The law, the commandments, and Christians.

Xeno.of.athens said:

The Law, as revealed by God and fulfilled in Christ, serves as a moral compass and pedagogical guide for the Christian faithful. It includes the Mosaic Law, especially the Decalogue, and finds its perfection in the New Law of the Gospel. “The Law has become our tutor unto Christ” (Galatians 3:24), and its enduring moral precepts are reaffirmed by the Church as binding. The Catechism teaches that “the Old Law is a preparation for the Gospel” and “remains necessary for man” as it “denounces and discloses sin” (CCC §1963–1964).

The Ten Commandments, given to Moses on Sinai (Exodus 20:1–17), are “fundamentally immutable” and “engraved by God in the human heart” (CCC §2072). They express the natural law and are reaffirmed by Christ, who deepens their meaning in the Sermon on the Mount (cf. Matthew 5–7). The Commandments are not abolished but fulfilled in charity: “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15). They are the foundation of Christian moral life, guiding the faithful in their duties toward God and neighbour.

For the Christian in this world, the Law and Commandments are not burdens but paths to freedom and holiness. Grace enables their fulfilment, and the Spirit writes them anew on the heart (cf. Jeremiah 31:33; CCC §1965–1966). The faithful are called to interiorise the Law, living it not merely by external observance but through love: “Love is the fulfilment of the law” (Romans 13:10). Thus, the Commandments remain essential, not as relics of legalism, but as living expressions of divine wisdom and the way of life in Christ.

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You’re merging multiple “laws” into one thing. Paul doesn’t treat “Law,” “Mosaic Law,” “Decalogue,” and “New Law” as interchangeable. He distinguishes between the law of works, the law of faith, the law of the Spirit, etc. Flattening them into a single category is a post-biblical move, not a textual one.

The idea that the Ten Commandments = natural law = permanently binding isn’t a biblical argument. Scripture never isolates the Decalogue as the “moral law” distinct from the rest of Torah. That’s a later Christian framework. James 2:10 actually warns against dividing the Law into keepable vs. non-keepable parts.

Galatians 3:24 is used selectively. Yes, the Law was a tutor. But Paul’s whole point is: "Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the tutor" (v. 25). You can’t use v. 24 to argue ongoing obligation while ignoring v. 25.

Jeremiah 31 doesn’t say God will write the Ten Commandments on the heart. It says “My law,” and explicitly contrasts the New Covenant with the one made when Israel came out of Egypt i.e., Sinai. The New Covenant is not just Sinai internalized.

“If you love Me, keep My commandments” doesn’t refer to the Ten Commandments. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ “commandments” are His own teachings, especially His new commandment to love as He loved (John 13:34-35), not Moses’ commands.

Paul repeatedly calls the Sinai covenant a ministry of death and slavery (2 Cor 3; Gal 4). So saying the Commandments are “paths to freedom” needs to reckon with Paul’s language. He explicitly locates Christian freedom in life by the Spirit, not adherence to written code (Rom 7–8; Gal 5).

Most of your argument depends on the Catechism, not Scripture. If the question is “What does the Bible say?”, the Catechism can't settle the issue by itself. The NT nowhere says the Decalogue survives as a uniquely binding law code for Christians while the rest of Moses doesn't. the OP may present a well-accepted Catholic interpretation, but biblically speaking, it assumes distinctions the text doesn’t make and ignores the parts of Paul that undermine the conclusion. The NT’s moral vision is grounded in the Spirit and the law of Christ, not a selective continuation of Sinai.

Xeno.of.athens said:

As a help to one's memory, and to make sure we are on the same page, I shall include the verse as a quote.

[NRSVUE acts 15:1] The Council at Jerusalem​

Then certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”​

I say that the "certain individuals" were wrong.

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And you are entirely correct on this point, as always, my friend

Xeno.of.athens said:

The Law, as revealed by God and fulfilled in Christ, serves as a moral compass and pedagogical guide for the Christian faithful. It includes the Mosaic Law, especially the Decalogue, and finds its perfection in the New Law of the Gospel. “The Law has become our tutor unto Christ” (Galatians 3:24), and its enduring moral precepts are reaffirmed by the Church as binding. The Catechism teaches that “the Old Law is a preparation for the Gospel” and “remains necessary for man” as it “denounces and discloses sin” (CCC §1963–1964).

