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| Illustration of a priest burning incense in front of the Ark of the Covenant. Image source. |
When I was a little girl in Sunday school class, I remember sometimes kids would ask the teachers why we don't do everything the bible commands. The bible has a lot of weird little rules about sacrificing animals and going to the temple and wearing tassels on your clothes and only eating kosher food, and Christians don't even attempt to obey any of those rules. We see them as rules specifically given to the people of ancient Israel, but they don't apply to us.
At the same time, though, the bible has a lot of rules that we were taught that we HAVE TO obey. Like, take this very seriously, it's in the bible!!! Rules about don't lie, don't steal, obey your parents, forgive, don't have sex before marriage.
So, we asked our Sunday school teachers, why do we follow some rules from the bible, but ignore others? When we read a commandment in the bible, how are we supposed to know if it applies to us or not?
And, they answered us, "There are different kinds of laws given in the bible: ceremonial law, civil law, and moral law. Ceremonial law and civil law were only for their society back then. But moral law is for all time- we still have to obey it now."
Ceremonial law was about things like what foods they were allowed to eat, or the rituals they had to perform in the temple. Civil law was about how their government/society was set up- kings, priests, etc. And moral law is like, love your neighbor, don't have sex, obviously those are moral issues that apply regardless of what society you're in. (Note: the "obviously" is intended to be read with a lot of sarcasm.)
And so, I accepted that this was the answer. Anything that sounded weird, I classified as "ceremonial or civil law." Anything that, like, obviously we have to follow now, I know because I hear it preached in church, I classified as "moral law."
And ... yeah, I believed that was the answer. Sometimes atheists would come along and say "the bible says men shouldn't have sex with men, well the bible also says you shouldn't eat shrimp, so, clearly these bible-believing Christians are just hypocrites" or Rachel Held Evans would come along and say "nobody obeys everything in the bible, all Christians are picking and choosing," and I would think they were wrong because there are reasons that we follow some biblical commands and ignore others. I thought it was all very logical, the system that existed to filter which things "apply to us" and which don't. If you correctly read the bible, I thought, there's no inconsistency about "why do you follow these rules but ignore those ones?"
(I'll always be grateful to Rachel for being the first one I ever heard asking these questions while also speaking evangelical-language.)
And at some point (I guess around 2014), I came across this post from the Slacktivist: ‘God hates shrimp’: Picking and choosing among abominations. He says the "ceremonial law vs moral law" explanation doesn't work:
But the problem is that this distinction between ceremonial and moral law in Leviticus isn’t actually a thing. It doesn’t come from Leviticus, but can only be retroactively imposed back onto it. And the text itself doesn’t welcome such an imposition.
The people who first wrote and compiled and read the Hebrew scriptures didn’t make such a distinction. Nor did first-century Jews, such as Jesus and Paul. The categories of “clean” and “unclean” in the Hebrew scriptures don’t really allow for this distinction either. It won’t let us treat those categories as merely “ceremonial” and somehow divorced from the matter of morality.
This problem becomes more acute when we actually try to apply this anachronistic distinction. The first step is, of course, to classify all the dietary stuff as “ceremonial” law and all the sex stuff as “moral” law. (Thus, shrimp is OK, but butt-secks is still bad.) But then it turns out we don’t want to keep all of the sex stuff, just some of it. So we have to sift through the sex bits, reclassifying the laws involving menstruation as “ceremonial” while still keeping many of the adjoining sex laws as moral.
And then there are the money bits. There are a lot of laws about money, trade, lending, property, widows, orphans and aliens, and these laws are explicitly, undeniably moral. There’s nothing “ceremonial” about them. And yet we disregard all of that stuff even more thoroughly than we disregard the idea of keeping kosher. So some will elaborate this theory even more by adding yet another new category of biblical commandment — a “civil” law that will explain our disregard for biblical commandments about money and property in the same way that the category of “ceremonial” law might explain our disregard for the dietary commandments.
The more we attempt to rely on these extra-biblical categories, the more unreliable this whole approach seems. The more we try to apply it to account for additional biblical passages we no longer treat as binding the more ornate and elaborate we’re forced to make it. It ceases to seem elegantly simple and begins accruing oddities and ornaments like those little recursive loops that were added in an attempt to salvage Ptolemaic astronomy. Such retroactive amendments make any system seem suspiciously pliable and convenient.
In practice, then, this approach doesn’t so much provide a system to explain the basis for our picking and choosing as it provides a fancy disguise for our pre-existing preferences. Whatever bits we like are deemed unchangeable moral laws while the bits we don’t like are deemed “ceremonial” irrelevancies. Rules about my money and my property become optional. Rules about your genitals and your sexuality do not.
And that's when I realized, this "ceremonial law vs moral law" thing isn't "the answer." This is just something that somebody made up! It's not in the bible! Sure, it's fine to come up with explanations and answers to questions people ask about the bible- of course Christians do that, we all have our own interpretations- but the thing is, you have to realize that those things are just something that people made up. They're not "the answer." They're just some people's opinions- and sure, they might be right, we are all certainly welcome to make arguments and bring out evidence to convince people that our opinions are right. But they're not "the answer." And some Christians might indeed decide that these explanations don't add up, and therefore we don't buy into them.
So what I want to say is this: This explanation about "ceremonial law, civil law, and moral law" is just a fan theory. It's not in the bible. You can believe it if you want (I don't, I agree with Slacktivist) but you have to realize it's not in the bible- it's just something a fan made up.
Fan theories are great. Love fan theories. Nothing wrong with making up fan theories. But you have to recognize that they're not actually in the canon, and so other fans don't have to believe them.
(It makes me so happy when I refer to things taught in church as "a fan theory," LOLOLOLOL.)
And also, the way I approached this question, when I was evangelical, was along the lines of "we know Christians are supposed to follow certain rules and believe certain things, so obviously, those things are 'what the bible says.' Help me understand this- I definitely know that Christians have to do X and believe Y- help me find a way to make the bible support those things." Rather than being open to the possibility that the things they taught in church aren't really "what the bible says."
I was so sure I already knew the right answer, and when the bible didn't say what the bible supposedly said, I was sure the right answer was still the right answer, and the issue was I wasn't understanding the bible right. Make the bible change to fit what we already believe. That's very *interesting* that evangelicals do that. We made such a big deal about how the bible is the only authoritative source, and all that.
And I hope, when I tell my son about these things, somehow I am also able to give him a sense of which things are facts that everyone agrees on, and which are someone's opinion- that people can and do disagree with. And the gradations of the whole spectrum in between.
But yeah, "we don't follow those Old-Testament commands because they are ceremonial law" is just a fan theory that someone made up. You can agree with it if you want- but you should evaluate it based on the evidence presented. Don't just accept it as the answer because someone told you it's the answer. It's not in the bible. Someone just made it up.
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Related:
"The Wise Men Came 2 Years After the Shepherds" Is Just a Fan Theory
The Bible Stories As I Read Them Were Never Actually In The Bible
The Bible and the Pixar Theory
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