In 1971, Ottowa, Canada’s Five Man Electric Band released the song ‘Signs’, a lament over the amount of posted rules and regulations proliferating in modern life. The chorus complains:
Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign!?
Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign!?
The song has had a real resonance for me since moving from
Ireland to Montana. The US in general has a lot more roadside advertising than
Europe. But in my local area, one sign in particular seems to be everywhere. On
the 20-mile drive from Bigfork to Kalispell, I have counted at least nine of
them, putting even McDonalds to shame. Several are on buildings or posted next
to the road. Many are on private property, and a sizeable number are displayed
on the walls of churches.
It is the Ten Commandments.
The particular sign I keep seeing is available from a
website (advertised on the sign itself), www.gods10.com. A quick perusal of the site makes clear that
the mission of 'God’s 10' is to ‘draw men’s hearts back to God and to restore the
relationship with God and to re-establish the foundation for a relationship
with God and with one another.’ Practically, this involves 'God’s 10' helping
churches ‘in each state in the United States to establish God’s Word in a
visual manner.’
As a theologian who works in theology that is practical and
contextual, I’m always interested when I see the biblical text used publicly or
politically, as well as where it is used and how. Inherent in that is also an
interest in which parts of the biblical text are not used- and again, extrapolating why.
So, why the Ten Commandments? Why display them and not some
other biblical text? The website does not say. There is a section that explains
what the Bible is and how it is laid out, but the site does not explain why the
Ten Commandments are felt to be of particular importance. Perhaps, from their
perspective, the answer is self-evident; obviously those behind the website
see the Commandments as very important indeed, perhaps an essential
underpinning of the Christian faith.
My take on this is that the website is an extension of a
tendency within evangelicalism toward public witness, with a nod to another
tendency within certain expressions of evangelicalism which desires to ‘reclaim’
public space for God. This evangelical understanding believes that, regardless
of the First Amendment’s prohibition against the establishment of religion by
the government, America has a very specific and definitive Christian foundation
that other religions and the outright godless have been seeking to erode. In
this sense, the First Amendment has become, not a protection of religious liberty,
but a hindrance to it. The visible diversification of American public life, with
many faiths seeking a more equitable and diverse public face to religious
expression- not to mention those within American society who wish to have as
little public religious display as possible- are seen as ‘un-American’, a
threat.
The argument made by these certain evangelical expressions is that the Ten Commandments are the foundation of all law and ethics. The
Commandments are deemed an essential part of secular law. Therefore publicly posting
them- particularly in public buildings like schools and courthouses and on public property
like town squares- is not ‘establishing religion’ but re-asserting a lost
historical understanding of America's (supposed) Christian underpinning. This argument holds no water for those who point to the establishment of America as more a product of the Enlightenment, with the First Amendment a key protection against a tendency to establish any one religious idea as preferable to any other.
What can be seen here is that these arguments are as much about divergent understandings of American history as they are about divergent
readings of the biblical text. I’d also argue that they are an expression
of dismay at the loss of assumed privileges by white Christian evangelicals
regarding the loss of prominence of their one specific vision of Christianity in public life. The
website’s use of the words ‘draw men... back to God’; ‘to restore’; and ‘to re-establish’
are further evidence of this.
But getting back to the subject of the Ten Commandment
signs, for me as a theologian, I’m intrigued as to why Christians would feel that
the first introduction to Christianity for people deemed unbelievers would be the Ten
Commandments and not something from Jesus. This was the opinion of the American
author Kurt Vonnegut who, near the end of his life, wrote:
For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us
never mention the Beatitudes, but often with tears in their eyes, they demand
the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses,
not Jesus. I’ve haven’t heard any of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount- the Beatitudes- be posted anywhere. 'Blessed are the peacemakers' in the
Pentagon? 'Blessed are the merciful' in a courtroom? Give me a break...
Vonnegut makes a very good point, even if he ignores- or was
ignorant of- the evangelical belief that the biblical text is a unified whole. But
his point about the absence of Jesus from much of the rhetoric regarding public
display of the biblical text is one worth dwelling on.
To be fair, when looking at all the various versions of the
‘Ten Commandments’ sign available from the website, Jesus does get to talk on a
couple of them, but always along the bottom of the sign, not in the main body. There is John 3:16 on one, which is no surprise. John 14:6 (‘I
am the way the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me’) is
also fairly unsurprising.
