Ten Steps on Freedom Road

Why the Commandments are Good News

John Badertscher

• Verlag: Resource Publications
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532693977
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: Christian Theology

The purpose of this book is to help those engaged in Christian formation, or those exploring faith perspectives for themselves, to see the Ten Commandments in a positive and liberating, rather than a restrictive, sense. Seen in the context of Israel's story, the commandments are guidance toward a life of freedom in community. Commonly held meanings of faith, freedom, and love are challenged as social and political dimensions of this journey toward freedom are developed.

1

The Shape of Freedom

For many people, religion is understood to consist of two parts: beliefs and rules. Beliefs can be seen as arbitrary rules for thinking and imagining, easily dismissed as lacking empirical evidence and therefore as matters of private, individual judgment. The related rules then appear as arbitrary limitations on human actions. Once beliefs and rules are so understood, religion can be classified as acceptable, tolerable in a free society as a matter of private and unaccountable judgment. Religion, then, is seen as a non-rational set of beliefs connected to a non-rational set of rules that one might, for whatever reason, choose to live by. This is not my understanding of a life of faith.

Freedom, for many people, is also seen as something pertaining to individuals. When we say that we live in a free country, we pass by the older sense that our political community is free because it is self-governing, making its own laws. Rather, we mean that our government is constrained to place the fewest possible restrictions on what we do, say, and think. Freedom, understood this way, is at its greatest when each individual can choose without restraint what to do, say, and think. This freedom is limited only by the presence of other free persons within the sphere of one’s life. Within this way of understanding freedom, it is hard to imagine why anyone would accept the rules, including the mental rules called beliefs or creeds, which any religious or other tradition or community would impose upon one’s freedom. We might be “spiritual,” however that is understood; but to be religious, in this sense, is to surrender one’s freedom. This is not my understanding of freedom.

The set of laws I intend to explore here are usually called the Ten Commandments or, in a Jewish context, the Ten Words. In what follows, I will be giving testimony to how I have come to acknowledge the Ten Commandments as offering us a better, truer path of freedom. In the course of this testimony, I will be challenging the way many people understand freedom and faith. My challenge will also have implications for the way religion is best to be understood. If this were a more philosophical writing, I might begin by redefining these basic terms. Instead, I simply warn the reader that the challenge is present. I will try to present a different and better understanding of freedom as we go. When we have finished our explorations, we can return to these matters to see whether more adequate understandings of faith and freedom are available.

These deeper ways of understanding freedom and faith are by no means original with me. I have been blessed by great teachers, some of them academic. With two exceptions, I choose not to name them here. I would rather that the conversation simply be between the reader and me. The two teachers I must acknowledge here are Walter Harrelson and Krister Stendahl. Harrelson, a man whom I never met, was a twentieth century Christian scholar of what is usually called the Old Testament. He published several books on the Ten Commandments and devoted himself to Jewish-Christian dialogue. Readers who want a scholarly treatment of the themes we will be exploring should consult his writings, still in print. His way of connecting the Ten Commandments to freedom has been formative for me. I thank Krister Stendahl, New Testament scholar and Bishop of the Church of Sweden, for a six-week course in the summer of 1959 which opened my eyes to a new reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Whatever wisdom there is in my treatment of that text, and in my understanding of the relation between Jesus’ teachings and the Ten Commandments, I owe to him.

Now we begin by showing how each of the Ten Commandments offers genuine freedom to those who would take them seriously, and how each of them gives us a path we can walk joyfully.

2

Law and Story

It is possible to imagine the Ten Commandments floating down from the sky, as if God were saying: “This is the way it has to be. These are the conditions under which you must live unless you want me to get really angry with you.” People whose parents or caregivers were strict or impatient or just plain mean might imagine the relationship between God and humans that way. But that is not the way the law appears in the Bible. In fact, no human community I know of has arrived at their laws that way. Laws always emerge as part of a story. People live together, make mistakes, hurt each other and, at their best, try to learn from what goes wrong. A law is always set in a story, although law-makers and judges are not always aware of the stories that are shaping their decisions. Strict, impatient, or mean parents and caregivers have their own stories, of which they may or may not be conscious. Sometimes when children are grown, they come to a point where they suddenly can say to themselves: “Aha! So that is why Mom or Dad was that way.” Embedded in a story, every law thus reflects experiences in which people have come to see some patterns of action as wrong and hurtful. No community has ever passed a law against something that no one was doing. So laws do not tell us: “In our community no one does this.” Rather, they tell us that such things have been done, and are done often enough that we have come to see how wrong and hurtful they are. Laws are both evidence of human brokenness and visions of human fulfillment. This evidence is remembered and these visions are carried in stories.

