By Rembrandt, Moses near Mt. Sinai.
Mount Sinai has yet to be positively identified.
A Meditation on God, Law and Armstrongist Torah Observance
By Cogitatio
“The facts are there is not a single text in the New Testament that teaches that any law that God ever gave was abolished and nailed to the cross . . .” – G.G. Rupert, 1915, Leader, Independent Church of God, Seventh Day.
“First, remember that God’s basic spiritual laws existed from the beginning … These Commandments existed from the beginning – since creation.” – Herman L. Hoeh, Article, “Which Old Testament Laws Should We Keep Today?”
“God’s eternal laws and statutes were instituted to teach us the proper use of material objects, to regulate our material relationships with other men.” Herman L. Hoeh, Good News Magazine, “What’s the Use of Working”
“…the eternal law of Almighty God – the Five Books of Moses, God’s Law (Torah) – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy." Robert L. Kuhn, Good News Magazine, “Did Moses Write the Five Books of Moses?”
“The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief — call it what you will — than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor bicycle, and golf courses.” – A.A. Milne
While God, and therefore his Nature, is eternal, the law of God exists in a number of dispensations. These various dispensations have a common thread in that they reflect the Nature of God but they differ in implementation details. The Old Testament Law exists in this legal context. The supposition that the Torah is eternal, the Armstrongist view, and cannot be replaced must be carefully considered. This article will present the viewpoint that the Old Testament Law in its complete detail is not eternal but was an instantiation of divine law for a certain people, at a certain time, and in a certain place. In that the Torah reflects the Nature of God, it possesses an eternal essence but in its full context-relevant implementation it is temporal.
First, it is useful to have a brief overview of how the Torah is viewed in Armstrongism. Herbert W. Armstrong and Herman Hoeh nowhere provide a view on the ontology or existence of an eternal divine law prior to Creation. WCG writers state explicitly that the law was created at the time that God made the Creation. It is not explained if this is the creation of the Cosmos or the creation of humanity. And they did state it was eternal, that is, it would go on into the eternal future, apparently for the governance of sentient beings. This means that, in Armstrongism, the Ten Commandments, the spiritual nucleus of the Old Testament Law, did not exist before the creation of the Cosmos. While sometimes WCG writers identify God’s eternal law with the Ten Commandments, at other times it encompasses the entire Pentateuch. Though the eternality of the law is frequently mentioned by Armstrongist writers, Armstrongist church administration has at times modified the Torah. One example is in how God places his name for holy day observances. Apparently, the law may be forever but it is not immutable and is subservient to church needs. Finally, while I could find no direct statement about this, I believe that Armstrong and Hoeh would have accepted the foundational idea that the law, any God-given law, has its ontological origin with God’s Nature and his expectations for his creation.
There are some obvious constraints on the Old Testament Law that should be noted before going further. The Old Testament Law is full of human relevant concepts. It is about human beings and their behavior. It is full of conditions that are earthly and for this present Age. Actually, the conditions fit the Bronze Age. Outside the human temporal context, some of the laws will not have meaning. There is the commandment concerning adultery which assumes the institution of marriage. Yet, in the future, the children of God will not marry but be as angels. There are laws in the Torah about how Hebrew slaves should be treated and managed. There are laws concerning purity that are based on human beings as biological organisms and one day there will be only resurrected, spirit children of God. Just as these laws were created, they can be uncreated by the fact that the conditions that require them no longer exist. The human relevant concepts are compatible with the Armstrongist view that the Torah was made at the Creation for human beings. But the human relevant concepts are not compatible with the Armstrongist idea that the Torah will be mandated in the eternal future for both non-human sentient beings or the more advanced resurrected children of God.
