The Law and the Love Command

The question put to Jesus in Matthew 22 was not idle. By the rabbinic period it was commonly said that the law contained six hundred and thirteen commandments; the Babylonian Talmud attributes the count to Rabbi Simlai (Makkot 23b), who divided them into two hundred and forty-eight positive commands and three hundred and sixty-five prohibitions. When there are so many, teachers will ask which ones carry the weight of the rest. The Talmud also tells of a Gentile who asked Hillel, a generation before Jesus, to teach him the whole Torah while he stood on one foot; Hillel replied that he should not do to his neighbour what was hateful to him, that this was the whole Torah and the rest was commentary, and that he should go and learn it (Shabbat 31a). Rabbi Akiva, in the generation after the apostles, called Leviticus 19:18 a great principle of the Torah. Asking for the greatest commandment was a recognised kind of question among teachers of the law.

Matthew frames it as a test. The Sadducees have just been silenced over the resurrection (22:34), and 'One of them, an expert in the law, tested Him with a question: "Teacher, which commandment is the greatest in the Law?"' (22:35-36). Jesus answers with two texts, not one. The first is Deuteronomy 6:5, the command that follows the Shema, the confession that the LORD is one, which a devout Jew recited daily. The second is Leviticus 19:18. Neither was obscure, but joining them was decisive. Jesus does not choose between a vertical and a horizontal summary, love for God or love for people. He says the second is like the first, and that 'All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments' (22:40).

The verb hang, kremannymi, gives a picture worth holding. Elsewhere in the New Testament it is used of hanging on a tree (Acts 5:30) and of a millstone hung round a neck (Matthew 18:6). The law and the prophets are suspended from the two commands as a load hangs from a beam. This picture cuts two ways, and both matter for ethics. If you take the beam away, the load falls: the commands of scripture without love for God and neighbour are a pile of rules with nothing holding them up, which is the legalism Jesus confronts in the Pharisees who tithe their herbs and neglect justice and mercy (Matthew 23:23). But the load is still there. Jesus does not say that the law and the prophets are replaced by the two commands. He says they hang on them, which means that the two commands are the meaning of the rest, and the rest is what the two commands look like in detail.

Mark's account adds a scene Matthew does not have. The scribe agrees with Jesus and says that to love God and neighbour 'is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices' (Mark 12:33), and Jesus tells him he is 'not far from the kingdom of God' (12:34). That is Micah 6:6-8 again, and Hosea 6:6, and Samuel's word to Saul that obedience is better than sacrifice. The prophets and the teacher of the law and Jesus are agreed: the visible, costly, countable acts of religion do not satisfy God if the love they are supposed to express is absent.

Most Christians know Leviticus 19:18 only as a quotation, and so imagine the love command as a feeling. Read it where it stands and it becomes very concrete. Leviticus 19 opens with the call to be holy because the LORD is holy (19:2), and then spells out holiness in a long series of commands, many of them about the neighbour. When you reap your harvest, do not reap to the edges of the field or gather the gleanings, and do not strip your vineyard bare: 'Leave them for the poor and the foreigner' (19:10). Do not defraud your neighbour or rob him, and 'You must not withhold until morning the wages due a hired hand' (19:13), because a day labourer needs his wage to eat that night. Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind (19:14), the two people who cannot answer back because they cannot hear the curse or see the trap.

Then come the courts and the tongue. 'You must not pervert justice; you must not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the rich; you are to judge your neighbor fairly' (19:15). Notice that the law forbids bias in both directions; sympathy for the poor is not allowed to corrupt a verdict any more than the bribes of the rich are. Do not go about slandering, and do not endanger your neighbour's life (19:16). Do not hate your brother in your heart, but rebuke him directly (19:17), so that resentment is not left to fester in silence. And then, at the end of this sequence: 'Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against any of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD' (19:18).

