Have you ever been told that The Torah is divided into three categories of moral, civil, and ceremonial laws, and then this separation further used to say that any commandments deemed “ceremonial” and sometimes even those listed as “civil” no longer need to be followed by “Christians”? Probably if you have embraced a Torah-positive faith practice for any amount of time you have encountered this claim, and even if you have been a follower of “mainstream Christianity” for a while you have heard it, as this is a very popular theological view. In this teaching I want to examine this idea, see where it comes from, evaluate it against The Bible, and seek the truth of the matter.
The plain reality is that this concept is not at all supported by anything in The Bible itself—these categories are concepts that have been developed by theologians and scholars over time. The origin of these categories may trace to earlier Medieval period “Christianity” or even to Jewish writers of that period, which may include Joseph Albo, Simon ben Ẓemaḥ Duran, or Maimonides. The idea of using these categories to deem certain commandments obsolete to the “Christian”, however, appears to trace directly to John Calvin, the reformer, and his work titled Institutes Of The Christian Religion. Prior to Calvin, however, indications are that these categories were created merely as a study aid, not as a method to deem certain commandments overturned.
Calvin's view was that the moral law is still binding on “Christians”, but the civil and ceremonial laws were specific to Israel and have been “abolished in Christ”. He believed that the civil laws were only for the government of Israel as a nation, and that the ceremonial laws were only for the temporary worship system of Israel. A segment of his work labeled One Hundred Aphorisms states the following:
The Law is threefold: Ceremonial, Judicial, Moral. The use of the Ceremonial Law is repealed, its effect is perpetual. The Judicial or Political Law was peculiar to the Jews, and has been set aside, while that universal justice which is described in the Moral Law remains. The latter, or Moral Law, the object of which is to cherish and maintain godliness and righteousness, is perpetual, and is incumbent on all.
Where this idea originates is of less concern than addressing the validity of it. I find it interesting, though, that the idea of using these categories to deem various aspects of The Torah voided and no longer binding on “Christians” comes from the same origin point as such dangerous and heretical doctrines as eternal security, predestination, and cessationism. It is also worth noting that Protestant or Reformationist theology is only roughly 500 years old and Calvin’s Institutes was first published in 1536, so this idea of certain commandments being voided through this alleged three-fold categorization is a somewhat modern theological construct. This is certainly something to keep in mind while going through this study.
I have often asked proponents of this view where The Bible actually separates The Torah into such categories, and where we have any Scriptural guidance as to which commandments would go into which of these three categories. The response is typically something to the effect of: Well, it’s not in The Bible, but it is what most Christian scholars believe. To this I would say that it is correct that this idea is not found in The Bible, but I would challenge the idea that “Christian” scholars overwhelmingly support this idea. Let’s take a look at what some leading theologians have to say about this categorizing of The Torah into moral, civil, and ceremonial classifications.
What Scholars Have To Say
First I will consider Dr. William Barrick, a highly regarded Hebrew language professor, who stated in his paper The Mosaic Covenant, as published in the Fall 1999 edition of The Master’s Seminary Journal: “No one can justly separate the
moral, civil, and ceremonial parts of the Law from each other; it is a unit.” Further into the work he says the following:
The essential unity of the Law of Moses is clear in the Scriptures (Jas 2:10; Gal 5:3). Dividing the Law into moral, civil/social, and ceremonial/religious is really an artificiality unsupported by the overwhelming evidence of Scripture.
As long as the covenant with Moses was in effect Israel was obligated to keep the entire law. (Division of the Mosaic law into distinct categories—such as civil, ceremonial and moral—was unknown to the OT Israelite. Within the theocracy the law of Moses was a unified entity.)
Division into three categories of law is unmasked as a fallacy by the testimony of the Book of Deuteronomy alone. Moses’s second exposition (4:44—26:19) presented the Decalogue and then illustrated each of the Ten Commandments by means of various legal stipulations. Such an arrangement demonstrates that the so-called civil and ceremonial stipulations are inextricably interwoven with what are considered to be the moral laws. Violation of any of the stipulations is a breach of the Decalogue.