The use of John 8:34 (‘everyone who sins is a slave to
sin... If the Son sets you free, you are free indeed’) is intriguing, and seems
to begin the process of building a link between the person of Jesus and the
Commandments. This process is made explicit with the use of Matthew 5:17 on
one of the signs (‘don’t think I have come to destroy the law... I have not
come to destroy the law but to fulfil it’). It is even more explicit with the quoting of John 14:15 (‘if you love me,
keep my commandments’).
However, this then raises the question: what are the
commandments of Jesus? As a Jew, Jesus was well aware of the canon of the
Jewish law, particularly the Commandments’ basic elucidation of right and
wrong.
The difficulty for the ‘God’s 10’ argument for the seeming supremacy of the Ten Commandments is that the Gospels don’t portray Jesus using
the Jewish law as it was popularly understood then- or now. Rather, we see
Jesus making it more complex, more nuanced. The Gospel accounts constantly
portray Jesus confronting those who felt they had an inside track as to God’s
requirements for righteousness and salvation.
The one account we have of Jesus interacting directly with
the Ten Commandments is in Mark 10, when a rich young official enquires of
Jesus how to attain perfection. Jesus reiterates the Commandments (‘you know what the commandments say: “Do not
commit murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not give false witness.
Do not cheat. Honor your father and mother”’). The young man presses Jesus (‘I
have obeyed all those commandments since I was a boy’). The text says that Jesus
‘looked at him and loved him’. ‘You are missing one thing,’ he said. ‘Go and sell
everything you have. Give the money to those who are poor. You will have
treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me.’ At this, the text says, ‘the
man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he was very rich’, to which Jesus
declares to his disciples, ‘How hard it is for rich people to enter God’s
kingdom!’
Jesus here makes
clear that true love is not in keeping the law- or indeed in declaring the law- but in declaring and living a new law: the law of love- love for one’s poor neighbours, to the point of ultimate
self-sacrifice.
And it is this
kind of love- the overriding message of the Incarnation of the Son of God in
the human person of Jesus- that the Ten Commandment signs, I believe,
completely miss. The closest they come is in the use of John
15:12 (‘this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you’).
But again, this quote is appended to the bottom of the sign, under the prominent display
of the Commandments.
And there is the rub: the central message of Jesus- the love of God for humanity
and the coming of the Kingdom of God- was not merely a quick addition to the
Ten Commandments. It was a new creation, a new revelation, a new beginning, a fulfilment beyond
any previous understanding of the mind of God.
The fact that Christians do not- cannot;
DARE not- publicly display signs that say ‘Go and sell
everything you have. Give the money to those who are poor. You will have
treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me’, proves the scandal of the Gospel,
even for those who call themselves Christians. We dare not say what Jesus said.
We dare not do what Jesus did. Better just to post a list of do’s and don’ts.
The do’s and don’ts are easier; they catch the unbeliever up short. The words
of Jesus invite the (so-called) unbeliever and the (so-called) believer equally. For all the
talk of Christians that Christianity isn’t a list of do’s and
don’ts, the unseemly haste with which we’re quick to post lists of do’s and
don’ts- and always 'OUR' list of do's and don'ts- makes me think that we don’t really believe that.
The Orthodox Christian mystic St. Cosmos of Aetolia
(1714-1779) expounded on these words of Jesus thus:
If you want to find
perfect love, go sell all your belongings, give them to the poor, go where you
find a master and become a slave. Can you do this and be perfect?
You say this is too
heavy? Then do something else. Don't sell yourself as a slave. Just sell your
belongings and give them all to the poor. Can you do it? Or do you find this
too heavy a task?
All right, you
cannot give away all your belongings. Then give half, or a third, or a fifth.
Is even this too heavy? Then give one tenth. Can you do that? Is it still too
heavy?
How about this:
don't sell yourself as slave. Don't give a penny to the poor. Only do this.
Don't take your poor brother's coat, don't take his bread, don't persecute him;
don't eat him alive. If you don't want to do him any good, at least do him no
harm. Just leave him alone. Is this also too heavy?
You say you want to
be saved, but how? How can we be saved if everything we are called to do is too
heavy? We descend and descend until there is no place further down. God is
merciful, yes, but he also has an iron rod.
The law is, and always will be, a ‘sign’; ‘do this, don’t do that… Can’t you read the sign?!’ The sign might point to perfection, but it will never make us perfect.
Perfection, Jesus said, was in love.
The love of Jesus is not a 'sign'; it is the 'way'.
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