Making Sense of Ethical Discontinuity Between the Old and New Testaments

Old Testament and New Testament Ethics

It is obvious to anyone who reads through the Bible that there are significant discontinuities between the ethics of the Old Testament and the ethics of the New Testament.  For example, the Old Testament Law allowed for divorce (Deut 24:1); Jesus absolutely forbids it (Matt 5:32). The Old Testament accepted the practice of polygamy without question; Paul holds up monogamy as the ideal (I Tim 3:1).  

The biggest area of ethical discontinuity between the Testaments, though, is with regard to the subject of violence.  Jesus commands His followers to love their enemies (Matt 5:44) and not to resist an evil person (Matt 5:39). The Old Testament, in contrast, not only assumes that the use of violence against the enemies of Israel is legitimate, but explicitly commands God’s people on numerous occasions to use violence against their enemies.  The most glaring example of this is when God commands the Israelites to destroy the nations inhabiting the Promised Land (Deut 20:16-17). While it is wrong to understand this as a command for “genocide,”^[1]See a discussion of this in The Lost World of the Israelites Conquest John H. Walton and J. Harvey Walton (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2017), pages 169-232.  Walton convincingly … Continue reading it certainly cannot be understood as consistent with the ethics of the New Testament, even from a Christian “just war” perspective.  How do we make sense of these apparent glaring contradictions?

Ignore the Old Testament?

One option for answering this question is to just set aside the teachings of the Old Testament.  This may be done implicitly, by just choosing not to study or talk about the Old Testament, or it may be done explicitly, by actually claiming that parts of the Old Testament are wrong.  

The problem with this approach is that the Lord Jesus clearly and repeatedly affirmed the Divine Authority of the Old Testament Scriptures.  He claimed that “Scripture cannot be broken” (John 10:35) (Jesus refers here to the Old Testament Scriptures, as the New Testament had not been written yet), and clarified that he had come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets, not to abolish them (Matt 5:17).  Similarly, the apostle Paul taught that “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (II Tim 3:16-17) (Again, Paul is referring here to the Old Testament Scriptures).  If we want to take Jesus, the apostles, and the New Testament seriously, we have to take the Old Testament seriously as Divinely Authoritative Scripture; we cannot just ignore it.

Descriptive Versus Prescriptive

Another option for answering this question is to distinguish between what God commands in the Old Testament and what God merely describes.  The Old Testament (and the New Testament) often describes human sin without condoning or approving of it. The purpose of Old Testament narratives is not to give a bunch of examples of good human behavior, but to tell us something about who God is as He interacts with flawed, sinful human beings in history.  

This approach certainly does away with many of the superficial criticisms some people make of the Old Testament as being immoral.  However, it still does not explain those cases in the Old Testament where God actually commands His people to do things which, by the standards of New Testament ethics, are morally wrong.  A modified version of this approach tries to deal with this by appealing to the dual authorship of Scripture, Divine and human. Sometimes, it is argued, the fallen human perspective of the human author leads them to claim that God commanded things which He never actually commanded.  But this runs into the same problem as just outright ignoring the teachings of the Old Testament: Jesus and the apostles clearly affirmed the Old Testament as being Divinely Authoritative. If we say that the Old Testament is wrong in its claim that God commanded the Israelites to destroy the Canaanites, then we are claiming that God’s Authoritative Word is wrong, which is not an option if we want to take the teachings of Jesus and the apostles seriously.

Infancy and Maturity

Another option for answering this question is to understand the differing ethical commands God gives His people over time as reflecting His people’s growth from spiritual infancy to spiritual maturity.  God meets people where they are at, and He provided lower ethical standards for His people in the Old Testament until they were ready for the higher ethical standards that He provides in the New Testament.  

This approach can definitely explain most cases of ethical discontinuity between the two Testaments.  For example, in the Old Testament, God allowed divorce without approving of it, while providing regulations to protect the divorced woman.  In the New Testament, though, God provides a higher standard that forbids divorce altogether, which reflects His ultimate desire for how human beings are to live.  However, this approach still does not seem to fully explain those cases in the Old Testament where God actually commands violent actions that would contradict the ethical teachings of the New Testament.

The Unfolding of Salvation History

So how do we make sense of the apparent ethical contradictions between Old and New Testaments?  If we conceive of morality as an abstract set of principles for human behavior, there does not seem to be any way of fully making sense of these apparent contradictions.  However, I would argue that this is not the way that Christians should conceive of morality. Instead of an abstract set of principles for human behavior, we should conceive of morality as something concrete: getting on board with what God is doing right now in salvation history.  

In Scripture, we encounter the story of God’s relationship with His creation through His covenant people.  In this story, God’s plan for the salvation of the cosmos gradually unfolds, as different stages in the story prepare for the next stage.  At different times, what God is doing in His relationship with His covenant people is different, and thus what He requires His covenant people to do is different at different times.  In other words, what is ethical has actually changed over time. This is not because God is capricious and can just arbitrarily change the ethical rules; it is because getting on board with what God is doing may look quite different during different stages of God’s single, unfolding plan for bringing redemption to the world.  

So, the Israelites destroying the nations of Canaan may not be ethical from the standpoint of New Testament Christian ethics, but destroying the Canaanites, in obedience to God’s command, was the ethical thing for the Israelites to do at that time.  The destruction of the Canaanites and the granting of Canaan to the Israelites as the Promised Land was a necessary part of God’s plan of salvation history. This plan has now culminated in the coming of Jesus, whose example and teaching has shown us God’s ultimate desire for how human beings are supposed to live (Hebrews 1:1-2).  But all the previous phases of salvation history, including Israel eliminating the Canaanites and occupying the Promised Land, were necessary in order to get to this point. The differing ethical requirements of God’s people at different points in time in Scripture, therefore, are not cases of God’s word contradicting itself; they fit coherently into the unfolding story that Scripture gives us and invites us to participate in.  It is by understanding the whole of that story and our place in it as disciples of Jesus that we can understand what is and what is not required of us ethically in order to be faithful members of God’s covenant people today.