom it was given. The principles we find there can often be picked up and “applied” to our lives today. But secondly, we must see that what God is doing in the Law is, in essence, the same thing God is doing in the Incarnation. God is getting his hands dirty, becoming involved with human beings at their level. So we cannot expect everything we find there to have some direct ethical or moral application.

We must sometimes decide that God was dealing with the people as they were in the place where they were, such as the law commanding the stoning of disrespectful children or women caught in adultery. I would even go so far as to suggest that the sacrificial system is an example of God working with a group of people where they are, while still making them distinct and pointing them towards the revelation in Christ, rather than, say, concluding that there is something fundamentally good about killing an animal for one's own sins.

But this is careful and dangerous work. There are very clear and obvious dangers, and perhaps what I’ve suggested already goes too far. But I think this is the kind of grappling we have to do, struggling to avoid two errors. On the one hand, it is a mistake to attribute fundamentally to God what is only there because of the particular historical place of the people receiving the Law. On the other hand, putting ourselves in the place to discern perfectly what is of God and what is human is precarious, and we must only do so prayerfully and in conversation with the community of faith both now and historically.

Our only hope is that God guides the grappling of the community with the text and with God. It is only this type of work that can allow us to understand and imitate Jesus’ and Paul’s uses of the Law, and see that mercy is greater than sacrifice.