The Ten Commandments, given to Moses on Sinai (Exodus 20:1–17), are “fundamentally immutable” and “engraved by God in the human heart” (CCC §2072). They express the natural law and are reaffirmed by Christ, who deepens their meaning in the Sermon on the Mount (cf. Matthew 5–7). The Commandments are not abolished but fulfilled in charity: “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15). They are the foundation of Christian moral life, guiding the faithful in their duties toward God and neighbour.

For the Christian in this world, the Law and Commandments are not burdens but paths to freedom and holiness. Grace enables their fulfilment, and the Spirit writes them anew on the heart (cf. Jeremiah 31:33; CCC §1965–1966). The faithful are called to interiorise the Law, living it not merely by external observance but through love: “Love is the fulfilment of the law” (Romans 13:10). Thus, the Commandments remain essential, not as relics of legalism, but as living expressions of divine wisdom and the way of life in Christ.

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By the way, its amusing that despite you affirming this, and despite the fact that your church is responsible for the majority of worship services celebrated on the seventh day, some sabbatarian members still accuse the Roman Catholic Church falsely of teaching people to break the Ten Commandments, when this is demonstrably, evidently false.

DamianWarS said:

You’re merging multiple “laws” into one thing. Paul doesn’t treat “Law,” “Mosaic Law,” “Decalogue,” and “New Law” as interchangeable. He distinguishes between the law of works, the law of faith, the law of the Spirit, etc. Flattening them into a single category is a post-biblical move, not a textual one.

The idea that the Ten Commandments = natural law = permanently binding isn’t a biblical argument. Scripture never isolates the Decalogue as the “moral law” distinct from the rest of Torah. That’s a later Christian framework. James 2:10 actually warns against dividing the Law into keepable vs. non-keepable parts.

Galatians 3:24 is used selectively. Yes, the Law was a tutor. But Paul’s whole point is: "Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the tutor" (v. 25). You can’t use v. 24 to argue ongoing obligation while ignoring v. 25.

Jeremiah 31 doesn’t say God will write the Ten Commandments on the heart. It says “My law,” and explicitly contrasts the New Covenant with the one made when Israel came out of Egypt i.e., Sinai. The New Covenant is not just Sinai internalized.

“If you love Me, keep My commandments” doesn’t refer to the Ten Commandments. In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ “commandments” are His own teachings, especially His new commandment to love as He loved (John 13:34-35), not Moses’ commands.

Paul repeatedly calls the Sinai covenant a ministry of death and slavery (2 Cor 3; Gal 4). So saying the Commandments are “paths to freedom” needs to reckon with Paul’s language. He explicitly locates Christian freedom in life by the Spirit, not adherence to written code (Rom 7–8; Gal 5).

Most of your argument depends on the Catechism, not Scripture. If the question is “What does the Bible say?”, the Catechism can't settle the issue by itself. The NT nowhere says the Decalogue survives as a uniquely binding law code for Christians while the rest of Moses doesn't. the OP may present a well-accepted Catholic interpretation, but biblically speaking, it assumes distinctions the text doesn’t make and ignores the parts of Paul that undermine the conclusion. The NT’s moral vision is grounded in the Spirit and the law of Christ, not a selective continuation of Sinai.

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We won't understand the gospel unless we first understand that, with or without regard to the law, whether or not one has even heard the law, one cannot be and remain a murderer, adulterer, theif, etc and still expect to enter heaven.

fhansen said:

We won't understand the gospel unless we first understand that, with or without regard to the law, whether or not one has even heard the law, one cannot be and remain a murderer, adulterer, theif, etc and still expect to enter heaven.

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The 10 are presented to a post-exodus Israel and establish a covenant relationship. They are framed in a way for a specific time, place and people and we shouldn't expect them to be universal as they were never presented that way. We cannot superimpose the 10 over Christian living and expect the same results because we are not in the same conditions the 10 were made in. The 10 have monotheistic claims and moral pillars framed in a way that uniquely challenges Israel and the surrounding cultures (through Israel). In the NT Christ reframes these as a heuristic approach over a list of dos and donts that is often summed up by NT authors as "loving your neighbour as yourself,"; this is known as "Christ's law".

It is this law that is fundamental and reaches deeper than the 10 can ever. First, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” this includes the monotheistic claims of the 10 but also far greater. it is not only about idolatry, graven images and using his name in vain (which of course are not consistent with loving God with all your heart), but also innately our every action as directly involved with obedience to love God. Christ calls this the greatest commandment. The second is to love your neighbour as yourself. and this certainly includes not murdering your neighbour, stealing, lying, sleeping with their wife, etc... but it goes far deeper. We are no longer merely resisting doing harm, but Christ flips it and tells us we should be actively seeking to love others.

