In his brilliant tract How Christians Should Regard Moses (1525), Luther argues: “We will regard Moses as a teacher, but we will not regard him as our lawgiver unless he agrees with both the New Testament and the natural law.”
If we are a people formed by Scripture, questions ought to emerge in our minds when we encounter Luther’s words. For the Christian, what is the Law? Has it disappeared? One kind of reading of Galatians 5 might lead us to a kind of antinomianism. Unless we’re ready to give up on injunctions against murder and adultery, such a reading may be a stretch. On the other hand, there is certainly an imperative to holiness in the New Testament that seems more than hyperbole, a stick to drive us to the savior. And even Acts 15 retains, perhaps to the surprise of many believers, a dietary law, an injunction against drinking blood.
In short, and to put the matter very simply, this is a very important topic. It goes to the core of the Gospel.
But perhaps the most important question is, what do we mean by the claim that Christ fulfilled God’s Law given to Moses? With the help of St Thomas Aquinas, I hope to shed some light on these perennial questions. In so doing, I draw on the wisdom of Aquinas’s account of “the old law” (as he calls it) in the Prima Secundae of the Summa theologiae.
In her magisterial two-volume work Doctrine and Scripture in Early Christianity, Frances Young makes the astute observation that “fulfillment did not necessarily mean annulment.” Christians agree that in some sense Christ fulfills or completes the Law. At the same time, Christians also recognize that while fulfilled, some aspects of the Law, e.g., again, thou shall not kill, thou shall not commit adultery, remain binding, while still other dimensions, e.g., the cultic regulations of the Temple, have given way to the priesthood of Christ (Heb. 9:24).
Is it then fair to say that fulfillment involves intensification of the moral laws on the one hand and abrogation of the cultic and civil laws on the other? I don’t think that’s quite right.
The whole of God’s Law is good. Here I draw on the Christian doctrine of Creation. All that comes from God is good and has its life in relation to God. This is as true of the Law given to Moses on Sinai as it is of you and me. The Law is unequivocally good, originating as it does with God and directing us toward our end, which is of course God.. The Law reveals God’s holiness, a holiness he desires for his creation, especially the image-bearing creatures who have stewardship of his creation. The Law is, in other words, an extraordinary good. Aquinas writes, the “end of the Divine Law is to bring man to the end which is everlasting happiness.”
If such is the case, then, what is the Law’s relationship to Christ? The Law bears “witness to Christ” and withdraws us “from idolatrous worship.” It remains an abiding good for these reasons. But there are things that the Law does not and cannot accomplish (Romans 7-8, Galatians 2). The Law does not bestow grace, and so we must wait, as Aquinas puts it, for “the perfect law of the New Testament,” which includes “the benefits of grace.” The New Testament and its law (the law of Christ) elevates the Old Testament and thus the Law given on Sinai. In both covenants, law has an extraordinary God-given purpose. Law, Aquinas writes, aims “at establishing friendship, either between man and man, or between man and God.” But this requires something of us, for if we are to become friends with God, we must strive to live as those worthy of God. And for that, we need God’s grace to heal us of our sins—hence the New Covenant.
God institutes the Law given at Sinai not only to prevent idolatry but to represent the mystery of Christ. The present tense matters, for God remains known through what we read of Israel’s sacrificial worship. Even though it is right to say that Christ fulfills the cultic and ceremonial dimensions, that is not to infer that they stop figuring Christ. God continues to speak in the old law, figuratively, even as the whole of Moses’ law is transferred to our great high priest, the Lord Jesus Christ. Thus, it’s appropriate to join with Matthew Levering in saying that the Law given to Moses “is still observed by Christians as fulfilled in Christ.” Transference involves neither annulment nor obsolescence. Instead, the transference of the Law to Christ means that the ceremonial and cultic continue to figure, the moral law (encapsulated in the Decalogue) continues to bind, while the civil does not.
What are we to take from this? For Aquinas, the issue isn’t so much the extent of the Law’s application. Instead, the various units of Torah are given by God to direct us to the good that God is and order our relations to one another, recognizing that the ultimate horizon of that direction is Christ. The Law in its entirety applies to the church, but its application to the church isn’t uniform. Even as the ceremonial has been fulfilled in Christ, it does not thereby cease sharing in God’s goodness and figuring Christ.
Put differently, the literal sense of Moses is the mystery of Christ, for Christ is what God, the author of the Law, given to Moses, intends.
One last thing, then: the Law is subject to God’s providence and direction. It’s unwise to think of the Law in purely typological terms. The Law, pouring from God himself, participates in the goodness of God. Because of that truth, the Law tends to an appointed end, its divine Giver. The Law has a profound dignity in light of God. Christ is the telos to whom God moves his Law in order that our friendship with God be perfected, that is, blessed with the indwelling grace of the Holy Spirit and the fruit of New Creation (2 Cor. 5:7).
The Rev. Dr. Christopher Holmes is professor of Systematic Theology in the Theology Programme at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.