So, here we have a leading Hebrew scholar stating quite emphatically that this idea that The Torah should be divided into moral, civil, and ceremonial categories of distinction is an artificiality and fallacy—in other words, it’s completely made up—and it’s unsupported by anything in The Bible. Next I will consider the words of Dr. Daniel Block from his book The Gospel According To Moses: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Book of Deuteronomy, where he says:
[B]oth God and Moses perceived the laws holistically, viewing all life as under the authority of the divine suzerain. Whereas modern interpreters tend to discuss the ethical relevance of the laws by classifying them according to moral, civil, and ceremonial categories, these categories are not very helpful and in any case do not reflect the nature and organization of the laws themselves. Christopher Wright has moved the discussion forward by recognizing five categories of Israelite law: criminal law, civil law, family law, cultic law, and compassionate law. Even so, we must realize that the documents themselves do not make these distinctions. This is illustrated most impressively in Leviticus 19, which, with its more than four dozen commandments, refuses to classify, let alone arrange in order of importance, civil, ceremonial, and moral laws.
Block is a professor of Old Testament at the highly esteemed Wheaton College, from where such names as Billy Graham, Josh McDowell, Daniel Juster, and A.W. Tozer are listed as alumni. Now, my point is not to endorse all of the theology, much of which does not favor a Torah-keeping lifestyle, that such men taught, but to show that among leading “Christian” scholars not only is there a lack of agreement on the idea of a separation into moral, civil, and ceremonial categories of The Torah, but in actuality there are strong scholarly statements against this position.
Now, to be fair to Dr. Christopher J.H. Wright, the point to which Dr. Block refers is from Wright’s book An Eye For An Eye: The Place of Old Testament Ethics Today where he says, “[T]o approach Old Testament law in the traditional hope of being able to lay bare a distinct category of ‘moral law’, as opposed to ‘civil’ and ‘ceremonial’ law, was not a very fruitful way in to discovering the ethical relevance of the law as a whole.” From there he presents the five categories to which Dr. Block refers and then follows with these words:
Although we may find it helpful to categorize the laws into various sociological and functional divisions, as we have done, there is a higher category which stands above them all: for an Israelite, all the law was God's law. It was the gift of God's grace and the demand of God's covenant. To break or neglect the law was not just a criminal, civil, cultic offence, nor even just a lack of charity. It was sin. God stood above and behind the law, so that keeping the law was by no means an end in itself, but rather the way to knowing God' in personal covenant relationship. In that sense, the law was indeed 'life'. It was in living as God commanded that they would be the people he wanted and so fulfil his purpose in the world (Ex. 19:5f.).
You know, it always amazes me when I read things like this how so many leading “Christian” theologians, preachers, pastors, and teachers know the truth yet still, when they get to certain commandments like the food laws or The Sabbaths turn back to that old deception from Eden where they fall for the lie that there are some things they don’t have to follow anymore. Wright may reject the traditional idea of a moral, civil, and ceremonial separation of The Torah, and if we follow his statements here to their logical conclusion it should indicate that the whole Torah is eternal and to be upheld, yet in other areas of his work, such as in his book The Mission Of God, he expresses a belief that the food laws from Leviticus 11 no longer have to be followed. It’s as if it’s not good enough to realize the error of the popular categorization of The Torah into moral, civil, and ceremonial groupings, they still have to find a way to claim there are commandments they don’t have to follow, despite that the only character in The Bible to make such a claim is Satan.
Next let’s look at what Dr. Walter C. Kaiser, another alumnus of Wheaton College, as well as a former professor of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and former president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. In his paper God’s Promise Plan And His Gracious Law published in the September 1990 edition of the Journal Of The Evangelical Theological Society Kaiser states:
Now we must recognize that there is a certain truth to the claim that the law exhibits a unity and stands as a unit. It is also true that the Bible does not classify laws according to a scheme such as moral, civil, and ceremonial.