So the Ten Commandments cannot be understood except as part of a story. They do not appear at the beginning of the story, and their meaning develops continually throughout the story. Jews and Christians, and in a way Muslims too, share this story. Of course there are important differences in the way the story is told and interpreted, not just between Jews and Christians, but within each group. I am writing as a Christian of a particular kind, and I know my “take” on the commandments will be different, sometimes very different, from that of others, even other Christians. As I try to interpret the Commandments in a way that is faithful to the story we share, I know my understanding is limited and fallible, and that others will see them differently. That does not make my testimony less serious.

As a Christian, I see the story leading to Jesus of Nazareth: his life, his teachings, his death and his resurrection. For Christians, the meaning of the Commandments is understood as leading toward, through and beyond Jesus. The story comes to us through the community (the church) Jesus called together, and which his Spirit continues to lead, however poorly we may follow. We have our own mistakes, wrongs and hurts which we have inflicted on ourselves and others; and we have our own story-tellers, especially in the gospels and letters of the New Testament. My understanding of the Commandments is shaped by that experience and tradition. The New Testament sometimes portrays Jesus as a lawgiver. Some Christians have come to see the laws of the New Testament as different from and superior to those of the scriptures we share with Jews. Of course, the Christian version of the story in which the Commandments are located is different from the Jewish version; but I am more impressed by how much is shared. I have come to see that the New Testament simply cannot be sensibly understood apart from the Original (“Old”) Testament, and that the truth of the New Testament validates and, I would claim, clarifies the truth of the Original Testament. I will have something to say about the teachings of Jesus on the commandments later. But first I want us to see the Ten Commandments in the context of the story Jews and Christians (and, in their own way, Muslims) share.

3

The Big Picture

If you want to know the whole story, you have to read the Bible. It is a great collection of writings, written originally in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and available in a bewildering variety of translations, each of which reflects the insights, culture and limitations of the translators. The Bible is a weird and wonderful collection. It does not simply tell a story, but is also made up of smaller stories, poetry and other kinds of writing. The whole story emerges from the collection only with the help of the reader’s imagination. I do not say these things to discourage you from reading the Bible, for that is something I very much hope you will (continue?) to do; but to approach the Bible without an awareness of its character, its weirdness if you please, will lead the reader to give up in confusion or despair, or to turn to some supposed authority for oversimplified help that is finally disrespectful of the book itself. So this is a “heads up.”

One of the most important figures in the story is a man named Jacob. He is a rascal. Having cheated his brother, Jacob leaves home to seek his fortune and avoid the consequences of his misdeeds. Much later he returns home, family and fortune in tow. However, he is still afraid of his brother and the army his brother has come to lead. So when Jacob gets to the border of his brother’s turf, he sends his family across but waits on the far side with his demons. During a restless night, he is confronted by a mysterious presence with whom he wrestles. At dawn the match ends in a draw, with Jacob demanding from the stranger a blessing. The stranger vanishes, after “blessing” Jacob with a dislocated hip and a new name. The new name is Israel, which means “wrestler with God.” It is no accident that the homeland of the Jewish people and one of the names Christians have for their community is “Israel.” I am suggesting that the only way to deal with the Bible is by wrestling with it, and that dislocated joints of various kinds may be part of the result.

Now I am not so foolish as to attempt to give you a summary of the whole Biblical narrative, but I must give you enough of a summary to show where the Ten Commandments fit. The story begins with a couple named Abraham and Sarah, who believe they have been called to leave a city which is one of the centers of civilization of that time. They are called to go with some relatives and associates to the remote area known today as Israel/Palestine, and to make a new life there. Over time, the God who calls them makes a covenant with them. They and their descendants will be his people, and he will be their God.

Wait! Doesn’t the Bible begin with creation, and the flood and all that? Yes it does, but those first chapters are a kind of prologue to the story of Abraham, Sarah and their spiritual descendants. It is important to acknowledge the Creator, for it means that we are creatures, related to everything else in the universe. The other main point of the creation stories is that the Creator pronounced the creation good, and then rested. We will get to what that might mean for us when we get to the Fourth Commandment. The point of the prologue for the story as a whole is that human beings, who were given a special responsibility to care for the creation, messed things up. This led to their exile from the garden that is their first home and to the corruption of their relationships, even to murder. God’s offer to Abraham and Sarah is part of God’s way to begin setting things right, restoring again the goodness of creation and the human role in it. Now, let’s go back to that story.