The 10 simply do not go to this length, and I may keep the 10 but hate my neighbour (and yes, even hate God), which is inconsistent with Christ's law. We cannot approach Christ if we cannot seriously approach our own actions critically to align with Christ. Christ's law has this goal, where the 10 are lacking, and we can keep the 10 while failing to critically address sin in our lives. This is the conversation Christ has with the Pharisees; it wasn't about how well they kept the law, Christ was more interested in their heart. The heuristic approach in Christ's law is not about a check list, and we must actively participate in understanding how our actions contribute to loving God/neighbour.

In its day the 10 were radical claims and ways of thinking challenging not just Israel but surrounding cultures too as a polemic to show order and restoration under God, but Christ's goes deeper than the 10 ever can; He is interested in letters of not just "the heart" but "OUR heart" which is the place where the value is birthed, but he is not interested in the letters on stone which can be exploited to support our own sin and may be devorced from our heart. It is good to think that murder, adultery, stealing, etc... are wrong but most (if not all) would accept this throughout all of civilization without any prompting and the 10 do not hold dominion over these moral claims. It is better to cut to the heart over a motivation to resist evil (which is limited, especially when condensed to 10), but actively be involved with doing good in all our actions. Christ himself tells us "it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath" (Mat 12:12), establishing that goodness itself is above sabbath law (directly) but also more broadly is a comment on all law and a nod to his own commandment that is Christ's law. This focus you will find is far more consistent throughout the NT.

DamianWarS said:

The 10 are presented to a post-exodus Israel and establish a covenant relationship. They are framed in a way for a specific time, place and people and we shouldn't expect them to be universal as they were never presented that way. We cannot superimpose the 10 over Christian living and expect the same results because we are not in the same conditions the 10 were made in. The 10 have monotheistic claims and moral pillars framed in a way that uniquely challenges Israel and the surrounding cultures (through Israel). In the NT Christ reframes these as a heuristic approach over a list of dos and donts that is often summed up by NT authors as "loving your neighbour as yourself,"; this is known as "Christ's law".

It is this law that is fundamental and reaches deeper than the 10 can ever. First, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” this includes the monotheistic claims of the 10 but also far greater. it is not only about idolatry, graven images and using his name in vain (which of course are not consistent with loving God with all your heart), but also innately our every action as directly involved with obedience to love God. Christ calls this the greatest commandment. The second is to love your neighbour as yourself. and this certainly includes not murdering your neighbour, stealing, lying, sleeping with their wife, etc... but it goes far deeper. We are no longer merely resisting doing harm, but Christ flips it and tells us we should be actively seeking to love others.

The 10 simply do not go to this length, and I may keep the 10 but hate my neighbour (and yes, even hate God), which is inconsistent with Christ's law. We cannot approach Christ if we cannot seriously approach our own actions critically to align with Christ. Christ's law has this goal, where the 10 are lacking, and we can keep the 10 while failing to critically address sin in our lives. This is the conversation Christ has with the Pharisees; it wasn't about how well they kept the law, Christ was more interested in their heart. The heuristic approach in Christ's law is not about a check list, and we must actively participate in understanding how our actions contribute to loving God/neighbour.

In its day the 10 were radical claims and ways of thinking challenging not just Israel but surrounding cultures too as a polemic to show order and restoration under God, but Christ's goes deeper than the 10 ever can; He is interested in letters of not just "the heart" but "OUR heart" which is the place where the value is birthed, but he is not interested in the letters on stone which can be exploited to support our own sin and may be devorced from our heart. It is good to think that murder, adultery, stealing, etc... are wrong but most (if not all) would accept this throughout all of civilization without any prompting and the 10 do not hold dominion over these moral claims. It is better to cut to the heart over a motivation to resist evil (which is limited, especially when condensed to 10), but actively be involved with doing good in all our actions. Christ himself tells us "it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath" (Mat 12:12), establishing that goodness itself is above sabbath law (directly) but also more broadly is a comment on all law and a nod to his own commandment that is Christ's law. This focus you will find is far more consistent throughout the NT.

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I agree with most of this completely and yet this is the very reason Jesus could truthfully say in Matt 19:17,
"If you want to enter life, keep the commandments”, referencing the ten,

and Paul could say In Rom 2:13:
"For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous."

or in Rom 8:12-14
Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God."