The Old Testament Law may be eternal in the weak sense that it will always be a matter of record or exist in memory. What is the state of a law that can be recalled but will never be applied in the future because conditions have changed? The author of Hebrews uses the term “obsolete.” (NRSV) Armstrong and Hoeh were wrong when they designated the Torah as God’s eternal law. Certainly, it does not rise to the level of a fixed standard for all of eternity. It has already suffered erosion. The priestly functions related to the Temple are gone. Jesus claims that he is now the Temple. The ministration of death is gone. The Law of Christ in the New Testament, on the other hand, for the most part, will never age. There is no way that the following principle will fall into disuse through irrelevance, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
Yet, the Torah may also live on as culture and tradition. The Jerusalem church in the First Century had a Jewish membership. No doubt they continued to keep the Torah even though it had lost its salvific significance. The Torah does make a profound ethical document even though for Christians it is not on the critical path for salvation. How should Christians treat this body of traditional legislation? In the Christian context, some of its laws may be determined to be obsolete, like the law about what to do with a Gentile woman captured in warfare, or continued, like the commandment against stealing, or transformed, like circumcision. The fact is, the Old Testament Law is not a fixed mark in eternity for Christians now, but rather a moveable feast of ethical considerations and traditions.
One popular rejoinder to this Christian stance is to assert that the law (Torah) stands inviolable and only the agreement about the law, read “agreement” as “covenant,” has changed. Jesus brought us a new view that magnified the law. We have traded one set of regular spectacles for a different magnifying set. So, the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament has nothing to do with the law – it only involves the covenants or agreements about the law. But Paul wrote in Romans 7: “In the same way, my brothers and sisters, you have died to the law through the body of Christ…” Paul calls out the law specifically. And Paul is not referring to Christians having “died” to it by keeping it perfectly so it can no longer exact a penalty, because earlier in Romans 7, Paul speaks of the termination of the authority of the Law. (And if “dying to the law” is keeping the Old Testament Law perfectly in all its minutiae, kiss salvation goodbye. Read through the Torah sometime and remember that Hoeh wrote that not only were the Ten still in force but so were the laws, statutes, and judgments because they are based on the Ten. Who when they have a contagious disease wears disheveled clothing and shouts “Unclean!” when in public? Wearing a mask is a very modest measure in comparison.)
There is also the unsettling question: “Do we have the Old Testament Law in the form that God intended it?” Because here is what God says about the Torah in the time of Jeremiah:
“How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the Torah of the LORD is with us’? But behold, the lying pen of the scribes has made it into a lie.” (Jeremiah 8:8, in the ESV translation, but also nearly every other translation carries this same sense except for the Jewish Study Bible.)
This scripture plainly asserts that the curation and editing of the Torah by scribes seems to have gone awry. Jesus kept the Torah flawlessly but he knew accurately what the Torah was – he was the one who gave it to Israel. Jesus kept every jot and tittle but he knew what was a real jot and a real tittle and what was not. And Jesus did not find it necessary to echo Jeremiah’s statement in his ministry or engage in Torah reform because he knew the full arc of the Torah for his own keeping (he decreed it, after all) and knew it would not be carried forward into the New Testament era. It is the modern-day Torah-keepers who are caught in a dilemma of believing that keeping the full Torah, every jot and every tittle, is required for salvation when they don’t know for sure what the Torah really is. Maybe some scribe interjected something into the Torah that goes against the grain of what God really intended. You can claim that is a sophomoric hypothesis but what about this: “He (Jesus) saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning, it was not so.” This does seem to say that Moses wrote something into the Torah that God did not originally intend.
The assertion that the Bronze Age, human-oriented Old Testament Law, as glorious as it may be, is the eternal law of God lends momentum to the idea that the Old Testament Law must be kept by Christians at this time and must be written on the heart. Historically, a similar view was held by the Circumcision Party, which waged war against the Apostle Paul energetically, and was also held by some of the Gnostics. G.G. Rupert started a latter-day revival of the idea in the Church of God, Seventh Day. What part of the Old Testament Law should be observed and how is a constant turmoil for those who believe the Old Testament law must be kept. Would Jesus really make salvation contingent on a nerdish understanding of the celestial mechanics of the new moons? For Torah-keepers who require and declaim rigor, the complex Bronze Age standard that is obscured by translation and arcane customs is a constant risk to salvation. For Christian soteriology, the Old Testament Law is a non-issue. Christians understand that the Old Testament Law has been replaced by the Law of Christ. The New Testament implements a new charter with new standards and better promises. That is why the Christian covenant is called the New Testament rather than the Old Testament 2.0.
Ut Sciatis Misericordiam Dei
