In the PostChristian America what law will we live by? Once our forefathers felt that the laws that passed were based on Jewish/Christian precepts or "highly aligned" with them at least. They also felt that the laws applied to all.
Two days ago for instance the FBI tried to pass off as "technical violations" their complete violation of the law with respect to privacy. Patrick Leahy had a different persepective on that. You may not care about privacy, but we should all care about the principle that the King and the Slave all are subject to the law, this was the dramatic difference that the Torah (Old Testament Law) had over the other Semetic codes (aka Hummarabi). I'm sure we can all think of a few things that are going on in US law, or have gone on for the past few years that are absolutely the opposite of what we believe God is interested in.
But this is the turn, we need to stop looking at US law as "our" law and think of it as the "powers" law. It turns out that we have some say in who the "powers" are, but how is that working for you? Are you satisfied with your local mayor/supervisor, your local state rep/senator, your governor, your US congressman, president, etc.? And how long have you been unhappy? If you are a serious anabaptist you don't vote at all, you know that the law is of the powers, and your kingdom is not theirs. I won't go there tonight.
As exiles we will do our best to conform to the law of the "powers", but we need to consider what the laws are of what we are going to diligently work on, the standard by which we live our lives and teach our children and grand-children. We certainly have Jesus' answer to the greatest commandment, but we need a lot more than this principal, we need some more detailed principles, corollaries you could say. Those corollaries actually exist, they are Torah law (Old Testament law), and you probably know 10 of them, but how does one apply them today?
For those who know Dr. Dorsey we need to apply the CIA (now a big word) hermeneutic - a way to interpret the Torah law. It really isn't that hard, and he is about to make it easier, as he is writing a book on the Torah law and how to interpret it. He breaks the law into three large sections:
A. Instructions for Godly Living
B. Civil Laws
C. Instructions for Religious Practice
God spent a lot of time on section A. Those standards look a lot different than what is encapsulated in the US lawbooks, and they are where our loyalty lies as exiles. Dorsey breaks down "A" into five sections, and in my next post I'd like to discuss in that fourth section (Love for the Disadvantaged and Vulnerable), Dorsey's number 10 there is
Help indebted people who have lost their land (Lev 25:25, 35-38)
4 comments:
Have the stakes been raised even higher by this week's Supreme Court ruling? As you've commented previously, when political contributions are dubbed protected expressions of free speech, the ownership of the law is ever more transparently in human, and unabashedly privileged hands. Do you think this makes the anabaptist stance more or less attractive? Coupled with the resistance of the banking moguls to any modicum of regulation and accountability, law grounded--or owned--in human hands seems ever less worthy of respect or obedience, save out of fear.
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