Here I want to make that case in more detail with a focus on three legal discourses within the Gospel accounts, each to illustrate a different point: (1) Jesus as a hyper-literal (though creative) textualist, (2) Jesus as a skeptic of oral tradition, particularly where it detracts from explicit written commands, and (3) Jesus as a whole-law originalist, urging that the Law’s expressed purposes must guide and constrain interpretation.

Matthew 22:23-33: Jesus’s Hyper-Literal Proof of the Resurrection

Substantively, Matthew 22:23-33 is a debate between Jesus and the Sadducees about the resurrection of the dead. But there’s more to this passage than meets the modern eye. Recall that the Sadducees are textualists who deny the resurrection; the Pharisees are oral-traditionalists who affirm the resurrection.

In this passage, Jesus cleverly employs Sadducean-style textualism to affirm a Pharisaical tenet.

The Sadducees begin the discourse with a question about levirate marriage, the legal requirement that if a man dies, his brother must marry his widow and raise his children. The Sadducees offer a hypothetical in extremis involving seven brothers, each of whom dies after marrying the same woman (the ultimate femme fatale). The Sadducees think this leads to an absurd result: “In the resurrection, therefore, of the seven, whose wife will she be? For they all had her” (v.28). Jesus denies any absurdity because, he says, there’s no marriage in the resurrection—everyone is “like the angels” (v.30).

Okay, Jesus, fine—but how do you know there’s a resurrection at all? That’s the basic point the Sadducees are making. And Jesus has an answer:

Jesus here quotes Exodus 3:6, the burning bush scene where God reveals himself to Moses: “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” How does Jesus get from this passage to the resurrection of the dead? His logic depends upon two things.

• First, the present tense of the verb: “I am the God.” By the time of Moses, the three patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are long dead. Yet God identifies himself as their God in the present tense—not “I was Abraham’s God,” but “I am Abraham’s God.” This implies that the patriarchs are still, in some sense, alive.

• Second, the Sadducees’ own example—levirate marriage—is predicated on the idea that death ends covenantal obligations. That’s why it’s not adultery for a man to marry his sister-in-law after his brother’s death. But if God in Exodus 3 sees himself as still covenantally bound to the patriarchs, then necessarily they are not dead. They are alive, or at the very least they remain under a promise of reanimation sufficient to keep the divine covenant binding.

QED: Resurrection. This is Jesus’s argument.

He appeals not to unwritten or prophetic tradition. He makes his argument based solely on the Scriptural text. His present-tense-verb argument is literal in the extreme. His enduring-covenant argument is creative. Both are techniques the Sadducees would have recognized and appreciated. By contrast, the Pharisees probably disagreed with Jesus’s approach—why creatively stretch the text when tradition offers the answer?—but they concurred in his conclusion.

Matthew 22:23-33 is Jesus using Sadducean logic to reach a Pharisaical conclusion. He gives each side something they want—and yet denies them both something they demand.

Matthew 22:23-33 is the Marbury v. Madison of the Gospels.

American legal scholars and practitioners will appreciate the analogy. The underlying events in Marbury occur at a tense time during the presidential handoff between John Adams (a Federalist) and Thomas Jefferson (a Democratic-Republican). Glossing over many of the details, in the decision, Chief Justice John Marshall asserts the power of federal courts to overturn unconstitutional laws—i.e., the power of judicial review, something very important to the Federalists—yet he uses this logic to invalidate a Federalist law and thus deliver a political win to the new Jefferson administration. In other words, Marshall uses Federalist logic to reach a pro-Jeffersonian conclusion. He gives each side something they want and denies them something they demand.

Marbury is one of the first cases American law students study. I think Matthew 22:23-33 deserves similar primacy of place for students of the Gospels and biblical interpretation. It is the example par excellence of Jesus as a sophisticated, text-bound legal thinker who simultaneously inhabits and defies the interpretive categories of his day.

Mark 7:5-13/Matt. 15:1-9: For Jesus, Explicit Mandates Trump Oral Permissions

If Matthew 22:23-33 is an example of Jesus’s “super-textualism,” then Mark 7:5-13 (with parallel in Matt. 15:1-9) showcases his critique of oral tradition.

The legal background to Mark 7:5-13 is the making of vows, specifically in regard to Temple-gifts, whereby one could pledge some portion of his property for the support of the Temple and the Temple would later receive the property or the monetary equivalent.

These were voluntary gifts, over and above what a person was obligated to bring to or offer in the Temple. As such, they were often expressions of heartfelt worship, devotion, and gratitude toward God. For Christians, the modern-day parallel would be financial contributions to your church or, more precisely, a charitable bequest specifying that, upon your death, your property is to be sold and the proceeds donated to your church.

In principle, vowed gifts were a good and noble thing. The Bible praises Hannah for dedicating her son Samuel to God’s service (1 Sam. 1-2). Jesus praises financial generosity toward the Temple (Mark 12:41-44).

But the Torah is not flippant about vows and oaths. It treats them with utmost seriousness, particularly if a person invokes God’s name (or a euphemistic equivalent) in the making of them (see Exod. 20:7). Numbers 30 supplies the basic rule:

There are basically no exceptions to this rule.1 In Deuteronomy 23:21-23, Moses reiterates: “If you make a vow to the LORD your God, you shall not delay fulfilling it, for the LORD your God will surely require it of you, and you will be guilty of sin.” But Moses also points out that vows are voluntary—you don’t have to make them, and “if you refrain from vowing, you will not be guilty of sin.” Both the wisdom tradition (Eccl. 5:1-7) and Jesus himself (Matt. 5:33-37) pick up this point, urging that because the Law is so strict about vows and oaths, it’s better not to make them at all.

Leviticus 27 is a limited qualification to the general rule, specifying how a Temple-gift is to be valued. If a person later decides to keep the property he has voluntarily pledged, it’s an expensive choice: he pays the equivalent value plus a 20% surcharge.

As against the Law’s stringency, the Pharisees had developed a set of oral traditions that treated vows more leniently. Among other things, they allowed a person to be released from a vow entirely—essentially voiding it—if his circumstances had materially changed in unforeseen ways. (See t. Nedarim 9.)

Such ex post leniency had ex ante effects. If people can get out of their vows too easily on the back end, they’re ready to make vows too easily on the front end. This cheapens the whole enterprise. Vows become less serious. People will invoke the divine name too flippantly. And they won’t be able to rely upon one other to keep promises, thus diminishing social trust.

This is Jesus’s basic critique in Mark 7:5-13, accusing the Pharisees of “rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition” (v.9). Jesus takes the written Law (“the commandment of God”) seriously, which means he takes vowmaking seriously. The Pharisees, by contrast, are too lenient, too liberal.

Jesus singles out one scenario for particular criticism. (Here I’m going to shift to the parallel rendering in Matthew.)

Note that Jesus is not criticizing the Pharisees for refusing to let the son out of his vow. Rather, Jesus objects to the fact that the son is allowed to make this kind of vow in the first place. His target is the Pharisaical rule that permits a son to make such a parent-dishonoring vow at all. Laxity about vowmaking encourages people to make vows they can’t keep or, worse, vows that violate other biblical precepts.

The key to understanding this is Leviticus 27, the Torah’s most explicit legislation on Temple-gifts. While the first half of the chapter concerns valuation of voluntary gifts, the second half spells out categories of invalid gifts—property that can’t be made the subject of a vow, including firstborn animals and tithes. A person is prohibited from pledging these because the Law already consecrates them. They already “belong to the Lord,” and one cannot voluntarily pledge what the Law has already set aside for a specific purpose. (Cf. t. Nedarim 2.4.)

It would be like bequeathing your property to your church and stating in your will that “whatever is owed to the bank on my mortgage and to the IRS in taxes is hereby given to my church.” You can’t do that—that pledge would be what lawyers call void ab initio (void “from the start”). What you owe to the bank and IRS are legal obligations that preexist and therefore supersede any later voluntary pledge.

Similar logic is at play in Mark 7/Matthew 15. Jesus views the command to honor father and mother as entailing a financial obligation that preexists and supersedes a later voluntary vow—on par with the gift prohibitions in Leviticus 27. The logic is straightforward:

1. Where the Law explicitly mandates that property be set aside for a specific purpose, that property cannot be voluntarily vowed for a different purpose.

2. The commandment to financially care for one’s parents is an explicit mandatory set-aside. The Law essentially “predesignates” a portion of one’s property for parental care.

3. Therefore, such property cannot be vowed to the Temple.

Any attempted vow to this effect is invalid. The vower’s words are void ab initio because they’re contrary to the Law’s express commandment to honor father and mother.

But the Pharisees’ permissive rule turned this logic on its head. They upheld a vow as against an express commandment. So where the vower’s words should have been void, the Pharisaical rule rendered God’s word void. Hence Jesus’s final argumentative flourish, preserved in both Mark and Matthew: “thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down” (Mark 7:13, emphasis added), and “for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God” (Matt. 15:6).

Understood correctly, the problem Jesus is attacking is not strictness in regard to vow annulment. It’s leniency in regard to vowmaking. Jesus views the Law’s express commandments with utmost seriousness—both the commandment to keep vows and the commandment to honor and care for parents. The oral tradition’s leniency in regard to the first led to transgression in regard to the second. As between oral tradition and written Law, the latter trumps.

