Ministry of Death or Simply the Law of Moses? Armstrongism’s Dubious Tailoring of the Torah

 

The Sabbath-breaker Stoned. Artistic impression of episode

narrated in Numbers 15. James Tissot c.1900 (Fair Use).

 

Ministry of Death or Simply the Law of Moses?

Armstrongism’s Dubious Tailoring of the Torah

 

By Scout

“But any prophet who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak or who speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die.” -- Deuteronomy 18:20-22, a law in the so-called Ministry of Death - part of the Law of Moses that Armstrongists assert to be cancelled.

 

A family member of mine worked for an American oil company in Saudi Arabia back in the Fifties. While he was there he witnessed a public execution and related this grim event to us when he came back to the United States on a break from work. He even brought photographs although none were close-ups. A man and a woman in an Arab village had been caught in adultery. They were both executed on the village plaza encircled by a crowd of villagers. The man was beheaded and then a sword was driven through his heart. She was shot with a pistol. Many societies throughout history have had some form of death penalty for perceived malefactors. Ancient Israel was no exception (Leviticus 20:10).

In the theocracy of ancient Israel, the Law of Moses (See Note 1) required the death penalty for certain crimes. Armstrongist theology claims that the Law of Moses is still in force and written on the hearts of believers. How then does Armstrongism address the death penalty laws required by the Torah? Of course, Armstrongists do not see these death penalties as still in force. But this exclusion is based on an erroneous view of the Law of Moses and of 2 Corinthians 3:1-11. There is adequate scriptural evidence that the death penalty clauses in the Torah are still a valid part of the Mosaic legislation and cannot be set aside.

 

The Mistaken Armstrongist Interpretation of Paul’s “Ministry of Death”

 

How is it that classical Armstrongism asserts that the Law of Moses is still in force, is written on the hearts of Christians, and yet death penalties required by the Law of Moses are not exacted by the Armstrongist church? The Armstrongist doctrine that deals with this issue is found in the article titled “Is Obedience to God Required for Salvation?” by Roderick C. Meredith. Meredith identifies the clauses in the Torah that require the death penalty with the phrase “ministration of death” in 2 Corinthians 3:7 (KJV). I will use the term “ministry of death” which is found in many translations. Background for Meredith’s article is found in Herman L. Hoeh’s article titled “Which Old Testament Laws Should We Keep Today?”

The Armstrongist explanation of this topic is lengthy so I will review just a few points – enough to demonstrate the faulty nature of the Armstrongist interpretation. Meredith’s interpretation focuses on 2 Corinthians 3 and follows the line of argument that the laws concerning the death penalty, or the Ministry of Death, are contained in the civil law and were “added” to the Ten Commandments 430 years later along with the sacrifices (Gal 3:19) and were only intended to last “until the offspring would come to whom the promise had been made”. Since Meredith provides no exegesis for this supposed later addition to the Torah in his article cited above, it seems to be simply an unsupported assertion. And, a question left hanging is why are these death penalty clauses grouped theologically with the sacrifices and then later abrogated? There is reason for the sacrifices to be dropped. The sacrifice of Jesus replaces them. But Meredith states that the death penalty clauses are “a physical type of the eternal punishment” which is yet future for those who do not obey the Law of Moses. There are no grounds for their discontinuance when the sacrifices were discontinued. Nevertheless, the Armstrongist conclusion is that the death penalty clauses of the civil law vanished along with the sacrifices after Jesus (See Note 2 below). So, Meredith’s interpretation permitted the Worldwide Church of God to not execute people for Sabbath-breaking, for instance, yet to paradoxically believe that the Law of Moses was still in effect.

