Recently I had the privilege of giving a lecture on Paul and the law of Moses to a mixed group of religion scholars. Not all were theologians or Christians, and the lecture presented a Paul who was much more positive about the Law than we see in many traditional Protestant interpretations.
But one member of the audience, a Jewish philosopher, was still concerned. He shared that when he hears what Paul wrote about the Law, he can’t relate. Their forms of piety are alien to each other because for Judaism, the Law is life-giving, whereas for Paul, the Law brings death. How could Paul, a Jew and a Pharisee, think such a thing about the law of God?
This question has been with the church since its founding generation. Didn’t Jesus love and obey the Law? Shouldn’t his followers do the same? Why have so many Christians since the first century seemed to ignore, resent, reject, or even despise the Law? What should believers think about the books of Moses, sometimes called the Pentateuch (Greek for “five scrolls”) or the Torah (Hebrew for “law” or “instruction”)?
I’ve written before about how Gentile believers should not approach the Torah: by trying to obey each and every one of its commands, from ritual circumcision to a kosher diet to the “ethnoreligious cosplay” of seder meals minus actual living Jews. This particular error is at least a well-intended one, rooted in a kind of outsize love for the Torah. But the apostles to a man were clear on this point: Baptized Gentiles are not supposed to take on the works of the Torah but are instead to remain Gentiles, set right with God by the grace of Christ received through faith (Acts 15:6–11, 19–29; Gal 2:15–16).
That answer is for believers whose affection for and obedience to the Law are, so to speak, so great as to be excessive. They don’t have a problem exclaiming with the psalmist, “Oh how I love your law!” (119:97, ESV throughout).
The believers I want to address here are those whose love for the Law is too little, sometimes to the point of nonexistence. These Christians would never dream of praying Psalm 119, which, as the longest of all the Psalms, is one long love letter to the glories of God’s Torah.
This second group’s attitude—whether benign neglect of the Torah or active hostility to it—has always been the greater temptation in church history. For whatever reason, Gentile Christians get anxious about the Torah. And their anxiety usually turns to Paul for support. He didn’t like the Law either, right?
Not so fast. True, taken out of context, Paul can sound anti-Law (or “antinomian”). But that’s a misreading, and for most of Christian history the church has affirmed that neither the apostles nor the gospel is antinomian. That alone doesn’t settle the matter, though. So in what follows I’d like to sketch out a range of positions believers and theologians have taken over the centuries regarding the status of the Torah in the light of Christ.
Some of these positions are, in my view, off-limits for Christian faith. Others are viable options for orthodox believers. I’ll lay my own cards on the table, but not because I think the answer is obvious. What’s obvious are the proper boundaries, which set firm limits on what the church can and cannot say about the Torah. At a minimum, I submit that Christians must be able to pray Psalm 119 from start to finish, and mean it—no ifs, ands, or buts, and certainly no fingers crossed.
Start with what the early church rejected: a view of the Law as evil, coming not from the Creator but from a false god. This perspective, associated with the heresy of Marcion and popular Gnostic groups, judged the Old Testament and found it and its God wanting. Thankfully, bishops like Irenaeus understood such a belief was self-contradictory for Christian faith in Israel’s Messiah. No Moses, no Jesus. And a yes to Jesus means, in some sense, a yes to Moses too.
In the last century, there have been strains of a sort of neo-Marcionism in some corners of Christian theology. Of all the books of the New Testament, Paul’s letter to the Galatians is lifted up as the key to the gospel, revealing the fundamental tension, discontinuity, or rupture between faith in Christ on one hand and the law of Moses on the other.
According to J. Christiaan Beker, for instance, the Torah is “the dark but necessary foil for the coming of faith,” and because it is “antithetical to God’s will in Christ,” it “seems … an antidivine agency.” J. Louis Martyn likewise arguesthat, according to Paul, “the Law speaks a false promise,” since “God had no role of any kind in the genesis of the Law.” These and other New Testament scholars don’t go quite so far as to assign an evil law to an evil deity, but the family resemblance to Marcion is hard to deny. On their version of Paul, the Torah appears to be opposed to the purposes of God, untrustworthy as a source of revelation, and finally, therefore, an enemy for Christ to counteract and defeat.
It goes without saying that this interpretation of Paul, like these scholars, could not sing Psalm 119. As Jason Staples and others have argued, this perspective cannot but make a hash both of the gospel and of Scripture itself. And if this really were what Paul meant, it’d be easy to understand why the Jewish philosopher in my audience took issue with him. If Paul believed the Torah was a curse brought on Israel by a foreign god—in effect, a satanic trick—then what pious Jew could possibly take his gospel seriously?
