Must Christians Obey Old Testament Law?

Here’s a small essay writ­ten in response to a ques­tion in my sem­i­nary class on the Old Testament.

Christianity stands in direct con­nec­tion with the covenants between God and human­ity. Accordingly, Christians must study the his­tory of God’s rela­tion­ship with man and the prin­ci­ples He has communicated.

The Abrahamic Covenant became an uncon­di­tional promise of God’s ulti­mate ful­fill­ment of His promises to Abraham and his descen­dents. The Mosaic Law was a com­ple­ment to the Abrahamic Covenant in that while the Abrahamic Covenant ensured a rela­tion­ship between God and the Israelites, the Mosaic Law pro­vided the route to the present enjoy­ment of that rela­tion­ship. The Law was not a route to sal­va­tion, which instead was strictly based on faith, but was a grant of access to the imme­di­ate pro­vi­sion of God’s grace and bless­ings. The Law pro­vided the spe­cific details of how the Covenant would best oper­ate amongst the Israelites, and it was spe­cific to their par­tic­u­lar covenant with God. The Law also served as the most effi­cient tool by which the Israelites would serve as a mis­sion­ary pres­ence amongst human­ity by call­ing the Israelites to adhere to a very dif­fer­ent set of life func­tions and principles.

The law dis­played God meet­ing the Israelites at their level and rais­ing them up to a rea­son­ably higher degree. The law gave their rela­tion­ship with God a depth and sub­stance. They could learn through the imple­men­ta­tion of the law to rec­og­nize and fear God’s holi­ness and moral per­fec­tion. The law demanded of them that their rela­tion­ship with God be exclu­sive. They had to meet God on His terms and wor­ship Him prop­erly with­out engag­ing in the degra­da­tion present in pagan forms of wor­ship. The law demanded that they live in sex­ual and moral purity. Through the law God taught them ele­ments of true jus­tice which could be imple­mented in prac­ti­cal ways, and sim­i­larly God taught them prac­ti­cal meth­ods and sound prin­ci­ples for car­ing for the poor and the needy. The Mosaic Law was spe­cific both in its pro­vi­sion of prac­ti­cal details and in its appli­ca­tion within the con­text of the Abrahamic Covenant.

Christians do not oper­ate under the Abrahamic Covenant, although it holds pro­found impact in our under­stand­ing of God. Our rela­tion­ship with God is made in new terms through His pro­vi­sion of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, we are not under the Mosaic law. Romans 6:14 makes this clear in that we “are not under law but under grace” (NKJV) and Hebrews 7:12 refers to a “change of the law”. The law remains rel­e­vant for us, how­ever. In Christ we are given a “per­fect law of lib­erty” (James 1:25) and we are to “estab­lish the law” of Christ (Romans 3:31). Rather than pulling a detailed set of casu­is­tic laws from the Mosaic Covenant, we are to imple­mant Godly behav­ior in our lives through prin­ci­ples of His morality.

The glean­ing of prin­ci­ples from the Mosaic Law which can and should then be applied to mod­ern life can best be accom­plished through the method­ol­ogy of prin­ci­pal­ism. This method­ol­ogy is con­sis­tent in its con­sid­er­a­tion of the Bible, does not depend on arbi­trary extra-biblical deter­mi­na­tions, reflects the lit­er­ary and his­tor­i­cal con­texts of the Bible, is highly con­scious of the the­o­log­i­cal con­text of the Bible, and cor­re­sponds with New Testament teachings.

Principalism con­sists of five key steps. The mean­ing of the Old Testament law must be iden­ti­fied as under­stood by the ini­tial audi­ence. The ini­tial audi­ence must be dif­fer­en­ti­ated from mod­ern believ­ers. Universal prin­ci­ples should be drawn from the text. Universal prin­ci­ples are under­stood to be reflected directly in the text, time­less in their nature, sys­tem­at­i­cally com­pat­i­ble with bib­li­cal the­ol­ogy, not cul­tur­ally based, and rel­e­vant to both Old Testament and New Testament read­ers. Those uni­ver­sal prin­ci­ples should then be cor­re­lated with New Testament teach­ing. The uni­ver­sal prin­ci­ples are thus mod­i­fied in such a man­ner that they can be applied to mod­ern life.