Two things follow. First, love in this chapter is not opposed to law; it is the summary of a list of laws. To love your neighbour is to leave food at the edge of your field for people who have none, to pay workers on time, to protect the disabled, to keep the courts honest, to guard your tongue and to let go of revenge. Every one of these is an action you could observe. Second, the command already reaches beyond Israel. Within the same chapter: 'You must treat the foreigner living among you as native-born and love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt' (19:34). The ground of the command is Israel's own history of being outsiders. When the lawyer in Luke 10 asks Jesus who his neighbour is, the answer was already in Leviticus.

This matters a great deal for a church in the global south, where many of the commands of Leviticus 19 describe daily life more closely than they describe life in a Western suburb. Day labourers who are paid late or not at all, judges who can be bought, disabled people mocked in the street, slander that runs through a village, cycles of revenge between families or clans, foreigners and refugees without protection: these are not distant illustrations. A preacher who teaches the love command as a warm feeling has thrown away the most practical chapter he had.

If the law and the prophets hang on the two commands, the next question is unavoidable: which parts of the Old Testament law does a Christian keep, and how? Christians do not offer animal sacrifices, most do not keep the food laws, and almost none observe the rules about mixed fabrics in Leviticus 19:19, which sits immediately after the love command. Yet the same Christians cite the Ten Commandments as binding and quote Leviticus 18 and 19 on moral questions. The Hermeneutics track, in its lesson on Law, set out this question at length, including the debate over Deuteronomy 25:4 and the muzzled ox, and in its lesson Which Commands Are Culture-Bound it examined how to sort commands in the New Testament itself. Read those first if you have not. What follows is the same question asked from the side of ethics: when you bring an Old Testament text to a real moral case, what weight does it carry?

The oldest and most widely held answer is the threefold division of the law into moral, ceremonial and civil or judicial precepts. Aquinas set it out in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, question 99), Calvin used it, and the Westminster Confession of 1646 states it formally in chapter 19: the ceremonial laws are abrogated, the judicial laws expired with the state of Israel except as their general equity requires, and the moral law, summarised in the Ten Commandments, binds everyone for ever. Its strength is that it describes what the New Testament actually does with the law: Hebrews argues that the sacrificial system has reached its end (Hebrews 8:13), Mark 7:19 notes that Jesus declared all foods clean, and the commands of the Decalogue keep reappearing in the letters as binding. For ethics, it gives a usable rule: the moral law applies directly, and the civil law applies through its general equity, the principle of justice the case law was protecting. Its critics answer that the Torah never sorts itself this way, that Leviticus 19 moves from love of neighbour to mixed seed without a break, and that the category moral can be filled with whatever the interpreter already wants to keep. Its defenders reply that the division summarises the New Testament's own differential treatment of the law, and that every other view has to account for that treatment somehow.

Lutheran theology approaches the question through the distinction between law and gospel, and through the uses of the law. The law restrains evil in society, which is its civil use; it shows human beings their sin and drives them to Christ, its theological use, as Galatians 3:24 calls the law a guardian to lead us to Christ; and, according to the Formula of Concord of 1577, it guides those who are already believers, the third use. Calvin called this third use the principal one (Institutes 2.7.12). Some modern Lutherans, Gerhard Forde among them, have questioned the third use, fearing that it brings the law back as a ladder to climb. For ethics, the Lutheran contribution is a warning: whenever you apply a command, ask whether you are using it to guide a forgiven person or to condemn a person who has not heard the gospel.

A third view holds that the whole Mosaic law, as a single covenant, has reached its goal in Christ, and that Christians are bound not by the law of Moses as such but by 'the law of Christ' (1 Corinthians 9:21; Galatians 6:2). Old Testament commands bind the Christian when, and in the form in which, they are taken up in the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. Douglas Moo set out this position in Five Views on Law and Gospel (1996), and versions of it are held under the name New Covenant theology. Its strength is that it follows Paul's language of not being under the law (Romans 6:14) and treats the law as a unit, as the Torah itself does. Its critics answer that the New Testament quotes and applies the law far more freely than this view suggests, as when Paul uses the muzzled ox, and that it risks leaving large parts of the Old Testament without ethical use. Its defenders reply that Paul's use of the muzzled ox is exactly what the view expects, an apostle taking up a Mosaic text into the law of Christ, and that the whole Old Testament remains Christian scripture, useful for instruction (2 Timothy 3:16), even where its commands do not bind directly.

