Thursday, January 12, 2006
(1:18 PM) | Old - Doug Johnson:
Paul, the law, anti Judaism pt. 1
Dave Belcher responds to me on the question of abolishing the law here and here. Rather than taking up each of the issues individually, I'll give a brief account of why I think the Christian tradition (as much as I am indebted to it) has a serious problem with respect to the law and anti-judaism and why those problems have to be remedied (even if one doesn't go all the way down the road with my particular remedy). There are varying degrees of the problem, as I think will be clear. Still, every major theologian shares in the problem, and Luther is the absolute worst (though in one important respect he is actually better than anyone else).Very early on, Gentile Christians took up an interpretation of Paul which saw him as arguing that continuing to keep the law was a mortal sin. This turns out, already in the mid 2nd century, to be the major bone of contention between Justin Martyr and Trypho (i.e. Rabbi Tarfon). In the last decades of the second century Pope Victor uses just such a logic to temporarily excommunicate the entirety of Asian Christianity for continuing to celebrate Easter on the date of Passover (Iraneus talked him down eventually). At Nicaea, this doctrine was officially recognized as the Orthodox position, and, centuries later, Irish Christianity would have to back down in the face of such claims (again, the date of Easter being a key bone of contention). To show that they really did self-identify over against Judaism, the Eastern tradition soon after Victor (early 3rd century) produced and venerated the Didascalion which included a prayer for the annihilation of the Jews.
Now, Dave rightly pointed us to a passage in which Augustine's biblicism makes him follow the Gospel of Matthew in its insistence that the law is not abolished. Augustine thinks, and this has been the Catholic position ever since (see most recently Matt Levering's Christ as Fulfillment of Torah and Temple), that the law remains, but is completely fulfilled in and by Jesus. For the rest of us, however, it is a mortal sin to keep the precepts of the law (Jerome and Augustine get into a dispute about when it became a mortal sin, Jerome says immediately afte the passion, Augustine leaves some lag time for Jewish apostles, etc.). Now this left the tradition in somewhat of a quandry since there were things from the Torah (especially the ten commandments) which continued to be taken as binding. By the time of Aquinas the problem was especially acute and now involved the question of why Old Testament law shouldn't be binding since it was given by God. Aquinas duly surveys the tradition, sides with Augustine over Jerome, and maintains the doctrine that keeping the law is a mortal sin. However, he does so by way of taking up a solution first proposed (I believe, but would have to check again to be sure) by Alexander of Hales that divided the law into three parts: moral, ceremonial, and judicial. Keeping the moral law is required (basically the ten commandments and prohibition against homosexuality, this is the whole of natural law for Aquinas). Keeping the ceremonial or judicial law brings mortal consequences (the former absolutely, the latter if it is kept with the intention of keeping the law, though if one keeps it because it seems the most practical in a given situation it's okay). The logic of the position suggests that keeping the law after Christ is a denial of Christ's sufficiency.
Reformation forward later:
