JimmyDiggs said:
So why then would the ethical teachings of Christ be superior to the OT law, if Jesus is God in the flesh? This seems slightly inconsistant. Especially given Numbers 23:19, which basically states that God doesn't change. As well as passages like, Malachi 3:6 and James 1:17. This seems to endorse the view that there is some sort of Iron Curtain between the Old Testament and the New Testament. If the NT is morally superior to the OT, then that seems to indicate God changes, and how does that not indicate that God would then be subjective and arbitrary in his moral decrees?
This is an area where we have to be nuanced. It’s a very big topic that has a lot of facets to it. Let me start with the easy thing, which is the beginning of Craig’s response (I didn’t read all of it). He says:
William Lane Craig said:
“…God’s commands can be contingent upon the realities of the human condition relative to the times and places of the recipients of those commands. Real people in the circumstances in which they exist may not be capable of receiving or carrying out God’s moral ideal for them and so are given commands which may be much less than ideal but nonetheless suited for the reality of their situation.
This is not just a hypothetical possibility. This is what the Bible teaches about God’s commands. One of the clearest examples of this is Jesus’ teaching concerning the Mosaic law on divorce.”
In this Craig is perfectly correct and I think this answers your question at one level. It’s not that God is changing here, but that the situation is changing or the (fuller?) expectation of God is being revealed. I’ve talked about this exact thing that Craig is talking about on the CC forums before. Laws, all laws in all societies, do not set a roof but a floor so to speak. That is, they do not instantiate the highest ideal but only the minimum of what the society will or should tolerate. For instance, most American states no longer have laws against adultery. This doesn’t mean these states approves of adultery, but that the states are willing to tolerate it. Likewise, every state allows for divorce, but no state believes that divorce is a good thing: only that the state should tolerate it. Likewise, God’s laws for Israelite society do not necessarily express the ideal of what God wants for or expects from his people. God’s law given to Israel is accommodated to and presupposes a fallen, sinful society.
The OT scholar Gordon Wenham explains this best:
Gorden Wenham said:
“The law sets a minimum standard of behaviour, which if transgressed attracts sanction. It regulates institutions like marriage or slavery, but it does not prescribe ideals of behaviour within marriage. Does the regulation of slavery or bigamy mean that the Old Testament endorses these institutions and regards them as ethically desirable? If the law punished adulterers with death only where the woman involved was married, does that mean affairs by husbands with unattached girls or prostitutes were permissible?... To pose the questions is to suggest their answer. In most societies what the law enforces is not the same as what upright members of that society feel is socially desirable let alone ideal. There is a link between moral ideals and law, but law tends to be a pragmatic compromise between the legislators’ ideals and what can be enforced in practice. The law enforces a minimum standard of behaviour…. though I may not have stolen my neighbour’s car or had an affair with his wife, I may be far from being a model citizen. I may have kept every law of the land to the letter yet be an obnoxious person to live with. To put it another way, ethics is much more than keeping the law. Or to put it in biblical terms righteousness involves more than living by the decalogue and the other laws in the Pentateuch. On reflection these points seem self-evident…. Thus a study of the legal codes within the Bible is unlikely to disclose the ideals of the law-givers, but only the limits of their tolerance: if you do such and such, you will be punished. The laws thus tend to express the limits of socially acceptable behaviour: they do not describe ideal behaviour” (Story as Torah: Reading Old Testament Narrative Ethically, p. 80).
So, in this sense, can the NT “improve” upon the OT ethic? If we are talking about the *civil law* (as distinguished from the moral law) then most Christians today would probably say yes. Personally, I’m not sure as I haven’t thought about all of the pros and cons. An obvious example that most people would want to turn to is the issue of slavery. The OT allowed for slavery to exist. Today, slavery is illegal in America. Isn’t that an improvement? Well the issue is more complex than most people are willing to deal with. For one thing, the slavery that the Bible permitted was not the form of slavery that existed in America. The type of slavery that existed in America was considered “man stealing” in the Bible and was actually a capital offense (Exodus 21:16). The Bible allowed for slavery to exist in a sort of indentured servitude way or with prisoners of war. In the indentured servitude manner, a person who became poor or indebted to someone that they could not pay could sell themselves into slavery to pay off the debt.
So is it an improvement for America to not have *this* form of slavery? Once we distinguish it from man-stealing the answer is less obvious I think. Today, if a person cannot pay their debts what happens? For the vast majority of cases, nothing. You can just incur debt and then not pay it. Is that good? No. In fact, it’s a form of legalized stealing. Wouldn’t it be better if these persons who incur debt that they can’t pay off could enter a form of indentured servitude? One might object to the physical punishments that could be given to slaves in the OT times, but wouldn’t that serve as a deterrent to incurring such debt in the first place? Otherwise, it just becomes a contracted job and the person being contracted may be getting the better end of the deal because it’s a guaranteed job. I’m not going to say that it would be an improvement to go back to the biblical allowance of slavery but I’m also not going to say that I’m sure it’s an improvement to discard it, because I haven’t given the issue a lot of thought.
The questioner says: “how do we improve our morals if it is an obvious improvement to not follow the bible? I make claim to the old testament where frivolous crimes carry the punishment of death by stoning.” But in fact the *New Testament* affirms that “every transgression or disobedience received a just retribution,” (Heb. 2:2). So it makes no sense to pit the OT against the NT at this point. The questioner is simply assuming that some set of crimes in the OT that received capital punishment were frivolous. But obviously the OT didn’t view these crimes as frivolous and neither does the NT. Does this mean it would still be just to have the death penalty for crimes like rape, adultery, incorrigibility, etc? Most Christians and non-Christians react against such things, but their reaction is largely a product of their emotional sense that has been shaped by culture than anything else.
But if one does think that we can improve upon these laws it doesn’t follow that God is changing his moral standard, only that he is holding us more closely to it.
Furthermore, I’ve been trying to keep clear that I’m talking about the civil laws given to Israel. Most distinguish between the civil law, the ceremonial law, and the moral law. Everyone agrees that the ceremonial and civil laws were particular instantiations of the moral law for a particular time and place. Most then say that we are no longer in the time and place that made those particular instantiations relevant. Therefore, we are no longer bound to those applications even though we are still bound to the same moral law.
Also, one doesn’t necessarily need to turn to the NT to find the fuller revelation. Craig gives the example of divorce that was given as part of Israel’s civil law. But one doesn’t need to wait till the NT for Jesus to reveal the ideal. One can find it in the OT and in fact this is where Jesus goes to support his claim.
