Dawn Blue is back with her excellent series on David C Pack's Restored Church of God with interviews of ex-RCG employee Marc Cebrian.
A fragment of the Holiness Code: Leviticus 17 – 26.
The code was intended to guide and sustain life.
The Wellspring of the Law
The Mistaken View of Law in Armstrongism
By Krischan
The Armstrongist view of Law, with a capital “L” and found in both the Old and New Covenants, is very different from that of Christian orthodoxy. And it is not just a contention over downstream application although that frequently emerges. The division in understanding begins at the beginning, at the point of origin, at the source.
Origin of the Law
The Law reflects the moral character of God. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Law is the socialized implementation of God’s requirements governing behavior and conduct for human beings. When we speak of the eternal spiritual Law of God, this is nothing less than a codification of the nature and character of God himself. God would not institute Laws that violate his personal character. There are three major instantiations of the Law in the Bible for humankind:
1. The Law that existed before Moses.
2. The Law of Moses.
3. The Law of Christ.
The character of God existed before the creation of the Cosmos, of course. God is what he is. God is eternal and the Cosmos is a created artifact. There was a time when there was no Cosmos, if I may be loose and free with the term “time.” The three categories of Law listed above are categories of legislation based on the character of God. They are contingent on God just as the Cosmos is contingent and humanity is contingent. The Law of God for humanity on this planet coincides with the existence of humanity and does not have an eternal existence in its human relevant implementation details.
Christian orthodox dogma has a view called Ex Lex. This is Latin for “outside the Law.” God is viewed as not being the object of his own law. This does not mean that God can choose to be a transgressor. It means that the Law does not exist as an external force to which God must comply. The Law is a reflection of his inherent nature that he would naturally always be in compliance with it. But it is not an imposition. It is not like someone gave him a list of required behaviors that he has in a drawer and he pulls out once in a while to see what he must do. The statement “God cannot break his own laws” is a deficient and anthropomorphic concept. It detaches God from his Law. God is his law. He is the giver of law not the object of law. Prior to the existence of humanity, there must have already been a law for angels; also, a reflection of God’s nature. God may have instituted other laws for other sentient beings. God is the wellspring of Law. All such bodies of legislation are compatible with God’s character (Romans 7:12).
The Armstrongist Assertion of the Eternality of Torah
Armstrongist theology recognizes that the Law is eternal but they mistakenly believe that eternal, spiritual Law is the Torah. Herman Hoeh, in his 1971 article “Which Old Testament Laws Should We Keep Today?”, states: ”…God’s basic spiritual Laws existed from the beginning … This Law is summed up in the Ten Commandments … These Commandments existed from the very beginning – since creation.” Hoeh connects the initiation of the Law with the creation of the Cosmos. But what about the period prior to the creation? Lesson 17 of the Bible Study published in 1984 by the Worldwide Church of God states, “God's eternal, spiritual Law existed long before Adam and Eve were created.” Further reading of the surrounding text indicates that the term “Law” refers to the commandments, statues and judgments given at Sinai. The Armstrongist authors of the Bible Study retroject (chronological terms fail us) the Torah into the divine and timeless realm of God – what would from our perspective might simplistically be called the “eternal past.” So, God’s eternal, moral, and spiritual law is the Torah created for humankind.
In other words, Armstrongists would have us believe that the Sabbath existed in eternity as a Law before God ever created a Cosmos with the earth circling the sun tracing out a seven-day weekly cycle. They would have us believe that the concept of adultery existed before there were gendered human beings who enter into a marriage covenant. They would have us believe that the idea of stealing was forbidden before the material realm and the concept of ownership known to us was created. It is painfully obvious that the Torah was created for a certain people at a certain time and in a certain place. It is derived from the eternal Law of God but it is not the eternal Law of God.
Moral Content and Methodology
I believe that Armstrongists sense that there is something about the Torah that makes it required. And there is something. It is the moral content of the Law that is durable but not its implementation details or methodology. Circumcision is an excellent example. The physical surgery is no longer required but the changed heart of conversion that it symbolized is on the critical path to salvation. Circumcision lives on in its spiritual intent but not in his physical implementation. The Circumcision Party, that opposed Paul so energetically, was characterized by not being able to understand how Jesus magnified the Law. A sketch of three views of the Law follows:
Armstrongism retains the methodology, that is the physical implementation details, of the Law and this circumscribes and limits the scope of the Law. Jesus magnified the Law (Isaiah 42:21) by releasing the moral spirit of the Law and letting it expand out of its physical implementation container. He did this by revealing the unrestricted moral imperative behind the Law. The result of the retention of the restricting container is that Armstrongists can believe they are keeping the Law exhaustively and, in the spirit of Phariseeism, never lift a hand to perform a single charitable act. Fish food containing yeast may be righteously cast out during the Days of Unleavened Bread but an elderly neighbor who needs help can be ignored without the Armstrongist feeling uncomfortable about conformity with the Law. While many Armstrongists are charitable people, it is not their commitment to the Torah that makes them so. It is, rather, their exposure to the New Covenant with its emphasis on proactive love.
The Christian ideal is that the Law should be freed from its container but it retains its moral imperative. This is because the moral content of the Law is derived from the nature of God. And it is the moral content that is written on the heart. That morality is defined by love. God is love. But it is not free-form, draw-your-own-conclusion love but love conditioned by the witness of the Old Covenant (Hebrews 12:1).
A third view is a kind of Marcionism – a belief that the God of the Old Covenant is an ogre. Marcion of Sinope believed that Yahweh was a demiurge and anything emanating from Yahweh was to be rejected. Marcion assembled his own Gospel and accepted a few of the Epistles of Paul and nothing else in what became the later canon. An extreme version of this view is that the Old Covenant has been proclaimed obsolete and that gives us now a blank slate on which we may write our personal proclivities as an auto-generated code of ethics. Both the moral content and the physical implementation are now obsolete, have been vacated, and can be expediently and imaginatively replaced. This is an antinomian heresy not because it lacks ethics wholly but because it rejects the Old Covenant based etiology of Christian ethics. The rejected etiology logically excludes God as the unchallengeable source of the Law who gives rise to the durability and consistency of the moral content of the Law. To assert that God abrogated both the methodology and the moral content of any given Old Covenant Law in the institution of the New Covenant is to declare God’s use of the concepts of good and evil to be arbitrary.
Summary Conclusion
The Torah is not the eternal spiritual Law of God as Armstrongists claim. The Torah is, rather, a specific instantiation of the eternal spiritual Law. The Torah is decreed legislation for a certain people in a certain time and in a certain place. Inherent in its very language are the humanistic and earthly details that support its tailored nature. But because the Torah reflects the nature of God, its moral content persists beyond any change in covenant. While the moral content of the Law is nonvolatile, the implementation details or methodology of the Law may be modified or become obsolete. The example of circumcision is canonical here for all Laws. Requiring zealous conformance to the physical surgery militates against the action of Jesus to make the Law honorable (Isaiah 42:21) by freeing it from physical constraint in order to bring it to its full spiritual stature. The entire Torah, in moral content, culminates in Jesus Christ (Romans 10:4).
