The Subjectivity of the Moral Law in the New Testament

The summer between my junior and senior year of college were terribly confusing times in my personal faith journey. In every sense of the psychological term, I was in a Christian's version of moratorium, and there was little peace in my soul about it all. In desperation, I remember scheduling a lunch with the dean of students, who happened to have some free time. We went out for chinese with the purpose of discussing faith matters over the guise of General Tso's chicken. Quickly, I unloaded all my frustrations with the inconsistencies of the New Testament and my understanding of the mechanistic nature of God on this genial man. Apparently he had heard similar frustrations expressed before and said to me, "A.J., there's another way of reading the New Testament." The comment confused me. I remember sort of titling my head with an inquisitive look on my face that said, "What brand of crazy beans are you sir eating for breakfast?" However, three years later I have an experienced appreciation for what that man meant.

Recently I've been reading Pete Rollins new book "The Fidelity of Betrayal" and I have only good things to say about it. This blog won't be a synopsis of this parallactically challenging read, but rather an analysis of a question that the book rendered about the subjectivity of the moral law in the New Testament.

By this, I mean to point out the subjectivity by which Christ speaks of the moral law as opposed to the objectivity that Paul speaks of the same moral law. I hear Christ say over and over, as exemplified in Luke 10, that the moral law comes down to loving God and loving neighbors. Yet reading Paul I see a characteristically stringent shift away from Christ's hippie love commandment towards a much more refined perimeters of moral expediency. For example, Paul's letter in 1 Corinthians seems primarily to set the Corinthaisn a walkin' on the moral balance beam which they seemed to have slipped off by the mentions of sexual, inter relational, and economic immorality going on.

The question relates to Pete Rollin's book because in it he challenges the reader, through many interesting and surprisingly literal interpretations of Old Testament theology, to perceive God as an experience as opposed to an object. Personally, I greatly appreciated this insight since it advently reveals "another way of reading the New Testament" like my old dean hinted at. However, it raises a new cadre of questions concerning the moral law in the New Testament. For instance, how can a subjective God outright insist on an objective moral law as it appears God does between Luke and 1 Corinthians? The idea of God as a "verb" or the cosmic mystery sort of implies, in my mind, an equally subjective moral law. Even more preposterously, the idea of God as a verb almost by definition inhibits God from making moral claims since a verb is incapable of doing so. It would be quite difficult for "walking" to stop and say, "Hey! You're walking too fast!" Walking is a verb and is thus lacking the ability to even say anything.

I don't want to downplay the or overlook other aspects of Pete Rollin's book in my arguements here, so if anyone has read this book and could clear up the muddy water, please comment.