At the far end stands theonomy, the view that the judicial laws of Moses, including their penalties, remain binding on civil governments today unless the New Testament explicitly changes them. Greg Bahnsen argued it in Theonomy in Christian Ethics (1977), and R. J. Rushdoony in The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973). It is a minority view even within the Reformed tradition that produced it. Its defenders point to Matthew 5:17-19, where Jesus says not a stroke of the law will pass away and that whoever breaks the least of its commands will be least in the kingdom. Its critics, including the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary in Theonomy: A Reformed Critique (1990) and Vern Poythress, who grants theonomists some of their points, in The Shadow of Christ in the Law of Moses (1991), answer that it misreads the relation between Israel as a nation under God and the church scattered among the nations, and that Matthew 5:17 is about fulfilment in Christ rather than the enforcement of Israel's penalties by modern states. Theonomists reply that this answer assumes the very break between Israel and the nations that it needs to prove, and that a government which sets aside God's law for its penalties must take some other standard of justice in its place, which they think worse. Between all these, Christopher Wright's Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (2004) offers a widely used approach that many in different camps share: Israel's law was given as a paradigm, a worked model of what a redeemed society looks like, so that its specific laws teach Christians the shape of justice, mercy and holiness even where they are not applied literally. Holders of each of the views above use Wright's work in their own way, and this track will return to him on land, debt, the poor and the foreigner, where he writes in detail.

Paul says it twice. 'For he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law' (Romans 13:8), and 'The entire law is fulfilled in a single decree: "Love your neighbor as yourself"' (Galatians 5:14). James calls the same command 'the royal law' (James 2:8). Taken alone, these sentences could suggest that love is a replacement for the commands, so that once you love, the commands no longer matter. Read in their setting, they say something more exact. In Romans 13:9 Paul names the commands that love sums up: do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet. He is not abolishing them. He is saying that love is what they were all aiming at, and that a person who loves will not commit adultery, murder, steal or covet. The commands describe what love does not do; love is the reason they exist.

The same holds in the other direction. Love without commands quickly becomes whatever the lover feels at the moment, and the New Testament refuses that. 'If you love Me, you will keep My commandments' (John 14:15). 'For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome' (1 John 5:3). In Galatians, the very letter that says the whole law is fulfilled in love, Paul warns 'do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh' (Galatians 5:13) and lists the works of the flesh that exclude a person from the kingdom (5:19-21). The commands give love its content; love gives the commands their purpose. Take away either and the other is damaged.

Augustine put the point in a sentence that has been misquoted ever since. In his seventh homily on the first letter of John he wrote, in Latin, dilige et quod vis fac: love, and do what you will. Out of context it sounds like permission for anything. In context Augustine is discussing a father who disciplines his son and a kidnapper who caresses a child he means to sell, and his point is that the same outward act can be loving or cruel, so that the question is what root the act grows from. He meant that genuine love of God will produce obedience, not that love excuses disobedience. Joseph Fletcher's Situation Ethics (1966) quoted Augustine's line in support of an ethic in which love is the only norm and every rule may be broken if love requires it. Paul Ramsey replied that Christian love generates rules and keeps them, because love takes a long view of persons and practices. That exchange is the modern form of an ancient argument.

Richard B. Hays, whose Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) the Hermeneutics track introduced, makes a striking proposal here. He argues that love, though central to the New Testament, should not be used as one of the focal images through which the whole New Testament ethic is read, because the word has become so vague in modern use that it can be bent to justify almost anything, and because several New Testament writers do not organise their ethics around it. He proposes community, cross and new creation instead, with love understood through the cross: love is what Christ did, not what we feel. Others answer that Jesus himself made love the summary of the law, and that the remedy for a debased word is to define it, not to set it aside. Both sides agree on the main point of this section: love in scripture has a shape, and the shape is given by the commands and above all by the cross.

