commandments i the basics why should anyone check let s restrict this to christians why do we want to find commandments in the books regarded as scripture what s going on i will pass on psychologizing answers whether dismissive or more open as not the kind of issue to deal with here the question is what is the theological point involved and it has been quoted at me often enough by those who don t believe i take it seriously that jesus is said to have said if you love me you will obey my commands john i am like any christian the slave of christ and it is my will that i should do as he wills me to do i am also or instead his younger brother but still under his direction though we both call god abba christians therefore will try to find what it is that their lord commands them and discovering it will feel obligated to do it or to confess their failure readers here may set aside the theologizing jargon such as slaves of christ the point is that adherents of a religion will read the texts whether classified as inspired or not that are held up as models in an effort to find application to their own situations this practice ranges from devotional reading of sermons and the like to the exegesis of canon ical scripture as the word of god and at the highest pitch this leads to a question of whether we can find in inspired scripture something that can act as absolute guidance for our actions the problem is in finding out just what it is our lord commands i am going to set aside for this essay one major direction in which christians have looked for these commands namely christian tradition that is not because i reject tradition but because my primary audience in this essay is protestants who deny tradition a determinative value in favor of the witness of scripture the question i want to deal with is what commandments can we find from our lord in scripture and that turns out to be a hard question if any of my protestant inquisitors would like to turn the discussion to the authority of tradition i can accomodate them unlike most protestants episcopalians admit claims from a scripture b reason and c tradition on roughly equal standing earlier in john than my quote above we read john i give you a new commandment love one another this is the only place in the nt where christians are given an explicit commandment with the context commenting on its imperative mode pronouncement by jesus at the same meal so we readers infer since it is not in john but in the synoptics jesus says take this bread this is my body mark cf matthew luke corinthians the mode is imperative greek labete and hence this too is a commandment in both cases we have to infer that the command is directed to a wider circle than the immediate collocation of disciples because we judge the evangelist s point in mentioning it with the disciples by then mostly or entirely dead is that we are expected to follow this as a commandment from our lord in the case of communion paul s mention at least this is probably true of the evangelists also implies an ongoing ritual liturgy in which these words operate to bind christians to the original command to his disciples as a continuing commandment to the christian community i am entirely comfortable with this inference but i must point out that it is there between us and the occasion on which jesus spoke the command i take it as a clear inference at the very least the evangelist s notion that all christians are called to love one another in jesus command directed at the disciples but i have to call attention to the inference the command cannot apply to me without the generalization from the specific context of its statement to my own context as a disciple of christ all reading of scripture has to make such inferences to get any sense out of the text whatsoever this is a general problem in reading these texts we cannot read them at all without our own understanding of our native languages in which we normally read the translated texts and without some appreciation of the original context and at points the original languages when english misleads us i am going to presume in what follows that we have the general problem of how to read scripture under control i don t really think this is true but it will suffice for my current purposes i will address only the issues that arise when we have already coped with the understanding of a year old text from another world than the one we live in questions at that level only introduce more reser vations about the commandments issue than will be found stipulating that we can read the texts as the original audience might have done among the reasons we have for seeing john s agapate allelou as a general commandment not merely an instruction by jesus to this disciples on that one occasion and one linking it to the synoptic great commandment is that we have criticism from jesus about limiting our love to those whom we congenially associate with in matthew ff we read you have learnt how it was said you must love your neighbor and hate your enemy but i say to you love your enemies in fact the leviticus context quoted does not say hate your enemy it is merely the common human presumption and leviticus is at pains to say that the love should extend to strangers amongst the people of israel luke in expanding on this same q context goes on to have jesus say even sinners love those who love them all of this suggests quite strongly i d say that limiting the scope of the new commandment is not quite what jesus has in mind in short inference leads me to generalizing the actual text to a command that is in force on christians and with objects not limited to other christians trickier than the agapate allelou or institution of communion there is the case of the great commission where matthew mark the twelve are sent out to evangelize proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is close at hand the verb is imperative ke russete but the context is rather specific to the twelve and there are further specifiers as in do not turn your steps to pagan territory and do not enter any samaritan town the lukan parallels are even more specific to jesus final journey to jerusalem which make it harder to see this generalizing to all christians than the previous examples that hasn t prevented christians from making such an inference what i have to call attention to is that such inference is not