What? A scheme? Here we have another leading theologian, this time going so far as to say that this false classification of commandments within The Torah is a scheme. Now let’s look at what Dr. Mark W. Karlberg says in his paper The Significance Of Israel In Biblical Typology published in the September 1988 edition of the Journal Of The Evangelical Theological Society:
[P]hysical blessing in the promised land was contingent upon Israel’s faithful observance of God’s law. As long as the covenant with Moses was in effect Israel was obligated to keep the entire law. (Division of the Mosaic law into distinct categories—such as civil, ceremonial, and moral—was unknown to the OT Israelite. Within the theocracy the law of Moses was a unified entity.) The retention of the land was thus conditioned upon Israel’s obedience.
Now, Karlberg seems to have stronger Calvinist leanings, and as such appears to acknowledge this truth in the midst of seeking to further claim a position that certain commandments no longer need to be followed today. But even in that, we see here yet another prominent “Christian” scholar acknowledging that these distinctions were unknown to the ancient Israelites—you know, the people who wrote The Bible. And with that I will turn to the last scholar I will be citing here, who is also perhaps the one I least agree with.
Dr. J. Daniel Hays is what would be called a principalist, meaning that his belief is that The Torah is made up of principles rather than clear and rigid commandments. While many commandments do have some element of principle within them, even those principles are all too often built on a clear commandment that is not to be overshadowed. Additionally, there are many commandments that give no indication that they are principles with the flexibility that may come with such an idea. For example, regarding the food laws given in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, there are very specific instructions on what to eat and what not to eat. Nowhere does the text indicate that these commandments are some type of principle about something more vague like “just eating healthy”, where some claim today that we can ignore the actual commandments because modern food processing and refrigeration practices make certain things listed as unclean, such as pork and shellfish, to now be “OK to eat”. Additionally, if you take something like The Sabbath Day, we know that this is biblically only the period between what modern secular calendars would call sunset Friday evening through sunset Saturday evening. If you make The Sabbath a principle and deem that it only means you take one day, any day, of the week for rest you destroy the prophetic picture given within Scripture of The Sabbath as it relates both to Sabbath years and The Millennium. With this in mind, let’s consider these statements from Hays taken from his paper Applying The Old Testament Law Today as published by the Dallas Theological Seminary in the January-March 2001 edition of Bibliotheca Sacra:
The distinctions between the moral, civil, and ceremonial laws are arbitrary, imposed on the text from outside the text. The Old Testament itself gives no hint of any such distinctions. For example, “love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18) is followed in the very next verse by the law “do not wear clothing woven of two kinds of material” (19:19). Should verse 18 be applied as binding, while verse 19 dismissed as nonapplicable altogether? The text gives no indication that any kind of hermeneutical shift has taken place between the two verses, On what basis can one decide that one verse is universal and timeless, even for believers in the Christian era, while the commandment in the very next verse is rejected? Many of the so-called moral, civil, and ceremonial laws occur together like this without any textual indicators that there are differences between them.
In addition, it is often difficult to determine into which category a particular law falls.
And a little further into his paper, Hays stated this:
So, the traditional approach to the Mosaic Law, which divide it into moral, civil, and ceremonial categories, suffers from three major weaknesses: It is arbitrary and without textual support, it ignores the narrative context, and it fails to reflect the significant implications of the change from Old Covenant to New Covenant. This approach, therefore, is inadequate as a hermeneutic method for interpreting and applying the Law.
Then in his conclusion he makes these remarks:
The traditional approach of dividing the Mosaic Law into civil, ceremonial, and moral laws violates proper hermeneutical method, for it is inconsistent and arbitrary, and the Old Testament gives no hint of such distinctions. This approach errs in two ways. On the one hand it dismisses the civil and ceremonial laws as inapplicable. On the other hand it applies the so-called moral laws as direct law. In addition the traditional approach tends to ignore the narrative context and the covenant context of the Old Testament legal material.