Meredith does not deny in his article that one ministry is being replaced by another in 2 Corinthians 3:7-11. But his claim is that it is not the Law of Moses that is being replaced but a sub-part of the Law of Moses – the Ministry of Death – laws that require the death penalty. How does he tease out the Ministry of Death from the larger body of legislation so that it may be treated separately? It is not clear how he arrives at this outcome. Meredith does seek to make a distinction between the Ten Commandments and all the remaining laws by asserting that the Ten Commandments were on tables of stone but the “civil law” (his term) was scribed on plastered stones as described in Deuteronomy 27:1-6. And his “civil law” contained the various death penalties. But he does not seem to have established this through exegesis and, further, this does not sort out the death penalty laws for any kind of special status or treatment. He gives us no reason to believe that Deuteronomy 27:1-6 does not refer to the totality of the law communicated through Moses. The Jewish Study Bible notes that the term “Torah” is used in v. 3 but it grants that the term is “elastic” enough to include many interpretations and that there is a significant debate in traditional and critical scholarship about what got written on these plastered stones. Yet, it is this uncertain inscription on plastered stone that forms somehow the crux of Meredith’s argument. What he seems to have, in the final analysis, is a hypothesis based on vocabulary alone that the Ministry of Death mentions death and is, therefore, connected to the various death penalties in the “civil law.” But this deduction does not match the context Paul gives us in 2 Corinthains 3. I will turn to that next.

The general Christian belief is that Paul is speaking of the Law of Moses throughout 2 Corinthians 3. Paul, in this passage, does not break up the Law of Moses into categories for differential treatment anywhere in this passage. Further, the Jewish view is that the ministry of death refers to the fading Old Covenant (See the Jewish Annotated New Testament). Paul is contrasting the New Covenant with the letter of the Law of Moses as a whole. (2 Corinthians 3:6). Paul makes the famous statement, “for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The “letter” is of general applicability to the entire Torah. The entire Torah has a letter meaning, and violation of the letter meaning leads to sin and finally death (Hebrews 10:28). Paul does not seek to confine the application of the “letter principle” to just certain parts of the Torah as Meredith does.. If Paul were referring to only the death penalty laws, as Meredith contends, and Paul did not explain that, it would be doctrinal malpractice. Further, Paul would not logically contrast the New Covenant as a pathway to salvation only with the sacrifices and civil law of the Law of Moses. The latter, by themselves, would not serve as a comparable pathway to salvation but would be truncated and ineffectual without the entire Torah. So, Christianity logically and exegetically equates the Ministry of Death to the Torah in toto.

Paul also makes a metaphorical connection between the letter of the Law of Moses and his later statement about the “Ministry of Death”. Paul writes of the “letter” of the Old Covenant Law in v. 6. Then he writes of the “letter” of the Law in v. 7 (see Bible Hub Interlinear). In both cases, Paul uses a form of the Greek word “gramma” for “letter” (the “Ministry of Death” should be translated “the Ministry of Death in the letter” according to Ellicott’s Commentary). While that is a literary connection, a more solid circumstantial connection is the fact that Paul associates the Ministry of Death with the radiance of Moses’ face. This radiance occurred when Moses came down from Sinai with the Ten Commandments. And it occurred later whenever Moses went in to speak with God (Exodus 34:29-35). While the use of the veil is unclear in this passage, what is clear is that the radiance is associated with all communications from God beginning with the Ten Commandments and encompassing the remainder of the Torah. When Paul refers to the Ministry of Death he is not referring to isolated, scattered death penalties contained within the Law of Moses. Paul is referring to the Law of Moses itself and in toto. The Law of Moses is called the Ministry of Death because, as he wrote in v. 6, “for the letter kills.”

Armstrongists frequently use the idea that when Paul is speaking about the termination of a body of legislation, he is always talking about the sacrifices and/or the Ministry of Death. It is important to note that in the entire chapter of 2 Corinthians 3, Paul does not mention that he is speaking of only some sub-part of the Law of Moses. He cites the radiance on Moses’ face and this we know from Exodus pertains to the giving of the entire body of legislation - the Decalogue and all else. In v. 15, Paul makes a broad scope statement, “whenever Moses is read” without carefully parsing the Torah into sub-parts. And Paul balances the Ministry of the Spirit against the Ministry of Death after pointing out that the Ministry of Death is ending (vv. 7-8). A replacement is occurring which involves two Ministries that are at parity in some way. They are at parity only when both are considered as pathways to salvation. Yet, as mentioned earlier, the Ministry of Death, as defined narrowly by Meredith is not a comparable pathway to salvation – it is only a small piece of such a pathway. There are other exegeses that define the scope of the Law of Moses, but the language and characterization of 2 Corinthians 3 are adequate to understand that the total New Covenant and the total Old Covenant are under consideration.