At the other extreme, also out of bounds, we’ve already seen one approach to the Law rejected by the apostles: Gentiles supposing it was for them. For if the Law was sufficient to set Gentiles right with God, Paul reasons, “then Christ died for no purpose” (Gal 2:21). Hence his stern warning: “Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you” (5:2).
That warning, however, raises the question “What about Jews?” One position that has gained traction with some scholars in recent decades is the idea that Paul preached (or presumed) two paths to salvation: one for Gentiles (through faith in Christ) and one for Jews (through works of the Law). This is sometimes called the Sonderweg reading of Paul,which is German for “special path”—that is, Jews have a special or alternative path to salvation compared to the typical or generic one available to Gentiles.
Christians have good reasons to reject this position too—not because it views the Torah too highly but because it limits the scope of Christ’s saving work. The gospel, in Paul’s words, “is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Rom 1:16). As Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Peter sums it up in Acts: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (4:12).
In a word, Jesus alone is “the Savior of the world” (John 4:42). Whoever is saved will be saved by Christ and through Christ, no exceptions. This applies to Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free, young and old, rich and poor, living and dead. And it would be true even if God willed to save all human beings—not offering many ways to heaven but a single path beginning in an empty tomb outside Jerusalem.
The point is that the salvation made possible through the passion of Jesus can be had by no other means than Jesus himself. The logic is simple: Jesus doesn’t give you something besides himself, however great a gift that might be. What Jesus gives is himself. And you can’t have Jesus without Jesus.
“God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life” (1 John 5:11–12). Why? Because the Son is “the true God and eternal life,” who “was with the Father and was made manifest to us” (5:20; 1:2).
To say this about Jesus is to say not one ill word about the law of Moses. It says only that if what you want is the eternal life manifested in the resurrection of Jesus, then fix your eyes on him. Whatever else the Torah is good for, it can’t give you that.
What then is the Torah good for? Here is the broad middle ground in which orthodox Christians have outlined different potential answers.
All the answers share a number of first principles: God gave the Law. The Law, in Paul’s words, is “spiritual” and “holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good” (Rom. 7:14, 12). The Law as a whole was given by God at Sinai through Moses to the twelve tribes of Israel—descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—for their well-being. It was to bless them in the land, to sanctify them in relationship to the Lord, and to set them apart from other nations (i.e., Gentiles) as God’s chosen, beloved people.
Furthermore, this broad middle affirms that Jesus was a rabbi and teacher of the Torah; that he both interpreted and kept the commands of Torah (i.e., he was “observant”); that he honored and safeguarded the Torah as the Word of God to the people of God; and that when he argued with fellow Jews about the Torah, he did so on the shared ground that the Torah was authoritative and needed to be obeyed in accordance with God’s will.
As Paul Sloan argues in his recent book, Jesus and the Law of Moses, Jesus was not a cavalier lawbreaker. In Jesus’ own words, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matt. 5:17).
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This verse deploys a crucial term common to all mainstream Christian understandings of the Torah: In some mysterious sense, Jesus fulfilled the Law. Just what this means is difficult to say. The Law points to Jesus. Jesus reveals its inner meaning. Jesus is its true and final interpreter—after all, as God incarnate, he is also its original author. Jesus is the maximally reliable guide to seeing and following what Moses was always about the whole time. Jesus, in short, is “the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Rom. 10:4).
But if Jesus himself says he came not to abolish the Law, how can he be its “end”? Perhaps, some have argued, he meant that the Law would not pass away “until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:18), and as Jesus says later in the same Gospel, “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (24:34). This would then illuminate Paul’s claim that, through the cross, Jesus made Jews and Gentiles “both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostilityby abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances” (Eph. 2:14–15).
On this view, the Torah has indeed been abolished—period. The Sinai covenant is now “obsolete” (Heb 8:13). Accordingly, Paul and the other apostles were “ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor. 3:6, my emphasis).
This is a very popular Christian view of the Torah both across church history and in our day. It has a certain logic to it, and it can appeal to a number of verses from the New Testament. But it runs into a couple major difficulties.
The biggest problem is what Christians ought to do with the Law now. It seems to make large swaths of the Old Testament—including whole books like Leviticus—utterly redundant for our faith. If an obsolete set of detailed instructions for animal sacrifices is irrelevant to my life as a disciple of Jesus, why read it? Why even keep it in the canon except as a historical artifact?
