More Thoughts on Law and Morality

A professor of mine made an interesting comment in passing that resonated with a lot of my recent thinking on the idea of law and human fallen-ness. He remarked, "God had to write his law on tablets of stone because human hearts were too hard." I think sometimes Christians overlook the narratives in the Pentateuch leading up to the giving of the Law of Moses and assume that somehow people were "pre-moral" before this event. The book of Genesis is full of moral judgments, and as I mentioned in my last post, full of various "falls." From the fall of Adam and Eve through Cain and Abel, to the flood (and numerous other places in between and after), we see time after time human beings engaging in wicked actions, causing death and division to one another. This is a far cry from the created order that God proclaimed to be "very good," itself a moral judgment.

The laws of Moses then are not some new source of moral revelation that humanity was somehow unable to discover on its own. On the contrary, the created ordered is described in moral language and as such it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to see moral awareness as a feature of humanity. (the "knowledge of good and evil" that Adam and Eve gained from eating of the tree, as I have mentioned elsewhere, ought to be understood in the more wholistic sense of "knowing" that is frequently employed in the Old Testament, which would mean experiential knowing, in the same way that Adam "knew" Eve. What was gained was not moral knowledge of good and evil, but first hand experience of doing evil). By engaging in deliberately de-humanizing behaviors, humans have dulled their hearts to their own moral natures, and the law represents an attempt to reawaken these natures. Jesus makes this point in his teaching on divorce when he notes that the laws concerning divorce were given "because of your hardness of heart; but from the beginning it has not been this way" (Matthew 19:8).

Sometimes I hear the moral teachings of the Bible treated as if they are only meaningful if they represent original, heretofore un-thought-of moral principles. The claim seems to be that the teachings of the Bible should be things that could not be recognized independent of reading its pages. The problem with this is that it ignores the way the Bible itself presents moral judgments. Moral judgments are present in the very beginning of all things, they do no magically appear at Mt. Sinai with the giving of the Ten Commandments. What the law represents is a badly-needed reminder of the moral truths that humanity has time and again rejected. It represents an accommodation to the sinfulness of humanity that would seek to move them from morally destructive ways back towards God. This process is completed in Christ, who is the fulfillment of the law, but we see the beginning traces of it in the Pentateuch and its commands which seek to cultivate an attitude of intentionality towards one's behavior.

Yes, you can be "good without God" in the sense of never needing to open up the Bible to discover many moral principles, but a quick glance at the world (and at my own actions) shows that we constantly need to be reminded of things that we know. Virtue is developed through habit, and in order to develop habits we need reminders that prompt us to be intentional about whatever behavior we are trying to develop. In this sense, we need moral instruction and guidelines in order to soften our hearts so that they might once again become receptive to God. This is the purpose of the law in the Old Testament, I submit, and not an attempt to provide wholly original (or wholly perfect) moral instruction.