Law and Grace (24) Trawling for Principles

When Christians try to develop a political theory, they find that the material in the New Testament is too sparse, so they quickly realise they need stuff from the Old Testament law. The common approach is to trawl through the Torah fishing for principles. The problem is that the judicial laws provided by God were given as part of system of justice. They do not make sense when wrenched out of that context.

The common result is that “biblical principles” are used to support or critique a modern economic or political system. Many years ago, I read a book by EC Wines called the Hebrew Republic. He analysed the principles he selected from the Old Testament and deduced that Moses gave the children of Israel a republic, complete with constitution, president, supreme court, senate and house of representative. This was a huge distortion of the Torah, but it provided a Christian buttress for the American political system. This shows the danger of taking principles from the Torah and ignoring the fact that the laws are part of a complete economic and justice system given by God.

The truth is that people try to draw out principles, because they do not understand, or do not like God’s system of justice. This allows them to cherry pick the bits that they like, and ignore what they do not like. This is a dishonest way to apply God’s word. If we do not trust the system of justice that God has given, we are not entitled to take out principles and use them to support some other human system of government.

Once principles are extracted from the legal and judicial system given by God, they can be used to support any number of worldly systems. The only way to get the benefit of God’s wisdom is to give up our modern worldly systems and allow him to establish his system of justice in our midst.

For the Lord is our judge,
the Lord is our lawgiver,
the Lord is our king;
it is he who will save us (Is 33:22).

If we reject God’s system of justice, we cannot expect to benefit from his wisdom. When Christians recognise that God is our lawgiver and judge, they will lose faith in human systems, and trust the system of justice that God gave to Moses.

This is the end of this series of posts. The full series can be found at Law and Grace.