The new covenant is not about whether one must be obedient but rather about how one becomes obedient, authentically, and, yes, love, which fulfills the law by its nature (Rom 13:10), is that authentic means. It's the righteousness that the law and prophets only testify to but cannot accomplish in us (Rom 3:21-22). That accomplishment comes solely by virtue of becoming united with the Vine, by communion with God, the very source of love. And that union, that ingrafting, is first established by faith.
"...not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith" (Phil 3:9).

fhansen said:

I agree with most of this completely and yet this is the very reason Jesus could truthfully say in Matt 19:17,
"If you want to enter life, keep the commandments”, referencing the ten,

and Paul could say In Rom 2:13:
"For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous."

or in Rom 8:12-14
Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God."

The new covenant is not about whether one must be obedient but rather about how one becomes obedient, authentically, and, yes, love, which fulfills the law by its nature (Rom 13:10), is that authentic means. It's the righteousness that the law and prophets only testify to but cannot accomplish in us (Rom 3:21-22). That accomplishment comes solely by virtue of becoming united with the Vine, by communion with God, the very source of love. And that union, that ingrafting, is first established by faith.
"...not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith" (Phil 3:9).

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Your argument hinges on interpreting all these references to mean the 10 where the texts never say this. Mat 19:17 we have a familiar account of someone asking Christ which commandments he should keep, Christ's answer seems to cover only the second half of the ten and adds an extra to love your neighbour as yourself. But the takeaway is not how justified the man was for keeping these, but that he still lacked. This exposes the 10 as lacking itself, not to mention it was only 5 commandments. Jesus uses these as a segue to expose the real problem, which addresses the heart.

No one is arguing that murdering, stealing, lying and adultery are wrong or that respecting your parents is a good idea. These are well-established morals that preexist the 10 itself and can be found in any culture. But the bigger question is not how profound these ideas are, but what follows in v20, "what do I still lack". The issue is not what the man kept, but what he was lacking that could not be answered by the 10 (or in this case, the 5)

We can conflate all these references and say "what they really mean is to keeping the 10" but this needs to be injected into the text, not to mention we are missing the point. The tablets are a seal of the covenant relationship first established in Ex 24 (the 10 were spoken in 20 and the tablets were received in 31). This is the covenant, and Hebrews 8:13 says it has been made obsolete.

Deut 5:2-3
The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Horeb. It was not with our ancestors that the Lord made this covenant, but with us, with all of us who are alive here today

The rest of Deu 5 is quoting the 10. The 10 had a unique relationship as a covenant relationship with Israel, "not with [their] ancestors." This shows us the 10 were never designed for outside the covenant relationship and explicitly for Israel. Coupled with Hebrews 8:13 it's hard to understand why our eyes are still fixed on the 10. It is Christ that we should be looking to and keeping "his commandments" which surpass the 10 in all ways as they address the root of the heart using a heuristic approach. Monotheistic values (commandments 1-3), we can say, are about loving the Lord with all our heart, yet "with all our heart" implicitly reaches further, so it's not just about no other gods, no idols and not taking his name in vain, but it goes beyond. These can all be mechanically observed and divorced of any heart action; Christ's law addresses the depths of our hearts that that's the point, not a list of rules. This is the same with loving your neighbour as yourself, it goes infinitely beyond the actions of the 10, no longer motivated with simply not harming our neighbour from a preset list but a charge to actively pursue love.

The 4th seems like the oddball one, but it really is a monotheistic claim, rescuing pagan 7th-day claims to point to the one creator. ANE (ancient near east) cultures already had a lot of these values in place. Hebrews had a strict 7-day week system, which was unique to them; other cultures used moon phases that may have aligned to a 7-day week but were reset with the lunar month (unlike the Hebrews, who decoupled the two systems). The decoupling is important because the weeks align with no observable phenomena (like moon phases), leading to pagan beliefs. But 7-day iterations already had established practices and values among surrounding cultures long before Israel was formed. It wasn't unique to them, and they inherited these values over being the first to introduce them. It wasn't unusual that the Hebrews had rituals or veneration practices on this day, and surrounding cultures would have overlapping agreement. But the difference is that Sabbath aligns with creation/monotheistic claims over using it to highlight pagan 7-day claims, and is also used redemptively, pointing to Christ. It is deeply rich with meaning, but these point to and are fulfilled by Christ, who is the source and meaning of the sabbath day. Where the physical observance is a part of the old covenant that no longer needs to be repeated.