An easily understood case that contradicts Meredith’s view is in Exodus and was cited earlier (Exodus 35:2). The Law requires the death penalty for breaking the Sabbath commandment, one of the Ten Commandments. It is clear that the death penalty clauses were not simply transient, civil concerns peripheral to the Decalogue and could be easily disannulled along with the sacrifices as Meredith claims. Here a death penalty is associated with the Fourth Commandment of the Decalogue itself – making the Fourth Commandment a part of the theoretically transient Ministry of Death by Meredith’s reckoning.

Summation

 

The unavoidable conclusion is that the “Ministry of Death” is a synonym for the Law of Moses. Paul states that the “letter” kills. To claim that the Law of Moses is still in force is to claim that its inherent death penalties are also still in force. There is no exegetically valid reason to believe that the death penalties included in the Law of Moses were ever selectively cancelled. This difficulty for Armstrongist denominations is a consequence of taking legislation that was designed for a national theocracy and attempting to re-purpose it and scale it down for modern denominational governance. And the church that believes that the Law of Moses is still required cannot relegate the death penalty to the State because the State does not follow the Law of Moses in its judgments and executions. All of this is not an issue for Christianity because Christian theology holds that the Law of Moses with its inherent death penalties was discontinued and replaced by the Law of Christ (See Note 3 below).

Note 1: It would be naïve of me to try to define “The Law of Moses” as to its textual boundary and any putative sub-parts in the Bible. How it is defined does not affect the argument I make in this article. It is enough to say that Armstrongists exclude the Decalogue from the Law of Moses and most Jews and orthodox Christian denominations include it. Defining the Law of Moses is the topic of significant debate. Both Armstrongists and Christians believe it is much more monolithic than it actually is. The idea that Moses sat down and wrote the five books of the Pentateuch just does not work. The Torah was derived from a number of sources. From the Jewish Study Bible, Second Edition, p.5: “We do not know how these various sources and legal collections, which now comprise the Torah, came together to form a single book.” It is likely that it was redacted by scribes during the Babylonian Exile or shortly thereafter. Basing a doctrine on how the text of the Torah is organized at a detail level when that detail is uncertain is imprudent. Though the Torah may be highly complex in origin, Jesus spoke of the Law and the Prophets. He did not dissect the Law into parts. For New Testament purposes, the Law may be treated as a monolith. It is well worth it to read the introduction to the Torah in the Jewish Study Bible.

Note 2: If the death penalty clause is canceled, what happens to the remainder of the law? No doctrine explaining this has ever been established to round out the Armstrongist view. If the death penalty is required for someone who is a false prophet and the death penalty clause is canceled after Jesus, what happens to the rest of this law? Does the cancellation of the death penalty clause cancel the entire law or does the law live on in a new formulation? How then are false prophets to be legally processed under the Torah? This issue is an important operative part of the Armstrongist doctrine of the Ministry of Death but appears to have never been addressed in Armstrongist literature. This leaves a gaping hole in the Armstrongist implementation of the Law of Moses.

It is worth noting that capital punishment does not exist in the New Testament as a part of church governance. The only foundation for capital punishment as a church action would be the Law of Moses which contains death penalty clauses but the Law of Moses is obsolete. However, there is Divine capital punishment, for instance, in the case of Ananias and Sapphira.

Note 3: Notice carefully that I am not taking an antinomian stance in this article. I believe in laws and morality just as did Paul did. Like other Christians, I believe that the Ten Commandments are in force in the New Testament. But the New Testament Law is the Law of Christ not of Moses. I believe it is important to make a clear and explicit statement about this. If you claim that the Law of Moses is no longer in force, as Paul did, Armstrongists will make the fatuous claim that you are a “law hater” or some similar epithet because they admit of no other law, apparently, than the Law of Moses. There is a solid body of legislation contained in the New Testament and it is the Law of Christ. So here is my pro-law position stated clearly for the record.