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The Abrogation of Old Testament Civil Law |
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The Comments of Samuel Rutherford |
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“Judicial laws may be judicial and
Mosaical, and so not obligatory to us, according to the degree and quality
of punishment.... No man but sees the punishment of theft is of common
moral equity, and obligeth all nations, but the manner or degree of
punishment is more positive: as to punish theft by restoring four oxen for
the stealing of one ox, doth not so oblige all nations, but some other
bodily punishment, as whipping, may be used against thieves.” Samuel Rutherford, A
Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience ( ‘But sure Erastus erreth, who will
have all such to be killed by the magistrate under the New Testament,
because they were killed by him in the Old: Why, but then the whole
judicial law of God shall oblige us Christians as Carolostadius and others
teach? I humbly conceive that the putting of some to death in the Old
Testament, as it was a punishment to them, so was it a mysterious teaching
of us, how God hated such and such sins, and mysteries of that kind are
gone with other shadows. “But we read not” (saith Erastus) “where
Christ hath changed those laws in the New Testament.” It is true, Christ
hath not said in particular, I abolish the debarring of the leper seven
days, and he that is thus and thus unclean shall be separated till the
evening; nor hath he said particularly of every carnal ordinance and
judicial law, it is abolished. ‘But we conceive, the whole bulk
of the judicial law, as judicial, and as it concerned the Republic of the
Jews only, is abolished, though the moral equity of all those be not
abolished; also some punishments were merely symbolical, to teach the
detestation of such a vice, as the boring with an aul the ear of him that
loved his master, and desired still to serve him, and the making of him
his perpetual servant. I should think the punishing with death the man
that gathered sticks on the Sabbath was such; and in all these, the
punishing of a sin against the Moral Law by the magistrate, is moral and
perpetual; but the punishing of every sin against the Moral Law, tali
modo, so and so, with death, with spitting on the face: I much doubt
if these punishments in particular, and in their positive determination to
the people of the Jews, be moral and perpetual: As he that would marry a
captive woman of another religion, is to cause her first to pare her
nails, and wash herself, and give her a month, or less time to mourn the
death of her parents, which was a judicial, not a ceremonial law; that
this should be perpetual because Christ in particular hath not abolished
it, to me seems most unjust; for as Paul saith, He that is circumcised
becomes debtor to the whole law, sure to all the ceremonies of Moses his
law: So I argue, a peri, from
the like: He that will keep one judicial law, because judicial and given
by Moses, becometh debtor to keep the whole judicial law under pain of
God’s eternal wrath.’ Rutherford, Divine
Right of Church Government (1646), pages 493-494.
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