The law. Lex Mundi. It is very interesting.

Far from being an absolute and clear dividing line between good and evil, right and wrong, law has entered something of a crisis in our post-modern era where questions like “what is evil really?” and “is there really such a thing as wrong?” become more and more dominant.

As always my discussion here will be framed within the lens of who I am. A man of Judeo-Christian faith straddling the gray area between modern and post-modern thinking. What I mean is this is bound to be messy.

The Oxford dictionary defines law as follows:

[mass noun] (often the law) the system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties.

The law – created to ensure order by the authority of a people or culture and eroded or changed as culture changes and the authority of said culture changes. Simplistic, I know but work with me.

The law is a necessary expression of order and control designed to ensure a culture continues and develops in a reasonably smooth way. Initially a tool of efficiency encoding morality and ethics so that cultures do not have to re-invent the wheel with each new murder or theft etc. it has, in most instances, become less than efficient as the years and decades and centuries and millenia have weighed it down with amendments and addendum and interpretive rulings etc.

My opinion – there is no such thing as a lawless country. There is no such thing as a lawless person. One might argue that Somalia is a lawless country but I would argue simply that the laws there are essentially safeguarding the rights of a minority of power brokers at the expense of the many who hold no authority.

North American and European law has their foundation in Judeo-Christian values. This is changing of course as culture shifts but the question of course is how is it changing. As the foundational J/C values are removed are they being replaced with anything or is the entire construct of legality at risk of becoming an inverted pyramid at risk of complete collapse?

When God gave a code of law to Israel at Sinai it was not done ex nihilo, that is, out of nothing. Israel was not a lawless people. Israel had a law of its own based on its history and culture and that law would have been very similar to other Semitic peoples of the middle east at the time. There are shadows of Israel’s old laws in scripture that closely mirror the code of Hammurabi for instance.

The principal of retributive justice seen in the phrase “an eye for an eye…” was clearly encoded in Babylon around 1,700 B.C. while Biblical scholars generally agree the Torah (which means law) was encoded roughly 600-450 B.C. although it was clearly an oral tradition for longer.

So God enters Israel’s timeline (or appears to but really God had been there all along) and offers a new interpretation of human law. God offers an interpretation that is based on God’s holiness because Israel, having been chosen by God to become a human reflection of Godself to the world, thus receives God’s imputed holiness and its laws must reflect this.

So we have a law now in the process of being redeemed. We also are given a law with a new purpose. Rather than simply act as a dividing line between right and wrong, good and evil, Israel’s law is meant to be a beacon to point to something eternal and beyond this world. It is meant to point to an absolute.

No longer is the law meant to point to a need for external order it is also meant to point to an internal need. The law serves the purpose of the tree of knowledge in the garden of eden story from Genesis. It gives us an awareness that there is right and wrong, good and evil, that is not dependent upon our culture and desires (unlike what happened in the garden story when the fruit opened humanity’s eyes to good and evil but drove God to a distance hence making us the arbiters of the dividing line between the two) but beyond us in a seemingly unreachable place – the heart of God.

In Romans 7:4-12 the apostle Paul says:

So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God. For when we were in the realm of the flesh, the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in us, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code. 

What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.

The law creates a new awareness…that we are not the true source of what is right and what is wrong. That holiness outside ourselves is and that initial awareness creates despair and causes us to cry out “who than can be saved?” In that state of yearning our own spirit which is of the same fabric as God’s seeks salvation and finds it in this same God.

But I digress.

Israel’s law was redefined on Sinai in the same way American law was redefined with the Constitution. It is not as if there was no law in the American colony before 1787 when it was adopted; there was law but it was British. The Constitution enshrined a new, redefined law based upon principles of a republic and against a monarchy.

Still as wonderful as the law has been, particularly in light of its basis in God’s revealed will it is still time and culture bound. Not, of course, because God is limited but because we are. We change, our culture and values change with new technologies, greater awareness of the world around us, new forms of power etc. God reveals God’s law into a time-bound, culture-bound, language specific context and then it is up to people to interpret and adapt the law appropriate to God’s holiness. The only way to do this is to remain close to the source of the law but of course Israel and everybody since pretty much messed that up within seconds of the revelation.

We are now, here in the west, sailing through time in a ship of law that veered a half-degree off course. This slight course change seems reasonable until you project it across thousands of years and come to realize that we are likely nowhere near where we should be at this point.

We find ourselves in the middle of an unknown legal ocean, captain absent and officers squabbling among themselves over where to go and how to get there while the crew threatens mutiny in their increasing restlessness.

Some would say – simply go back to the beginning and start again. This sounds good but it is not possible. We are lost. There is no way back and when we left port we were much different from who we are now. No – we must forge ahead somehow from where we are and do the best we can but I would suggest it would be a mistake to forget the original purpose and intent of the law as we have it. To forget the ethical and moral intentions of the law and deny the absolute God who sought to redefine it for holy purposes would leave us adrift in a hot windless sea for a long time with the law becoming a dead albatross around our necks weighing us down.

We must do the one thing our culture is absolutely trying not to do – look to God and pray for grace and interpret our laws accordingly. How this looks practically I cannot say but it would impact everything.

Do not suppose such a move would create either a Republican or Conservative promised land either. God is neither of these things though God’s persona has been successfully redefined and co-opted by both in recent years to look the part. Of course every time one seeks to speak for God one invariably paints their own face and creates an idol be they left or right.

No matter what, the law will continue to be defined, redefined, and interpreted and the outcome will largely depend upon the people who are doing the interpreting. Since there is no way people can separate themselves from their biases and beliefs (and we all have them) it is these things that will be the ultimate determinants in how our law looks in the future.