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The Absolute Divine Law
Divine Law makes a simple business of ethics: “If God says it’s wrong, it is wrong, wholly and absolutely. That’s all she wrote!! There are some difficulties with this thinking though. The first is, how can we be sure what God really thinks? Fundamentalists have answered this question: “Scripture says it, I believe it!” But how did the people in Scripture know that what they heard in their heads was God? Abraham thought he was called by God to sacrifice his son on the altar. He figures, “If God says so, I’d better do it!” My question is, “What are you crazy? You hear ‘God’ tell you do something nuts and you don’t ask for identification?
Another challenge with following Divine Law is interpretation. What exactly qualifies as honoring thy father and mother? A Mother’s Day card? Marrying the boring son of the family dentist, as one’s honorable mother and father want you to do? These questions don’t feel like Talmudic hari-splitting when the dentist’s son is 4’11” and weighs 270lbs.
A prime characteristic of Divine Law is that God always has the last word!
Moses trudges down from Mt. Sinai, tablets in hand, and announces to the assembled multitudes: “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. The good news is I got Him down to ten. The bad news is ‘adultery’ is still in!
The discussion of morality and divine law is an interesting one in and of itself. It would seem that morality evades the center of operation of our behaviours. What I mean is that a moral code doesn’t seem able to put appropriate value on behaviours. A flawed moral (or ethical) behavoiur in one circumstance might find itself weighing in differently than in another. Accepting something as “Scripture says it, I believe it” is naive in a multitude of ways. It fails to understand that the gospel has entered into a pluralistic world, yet claiming that all things are held together by God. In my humble opinion, it gets too close to making God into a manipulator as well. It’s as if he designed this world only to manipulate us into not stealing and commiting adultery. Well, that sounds nice, but I don’t buy it.
To me, the story regarding Absolute Divine Law centers on the essence of what it means to be human. The essence of what it means to be physical creation with the Breath of God. If an actions harms us, as created beings, we cannot simply conclude that we have broken some divine law. We have to understand that we might have failed to gain deeper understanding for things that we cannot know or imagine. If I put my hand in a flame, I’ve no more broken God’s Absolute Divine Law than I’ve damaged what God has purported as a wonderful union of the physical and spiritual. What is the essence of that broken law? What does it really mean?
It often seems as though language fails to describe unless you cater to flowing descriptions of images that reflect some greater intent. It’s almost as if they are pointing to something greater than themselves.
Needless to say, what was the Divine Law in the Garden? What is the use of Divine Law outside in this empty garden? Good questions I suppose from someone who enjoys furthering and deepening the questions.
I think this quote from N.T. Wright is appropriate for a discussion on Christian ethics.
“Holiness is not simply a matter of keeping rules. The debate in Christian ethics seems to be mostly about rules. Holiness is God’s future plan for you arriving in the present. It’s a matter of living in the present as you will be in God’s future. We are called as human beings to be stewards of creation, under God and over the world, and as with prayer we are given one bit of the world in particular, for which we have unique responsibility; and that is ourselves, our bodies, our imaginations, our mental and physical lives.
And we are, as it were, to practice for the sovereignty that we are supposed to exercise redeemingly over the whole of creation in Gods new world, by learning to rule our own selves as God would have us do.”