To recap, these leading scholars, all of which hold an earned Ph.D. and are associated with top “Christian” theology schools, have referred to this idea of moral, civil, and ceremonial categories of The Torah as an artificiality, a fallacy, not very helpful, a scheme, unknown to ancient Israel, so-called, inconsistent, arbitrary, and inadequate as a hermeneutic method. This shows that at least some prominent scholars not only reject the idea that there is a separation of commandments into distinctions called moral, civil, and ceremonial, but use rather scathing and mocking terms to describe this concept.
I also want to consider Leviticus 19, as this is repeatedly cited as a prime example of the failure of the concept. Commonly referred to as the holiness code or the code of holiness, the segment begins with the statement in verse 2 “be holy, as I [God] am holy”. This is one of four places in the entire Bible we find this statement, with a few other places where similar wording is used. The other three places are Leviticus 11:44 and 20:25-26 where the phrase is directly connected with following the food laws and 1 Peter 1:16 where the apostle reminds us that, “it is written, ‘be holy, as God is holy,” referring, of course, to the three places it’s written in The Torah—where it’s directly connected with the food law, keeping The Sabbath, not wearing wool and linen together, and not getting tattoos, among other things.
An Illustration Of The Problem
A proponent of the idea of a moral, civil, and ceremonial categorization of The Torah is R.C. Sproul, who addresses the concept in a short article published through Ligonier Ministries titled Which Laws Apply? The article provides a great example of the flaws in this idea while being a fast read, so I have selected it for this study to further evaluate the errors of this belief in moral, civil, and ceremonial separations of The Torah. To begin, Sproul claims the following:
Technically speaking, Christians are not under the old covenant and its stipulations. Yet, at the same time, we are called to imitate Christ and to live as people who seek to please the living God (Eph. 5:10; Col. 1:9–12). So, although in one sense I’m not covenantally obligated to the law or under the curse of the law, I put that out the front door and I go around the back door and I say, “Oh Lord, I want to live a life that is pleasing to You, and like the Old Testament psalmist, I can say, ‘Oh how I love Thy law.’” I can meditate on the law day and night because it reveals to me what is pleasing to God.
The problem here is that once you have thrown out the actual Torah of God and then “come in through the back door” and declared how you love God’s Law what “Christians” have typically done is fallen in love with a redefined form of God’s Law. So often when I have these discussions with people they will refer to some kind of “Law of Christ” or “Laws of Love” that in their mind is somehow different from The Torah of God. This is something that should be of particular concern, especially when Scripture plainly tells us that it is the adversary who will try to change the appointed times and law (Daniel 7:25). Sproul goes on to tell a story about an encounter he had with some “Christians” doing something that he considered so against God’s Law even under the new covenant that he seemed appalled when they said to him they are “not under the law”, but then proceeds in the next paragraph with these words:
Of course, as we read Scripture, we see that there are some parts of the law that no longer apply to new covenant believers, at least not in the same way that they did to old covenant believers. We make a distinction between moral laws, civil laws, and ceremonial laws such as the dietary laws and physical circumcision. That’s helpful because there’s a certain sense in which practicing some of the laws from the Old Testament as Christians would actually be blasphemy.
Can you imagine being so deceived that you believe it would be considered blasphemous to obey The Bible? And yet here we have this highly regarded Bible scholar saying this very thing!
Finally, Sproul proceeds to explain what he feels is the distinguishing factor between commandments that remain binding and those that are abrogated: Anything that would do violence to God’s character he classifies, apparently, as a natural law to be kept by “Christians”, while anything else must fall under the categories of civil or ceremonial laws that can now be ignored. In describing the laws that would remain binding as natural laws, he states:
By “natural law,” they meant those laws that are rooted and grounded in God’s own character. For God to abrogate these laws would be to do violence to His own person. For example, if God in the old covenant said, “You shall have no other gods before Me,” but now He says, “It’s OK for you to have other gods and to be involved in idolatry,” God would be doing violence to His own holy character. Statutes legislated on the basis of this natural law will be enforced at all times.
