O’Donovan on the law and community adherence

Following on from our discussion in the last post, I thought I’d post a great quote from Oliver O’Donovan on the Law. It’s from Resurrection and Moral Order, pages 151–156 of which are, I think, a stunning treatment of this whole issue. Here, O’Donovan is describing Israel’s experience of being under the law—which he claims has universal relevance. What I think is particularly interesting is the way he sees being under law leading to a special emphasis on the outward signs of community adherence, a link which could be very relevant to various contemporary discussions:)

In speaking of ‘the Law’… the Reformers rightly believed they had found a category for understanding the burdensomeness of morality as such, which is to say, of any socio-moral order which bore down oppressively upon the moral agent because of its arbitrary relation to his plight… When the apostle contrasted ‘the law’ and ‘the gospel’, he was pointing to the dialectical tension in Israel’s history between the experience of God through promise and the experience of God through command. The law represented a phase in God’s dealings with his people in which their primary character as blessing, first made evident in the promises to Abraham, was provisionally obscured through the Mosaic order, in which they are seen as ambiguously open either to become blessing or to become curse. The law was thus a particular historical phase of Israel’s experience of God; but the Jewish experience of history is seen to represent a universal existential situation in which an individual at any point of history may find himself before Christ has become a saving reality in his own experience. To experience moral command as ‘the law’, then, is to encounter it as though from a point in the history of salvation at which God has not yet given the total blessing which he had promised his people. Law supposes that God’s complete saving purpose is still an object of hope. But the promise of completion is conditional, and depends upon the faithful performance of the command. Command, therefore, becomes a hurdle which one must overcome in order to experience blessing. Law is command as reciprocal bargain, the breach of which promises disaster. In these circumstances command evokes anxiety, but not anxiety for the future of the community so much as for the individual. The divine promise assures us that Abraham’s seed will be preserved for salvation through a faithful remnant; but that offers no ground of confidence to the individual, for whom the question ‘Am I to be among the chosen?’ is not answered either in promise or in law. Thus the anxiety which the command promotes isolates the individual, with his unresolved destiny, from the community which is to inherit God’s promises. Inescapably, then, the law confronts the individual supremely as a demand for community adherence. Its content is dominated by ritual observance, that aspect of public righteousness by which the individual is claimed by his conformity for membership of the community. (Resurrection and Moral Order, 151–2).