It’s important to understand this. Commentary after commentary on this discourse suggests that Jesus is repudiating some aspect of “law” in order to prioritize law’s “purpose” or “spirit.” But Jesus’s obvious concern is ensuring that the Law’s explicit commands are fulfilled. Honoring one’s parents is not some unexpressed “spirit” “behind” the Law—it is the Law. By contrast, it is the Pharisees who were flexible purposivists, trying to accommodate the Law’s demands to the complexity of life, relying upon oral traditions to water down straightforward requirements and, in the process, courting transgression.

Jesus demands strict adherence to the Law’s plain text, not because he’s aloof to the Law’s purpose but because the only sure guide to that purpose is the text itself. The Pharisees’ reliance on unwritten rules to relax the Law’s requirements was, for Jesus, misguided.

Matthew 19:3-9: The Law’s Expressed Purposes Constrain and Guide Interpretation

Sometimes a word or phrase in a law is susceptible of more than one meaning, and there are reasonable arguments on both sides for reading it different ways. What do you do with divergent interpretations? After all, to obey (“fulfill”) a law, one must know what it means.

Over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court has confronted cases like this. A recent entertaining example is United States v. Yates, where the defendant John Yates, a commercial fisherman, illegally harvested undersized fish but tossed them back into the sea to prevent federal officials from confirming the illegal catch. He was later convicted under a federal statute that made it a crime to knowingly destroy or conceal “any record, document, or tangible object” with intent to impede a federal investigation. The question in the case was whether a fish was a “tangible object” within the meaning of this law.

A majority of the Court’s Justices said no. The law in question was part of broader federal legislation aimed at curbing financial fraud after the Enron accounting scandal, and Congress’s aim was to prevent document-shredding to hide evidence of wrongdoing. Thus, “tangible object” was best read not as any physical object in the world but as any tangible object used to record or preserve information—which a fish is not.

But three Justices on the Court disagreed, observing that the plain meaning of “tangible object” means physical objects of every kind, fish included. And giving that phrase a broad construction comports with Congress’s purpose, which was to punish those who destroy physical evidence to thwart federal investigations. “A fisherman, like John Yates, who dumps undersized fish to avoid a fine is no less blameworthy than one who shreds his vessel’s catch log for the same reason.”

In Jesus’s day, a similar kind of debate was taking place—not over too-small fish, but over the permissible grounds for divorce. The debate centered on a particular phrase in Deuteronomy 24:1, ervat davar, variously translated as an “unseemly thing” or the “indecency of a thing.” The ambiguity of the phrase led to an intra-Pharisaical debate between the strict constructionists in the House of Shammai and the more lenient House of Hillel.

The relevant background is the Torah’s legislation on marriage and divorce. About marriage, the Torah has more to say. It prohibits sexual relations outside of marriage, including adultery (Ex. 20:14; Deut 5:18); exempts newlywed husbands from military service for a year (Deut. 24:5); requires husbands to care for wives (Ex. 21:10-11); urges couples to have children (Gen. 1:28: “be fruitful and multiply”); enjoins children to honor parents, thus promoting harmony and stability across generations (Deut. 5:16); and more.

On divorce, the Torah has less to say. In various places it assumes the reality of divorce (Lev. 21:7, 14; Lev. 22:13; Num. 30:9) and in certain situations prohibits divorce (Deut. 22:19). As to permissible divorce, the only thing that comes close to legislation is Deut. 24:1, which suggests that a husband may divorce his wife if “he has found some indecency in her,” in which case he must give her a certificate of divorce. That phrase “some indecency” in the ESV (“something obnoxious” in the JPS) is ervat davar.

Second Temple interpreters diverged over what this term meant.

Shammai’s disciples urged a narrow reading of ervat davar. Hillel’s disciples urged a reading so broad as to encompass a woman’s bad cooking. The literal meaning of the phrase conceivably accommodates both readings.

These are the basic terms of the debate when the Pharisees put the question to Jesus in Matthew 19:3: “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” Their question, in essence, is how Jesus interprets Deuteronomy 24:1 and whether he thinks the Hillel school is right. Given that framing, the questioners were probably Shammai’s disciples tossing Jesus a softball.

Jesus answers that “whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery” (Matt. 19:9, emphasis added). He thus construes Deuteronomy 24:1 narrowly, permitting husband-initiated divorce only where the wife has been sexually unfaithful. That is, on the question as put to him, Jesus sides with the strict constructionist Shammaites over the lenient Hillelites.

I’m less interested here in the millennia-old Christian debates spawned by Matthew 19:3-9,2 and more interested in Jesus’s interpretive method and why he adopts the stricter view. He explains his reasoning with the phrase “from the beginning.”

Again, Jesus shows a keen understanding of the written Law, quoting here from Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 on male-female sexual difference and the origin of marriage itself. These, like Deuteronomy 24:1, are Torah, but they are more foundational and constitutive, expressing God’s creational intent for marriage “from the beginning.” That original intent places limits on how the Law’s other rules about marriage and divorce are to be construed.

In the original biblical understanding, marriage is bodily covenantal union rooted in sexual difference. It follows that any post-marital act that destroys the sexual union necessarily destroys the marriage, justifying divorce. But marriage is not a mere transactional union rooted in, for example, culinary differences. Burning the broccoli or oversalting the fish has nothing to do with marriage qua marriage—so it is not a valid ground for divorce.

Thus, whatever “some indecency” in Deuteronomy 24:1 might mean in the abstract, in the context of biblical marriage, its meaning is necessarily constrained. That is why Jesus, siding with his Shammaite questioners, reads that phrase narrowly.

This is a classic interpretive move. Viewed in isolation, the meaning of a legal word or phrase may be fuzzy and uncertain. But zoom out a bit, consider what the law or its author is trying to accomplish, and the meaning comes into better focus. The Supreme Court majority pursued the same logic in Yates. In the abstract, a “tangible object” encompasses almost anything. But the purpose of the law in question—combating financial fraud—warranted a more limited construction, which didn’t include fish.

“Now, hold on,” you might be thinking. “If Jesus insists that the Law’s purpose constrains its meaning, doesn’t that make him a purposivist?” Answer: no.

Matthew 19:3-9 is yet another example of Jesus as the attentive textualist. Textualism does not mean the interpreter is indifferent to or ignorant of purpose. It simply means that one looks to text first and foremost, if not exclusively, to convey that purpose, and if a law is to be understood, its meaning, scope, and limits must be rooted in the text itself, not in some free-floating, unexpressed intent or “spirit” of the law.

In all three of these legal discourses, just as important as what Jesus does do is what he doesn’t do. He doesn’t, in any of these passages, say that the Law—the written Law of Moses, as contained in Genesis through Deuteronomy—is obsolete, abolished, or to be ignored.

To the contrary, here and elsewhere Jesus urgently insists on both attention to the Law’s contents and adherence to its commands.

• In Matthew 22:23-33, Jesus appeals not to authority (“I’m the Messiah and I say so”), not to private revelation (“A voice from Heaven told me”), and not even to tradition (“This was passed down to me”). He critiques the Sadducean view on resurrection by appealing directly to the text of Scripture itself—precisely the sort of legal apologetic the Sadducees understood.

• In Mark 7:5-13 and Matthew 15:1-9, it is the Pharisees who rely on unwritten rules to relax legal requirements, and it is Jesus who insists on strict fidelity to written commands. Because the Law is serious both about vows and about caring for parents, Jesus urges an interpretive method—text-centrism, tradition-skepticism—that honors both sets of requirements.

• Matthew 19:3-9 is a reminder that Jesus’s textualist method doesn’t preclude a focus on the Law’s purpose. Rather, it insists that the Law’s purpose is to be found in its text—what it means must be anchored in what it says. This necessarily constrains legal interpretation, orienting it toward its life-giving, divinely ordained moral telos. To keep the Law is to keep all of it, Deuteronomy and Genesis, and everything in between.

But What About…?

Matthew 22:23-33, Mark 7:5-13, and Mathew 19:3-9 are, of course, not the only legal discourses in the Gospels. There are others that, seemingly, lay a stronger claim to Jesus as a purposivist—an interpreter who overlooks or obliterates the Law’s written requirements in favor of a higher moral purpose.

The Sabbath controversies come immediately to mind. I’ll tackle these in the next essay and explain why they don’t undermine my argument that Jesus is a committed textualist and even a super-textualist.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a local park superintendent. It’s your responsibility to ensure park rules are followed, and you very much want to fulfill this responsibility. Of course, you also know that park rules have a deeper purpose: they’re designed to keep the park beautiful, to ensure parkgoers feel welcome and safe and can relax and recreate.

One of the rules you’re charged with enforcing is this one, emblazoned on a park sign: NO VEHICLES IN THE PARK. Five simple words. It seems straightforward, right? But in concrete situations, questions multiply quickly.

• Does the rule forbid bicycles? Skateboards?

• What about wheelchairs and baby strollers?

• Remote-controlled toy cars? Drones?

• Suppose there’s a medical emergency and an ambulance needs to access the park.

• A dad in a minivan wants to drop off a bunch of kids and soccer equipment—can he enter temporarily so the kids don’t have to schlep their gear?

