Israel’s Law and Christ’s Obedience

Matthew Levering has a couple of brilliant pages on Aquinas’s discussion of how Christ’s sacrificial obedience to the Father restores justice in the world ( Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple ).

First, Thomas emphasizes the uniqueness of Israel’s law, which don’t simply aim, as human law order does, at maintaining “temporal tranquility of the state” but instead aims at charity. He points to gleaning laws, rules concerning debt cancellation, and so on to shows that (in Levering’s words) the purpose of property and lending is “to help others, not to make a profit off them.” Israel’s law thus “formulates precepts about economic relationship with the primary goal of establishing practices that promote the end of charity .”

Second, Israel can never fulfill this law, never attains to charity. The law thus points Israel beyond herself to a future event, when charity will be finally achieved. For Israel to be truly charitable, it’s necessary for God, who is Charity Himself, to enter human life: “The end of divine law,” Levering says, “must involve the indwelling of God in the human heart. Thus for Israel’s law to be fulfilled, it must simultaneously be transformed into an inner law.”

Thus, third, Israel’s law can never be isolated from the fulfillment of Christ: “the community of Israel is exalted primarily because of Christ.” Thomas says, “God vouchsafed both the Law and other special benefits to that people, on account of the promise made to their fathers that Christ should be born of them.” The Messiah’s fulfillment of the Law is thus also the fulfillment of Israel, which was called to obey that law of charity.

It’s thus not arbitrary that Jesus is born of Israel: “God prepared for himself a people whose laws could, if fulfilled in both their literal and figurative sense, reestablish justice between God and humanity and among human beings. God gave the people of Israel a divine law so that the incarnate Son of God might, as a member of this people, perfectly fulfill this law . . . and thereby restore the world to justice.” As a result, we can’t understand Christ except in the “context of the law that constituted Israel as a holy community.”

Christ’s passion thus is the place where Israel and the church unite. It is the fulfillment of Israel, and the beginning of the church, which sacramentally participates in Christ’s passion.

Levering goes on, but a couple of comments here: First, Levering’s description of Torah as aiming at charity is arresting and accurate. Second, Levering’s discussion makes it clear that there can be no coherent atonement theology on Marcionite grounds; it’s no accident that modern theology, indebted as it is to Marcion, has been desperately confused about the atonement. But this is not, third, only a “liberal” problem. Conservative theologies rarely link the atonement to the specifics of Torah or integrate the charitable trajectory of Torah to Jesus’ work.