God's Law (9) - Application

God’s law is perfect. It is perfect in the principles it enshrines. People have not changed and the principles are still the same. The only thing that has changed is the technology. However, it is not that hard to work out that the law about a flying axe head, also applies to a speeding car. So the issue of translating into a modern environment is not as big a problem as we think.

There are two ways that we can apply God’s laws. The first is to use them as they are in the scriptures. Biblical law would then function in the way that judges apply common law, working back to the original principles and applying them to particular cases. The interesting thing is the English common can be traced back to a codification of biblical law by Alfred the Great in his Doom Book or Code of Laws.

The other way would be to codify God’s laws in modern language and relate them to the modern technological environment. This is what John Cotton did for the colony in Massachusetts in his "An Abstract of the Laws of New England” published in 1641. He took biblical laws and applied them to the situation in the colony. The danger of this approach is that God’s law can be corrupted or distorted in the process. John Cotton got some things wrong because he was stuck in his own context.

My preference is for the former method.

Another interesting point is that codification of God’s law is task that will be best done by biblical and legal experts. A democratically elected parliament is unlikely to have the skills needed for the task.