• City officials want to mount a decommissioned tank on a park pedestal as war memorial—is this allowed?

Every one of these situations involves a “vehicle” of some sort “in the park,” which is literally forbidden by the rule. And yet, in view of the rule’s purpose—a welcoming and safe park environment—some of these situations not only seem fine but actually further the rule’s purpose. Wheelchairs and strollers ensure old and young alike can enjoy the park with ease. Bicycles are quiet and promote recreation and exercise. The mounted tank is immobile and provides a focal point for gatherings and civic pride. The ambulance of course should be allowed—it’s necessary for safety, even if the siren and flashing lights temporarily diminish the quiet environment.

Is it possible to accommodate these situations while staying faithful to the rule?

As the superintendent, you didn’t make the rule. You only interpret and enforce it. So you have two basic options. You can be a textualist or you can be a purposivist.

The textualist approach is to interpret and enforce the rule according to its terms—its text.

• The rule says no vehicles, and it means no vehicles. It’s dangerous to give people (especially government officials) too much interpretive discretion. If they can ignore the plain text in favor of the rule’s unexpressed “intent” or “purpose,” there’s no limit to the creative liberties they’ll take. They’ll craft exceptions that swallow the rule. They’ll adopt interpretations that further their own preferences and favor certain interest groups. If you as the superintendent are a cyclist, you’ll interpret the rule to permit bicycles but prohibit skateboards. This is an arbitrary distinction at war with the rule’s text, and it will only breed resentment—the very opposite of the community harmony the rule aims to promote. If the law doesn’t govern everyone equally, people will lose respect for it, and they’ll see lawmaking and law enforcement as exercises of power rather than principle.

• Still, under a textualist approach, the tank memorial is okay because once immobilized on a pedestal, the tank isn’t a “vehicle” anymore. And the ambulance should be allowed—not because it’s not a “vehicle” (it clearly is), but because the need to preserve life overrides the no-vehicles rule.

The purposivist approach recognizes that all rules are purposive.

• Law is tied to life, and you can’t interpret a rule without understanding the human activities the rule is designed to foster or restrict. Interpretation requires understanding the intent of the lawmaker and the purpose of law so these can be faithfully carried out. Sometimes this will mean the rule’s literal text must yield to its deeper purpose. After all, language is limited—it can’t possibly account for every shade of meaning or every possible application. But this doesn’t mean interpretation is untethered and free-wheeling. Rather, the lawmaker is presumed to be reasonable and to have intended reasonable results, and the task of the interpreter is case-by-case discernment to bring those results to fruition, avoiding absurdity and injustice.

• We can distinguish between different kinds of vehicles, for example, by their recreational benefits and safety risks: so maybe bicycles are okay, but drones are not. Skateboards should be confined to a particular area. The tank memorial presents no safety risks at all. Ambulances are allowed because they promote safety. And so forth. Elaborating these sub-rules may start to look like you’re making rather than interpreting law, but that’s unavoidable and, indeed, desirable.

Sometimes these different interpretive approaches get mapped onto another distinction—that between strictness and leniency. On this mapping, textualism is considered strict, rigid, and inhumane, while purposivism is considered lenient, flexible, and compassionate.

But this isn’t necessarily so. A textualist ban on bicycles in the park might seem harsh toward cyclists. But if pedestrians enjoy the park as a vehicle-free zone, allowing fast-moving bicycles in the park under a purposive approach necessarily increases the risk of harmful collisions. Sometimes, strictness protects and leniency harms. In some situations, strict adherence to the legal text is more compassionate and humane.

So what was Jesus—a textualist or a purposivist?

For that question to make sense, we have to do some retrofitting. Textualism and purposivism are modern legal categories, with particular resonance in the United States in light of our written Constitution and strong traditions of separation of powers and judicial review. We can’t just backward-project our contemporary questions onto ancient Scripture.

But the text-purpose divide shows up in other cultures with written legal codes, and it has close analogues in Second Temple Jewish debates.

First, there was a contrast between written Law and oral tradition.

The Sadducees—the aristocratic Temple sect—refused to go beyond the written Torah, rejecting anything not written and tending toward a literal interpretation of the text. They denied the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the dead, and even angelic beings. As Acts 23:9 informs us, “[T]he Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit, but the Pharisees acknowledge them all.” It’s fair to say the Sadducees were committed textualists.

The Pharisees—the popular holiness sect—“acknowledge[d] them all” because they recognized the authority of both text and oral tradition. That oral tradition, they claimed, originated with Moses and was passed down to successive generations: “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly” (Pirkei Avot 1:1.) This oral Torah, alongside the written one, was normative for Jewish life.

The Pharisees affirmed the resurrection of the dead because that doctrine, while not explicit in the Torah, was an oral tradition transmitted from Moses and mediated through the Prophets. Thus do we find Paul (a self-identified Pharisee) claiming in Acts 24:14-15, “I worship the God of our fathers, believing everything laid down by the Law and written in the Prophets, having a hope in God, which these men themselves accept, that there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust.”

The second contemporary analogue was a contrast between strictness and leniency.

This isn’t the same as the text vs. tradition dichotomy. The Sadducees had lenient textual readings; the Pharisees had strict traditional readings; and among the Pharisees themselves, different schools tended toward either strictness or leniency. In the Second Temple period, the most famous divide was that between the stricter House of Shammai and the more flexible House of Hillel. These two rabbinic sages, older contemporaries of Jesus, are the subject of a famous tale:

Shammai’s view is that you can’t appreciate the Law, much less fulfill its requirements, unless you understand it in all of its complex detail through a long process of study. Trying to reduce the Law to a soundbite is foolish, and for that, Shammai nearly beats the man with a rod!

For Hillel, by contrast, all that complexity has a discernible moral purpose or telos—“neighborliness.” The Law takes time to learn, but Hillel is willing to be patient: offer the big picture first, fill in the details later. He converts the man, then bids him study.

Text vs. tradition, strictness vs. leniency. It’s within this Second Temple matrix that we need to understand Jesus’s interpretive approach.

Jesus was not a purposivist.

If you put the question to Christians—laity, pastors, scholars, etc.—most will say Jesus was a purposivist, not a textualist. He was a compassionate, “spirit of the Law” guy. He went “beyond” or “behind” the Law to effectuate its purpose. He set the letter of the Law aside or ignored it for the sake of a “higher” ethic of love or grace. He cared more about the big picture, less about details—people over rules, relationships over “religion,” etc.

This view is wrong for several reasons.

First, it wrongly presumes that the Law was not loving or graceful, that love and grace must be established in contrast to or over against the Law.

But that’s a false dichotomy. As my last essays have laid out, the grace of God inheres in the Sinai covenant, and genuine heartfelt love of God and neighbor is explicitly commanded. These aren’t invisible or latent purposes “behind” the Law—they are the Law. Jews then and now understood grace and love in light of the Law, not in spite of it. The Sermon on the Mount shows that Jesus did, too.

Second, this view conflates purposivism with harm-reduction and compassion.

But there’s no necessary relationship between these. Jesus was indeed compassionate, but that doesn’t mean he was a purposivist. Often his compassion led him toward strictness. That brings us to the third point.

Casting Jesus as a purposivist is wrong, above all, because it ignores the evidence.

The Gospels portray Jesus as hyper-focused on the text of Scripture and the explicit requirements of the Torah. His most consistent critique of the Pharisees is not that they’re too strict, but that they’re too lenient because they privilege oral traditions over written requirements and allow implied rules to trump explicit ones. Jesus is closer to a modern-day textualist than most Christians appreciate—and in ways that modern readers should find jarring.

In the next essay, I’ll fill out this last point, with a focus on three legal discourses in the Gospels:

• Matthew 22:23-33: A debate with the Sadducees over resurrection, in which Jesus creatively deploys a Sadducean interpretive method—hyper-literal textualism—to affirm a theological tenet of the Pharisees.

• Mark 7:5-13: A debate with the Pharisees over the relationship between written Law and oral tradition, in which Jesus takes the view that explicit rules trump implied ones.

• Matthew 19:3-9: A debate with the Pharisees over the permissible grounds for divorce, where Jesus uses what we might call an “originalist” interpretive method to resolve an intertextual conflict.

The idea is that only outward acts are subject to legal restriction. Inward thoughts are not. A person may think, believe, desire, and imagine what he pleases, and the law cannot touch him.

But this is a gross overstatement. Legal consequences often flow from a person’s state of mind. Many crimes and civil torts require proof of a person’s intent. In employment discrimination cases, an employer’s motive is relevant to liability. And in other contexts, legal responsibility depends upon a person’s knowledge of something (a dangerous condition on one’s property, for example). Each of these concepts—intent, motive, knowledge—describes an inward state of mind to which the law attaches consequences. This is not usually regarded as controversial.

There are, however, controversial scenarios. Consider the “thoughtcrime” punishable in George Orwell’s fictional 1984, or the recent nonfictional cases of British individuals prosecuted for silent prayer, or American hate crime laws that enhance punishment when the behavior is motivated by racial animus.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus expounds upon a distinction between outward acts and inward thoughts, and uses it to advance his moral agenda:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, “You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, “You fool!” will be liable to the hell of fire….