On the other hand, there is legislation made on the basis of the divine purpose in redemption, such as the dietary laws, that when their purpose is fulfilled, God can abrogate without doing violence to His own character. I think that’s a helpful distinction.
You know, I have to really wonder what people like this do with the phrase: Be holy, just as I [God] am holy. Again, this phrase is twice directly linked with those very same dietary laws (Leviticus 11:44, 20:25-26) and once with such commandments as keeping The Sabbaths, not wearing wool and linen together, and not getting tattoos on your body (Leviticus 19:2-3, 19, 28)—being listed in the same chapter among numerous other things most “Christians” would actually agree fall under this idea of being holy, as God is holy”, or what they might classify as “moral laws” or “natural laws”. Then the apostle Peter quotes this very same phrase to “be holy, as God is holy”, carrying both it and all commandments attached to it into the parameters of the new covenant.
I would contend that there is no greater way to connect a commandment to the character of God than to directly link the phrase “be holy, as I am holy” to it, and subsequently breaking that commandment becomes, then, doing violence to the character of God. This would mean that eating unclean things, not keeping The Sabbaths (both the weekly and the Feast Days), wearing wool and linen together, and tattooing your body, among numerous other things, do violence to the character of God. That is something that warrants some serious consideration.
Principalism
I also want to briefly speak in more detail about this concept of principalism, which I touched on briefly in regard to the citation from Dr. Hays. This is not a completely unwarranted idea. Take, for example, the commandment regarding what someone needs to do if they have an ox that gores a man and kills him. Most of us do not have oxen today, but we do drive cars, and there is a broader principle within the command regarding how we might handle an automobile accident, especially if it results in a fatality. Another example would be the commandment to build a parapet around a roof. In modern-day American culture, and many other parts of the world, we no longer use the flat roof style of the ancient Israelites that were a place of gathering and socializing. Rather, we have pitched roofs that nobody goes on unless they are doing maintenance to them. But there is a principle of safety that might equally apply if you have an elevated deck or patio that would require the same type of border to prevent someone from falling and being injured or for putting a gated fence around a swimming pool to prevent children from falling into the water and drowning.
Another important example of a commandment that could be viewed as a principle is Deuteronomy 12:29-31, where it speaks against the appropriation of the rites, rituals, practices, and festivals of other religions into our own faith practice and worship of Yah. This would broadly apply to any application across time and culture. As such, we really must consider the implications such a commandment has on the most popular holidays of modern times, like Christmas, Easter, and Halloween, all of which originate with the Roman Catholic religion and at least strongly appear to have connections with religions completely outside of the broader idea of “Christianity”. And while most consider Catholicism to be a form of “Christianity”, it is a religion plagued with idolatry, paganism, and the idea that the so-called popes are the “Vicar of Christ”, meaning that they consider their sitting pope to literally be “Jesus Christ”—something that is blasphemous and appears to have elements of the Eastern mystic belief of reincarnation involved with it. I don’t know about you, but I am not Catholic and want nothing to do with that stuff. We have plenty of celebrations in The Bible that God gave us, I see no valid reason to celebrate the holidays invented by the Roman Catholic religion, regardless of whether or not they were further influenced by other religions in creating them.
There are, however, commandments that are very clear and specific, giving no flexibility or latitude. For example, the commandment against murdering people is not a principle, it is very clear and specific, we are not to murder people. While it is true that Yeshua points out in a broader sense that this commandment includes not spiritually murdering people with your words, this is not quite the same as treating a commandment as a principle. In like manner, such things as the Leviticus 11 food laws, The Sabbath Day, the Feast Days, the prohibition against tattooing your body, and the commandment against wearing wool and linen together would all be examples of commandments that are specific and not to be reduced to principles.
