“The Religion of the Apostles”–Book Analysis (Part 8): The People of God and the Law of God (Wrapping things up…)

It has been a couple of weeks since my last post on Stephen De Young’s The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century. And although I like the book, I have to admit that I’m getting a bit burned out writing on it. Therefore, even though there are two more chapters to go, I’m going to stuff both of them into this final post.

Now, the gist of the entire book really is to show that Orthodox Christianity not only stems all the way back to the original teaching of the first century Church, but that it has its roots firmly in the soil of the Old Testament and Second Temple Judaism. In other words, Christianity was not some brand-new invention that some renegade Jews in the first century simply made up. It was presented as a fulfilled Judaism. The concepts of the Trinity, the divine-human natures of Christ, the perception of the spiritual powers, the destination of the saints in glory, creation, salvation, and atonement—all of these Christian views and teachings were rooted in Judaism.

In this post, I will touch upon De Young’s final two chapters/topics: (1) The concept of God’s People, and (2) The understanding of the Law of God.

God’s People
In Chapter 8, De Young gives a fairly lengthy discussion regarding the identity and role of Old Testament Israel as God’s people and then how the New Testament Church was a fulfillment of God’s plan to have a people for His Name. The main points he makes are the following:

1. Israel came into being as a people and a nation during the Exodus, from the time of the Passover to the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, which the feast of Pentecost celebrated.
2. Later on, due to their sin and apostasy, the ten northern tribes were dispersed among the nations, but nevertheless, various Old Testament prophets spoke of a future time when they would be regathered from the nations and reconstituted as God’s people under the rule of a Messianic king.
3. This, though, created quite the conundrum: How would that happen, given the fact that the ten northern tribes had intermarried with the surrounding nations? Ethnically, that would seem impossible to do.
4. This is where the work of Christ steps in to answer that “How?” question. From His celebration of Passover at the Last Supper to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Christian proclamation was that Christ’s work fulfilled that “Passover to Pentecost narrative,” so to speak, and that the restoration of the ten tribes would not happen on the basis of ethnicity, because God’s people had never really been based on ethnicity to begin with.
5. If we look back at the first Passover, the original Israelites came from a mixed group of ethnicities (albeit predominately from the descendants of Abraham, granted), and the distinction, therefore, between Israelites and Egyptians wasn’t so much one of ethnicity, but one of faith. As De Young says, “The faithless, regardless of ethnicity, became Egyptians that day. The faithful, regardless of ethnicity, became part of God’s people Israel on that day and in subsequent generations through participation in the Passover” (214).
6. Therefore, God’s people Israel has always been based on faith. And that means that the Church didn’t “replace” Israel, because the Church is Israel. This is one of the main things that is argued throughout the New Testament, particularly the letters of Paul: the regathering of the ten tribes was a gathering of the faithful from among all nations. And that is why prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel prophesied about a new covenant that wouldn’t be like the Mosaic covenant, but that nevertheless would be the fulfillment of the Mosaic covenant.
7. This puts the dispute between Christ and His followers and the Pharisees into a clearer light. Christ and His followers argued that righteousness always comes through faith. Christ came to seek and save the lost so that they could have their sins forgiven, be given the gift of reconciliation with God, and then bear the fruit of righteousness basis on their faith in Christ. The Pharisees, however, felt that restoration had to be earned through the observation of the Torah. They taught it was the keeping of the Torah that made them righteous, and once they did that, then God was essentially obligated to restore them.

This, though, leads to the question, “Well what was the role and intent of the Law/Torah, if God’s people were always determined by the issue of faith?” In other words, if it was always about faith, then what was the point of the Torah in the first place? To that, we turn to Chapter 9.

The Law of God
In the final chapter of his book, De Young elaborates on just what the purpose of the Law (Torah) of God is. He begins by briefly discussing the way Protestant theology has tended to treat the Torah by dividing it up into three categories: civil laws, ceremonial laws, and moral commandments. Thus, it argues, since Christ fulfilled the Law, Christians are no longer bound by the Torah’s civil and ceremonial laws, because those were specifically addressed to ethnic Jews, not to Gentiles. The moral commandments, though, will always apply to everyone.

That’s problematic, says De Young, for a variety of reasons. First, Christ Himself says in Matthew 5 that every one of the commandments are to be maintained until the end of the age. Second, in the Torah itself, those “Protestant distinctions” are simply not there—it is seen as a whole, and at not point in the Old Testament are those three divisions ever laid out. Such distinctions, De Young argues, are simply foreign to both the Scriptures and the underlying mentality of the Scriptures. Simply put, it may be neat and clean, but is nevertheless just wrong.

We see the apostles’ understanding of the Torah in the way they came to their conclusions about Gentile believers during the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. The four commandments they give for Gentile believers to follow are not random but are extremely purposeful. To be clear they are abstaining from (1) food that has sacrificed to idols, (2) the eating of blood, (3) the eating of anything that has been strangled, and (4) fornication.

These commandments come from the Holiness Code in Leviticus 17-26. This code contained commandments for the people of Israel to keep themselves distinct from other pagan nations. They were not to enforce these laws on other nations but were to keep them so they could be a light to the nations. That being said, there were some laws addressed to both Israelites and to any foreigner who lived in their midst. Surprise, surprise, they were laws that prohibited idolatry, the eating of blood (or meat with blood in it), eating strangled animals, and sexual immorality/fornication. Even if one wasn’t an ethnic Israelite, one could live as a member of the community in God’s land if one abstained from idolatry and is its related practices, as well as sexual immorality.

Therefore, De Young argues that the apostles were deliberate in their choosing of those four prohibitions—they were following the guidance of the Torah in determining how to respond to the new reality of Gentiles coming to faith in Christ.

De Young also touches upon the purity laws in the Torah, specifically the distinction between clear and unclean foods and the idea of sacred space. Obviously, these things are found in the Torah. From the Christian viewpoint, though, since Christ had atoned for the whole world, He had cleansed the material creation from sin and had sanctified the world as a sacred space. This, by the way, takes us back to Genesis 1-3 and God’s purpose for Adam (seen as a both a priestly and royal figure) in the first place: to dwell with Him in Eden (a sacred space) and then to participate in God’s creative work by going out and ruling/subduing and sanctifying the rest of His creation. Christ, the fulfillment and recapitulation of Adam, accomplishes these things and then commissions the Church to participate in that very work.

Conclusion
De Young elaborates on a few more aspects of the Torah, namely how Christ fulfills it and how a number of Orthodox Christian practices are actually rooted in the Torah, but I will leave that discussion for anyone who cares to read the entire book.

The long and short of De Young’s book is this: “The primary aim of this book is to demonstrate the absolute continuity of ancient Israel religion, the religion of the Second Temple, first-century Christianity, and the religious life preserved and practiced in the Orthodox Church” (269). Overall, I think he does a tremendous job teasing out a number of lines of that continuity. It is a worthy read.