You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matt. 5:21-22, 27-28)

Many read Jesus’s words here as critical of the Law. They see him drawing a distinction between the Law as such and his own teaching: “The Law says X but I say Y.” On this reading, the Law is limited, malformed, and ineffective. Because it regulates only external actions like murder and adultery, it makes people think that only external actions matter. But the thoughts and intents of the heart matter, too. So Jesus offers something new and better. By focusing on the heart, on a person’s inward thoughts—something the Law didn’t or couldn’t do—Jesus institutes a more complete and more virtuous ethical system.

So the argument goes anyway. And the supposed dichotomy between the old Law and Jesus’s new ethic tends to get mapped onto other theological distinctions: old vs. new covenant, works vs. grace, letter vs. spirit, and even Judaism vs. Christianity writ large. In extreme forms, it diminishes the importance of ethical conduct altogether. “It doesn’t matter much what a person does or doesn’t do, so long as they have the right heart.” Or to repurpose a common refrain: “It’s the thought that counts.”

But this dichotomy is a false one, and it misses a crucial point Jesus is making, one that undergirds his legal theory. (For prior essays exploring Jesus’s Legal Theory, see this “Introduction” and this essay on “7 Misconceptions About the Law.”)

The Law was just as concerned with inner thoughts as it was with outward actions. This is everywhere in the Torah.

• The Shema (the “greatest commandment,” by Jesus’s reckoning) enjoins Israel to love God with their whole heart, soul, and might (Deut. 6:5). The next verse reiterates: “[T}hese words that I command you today shall be on your heart.” The word “heart” here—Hebrew levav—has a semantic range similar to English, referring to the inner man, the will, the seat of appetites and emotions. (See also Deut. 10:12-16, 11:13, 30:6.)

• The Ten Commandments also operate in both dimensions, outward and inward. Murder and adultery are prohibited. But so too is coveting—an explicit regulation of desire. “[Y]ou shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. And you shall not desire your neighbor’s house…” (Deut. 5:21).

• Leviticus 19:17 instructs, “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him.” The next verse prohibits “bear[ing] a grudge” and famously ends with the second greatest commandment: “[Y]ou shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The Law does not limit its injunctions to external conduct. It also regulates internal dispositions. It commands heartfelt love of God and neighbor, and it prohibits hateful thoughts and lustful desires. The Law operates upon the whole person—heart, soul, body—envisioning a people who not only conduct themselves outwardly but also form themselves inwardly in a God-given way of life.

So when Jesus says, “Don’t just not murder—also don’t be angry. And don’t just avoid adultery—also avoid lust,” in one sense, he’s simply reminding his listeners of what the Law already says. But I think there are several other things going on here.

First, Jesus is doing constructive interpretive work. When construing a legal text, especially a large and complex one, interpreters strive to read it as a harmonious whole so that its various provisions are rendered compatible, not contradictory, with no provision ignored. Jesus brings together different strands within the Law—conduct-oriented rules and thought-oriented rules—and interprets them in light of each other. He reads the prohibition on murder in light of the prohibitions on hate and grudge-bearing. He reads the prohibition on adultery in light of the prohibition on wrongful desire. Or to put it more succinctly, he reads the Sixth and Seventh Commandments in light of the Tenth. These are not, to Jesus’s mind, separate commands but constituent parts of a harmonious whole.

Second, in relating these commands to one another, Jesus allows the inward-focused commands to function as prophylactics—interior cognitive guardians that protect against exterior ethical transgressions. Take care of what’s inside first, Jesus is saying, and the outside will follow. The converse is also true: sin that’s inside will eventually flow out. There’s an echo here of Matthew 23:25-26: “First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean.” We’ll return to this connection in a later essay.

Perhaps those in Jesus’s day were posing the same kinds of questions people ask today: “Why should the Law care about my internal thoughts, as long as I’m not acting on them? Aren’t my thoughts my own? They can’t hurt anyone. They don’t have social consequences.”

Return to American law for a moment. Consider the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1969 decision in Stanley v. Georgia. Robert Eli Stanley was suspected of being a bookie. In executing a lawful search warrant at his home, officers discovered several reels of pornographic film. Stanley was convicted under a Georgia obscenity law, which made it a crime to possess obscene materials. But the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction, holding that the First Amendment’s protection for free speech prohibits a state from criminalizing the “mere private possession” of such materials. The Court reasoned that “the moral content of a person’s thoughts” is beyond the purview of government regulation because “[o]ur whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.” Georgia countered that this wasn’t merely a “private” matter because what a man views and thinks affects his behavior. But the Supreme Court reasoned that if the state was concerned about behavior, it could regulate behavior; it shouldn’t try to regulate thought.

Both the Torah and Jesus reject the anti-human logic of Stanley v. Georgia. Jesus teaches that the Law is addressed to the whole person. It does not limit its focus to conduct and ignore the intentions of the heart. It places demands upon both because they are interrelated. God doesn’t just want you to act virtuously and avoid sin. He wants you to become the kind of person that loves virtue and hates sin, the kind of person that does the right thing for right reasons.

Third and finally—the most crucial point—Jesus in Matthew 5 is not criticizing the Law. He’s criticizing the failure to keep the Law. The problem is not the Law. The problem is laxity in regard to the Law’s demands. “You may have heard that the Law cares only about your outward actions. But I’m here to remind you that it cares about your heart, too.” Jesus wants his listeners to keep the Law fully, not just partially, because only fulsome lawkeeping will bring about the moral transformation the Law envisions—a virtuous people doing virtuous things according to God’s instruction.

This, in my view, is Jesus’s legal theory: Morally Fulsome Lawkeeping (MFL). It is on full display in Matthew 5, and I believe it provides the interpretive key to the rest of Jesus’s teaching, in Matthew’s Gospel and otherwise. Indeed, the placement in the New Testament canon matters. The Sermon on the Mount is our first canonical encounter with Jesus’s legal discourse,1 and ought to serve as a lens through which the rest of Jesus’s teaching is viewed.

So wherever we encounter legal debate or discourse in the Gospels, we should strive to read it in light of MFL framework that Jesus propounds in Matthew 5. This entails the following three principles, at a minimum:

• Lawkeeping: Jesus does not replace or displace or seek to do away with the Mosaic Law. He seeks to uphold it, and he teaches his followers to uphold it.

• Fulsome: Jesus teaches that all the Law must be kept. As Matthew 5 begins to elucidate, every commandment matters—large and small, exterior and interior, ethical and ritual. The Law is to be interpreted holistically and harmoniously; it is addressed to the whole person, and the whole community; and no part of it is to be ignored. To fulfill the Law does not mean to bring it to an end. It means to fill it up to the fullest, to keep it in the most fulsome way.

• Morally: The Law has a telos, a purpose, an end: individual moral formation and communal-social transformation. The Law envisions a holy and virtuous people following a holy and virtuous way of life that grows out of a covenantal relationship with a holy and perfect God. Every provision of the Law is oriented toward its moral telos. For Jesus, lawkeeping isn’t an end in itself. It is indelibly connected to the Law’s larger moral-formational agenda.

In future essays, I’ll continue to explore how Morally Fulsome Lawkeeping characterizes Jesus’s thought and helps us understand his teaching, debates, and legal discourse.

Centuries of Christian theological tradition have characterized and caricatured the Torah, and Jewish law more broadly, in ways that would have been foreign or unintelligible to Jews of the Second Temple period. Jesus himself operated within that world, not outside it. So if we’re going to understand his legal critique, we first need to correct some stubborn errors about what the Law was and how it functioned.

Herein, then, seven misconceptions about the Law. For these, I’m heavily indebted to Episode 1 of the Jesus and Jewish Law podcast hosted by Drs. Paul Sloan and Logan Williams. I’ve added my own glosses.

Seven Misconceptions About the Law:

1. “Obeying the Law is about earning salvation.”

2. “The Law demands perfection and is an impossible burden.”

3. “Being impure means you are evil or sinful.”

4. “The Law excludes Gentiles.”

5. “The Law uniformly obligates everybody everywhere all the time.”

6. “The Law governs only external actions, not internal dispositions.”

7. “In sacrifice, God punishes an animal instead of you for your sin.”

Of these seven, I discuss the first five below. The final two deserve more extended discussion and are reserved for future essays.

Misconception 1: Obeying the Law is about earning salvation.

This misconception is fundamental and, in some sense, props up the others. The idea is that Jews followed a “religion of works” and adhered to the Law as a way to “earn” salvation, but Jesus established a “religion [or better, a relationship] of grace” in which salvation is a free, unearned gift that renders both the Law and lawkeeping irrelevant.

This misconception errs in at least two ways. First, Jesus himself was deeply concerned with individual ethical behavior, linking it directly to one’s fate both in the present age (Matt. 19:16-22) and in the age to come (Matt. 25:31-46).

Second, more basically, this misconception gets the covenantal logic backwards. In the biblical narrative, God does not give Israel the Law and then rescue them as a reward for keeping it. The sequence runs the other way: God rescues Israel first, and then gives them the Law. Exodus precedes Sinai. Redemption precedes obligation.

The sequence was the same with Abraham. God first chooses Abraham—and not for any apparent merit; it was God’s sovereign choice—then establishes a covenant with him, including the blessing of offspring and the obligation of circumcision.