justified in the text nor unlike the first two cases i cite by the rhetoric of the evangelist urged on the reader still paul seems to have felt obliged to proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is close at hand even contrary to jesus instructions to the to the gentiles to the ends of the earth so christians after him have also taken this as a commandment in the sense of john do i accept this i don t know it is surely rather speculative but you see how the ripples of inference spread out from the text that is the pretext christians may infer a general commandment applicable to all from what is presented in the gospels as a specific occasion i do not necessarily object to this kind of generalization but i insist that people who make it must have an understanding that they are reasoning at some considerable length from what we actually have in scripture there are assumptions involved in this reasoning and these are not themselves scriptural though people will do their best to justify their assumptions by other references to scripture which simply adds more inference into the mix let s move on to the great commandment that we should love god with our whole hearts and minds and souls this is perhaps the synoptic equivalent of john s agapate allelou and yet it is not presented as a commandment in our texts rather the context is controversy with the pharisees to cite matthew ff but when the pharisees heard that he had silenced the sadducees they got together and to disconcert him one of them put a question master which is the greatest commandment of the law it is by no means obvious here though i accept it as such that jesus answer is meant to be a commandment to christians he is answering a polemic from his enemies mark s account in casts the answer in a far more positive light as so the scribe in this version says far more important than any holocaust i need to point out that this word originates in the context of animal sacrifice forget the nazis for this or sacrifice luke is intermediate he has a lawyer posing the question to disconcert jesus and gets the good samarian parable for his pains luke the contexts here are so confusingly various that one could be forgiven for drawing no inferences in no account is this said as if it were obviously to be taken as a commandment binding on christians though i think it an entirely reasonable conclusion in each case that jesus thinks it to be so the point is that our mental gears have to grind a cycle or so to get to any conclusion from all of this about what we are commanded to do by jesus and all of this is contingent on our understanding the point of jesus use of the torah in the all quite different gospel accounts and the application of such a context to us the different contexts among the synoptics are curious it should be noted that only in luke do we get the fixing of this command by the parable of the good samaritan we may look for an analogous intent in matthew where gives the golden rule as the meaning of the law and the prophets and where we may also hear an echo of hillel saying the same a generation before jesus if we make these associations which i think are entirely reasonable we are again indulging in inference the texts do not explicitly support us rather we read the texts as having this kind of inter relationship current literary theory calls this intertextuality my discussion of why the agapate allelou has to apply beyond the community of the disciples and beyound the circle of christian believers applies again here to buttress a conclusion that this is despite the presentation not saying so explicitly a commandment to christians few christians would disagree with my conclusions but i must point out that they are conclusions they depend on rather elaborate chains of reasoning that are simply not present in the texts themselves the contextual problem keeps coming up more and more severely as we look at those sayings of jesus that are not so universally taken by christians as commandments and we get some really hard cases take divorce mark is pretty clear the man who divorces his wife and marries another is guilty of adultery against her cf luke except that matthew has an escape clause except in the case of fornication this seems to be a rather clear commandment whether or not we take matthew s reservation and some christians to this day take it so but some don t at least in practice this is rather peculiar it is not as if jesus were not explicit about this whereas he says nothing at all about some of the things people gnash their teeth over how is it possible if the commands of christ are clear that matthew can so disagree with the other evangelists of the synoptic tradition i m going to continue this examination into ever murkier waters but this is enough to start with the theme is finding commandments in scripture is an exercise in inference our inferences are informed by our assumptions that is our own cultural biases i have so far identified a very few commandments that are generally accepted by all christians and yet in these already some of the difficulties start to surface it is these difficulties i want to discuss in my next essay on this topic the divorce commandment already strikes at some of the difficulties i see almost no evidence that the people who are so eager to find commandments to condemn me with spend any time at all writing nasty screeds to soc couples or misc legal about the horrors or viciousness of divorce or demanding that us law refuse to allow it or refuse unrepentant divorcees places in their churches that is not to say that divorce doesn t enter into consideration in general it is most definitely a matter of concern in even the most liberal church circles for example a wildly liberal episcopalian priest of my aqauintence in a wildly liberal diocese has recommended to a couple who approached him to marry them that they have a private secular ceremony before a judge so that the public ceremony he celebrated need not go through an agonizing examination by officials who would just as soon not take on this role of interpreting the commands we are faced with as christians this in a church that was effectively created by a famous divorce michael l siemon i say you are gods sons of the mls panix com most high all of you nevertheless or you shall die like men and fall mls ulysses att com like any prince psalm