Notice finally how Matthew 22 orders the two commands. The first and greatest is love for God; the second is like it. They are not rivals, and 1 John 4:20 will not let anyone claim the first without the second. But the order matters. Love for neighbour that is cut off from love for God tends either to become a project that uses people for a cause or to collapse into telling people only what they want to hear. Love for God gives love for neighbour both its depth and its limits: you will not lie to your neighbour, flatter him or help him do evil, because the God you love does not.

A real moral case almost never asks whether to love. It asks whom to love first when you cannot do everything for everyone. Augustine saw this clearly. In On Christian Teaching (book 1) he argued that since you cannot do good to everyone, you should give special care to those who, by place, time or circumstance, are more closely joined to you, as though by lot. In the City of God (book 15, chapter 22) he gave a short definition of virtue as the right ordering of love. Aquinas devoted a whole question of the Summa to the order of charity (II-II, question 26), and concluded that love rightly owes more to those nearer to us, family first among them, while still owing love to all, including enemies. Scripture supports both halves: 'If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially his own household, he has denied the faith' (1 Timothy 5:8), and 'let us do good to everyone, and especially to the family of faith' (Galatians 6:10).

In many African and Asian societies this question is not theoretical; it is the daily shape of moral life. Obligations to the extended family, the clan and the village are strong and good, and Western individualism often looks to these societies like a failure of love. But the same obligations can become the engine of nepotism, tribalism and corruption, when the job, the contract or the church office goes to a relative or a tribesman over someone better qualified, and the people outside the circle are treated as if they were not neighbours at all. The parable of the Good Samaritan was told precisely to break that pattern. The order of love says you have particular duties to those near you. The parable says that no one is outside the command, and that the test of whether you have kept it is whether you showed mercy to the one who was not yours.

Here, then, is how the law and the love command work together when you bring scripture to a case. First, find the commands that bear on it, from both Testaments, and read each one in its setting, as Leviticus 19 was read above. Second, ask how each command binds, using whichever account of the law you find most faithful, and be honest that Christians differ here. Third, ask what the command was protecting: which neighbour, against what harm. That is the general equity of the Westminster Confession, the paradigm of Christopher Wright, and the law of Christ of the New Covenant view, approached from different directions. Fourth, ask whom love requires you to serve first in this case, and whom the case is tempting you to forget. And fifth, ask whether your conclusion could be stated to the neighbour with the least power in the situation without shame.

Two failures stand at either side of that method. The first is legalism: applying the letter of a command with no attention to the person it was meant to protect, as when a church refuses help to a starving family because the father has not attended services, or treats a rule about dress as more important than a widow's hunger. Jesus' anger at the Pharisees over the Sabbath (Mark 3:1-6) is aimed at this. The second is antinomianism, from the Greek for against the law: treating love as a feeling that exempts the lover from any specific command, so that adultery becomes acceptable because the couple love each other, or a bribe becomes acceptable because the money will help the family. Paul's question in Romans 6:1, whether we should continue in sin so that grace may increase, is aimed at this. A faithful Christian ethic walks between them.

Open your casebook to your working case and give this lesson a full page. At the top, write the two great commandments from Matthew 22:37-39. Under them, make two columns headed Old Testament and New Testament.

Using a concordance or the search on Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible, find every passage you can that bears on your case, and write the reference and a few words of each in the right column. Search for the key words of your case: if it is about wages, search wage and hired; if about land, search inheritance and field; if about leadership, search elder and overseer. Aim for at least three passages in each column. Then read each one in its own chapter, not just the verse, and correct anything you wrote in the inquiry that the setting changes.

Beside each Old Testament passage, write one line on how it binds you, and if you are unsure, write how two of the views in section 3 would answer. Beside each passage from either Testament, write the neighbour it protects: who is the vulnerable person, and what harm does the command guard against?

Last, write a short paragraph at the bottom of the page answering three questions. Who are all the neighbours in your case, including those who will never hear about the decision? Whom does love require you to serve first, and why? And who is the person with the least power in the situation, the one Leviticus 19 would have told you to think of: the hired hand, the blind, the foreigner? Do not name anyone; describe them by their place in the situation. The capstone will ask you to show that your conclusion can face that person.