Jews of the Second Temple period understood this well. They had a concept of divine grace at least as robust as that expounded by later Christians. E.P. Sanders puts it this way in his landmark work, Paul and Palestinian Judaism:

[G]race and works were not considered alternative roads to salvation. Salvation … is always by the grace of God, embodied in the covenant. The terms of the covenant, however, require obedience.1

So when Paul says in Eph. 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works,” and then in the very next verse says, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works” (2:10, emphasis added), he’s working with the biblical grain, not against it. God first gracefully extends His salvation, and his people then respond with faith-filled obedience.

Understanding the covenantal sequence and its biblical throughline is key because it accurately frames the Law’s purpose. The Law is not a ladder Israel climbs toward a God who is waiting at the top to gatekeep entry. Rather, it’s the framework for God’s ongoing relationship with a people he has already claimed as his own. God’s aim is to dwell with his people. The Law is the structure that makes that cohabitation possible. Lawkeeping responds to and maintains the covenant relationship. It does not initiate or earn it.

Misconception 2: The Law demands perfection and is an impossible burden.

This error has a more identifiable pedigree. It derives from a particular reading of certain passages in Paul’s letters: God gives the Law to articulate a perfect moral standard, knowing full well that no one can meet it, so that human beings will recognize their own insufficiency and turn to “grace.”

On this reading, the Law is a kind of cosmic setup—a standard deliberately pitched beyond reach. God issues commands he knows cannot be obeyed so as to engineer a crisis of conscience. In this portrayal, God plays Lucy to humanity’s Charlie Brown, setting us up for the placekick only to yank the ball away at the last second.

The misconception has crept into legal scholarship. The late Harvard scholar William Stuntz used it to argue for a position he called legal agnosticism. Jesus defined sin “so radically,” Stuntz maintained, that he made lawkeeping impossible. The lesson Stuntz drew was that society ought not use law to restrain “morally contested behaviors.” As I laid out in a prior essay, this gets both the Law and Jesus’s teaching all wrong.

The Torah is a gift to Israel, not a crushing and unattainable demand. It is a source of life, an object of love, and a font of wisdom (Psalms 1, 119). It contains rules, yes—but it also contains remedies. It has built-in structures for dealing with transgression: sin offerings, restitution, prescribed processes for restoration. The Law anticipates failure and provides for it. It does not demand sinless perfection. As we’ll see, Jesus’s teaching assumed as much (e.g., Matt. 5:23-24, Luke 19:8-9).

But the Law also had limits. It wasn’t designed to right every wrong or remedy every sin. Israelites still needed the forgiveness of God himself and of one another—just as we do. Law and grace were never oppositional forces. Each was a load-bearing pillar in the covenantal relationship.

Misconception 3: Being impure means you are evil or sinful.

This misconception has done particular damage to how people read the Gospels. The implicit contrast often drawn goes something like this: Jewish law is exclusionary and harsh, treating impurity as a moral failing and shunning those who contract it. Jesus, by contrast, is loving and inclusive, willing to touch those with skin conditions and associate with the unclean.

But the Law does not treat impurity as sin. Impurity is (largely) a ritual category, not a moral one. And it was a normal part of everyday life. Most ancient Israelites were in a state of impurity most of the time. Childbirth, genital discharges, skin conditions, contact with the dead—these generated impurity, and they were ordinary human experiences, not occasions for moral condemnation. Indeed, some of the conditions that generate ritual impurity, like having children and burying the dead, are positively commanded in the Law.

Contracting impurity is never a punishment or a sign of divine disfavor. What the Law establishes are procedures for managing and resolving impurity, not judgments against those who experience it.

This is key to understanding the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus. When he heals people with skin conditions, is touched by a hemorrhaging woman, and raises a girl from the dead, he is not transgressing some moral code that brands people as “evil.” Rather, he’s a peripatetic purification agent—a mobile, contagious source of life extinguishing the forces of death represented by ritual impurity.2

Framing the Law as an exclusionary system and Jesus as the inclusive rebel maps nicely onto modern sensibilities, but it is neither how the Law functions nor what Jesus was doing. I’ll have more to say about this in future essays. And I hope to persuade you that Jesus didn’t reject or replace the Law’s ritual purity system. Rather, taking a page from the prophetic tradition, he used it as a pedagogical springboard for his insistence on moral purity.

Misconception 4: The law excludes Gentiles.

The Law clearly distinguishes between Israelites and non-Israelites. Certain commandments apply to Jews that do not apply to Gentiles. But distinction is not the same as exclusion, nor does distinction imply superiority (or inferiority).

The Torah extends meaningful protections and provisions to Gentiles living among Israel. Non-Israelites were entitled to a fair trial (Lev. 24:22; Deut. 1:16), could take refuge in the designated cities of refuge (Num. 35:15), were eligible to participate in the poor tithe (Deut. 14:28-29, 26:12-13), could join in the Feasts of Weeks (Shavuot or Pentecost) and Booths (Sukkot) (Deut. 16:11, 14), and could enjoy the benefits of the sacrificial system (Num. 15:14-16, 15:29). The Law also imposed obligations upon Gentiles living among Israel—requirements designed to accommodate their manner of living to the unique obligations of Israel (e.g., Lev. 17:10-16).

The Law, in other words, envisions a community that includes Gentiles, even as it differentiates their obligations from those of native Israelites.

This distinction becomes especially important in the New Testament, when Gentiles begin joining the Jesus movement in significant numbers. The question of how Gentile inclusion works is not settled by collapsing all distinctions, as if becoming part of the covenant community means everyone now has identical obligations. The more coherent framework, and the one that seems to underlie much of the New Testament’s own reasoning, is that Gentiles join the covenant as Gentiles. Jews continue to bear the obligations that the Law assigns to Jews; Gentiles bear the obligations the Law assigns to Gentiles. Acts 15 and 21 are especially important in helping us understand this.

Again, as with Law and grace, differentiation and inclusion are not oppositional forces but mutually reinforcing ways of expressing God’s love for his people.

Misconception 5: The Law uniformly obligates everybody everywhere all the time.

Related to the previous error but distinct from it, this misconception treats the Torah as a kind of universal ethical code, binding on all people at all times in all places in the same way. But the Law doesn’t work this way. It differentiates obligations by (1) ethnicity, (2) role, (3) place and time, and in other ways besides.

• Ethnicity: Some of the Jew/Gentile distinctions are described above. Consider another: Leviticus 11:2 specifies that the dietary laws apply “to you”—meaning, to Israel. Deuteronomy 14:21 explicitly allows foreigners to eat an animal that has died naturally, though this is prohibited to Israelites.

• Role: The rules governing priests are not the rules governing ordinary Israelites. A lay Israelite who comes into contact with a corpse — such as to bury the dead — contracts impurity (and can, of course, alleviate it). A priest is subject to stricter regulations: no corpse contact except for close family members. For the High Priest, the rule is stricter still: no corpse contact whatsoever, even for a family member. (See Num. 19; Lev. 21.)

• Place and time: Some legal prescriptions apply only when Israel “comes into the land.” The sabbatical year (letting the land rest every seventh year) and the Year of Jubilee (sabbatical plus debt remission every fiftieth year) are regulations that apply only to the land of Israel and, of course, are time-specific. (See Lev. 25.) The seven-day Sabbath cycle is also time-specific—certain rules apply during Shabbat but not the rest of the week—and Sabbath controversies in the Gospels are key to understanding Jesus’s views on the Law. More on this later.

The point for now is that the Law isn’t monolithic. It’s careful and intentional about distinctions, and attending to those will help us better understand Jesus’s legal arguments.

Two more misconceptions remain: “6. The Law governs only external actions, not internal dispositions” and “7. In sacrifice, God punishes an animal instead of you for your sin.” Both are important; both require more extended treatment in later essays.

With some of the ground cleared, we can begin constructing a sense of Jesus’s legal theory. We’ll start with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus himself mythbusts the idea that the Law is concerned only with outward actions and not the heart.

That is, Jesus had particular views on the nature, purpose, and functional domain of law, and he had an interpretive framework for analyzing, critiquing, and reforming the legal system of which he was a part.

This much is evident from the Synoptic Gospels (and to some extent, the Gospel of John), which portray Jesus as an eager participant in legal debates of his day. Sometimes it’s because a question is posed to him. Other times, he is himself posing the question, offering a critique, or inveighing against some rule or practice he regards as wrong or unjust.

That these are legal debates—and not, for example, philosophical debates—I take as a given. Second Temple Judaism, the era and thoughtworld Jesus inhabited, presumed that God had established a covenant with Israel, that the covenantal blessings entailed reciprocal obligations binding on both individuals and the nation as a whole, and that fidelity to the covenant required careful attention, interpretation, and elaboration to ensure its demands were fulfilled.1 Jesus himself conceived of Israel’s covenantal obligations as “law,” indeed as “the Law,” and that conception shaped the questions he asked and the discussions and debates in which he engaged.

But what exactly the law is and what it requires aren’t always clear. Legal rules, by their very nature, are underdetermined. They can articulate what is expected or required in general terms, but they cannot specify outcomes for every possible situation. Underdeterminacy flows from the inherent limits of human language and human foresight. Even a divinely given law like the Torah—the Five Books of Moses that undergird Jewish law—is underdetermined in this way.