Principalism can lead to dangerous beliefs and errant views of Scripture. Popular “Christianity” is notorious for principalizing and spiritualizing Scripture to a point where clear commandments and other matters intended to be taken literally are dismissed and people can then make the biblical text say “whatever it means to them”. At this point the “Christian” becomes their own god and their own imagination becomes their Bible. Principalism is not wrong in itself, there is truly a biblical basis for it, but when it is used to dismiss the actual commandments it becomes heretical.
A Better Way
These are the testimonies and the statutes and the ordinances, which Moses spoke to Bnei-Yisrael when they came out from Egypt—
—Deuteronomy 4:45 (TLV)
Take care that you do not forget Adonai your God by not keeping His mitzvot, ordinances and statutes that I am commanding you today.
—Deuteronomy 8:11 (TLV)
Therefore you are to love Adonai your God and keep His charge, His statutes, His ordinances and His mitzvot at all times.
—Deuteronomy 11:1 (TLV)
Today you have affirmed Adonai as your God, that you will walk in His ways, keep His statutes, mitzvot and ordinances, and listen to His voice.
—Deuteronomy 26:17 (TLV)
These four passages present three biblical categories of The Torah that are easily supported through the rest of scripture and historically through other Hebrew writings and thought: statutes, mitzvot or testimonies, and ordinances. I cannot take time here to do an in-depth word study on each of these, but I will provide you with what each one means.
Ordinances: These are commandments that need no explanation or reason, common sense would tell us why we should follow them. They would include such things as don’t steal and don’t murder people. Most people today, especially in any kind of religious setting, would not need to know why God would tell us to follow such things.
Mitzvot: Also called testimonies, these are commandments that we are given a proper explanation for in Scripture. For example, regarding The Sabbath Day we are told in Exodus 20:11, immediately after the commandment is given, that we are to follow it because God created it on the seventh day of the Creation week. Without the explanation the commandment may seem odd, but with the explanation we can say, “Oh, that makes sense.”
Statutes: These give no explanation as to why they are to be kept, or if there is an explanation it may be particularly vague. For example, apart from being linked to the phrase “be holy, just as God is holy” there is no direct explanation behind the food laws given in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, we are simply told what to eat and what not to eat. Additionally, commandments like the prohibition against wearing wool and linen together, not mixing two kinds of seeds in the same field, and not tattooing your body give no explanation, we only know that God gave the commandment.
What I find interesting is that the “Christian” concept of moral, civil, and ceremonial laws would attach moral laws with the ordinances, civil laws with the mitzvot, and ceremonial laws with the statutes, as is done by the popular website Got Questions, and in doing this creates a belief that is completely backwards and deems obsolete the most important commandments in The Bible. You see, it’s not hard to comprehend obedience to the ordinances, you don’t have to go to any effort to convince people not to murder other people or steal from other people. The mitzvot, however, begin to get into things that truly set us apart as a peculiar people unto God through such things as keeping The Sabbath and the Feast Days. But then when we get into the statutes we are dealing with commandments that can only be kept through pure faith—we believe that God is God, He is supreme, and we obey solely because He gave the commandment with no other reason given or needed. In Jewish practice there is a saying, “This is The Torah’s decree,” and it is applied to such commandments as a way of saying, “We don’t need a reason, the mere fact that God commanded it is reason enough.” In modern American culture we would say it this way: God said it, that settles it.
In this way, “Christians” through their buying into the lies have deemed the commandments that would actually set them apart and those that would express the highest level of true faith in their God to be obsolete and even go so far, as Sproul did, to say that such commandments are blasphemous. The “Christianity” of the masses truly is a religion of the deceived holding to a belief system that is always the opposite of what The Bible actually says. If people feel the need to categorize the commandments of God for ease of study, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But the moment you use categorization to deem certain commandments no longer need to be followed is the moment you have crossed into actual blasphemy and are following the lawless one, Satan, instead of The God who gave them, The Messiah who came to lead you in following them, and The Spirit who came to cause you to walk in them.
Blessings and Shalom
©2023 Truth Ignited Ministry