A second problem is, again, Psalm 119. If the Torah turns out to have been nothing but a temporary “guardian until Christ came” (Gal. 3:24), then once Christ has come—once we are adults and no longer minors—shouldn’t we put away childish things (Gal 4:1–7; 1 Cor. 13:11)? Shouldn’t we, in other words, cease to join our voices to the psalm’s great hymn of praise for the Torah? At one point the psalmist prays to God, “Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (119:18). That seems a very strange thing to say about a childish book now abolished for mature believers.
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As you can tell, I find this popular approach to the Torah unsatisfying. It seems to make the Law a ladder God’s people climb to get elsewhere. Once they do, they kick it over, its purpose having been served. This approach is insufficient theologically, because it throws so much of Scripture into confusion, and practically, because it leaves believers stranded in relation to the five books of Moses.
Let me conclude, then, with some alternatives also within this orthodox middle.
Before the Protestant Reformation, the most prominent approach to the Law was to interpret it spiritually. This meant the Law was still God’s inspired Word and relevant to the gospel believed by Christians. Yet the exact letter of the Law—the customs of ritual purity and animal sacrifice and dietary commands—no longer applied in the church.
At the same time, every single one of those laws and regulations, every “jot and tittle” of the Hebrew, was worth believers’ closest study and interpretation, because all of it was ultimately about the Messiah. To discover how it all pointed to him was a great exegetical and spiritual adventure. The words couldn’t mean nothing and they couldn’t mean anything, but in the end faithful readers would discover that the letters of the Law spelled a name, and that name is Jesus.
The Reformers accepted aspects of this approach but reformulated it in important respects. The tendency of the Lutheran tradition was to frame the Law in a more negative way. Yes, it was given by God, but primarily to restrain sin and to reveal sinners’ unrighteousness, precisely so that all might throw themselves on the mercy and grace of God.
John Calvin and his heirs were more favorable toward the Law, in their rhetoric and in their theology. Granted that the Torah could not give eternal life, they taught that once a person is reborn a child of God, the Torah functions as it always was meant to do: namely, to guide the paths of God’s people into holiness and righteousness according to God’s will. For this reason, Reformed Christians have never had much trouble singing Psalm 119. Or, for that matter, the opening lines of Psalm 1:
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night. (vv. 1–2)
From this vantage point, the law of the Lord remains a tool in the hands of a loving Father to make his people holy. Only, in the case of the church, the tool is in the hands of God’s Son, and by the Spirit our brother and rabbi speaks his holy word through Moses to draw us toward himself in love.
It would be wrong, then, to discard or ignore the Law as of no active importance in our lives. Not all has been accomplished just yet; that will occur at the Second Coming.
To be sure, some aspects of the Torah no longer apply (such as animal sacrifices in the temple), while other aspects do, whether directly (the Ten Commandments) or indirectly (for instance, in Deuteronomy 17–18, when Moses speaks of God raising up a future king and prophet over Israel—believers know of whom he speaks). At its best, the church has always recognized this, which is why I prefer a mix of the medieval and Reformed approaches. Together, they make good sense of two distinct relationships: between the Torah and the gospel, on one hand, and between the Torah and the baptized believer, on the other.
As Calvin puts it in a lovely phrase, “The law was not a stranger to Christ.” And for those reborn in Christ, filled and led by his Holy Spirit, “the doctrine of the Law has not been infringed by Christ, but remains, that, by teaching, admonishing, rebuking, and correcting, it may fit and prepare us for every good work.” According to Paul, this good work corresponds to “the righteous requirement of the law,” which through Christ is “fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:4). Christ fulfills the Law twice over: first in his life, then in ours. Through the gift of his own Spirit, the Messiah empowers his people to be doers of the Torah and not just hearers of it (2:13).
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Christ, in sum, is the “end” of the Law in something like the way a staged performance is the “end” of a Shakespeare play, or a marriage is the “end” of a long courtship, or children are the “end” of a marriage: fulfillment without cessation or exhaustion. And “the curse of the law,” in Paul’s phrase (Gal. 3:13), does not mean the curse that the law isbut rather the curse that the law brings if you disobey it.
That this curse means death is Moses’ own covenant promise at the end of Deuteronomy: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him” (30:19–20).
In the very same passage, however, the Law itself makes a promise of life beyond the curse of death. After you disobey and these curses come upon you, Moses says, “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live” (v. 6).
This heart circumcision is the gift of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, a gift not contrary to the Torah but premised upon its every jot and tittle. “For all the promises of God find their Yes in him,” writes Paul (2 Cor. 1:20). And the promises of God are one and the same as the promises of Moses. And so with Psalm 119:174, Christians may pray with joy: “I long for your salvation, O Lord, and your law is my delight.”
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.
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