So every legal system needs interpreters. It needs lawyers, judges, and anyone else willing to engage in the legal enterprise. Interpreters confront and clash over questions generated by the undeterdeterminacy of law.

• What happens when two or more principles come into conflict? Which principle controls or overrides the other?

• Suppose social conditions change so that a rule, or a particular application of a rule, no longer makes sense. A law made for one time and place, or one group of people, might not apply to another.

• The application of a rule may be faithful to the “letter” of the law—it may be literally correct—but it produces an unforeseen, undesirable, or unjust result. What then?

• What weight is to be given to precedent and tradition? What if a traditional practice or understanding conflicts with a law’s text or plain sense?

These are perennial questions common to every legal system. And they are exactly the sorts of questions Jesus wrestles and engages with in the Gospel accounts.

In concrete scenarios, these questions generate cases and controversies. The controversies are resolved through legal reasoning—the logical application of accepted (or contested) principles to the situation at hand. The resolution itself becomes part of the body of law accessible to interpreters (hence “case law”), establishing new rules that then generate yet more controversies requiring resolution. And so it goes.

To understand Jesus as a legal interpreter is not to say the Gospels’ portrayal of him precludes philosophical questions or questions of theology, ethics, virtue, politics, science, or much else besides. Jesus’s life and teachings shed light on all of these.

But I’d like to argue that the primary register of Jesus’s thought is the domain of law. Law, as expressed through the covenantal framework, is the means by which God revealed himself at Sinai. It was a primary medium through which Israel, and particularly Second Temple Jews, understood their faith. And it supplied the social and cultural milieu in which Jesus taught, debated, and discoursed. If you want to understand Jesus, you need to understand his legal theory—his approach to law in general and to Jewish law in particular.

There’s a threshold objection we need to address. Didn’t Jesus do away with the law—oppose it, bring it to an end, make it unnecessary? Didn’t he view the law as an impossible burden, a legalistic yoke to be discarded in the name of “freedom” and “grace”? The short answer is no. Emphatically no. That was not Jesus’s view. And defending that answer is no small part of this series of essays. But it suffices for now to point out that, even if that were a correct reading of Jesus’s teaching—even if his project were one of opposition to the law as such—that itself would be a legal theory. It would be philosophical framework within which Jesus approached, analyzed, and critiqued law and the legal system. One way or another, Jesus had a legal theory. The only question is, what was it?

I’d like to posit that Jesus’s legal theory can be described by the phrase Morally Fulsome Lawkeeping. Each word bears weight, and they’re best explained in reverse order.

• Lawkeeping: Jesus taught that the Law must be kept. And by the Law, I mean the Torah, the written law given to Israel at Sinai and contained in the Five Books of Moses. Where I intend this narrow definition, I’ll try to use the definite article and a capital letter—“the Law”—to distinguish it from the concept of “law” more generally.

• Fulsome: Jesus insisted that all the Law be kept—ethical and ritual requirements, commandments both large and small.

• Morally: Jesus believed that the Law had a clear moral thrust, that even the most seemingly trivial rule had a moral component or was designed to teach a moral lesson, and that to fulfill the Law meant attending to the Law fully—to both its literal form and its moral content.

In my view, the concept of Morally Fulsome Lawkeeping best explains the legal discourse data available to us in the Gospel accounts. Even as I defend this view, however, I’ll try to be honest about its limits—especially where Jesus slips the bonds of legal argument and is operating within different paradigms altogether (prophetic, eschatological, etc.).

First, though, we need to do some ground-clearing. That’s the subject of the next essay, “Seven Misconceptions About the Law.”

That’s because the American tradition is one of ordered liberty—liberty grounded in a particular vision of the common good. That “particular vision” is a set of values that includes sanctity of life (contra murder), private property (contra theft), and human dignity (contra abuse).

These values are themselves grounded in a religious worldview, one shaped by the Bible, the Christian traditions of the West, and the American historical experience.

Protecting these values is not only something governments may do. It’s something they must do. It is why Americans formed a government in the first place. As Americans, we are committed to a set of truths about the human person, which entails a responsibility to secure those truths and protect the rights that flow from them. This is the chief aim of government.

Religious freedom is embedded within the broader matrix of ordered liberty—and is incoherent outside of it. The American commitment to religious freedom depends upon a vision of the human person as a free moral agent ultimately accountable to God. That vision is, again, inescapably a religious one. Not all worldviews share this view of the human person and so not all worldviews grant religious freedom.

The great challenge of American constitutionalism and civic life is to nurture the religious roots of our republic while preserving the broader religious freedom those roots support.

I wrote more about the “paradox of religious liberty” at Mere Orthodoxy last year: “Freedom to be Bound: Religious Liberty from Moses to Madison.”

No. 1 - Hamilton

The proposed Constitution is a test of our people
Whether history will repeat or change its course.
May government be founded on reflection & choice,
Or be subject always to accident & force?

Views will be mixed. Be guided by truth.
(Everyone’s tainted by his own ambition.)
Let me lay my own cards on the table:
The necessity of Union is my highest conviction.

On two things does good government depend:
Energy (the means) and Liberty (the end).

No. 2 - Jay

That Union is key, the People well know.
As a nation we toiled and bled for this land.
Behold what bounty will Union bestow,
Guided withal by a Provident hand.

Divisive men shun.
Learned men prize.
Men of the Convention,
Prudent and wise,
Have proposed (not imposed) for your approbation
A Charter to hearten and prosper our nation.

Nos. 3-5 - Jay

(Each a haiku)

A Union of States
Is less apt to cause a war—
United we stand.

Common interests
Require mutual defense—
Divided we fall.

If not united,
Foreign powers will play us
Off one another.

No. 6 - Hamilton

(Iambic pentameter)

It’s time to wake from the deceitful dream.
We live not in some Utopian age.
The past is not past—we stand in its stream.
Perfect wisdom we have yet to engage.

“Republics pacify! Commerce softens!”
So the opponents of Union will cheer.
But hist’ry says republics war often.
Nat’ral enemies are the ones more near.

The evil: sov’reignties disconnected.
Remedy: more solemn ties effected.

No. 7 - Hamilton

That men love money is as trite as true.
Land and trade, debt and taxes
Will always supply just cause for wars.
Hence we need the constitutional glue—
For common rules, market access
And adjustments by reason, not force.

No. 8 - Hamilton

True, a standing army isn’t banned
But let the dispassionate understand:
Military defense is needed regardless.
No sovereign state can ever be guard-less.

Europe is not the model—
Prone to strife among neighbors divided,
Conflict for them a constant exposure.
Britain rather emulate—
Strong because internally united.
Protected, like us, by an ocean enclosure.

No. 9 - Hamilton

Small republics are unstable—
Violent tendencies.
Confederation is better—
Montesquieu agrees.

No. 10 - Madison

Faction is the problem that demands a solution—
The leading cause of republics’ dissolution.
Virtue alone cannot be the plan—
Faction is sown in the nature of man.

Don’t kill the cause, for liberty suffers.
Control the effects. These are the buffers:
A large republic with interests diverse
Mean power and wealth are widely dispersed.
And elected leaders will opinion refine
To ensure “public interest” is broadly defined.

Where policy rests on broad coalitions,
A republic is cured of factional divisions.

Originally published November 18, 2016

Evangelicals love to talk about the “culture wars,” usually with some mixture of zeal and disdain. I wish we could dispense with the term. It frames our moral agenda all wrong. Christians aren’t called to be at war with their culture. We’re called to be witnesses to the Kingdom of God—in our worship, words, and deeds.

I don’t doubt that bearing witness sometimes feels like war. Jesus promised, after all, that we would have trouble in the world. But rather than fight back, He urged us to “be encouraged” because He has already won the battle—“conquered the world,” as He put it—through His death and resurrection. As evangelicals, we need to focus less on fighting a war with our culture, and more (much more) on following the way of the cross.1

But however we frame our moral agenda, a dilemma remains. For evangelicals, activism has long been a key feature of our faith. Whatever the cause—from abolition of slavery to ending human trafficking, from women’s suffrage to respect for life—evangelicals have been among the country’s most passionate advocates of social change. Indeed, the very definition of “evangelical” includes this sort of Gospel-grounded activism.

But activism often gives rise to moralism, the insistence that our moral preferences be enshrined in law. This conceptual move—from social concern to legal coercion—is easy to make. If X is wrong, then X should be illegal, right? There’s undeniable logical force to that intuition, and most Americans, certainly most evangelicals, think this way.

Christians are called to think critically—which is to say, Gospel-centricly—about our moralist instincts. As Christians, is our moral agenda always a legal agenda? Is it ever? When we link our social cause to the coercive powers of the state, are we being faithful witnesses to a Gospel that insists on “foolish[ness] ... to shame the wise” and “weak[ness] ... to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27)?

These are questions that legal scholar William J. Stuntz takes up in his seminal essay “Christian Legal Theory.” They form Part 3 of this series exploring the theoretical and theological underpinnings of a Gospel-centered theory of law. (Part 1, “Law, Gospel, and foolishness” laid the groundwork for this discussion. Part 2 covered “Justice for the poor.”)

How then shall we legislate?

Let’s get something out of the way at the outset. The question here is not whether we should “legislate morality.” This is hardly a useful approach to the issue. All law is normative, which means all law has moral content. When law ceases to be normative in this way, it ceases to be law and becomes only a will to power, a tool of oppression to be wielded by whoever happens to hold the scepter of public authority. Law devoid of moral content is tyranny.

At some point, everyone’s a moralist. Everyone has a list of moral wrongs they think should be legally punished and moral rights they think the law should encourage, permit, and secure. (Indeed, at its root, what is the democratic process but an attempt to peacefully reconcile competing moralistic visions for society?) The question, then, is not whether we should “legislate morality,” but what kind of morality we should legislate.

Stuntz argues that the proper Christian approach to this issue is legal agnosticism, particularly when the relevant moral principles are contested. When the public is divided over what’s right and wrong, Stuntz insists we should “err on the side of freedom rather than legal restraint.” In his view, we shouldn’t forbid, or at least we shouldn’t criminally punish, “behavior that a large fraction of the populace thinks is morally permissible.”

As a concrete example, Stuntz offers up the morally charged fight over abortion. He thinks this issue is a “good candidat[e] for legal compromise, for solutions that do not award total victory to either side.” Moralists should be seeking to persuade, not legally coerce, targeting the culture instead of the law.

Stuntz tries to ground his legal agnosticism in both Scripture and history. First, he suggests that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’s definition of sin was so expansive as to make true moralism impossible. Society might aspire to punish all murder and adultery, but it could not feasibly punish anger and lust (see Matt. 5:21-28). By defining sin “so radically,” Stuntz says, Jesus removed any justification for a legal regime that seeks to forbid all sin.

Second, Stuntz asserts that historically, “[l]egal prohibition of morally contested behavior has not been a successful strategy,” pointing to the 19th century fight over slavery. Slaveholders won many of the legal battles: the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which opened new territories to slavery, and the infamous Dred Scott decision, which opened all territories, even free states, to slavery. Yet in each case, legal victory led to political defeat for slaveholders. Kansas-Nebraska gave birth to the Republican Party, and Dred Scott spurred the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who would later write the Emancipation Proclamation.

Stuntz’s essential argument is that moralism is counterproductive and self-defeating, that unwelcome legal coercion is often a flashpoint and catalyst for political and social change. I don’t find this argument compelling, though. Worse, I do not think it’s fully faithful to the Gospel.

Jesus’s legal theory: moral seriousness about law

To begin, I think Stuntz gets Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 5 precisely wrong. When Jesus connects murder to anger and adultery to lust, He’s drawing on the familiar rabbinic concept of “drawing a hedge” or “building a fence” around our legal obligations. It’s wrong to murder, and to avoid committing that sin, we should also avoid things that, while not murder themselves, might lead to it—like anger. It’s wrong to cheat on your spouse, and to avoid committing that sin, we should also avoid things that, while not adultery themselves, might lead to it—like lust.

Most people grasp this concept intuitively. If you’re dieting, you shouldn’t keep cheesecake around the house. Seeing the cheesecake and having it around, of course, aren’t cheating, but they certainly make cheating more likely. So you toss it.

This principle of “building a fence” is familiar to modern jurists. In the First Amendment context, courts routinely strike down laws that, while not directly inhibiting speech, threaten to “chill” it, i.e., reduce the amount of speech or make people reluctant to express their views. Both Jesus in the first century and judges in the twenty-first are making the same jurisprudential move: they’re using a prophylactic rule to protect a more important legal principle.

If there’s a lesson from Matthew 5, it’s that we need more law, not less, at least when we’re protecting paramount interests like human life and marital faithfulness. And here’s the connection to abortion. If murdering a human being is wrong, the law should be such that we avoid even the possibility of wrongfully taking a life. So even if we’re not sure whether a fetus is a human person, we should “build a fence” —we should protect it. We shouldn’t draw our legal obligations so narrowly that we risk transgressing the moral principles at the heart of the law.2

Contrary to Stuntz, then, I read Jesus in Matthew 5 as demanding moral seriousness about law, not agnosticism and compromise.

Second, I don’t think Stuntz has the right read on 19th century history. Slaveholders and abolitionists both used legal coercion to achieve their social and economic goals. Abolitionists, after all, wanted to ban slavery and racial segregation and to back up those prohibitions with the force of law. And in the end, the abolitionists won. The aftermath of the Civil War brought the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude everywhere in the United States. It also spurred the enactment of civil rights laws that allowed private citizens to sue public officials for the deprivation of constitutional rights. The motivation for these laws was clear: “to restore peace and justice to the [South] through the subtle power of civil enforcement” (Wilson v. Garcia). It was law doing the powerful work of social change, even though the American public was still deeply divided about the relevant rights and wrongs.

It’s hard to read Stuntz’s insistence on legal agnosticism as anything other than a passive wait-and-see approach: “only after society comes around, then see to the necessary legal reforms. In the meantime, compromise.” But doesn’t that only prolong injustice? Aren’t some social ills simply too grave and too urgent?

Stuntz’s agnosticism about law creates a systematic bias that should trouble anyone with a conscience. If law should stand down whenever moral principles are publicly contested, then law will always give way whenever social wrongs can be recast as civil rights. That’s the logic that underlies both Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade—decisions that will live in infamy—and Stuntz’s approach has no real answer to them. His legal agnosticism would consistently favor a freedom to harm over a conscientious demand for justice as long as public opinion remains divided.

Christian activism: a signpost of God’s redemptive work

For Christians, the trouble with Stuntz’s legal agnosticism goes even deeper: it allows culture to dictate our moral witness. It counsels compromise whenever our calls for social change lack cultural currency. But that is not the role of the church in society. We are not called to be simply another social institution—negotiating, bargaining, lobbying, jostling for power and influence, brokering compromises to get “our way.” The church is something else entirely. It must be a signpost for the arriving Kingdom of God. It must be, in Eugene Peterson’s phrase, “a colony of heaven in the country of death.”

We must be ever bending society toward justice and the common good, recognizing that God is working in and through His people, and through history, to accomplish His redemptive purposes. In their social activism, Christians must align themselves with that work first, foremost, and finally, always “preparing the way” for God (Is. 40:3). Sometimes that will mean legal and political victory. But sometimes—and maybe more often—it will mean sounding a prophetic voice in the cultural wilderness.

When social desolation is all around us, our task as Christians is not to settle down in the desert. It’s to build a highway through it, to “make straight” a path for the renewing, restorative work of God in Christ. It’s no coincidence that the prophets speak of law and justice in this way:

Behold, a king will reign in righteousness,
and princes will rule in justice.
Each will be like a hiding place from the wind,
a shelter from the storm,
like streams of water in a dry place,
like the shade of a great rock in a weary land.

(Is. 32:1-2.)

As Christians, then, this should be our model for social activism: moral seriousness about the law, grounded in the work of Christ at the cross, pointing ever and always to the Kingdom He is quickly ushering in.

Christian legal theory, Part 2: Justice for the poor

Originally published Sep. 9, 2016

Thinking about law through a Christian lens means focusing on the poor. “[The Lord] has sent me to preach good news to the poor,” Jesus declares in Luke’s Gospel:

to proclaim release to the prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to liberate the oppressed,
and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

(Luke 4:18-19.) These words not only launched Jesus’s ministry. They defined his mission. The poor, the oppressed, the stranger, and the outcast—the “least of these” (Matt. 25:40)—were closest to Jesus’s heart precisely because they were at the margins of society.

Centuries before Jesus, this is what the Prophets taught: that the measure of society is at its margins. Justice in the Kingdom of God isn’t about pious rituals, propping up the powerful, or even punishment of wrongdoers. Rather, Kingdom justice is about the poor. “Seek justice!” Isaiah enjoins. “Help the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Is. 1:17).

If “good news” for the poor is both the message of the Gospel and the measure of a just society, then it must be central to any Christian conception of law.

Sacrificial Justice

In his seminal essay “Christian Legal Theory,” late Harvard scholar (and evangelical Christian) William Stuntz sketches out the theoretical and theological underpinnings of a Gospel-centered theory of law. As I argued in Part 1 of this series (”Law, Gospel, and foolishness“), Stuntz’s essay holds two key insights for Christian legal theory.

• First, a Christian conception of law must be “faithful to the subversive implications of the Gospel.”

• Second, instead of searching the Gospel for a systematic theory of law, we ought to look for what Stuntz calls “Christian lines of critique, the sin-induced tendencies that run through all legal fields and all legal forms.”

Stuntz’s essay applies these insights in three areas: distributive justice, moralism, and humility. I’ll tackle moralism and humility in forthcoming posts.

When Stuntz talks about “distributive justice,” his focus is not on wealth redistribution policies, but on the dispensation of justice within the legal system, and particularly on the role of lawyers in securing justice for the poor.

And Stuntz’s assessment is a grim one. “Poor litigants do not reliably get fair outcomes, much less empathetic lawyers,” he writes. Public defender offices are understaffed and underfunded, leaving indigent criminal defendants with “overworked bureaucrats” rather than able advocates. And civil litigation is plagued by gamesmanship—tactics designed not to arrive at fair solutions but to exact unfair settlements. As Stuntz notes, these tactics “are especially problematic when used by rich litigants against poor ones.”