Jacob/Israel is the grandson of Abraham and Sarah. He has a lot of children, including twelve sons, with a few wives. (This is what the Bible presents as a “traditional family.”) The next-to-youngest son, Joseph, is a favorite of his dad. His jealous older brothers secretly sell him into slavery. He ends up in Egypt, another center of civilization, where he becomes the Prime Minister. In a time of famine, his brothers come to him for help, not knowing who he is. He reconciles with them, and the whole family moves to Egypt. They prosper for a few generations; then a new king, worried about these immigrants, reduces them to slavery and finally orders all their male children killed. This king is obviously unaware of the power of women; because women, both Israelite and Egyptian, see to it that one of the slave children, Moses, not only survives but is raised in the royal palace.

When as a young man Moses protests against injustice, he has to flee to the desert. There he has an encounter with a mysterious presence who tells him to return to Egypt and lead his people out to freedom. Moses wants to know the name of the one who is calling him, but gets this strange response: “I AM WHO I AM. Do what I have asked you to do, and you will find out who I am.” As with Abraham and Sarah, knowing God is possible only through undertaking a journey in faith, doing what God calls us to do.

So Moses goes, and the going is not easy. The king vacillates. Disasters fall on the land. Finally, the people miraculously make it into the desert with the leadership of Moses and his sister Miriam. So there they are, free at last . . . but in the desert! Just when they are starting to think that maybe they were better off as slaves in Egypt, they find themselves camped at the foot of a mountain which is behaving just like it was an active volcano. Moses is called to go up the mountain to meet the mysterious presence. There God tells Moses to remind the people of how he has liberated them, and to offer them a covenant in which, if they follow God’s instruction, they will become “a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.” He comes back down with this message, and the people agree to their part in this covenant. After one more trip up and down the mountain for Moses and his brother Aaron, there follows, in Exodus, chapter 20, the Ten Commandments, spoken by God.

The people hear the voice of God, but it is too much for them. They ask Moses to carry on listening to God, and then to tell them what was said. So Moses goes back into “the thick darkness where God was.” What follows are eleven chapters of detailed instructions on a wide variety of topics, at the end of which God gives Moses “. . . the two tablets of the covenant, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God.” Later we shall consider the fate of those stone tablets.

The “I AM” has offered a covenant to the people, just as with Abraham and Sarah. The Ten Commandments, God’s contribution to the terms of this covenant, give the people the shape of freedom, but learning to live as free people takes the practice of faith and hope and love. It takes generations of wandering in the desert before the people finally, after the death of Moses, return to the land promised to Abraham and Sarah. Before Moses dies, he makes a great farewell speech to the people, reminding them of the covenant relationship at the heart of their freedom.

Another version of the Ten Commandments is included in Moses’ final address to the people, found in chapter five of Deuteronomy (the name means “second law”). When we get to a discussion of the commandments, I will give the two versions of each commandment, so that we can reflect on the differences. One significant feature of the Bible is that it includes more than one version of many major topics (e.g., creation, the life of King David, the life of Jesus), as if to invite us to search for and be challenged by multiple perspectives and divergent interpretations.

After entering the Promised Land, the people struggle with their neighbors, often with bloody consequences. Eventually they mak...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Shape of Freedom
• Chapter 2: Law and Story
• Chapter 3: The Big Picture
• Chapter 4: The First Commandment: a faithful atheism
• Chapter 5: The Second Commandment: freedom for imagination
• Chapter 6: The Third Commandment: freedom for listening
• Chapter 7: The Fourth Commandment: freedom to rest and enjoy
• Chapter 8: The Fifth Commandment: freedom to be yourself
• Chapter 9: The Sixth Commandment: freedom for life together
• Chapter 10: The Seventh Commandment: freedom for intimacy
• Chapter 11: The Eighth Commandment: freedom for ownership
• Chapter 12: The Ninth Commandment: freedom for friendship
• Chapter 13: The Tenth Commandment: the freedom of gratitude
• Chapter 14: The Christ and the Commandments
• Chapter 15: Faith and Freedom: a postscript