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I Am the Lord Your God: Christian Reflections on the Ten Commandments
I Am the Lord Your God explores anew the place of the Ten Commandments in contemporary civil society, their relation to natural moral law, their relevance for Christian instruction, and their pertinence to ethical issues such as abortion, killing, homosexuality, lying, greed, and the like. Written by an outstanding group of ethicists, theologians, and Bible scholars from various church traditions - Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist - this timely work argues unequivocally for the divine authority and permanent validity of the Ten Commandments in both church and society. While including the Judge Roy Moore controversy in Alabama and other pertinent current issues in their discussion, the authors above all call the church to remain faithful to its heritage - ultimately to the Lord God - amid our postmodern culture at large. Markus Bockmuehl Carl E. Braaten William T. Cavanaugh David Bentley Hart Reinhard Hütter Robert W. Jenson Gilbert Meilaender Thomas C. Oden Ephraim Radner R. R. Reno Christopher R. Seitz Philip Turner Bernd Wannenwetsch Robert Louis Wilken
- GenresBiblical StudiesTheology
288 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 11, 2020
Perhaps this book should be subtitled “The First Things Guide to the Ten Commandments.” Most of the contributors are in that crew, and like a bag of Ruffles, you know exactly what you’re getting. But if you’ve got the munchies for some heavily traditionalist readings of the Ten Commandments, this is your book. The contributors span the First Things confessional spectrum, including Roman Catholic (Cavanaugh, Reno), Eastern Orthodox (Hart), Anglican (Radner), Lutheran (Meilaender), and even a stray Methodist (Oden). It is telling that, even across this broad denominational spectrum, the similarities of these authors outshine their differences. It is a testimony to how conservative loyalties can burrow deeply, even overriding confessional commitments. Sometimes I wonder if the First Things gang should be a little more worried about this. Or maybe it’s time for an ecumenical meta-confession about traditionalism?
Even with all of the denominational diversity, I was very surprised that Martin Luther is cited far more than all other authors combined. This surprised me because a common Reformed caricature of Lutherans is that they don’t really care about the Law, seeing it only as a painful doorway to get through. Boy was I wrong. In fact, Luther wrote a decent amount on the Ten Commandments, and in his interpretation of them he actually employed a very sophisticated dialectic. So sophisticated, in fact, that no one is quite sure what it is or how it works. Whether this is a sign of Luther’s genius or his magnificent capacity for self-contradiction is the stuff that Luther studies are made of. After a while, it did become a little painful to watch the Lutheran theologians go to such great nursing lengths to resuscitate Luther’s flailing categories. Even still, I left the book with a suspicion that somewhere in the mess of Luther's thought about the Ten Commandments there is something good. I was also surprised by how little Calvin was cited, given that he wrote a TON about the Ten Commandments. But, Calvin was only a phantom in this book. A pity.
Like any collection of essays, the book is of fluctuating quality. There are a few outstanding essays (Seitz and Bockmuehl), a few duds (Oden’s is a grocery list; Reno’s is a growling, reactionary, pointless Jeremiad), and a few hidden gems (Radner’s dark and dreary essay has points of intense illumination). Overall, though, the book disappointed in two key ways. First, the authors were unable to come to a meaningful agreement on the place of the Ten Commandments in American public life. I sided with the minority position, that the Ten Commandments are unintelligible outside of the revelation given to the covenantal community, and therefore they do not belong in America’s pluralist, secular political institutions. Most authors, however, were stuck pining for the good old days of the mythical Christian nation that never was. My second disappointment with the book is that all too often the authors descended into standard moralist tropes about how bad American culture has become. Whether talking about abortion or consumerism, the authors were far more content to make lazy ethical platitudes than to actually do the harder work of meticulously and imaginatively naming the contours of the soul or of the culture. To return to the Ruffles analogy, moralism is salty, but uninteresting. I found myself wishing that the authors would attend to the intricacies of the gospel’s answer to the law, and then courageously map out the ways that we reject or receive this law and gospel within our deepest selves and in our communities. Enough with the moralistic platitudes.
Some of the book is still very worth reading, however.
Even with all of the denominational diversity, I was very surprised that Martin Luther is cited far more than all other authors combined. This surprised me because a common Reformed caricature of Lutherans is that they don’t really care about the Law, seeing it only as a painful doorway to get through. Boy was I wrong. In fact, Luther wrote a decent amount on the Ten Commandments, and in his interpretation of them he actually employed a very sophisticated dialectic. So sophisticated, in fact, that no one is quite sure what it is or how it works. Whether this is a sign of Luther’s genius or his magnificent capacity for self-contradiction is the stuff that Luther studies are made of. After a while, it did become a little painful to watch the Lutheran theologians go to such great nursing lengths to resuscitate Luther’s flailing categories. Even still, I left the book with a suspicion that somewhere in the mess of Luther's thought about the Ten Commandments there is something good. I was also surprised by how little Calvin was cited, given that he wrote a TON about the Ten Commandments. But, Calvin was only a phantom in this book. A pity.
Like any collection of essays, the book is of fluctuating quality. There are a few outstanding essays (Seitz and Bockmuehl), a few duds (Oden’s is a grocery list; Reno’s is a growling, reactionary, pointless Jeremiad), and a few hidden gems (Radner’s dark and dreary essay has points of intense illumination). Overall, though, the book disappointed in two key ways. First, the authors were unable to come to a meaningful agreement on the place of the Ten Commandments in American public life. I sided with the minority position, that the Ten Commandments are unintelligible outside of the revelation given to the covenantal community, and therefore they do not belong in America’s pluralist, secular political institutions. Most authors, however, were stuck pining for the good old days of the mythical Christian nation that never was. My second disappointment with the book is that all too often the authors descended into standard moralist tropes about how bad American culture has become. Whether talking about abortion or consumerism, the authors were far more content to make lazy ethical platitudes than to actually do the harder work of meticulously and imaginatively naming the contours of the soul or of the culture. To return to the Ruffles analogy, moralism is salty, but uninteresting. I found myself wishing that the authors would attend to the intricacies of the gospel’s answer to the law, and then courageously map out the ways that we reject or receive this law and gospel within our deepest selves and in our communities. Enough with the moralistic platitudes.
Some of the book is still very worth reading, however.
December 25, 2014
recommend! if you like to read scholars and think along with them. no conclusions--but challenging thoughts, that may or may not reshape your own outlook.
i especially enjoyed reading the chapter "God or nothingness" by David Bentley Hart.
i especially enjoyed reading the chapter "God or nothingness" by David Bentley Hart.
March 28, 2017
I didn't read all of the essays in this book when I had it borrowed from the library, but I was completely wowed by those that I did. I especially liked the articles by Hart and Ratner.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews