Post 10 commandments, Forget social gospel?

The 10 commandments aren't what you think

MAGA Christians don’t want to think about the social gospel, though the Pope and many Christian theologians like to preach the social gospel. They see it as the church’s inside gospel being carried out the door into the public square.

But conservative religious thinkers believe they can establish America as a Christian country by posting the 10 commandments in schools and court houses. But here’s the problem: the 10 commandments don’t signify what they think. Indeed, they are an Old Testament way of speaking a social gospel. Contemporary Old Testament scholars, above all the recently deceased Walter Brueggemann, have argued that the 10 commandments are “codes and covenants” for the kind of living together in community God had in mind.

Consider the 10 commandments in the light of the Exodus and the character of the God of Israel. Almost nobody does so today, with the 10 commandments reduced to a slogan that proves we are a pleasant Christian country, and so they miss the fingerprints of a liberating God on a community code. They just sit on schoolhouse blackboards, with no explanation. American icons that signal our piety. But at Mt. Sinai, in the midst of Israel’s post-Exodus wanderings, God inaugurated a new covenant (social contract), which came to be seen as the mark of Israel’s chosenness and, in the prophets’ subsequent vision, a light to the nations. The commandments are covenant stipulations to guard life in community, not a moralizing list to be absent-mindedly memorized. (I did my memorizing in 8^th grade Confirmation Class.). The commandments instruct the children of Israel how to live on the land and together in community, how to organize public life for the common good. They begin by calling people to love, serve, and trust the God who brought them out of Egypt and slavery. The Exodus is the premise of the commandments and a window on what kind of God is inviting Israel to a new self-understanding as a liberated people.

This is how the commandments work. Look them up in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. Commandments 1-3 (God is Lord of all, Do not make idols of anything or anyone, Do not misuse God’s name and authority to legitimize your own self-interest)—all three announce a regime change that is to govern the peoples’ consciousness regarding where ultimate authority lies. They declare under what point of view human society is to be constructed, not unlike America’s founding documents, but far more radical. God’s liberal grace, and not the king’s economic and political power and not the survival of the fittest, is determinative of how this new community should live. Ultimately, human life is a gift, not a product of striving and acquisitiveness. Commandments 5-10 (we’ll come back to 4 at the end) instruct how “the neighbor,” all kinds of neighbors, is to be respected and protected and not exploited. Honor your parents. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Do not lust after your neighbor’s wealth. The new community is meant to unlearn Pharaoh’s methods for manipulating others for political or economic ends. Neighbors are to be ends and not means. Commandment 10 forbids the community-destroying, greedy acquisitiveness that governs so much of our own national life. Do not covet anything that belongs to someone else—house, spouse, goods. Do not spend your lives to gain at the expense of others.

So we must unlearn most of what we think we know well and relearn how the commandments carry the DNA of a liberal God. This is because we have taught ourselves to trivialize the commandments by making them God’s checklist for bourgeois values. Or we pose them in front of court houses as public trophies that give evidence that we are God’s favorite people. We have trimmed them to fit nicely into our present economic system, shaming the working class into showing up on Monday mornings and making the neighborhood safe for commerce, but betraying no concern for the good in common. These commandments are not paeans to the nuclear family or authorizations for the culture wars, but the foundation of a new kind of life in community, a dike against all the predatory practices and aggressive policies that make the little vulnerable to the big. The ten commandments reset life in community from the rapacious system in which nobody’s house or field or family or goods or inheritance are safe from lenders and foreclosures. The mention of Egypt in the preface to this new social order is code for the exploitative system authorized to demand ever more—demanding workers produce more bricks from less straw. Continuing deliverance from Egypt requires us to move out of our quagmire and set up a society that is modeled after the generosity of a liberal God. Where is this Egypt today? If upon critical reflection you find yourself in its midst, find the religious power and authority to walk you out. Are we part of the oppressive system, or will we become the visionaries who see a life over the wall?

All the commandments are embedded in the Jewish genome commandment: You are to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy. That means a whole lot more than getting to church on Sunday. The Sabbath commandment institutionalizes an alternative to relentless striving and greed and the economic anxiety that drives it. The Sabbath requires work stoppage, and also worship, and also the enhancement of the neighborhood. The Sabbath tempers economic productivity with acts of communal imagination and renewal. In effect, the Sabbath becomes the great equalizer, the sacrament of God’s reordering of life, the one day when economic exploitation cannot happen, cannot drive human life, cannot determine everything else. Especially on this day, God-the-revolutionary idealist is worshipped and God’s designs for the commons are proclaimed and exemplified. It seriously distorts this commandment to reduce it to “Sunday closing laws,” a strategy that claws back from God the meaning of our life together as 24/7 commerce. Judaism at its best turns Sabbath into an art form, a sacred aesthetic of common life. Who knew?

The ten commandments and the social contract they authorize may be seen as the first social safety net in the history of the world. They propose to guard the good of every neighbor and hem in every propensity of the rich and the powerful to render the neighbor a means to their own ends. This social mandate of the God of the Exodus is greatly expanded in the book of Deuteronomy (the Deuteronomic Code). There we are instructed that debts owed by the poor must be canceled after seven years so that no permanent underclass develops. (Just imagine!) Interest is forbidden, no collateral is required on loans to the poor, permanent hospitality is to be a communal norm, justice is extended to aliens, leftover abundance is reserved for widows and orphans. Always the reason is the same: Once you were slaves and God delivered you and decreed a new kind of community. Ultimately the land is God’s own, so there must be grain, oil, and wine available for all. Never is the economy meant to be a freestanding autonomous system—that would break the first commandment, devoted to God’s priorities. Israel’s God is a liberal and a liberator, not a crony memorialized in the Chamber of Commerce. Can you believe this? Can anyone in government or commerce? Can your pastor? Do church members contemplate marches on city councils? Have they carried the Old Testament lesson out the door as a social gospel?