In our system, justice depends on what you can afford. A client might get a fair outcome if she can pay for a good lawyer. And good lawyers aren’t cheap. As every litigant quickly learns, in the American system of justice, your status depends on your means.

The Gospel flips this story on its head. Christianity teaches that each of us is a lawbreaker, each of us a guilty defendant who deserves punishment. And yet we are saved, not by our own merit or means, but simply by the mercy of God in Christ, the free gift of grace. Christ, our counselor and divine advocate, bought us with a price, not the other way around. In the Kingdom’s upside-down system of justice, it’s the Lawyer who buys—redeems—the client.

This, Stuntz says, is the real lesson the Gospel teaches when it comes to the legal system and the poor. In his view, a more fair legal system would focus less on “right legal doctrines” and more on “the right lawyers.” Stuntz calls for “a more Christian legal profession”—more lawyers willing to “defend the defenseless and befriend the friendless,” to sacrificially enter into the client’s distress, and to pursue justice with compassion and empathy.

By training his gaze on lawyers, Stuntz’s comments are intensely practical. Yet Stuntz pinpoints sacrifice as essential to doing justice for the poor, and that insight is radical. This notion of “sacrificial justice” is nowhere to be found in contemporary legal ethics. It’s rooted in the cross of Christ, not the classroom.

Focusing on the Poor

Stuntz’s conception of distributive justice is faithful to the essential elements of his legal theory, particularly his emphasis on relationships over rules and the subversive implications of the Gospel (on which, see Part 1). But there are other Christian lines of critique that Stuntz leaves unexplored.

The Gospel should sensitize us to the ways that society’s rules and systems work to oppress the poor—by reinforcing existing power structures and maintaining social stratification. Often this process isn’t deliberate; indeed, it may be rooted in good intentions. But sin taints everything, and Christians, of all people, should take notice.

There are so many areas that deserve our attention. Let me highlight just one: criminal history information.

With the increasing reliance on criminal law to punish even minor transgressions and technology that makes it easy and cheap to check a person’s background, a growing number of people—one in four American adults—find themselves with criminal records that are wide open to public inspection.1 Schools, employers, and landlords now routinely reject applicants who have even a hint of a criminal past—no matter how long ago it was, no matter the circumstances of the crime, no matter how much the person has changed. As a result, people with criminal histories face discrimination and barriers in education, employment, housing, and financial aid, institutions that are critical to socioeconomic mobility and reintegration into civic life.

Not surprisingly, this problem disproportionately affects the poor and people of color, reinforcing a cycle of poverty and recidivism. Simply put, if a person has no legitimate options because of her criminal past, she’s more likely to resort to crime (again) as a way to provide for herself and her family.

As advocates for the poor, Christians should be critical of this system. Just as God has wiped the slate clean for us and remembers our “lawless deeds no more” (Heb. 10:17), so we should work to ensure that a person’s past mistakes don’t haunt him forever. Here are three ideas:

• Christian schools, employers, and landlords can give people with criminal histories a second look and a chance to talk frankly about their past.2

• Support legislative efforts that allow more people to expunge or seal their criminal records, which prevents the information from appearing on a background check.

• Advocate legal reforms that protect employers from liability for hiring people with criminal backgrounds, at least where the crime has no real bearing on the job.

Any legal theory, to call itself Christian, must have justice for the poor at its heart. Whether it’s practicing law sacrificially or pursuing legal reforms that give people a second chance, the Gospel reminds us that our social and spiritual destinies are intimately tied to how we treat the “least” among us.

Much has changed in the nine years since I wrote these essays, but they stand up pretty well, so I’m going to publish them in three parts here. My views have changed on a few things, so I’m adding editorial footnotes to clarify, or in some cases contradict, my then-expressed views. Here’s the first of the three.

Radical Christian legal theory, Part 1: Law, Gospel, and foolishness

Originally published Aug. 20, 2016

It’s not often one can say a law review article affected them profoundly. But for me, that’s true of “Christian Legal Theory” by the late Harvard scholar William Stuntz.

This post is the first in a series on Stuntz’s article. My goal: to illuminate Stuntz’s ideas for a broader audience, to shed some light on the question that Stuntz poses in his opening sentence: “Why should anyone think about law in Christian terms?”

Law, Gospel, and Foolishness

The impetus for Stuntz’s piece is Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought, a series of law professor essays on the intersection of Christian thought and American legal theory. Stuntz spends time summarizing and critiquing the essays, which cover a broad range of topics, from the Christian roots of liberal thought to Christian perspectives on— and defenses of—the issues of the day: racial equality, feminism, environmentalism, economics, criminal justice, and even contracts, torts, and legal ethics.

Ultimately, Stuntz finds Christian Perspectives as a whole “moderate and familiar,” “comfortable,” and “ordinary.” “If this book is a fair gauge of the effect serious Christians might have on legal thought,” Stuntz writes, “those who like legal thought just as it is needn’t worry.”

I want to reserve my own judgment on the book, but Stuntz’s critique is astringent, and for good reason. The Apostle Paul taught that the Gospel is “unto the Greeks, foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:23). It is at odds with the wisdom of the world. (Eugene Peterson calls it “the seeming absurdity of God.”) But as Stuntz dryly observes, anyone reading Christian Perspectives “might be excused for wondering why the transcendent God seems to think like a typical American law professor.”

The trouble with many of the book’s essays is that they start in the wrong place. They begin with a particular cause du jour, like racism or sexism, and work their way backwards, hoping to show that Christian thought is compatible with contemporary legal perspectives. The essayist’s task is less a Christian lens on law, and more a legal lens on Christianity.

But Christian thought shouldn’t be so mainstream. True to itself, the Gospel is upside-down religion. As Stuntz notes, Christ in his teachings “is constantly reversing the natural order of things, saying that the last shall be first and the first last, that those who lose their lives will save them (and vice versa).” If subversion of the natural order lies at the core of the Gospel, it should also be at the center of any Christian perspective on law.1

That intuition is both Stuntz’s central insight and the key driver of his critique of Christian Perspectives. So in his essay, Stuntz sets about to divine first principles and lay the groundwork for a Christ-centered understanding of law, one that’s faithful to the subversive implications of the Gospel. The result is a different kind of Christian legal theory, what Stuntz calls radical Christian legal theory.

Radical Christian Legal Theory

To be fair, Stuntz doesn’t see himself as divining first principles, but as taking disparate strands of Christian thought and weaving them into a common legal-ethical fabric. For him, any legal theory that calls itself “Christian” must take into account at least four ideas:

[Note: I’ve reformulated and stylized these, but they are faithful to Stuntz’s thought.]

1. Ethical theism: Underpinning all of Christian thought is the belief that God has an abiding interest in man’s everyday conduct and thus “cares deeply about law and the moral messages it sends.”

2. The taint of sin: Because sin affects everything we do, it should induce caution and uncertainty—not about God, but about ourselves, our motivations, and our perceptions.

3. Relationships over rules: The emphasis of Christianity is on right relationships, not rules.

4. Christ-centered radicalism: In pointing to a different reality, a different Kingdom, and a different King, the Gospel turns the systems of the world on their head, law included.

What does all this mean for legal theory? Stuntz begins to sketch out the implications.

Most important is Stuntz’s suggestion that there really is no Christian legal theory at all: “instead of looking for the Christian theory of contracts or criminal law or anything else,” he writes, “we ought to be looking for the Christian lines of critique, the sin-induced tendencies that run through all legal fields and all legal forms.”

That insight really is radical because it works against the human tendency to systematize, a tendency that (perhaps paradoxically) affects lawyers and theologians more than most. Indeed, if there is a moral-legal thrust to the Gospel, it is anti-systematic. Christianity, as Stuntz puts it, “embraces no one theory but criticizes all.” It is ever skeptical of the way that rules and systems—the domain of law itself—tend to reflect our self-interest and the entrenchment of power.2

Stuntz’s emphasis on critique over theory is the key that unlocks the rest of his essay, and he works out its implications in three areas: distributive justice (i.e., special concern for the poor), moralism, and humility. I plan to explore each of these in subsequent posts.

Redeeming Law

A parting thought on the theological implications of Stuntz’s essay. At the root of “Christian Legal Theory” is the intuition that the Kingdom of God and the message of the Gospel are for the here-and-now. As Christ taught us to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Even to speak of a Christian perspective on law is to believe that God is acutely concerned not only with human actions, but also with how those actions point to a deeper reality, the reality of a Kingdom breaking through.

Between these two poles lies the moral agenda of Christian people: the restoration of right relationships over against the ubiquitous taint of sin (starting with our own). Law has an important role to play in this project, but only if it remains oriented toward the grace-filled, redemptive work of Christ.

AI and emerging tech are promising vehicles for religious expression. But that promise is jeopardized when regulations designed to address misuse—like the spread of misinformation or algorithmic bias—fail to account for the unique needs of religious groups. Policymakers must ensure that new technology regulations don’t diminish fundamental rights.

A Legacy of Freedom: The First Amendment and Technology

In every generation, advancing technology tests the boundaries of the First Amendment. In the early twentieth century, it was motion pictures. The Supreme Court held in 1915 that motion pictures were not a form of protected expression; they were “a business, pure and simple” and “not to be regarded … as part of the press.”

That decision stood until 1952. In Burstyn v. Wilson, the Court considered a New York statute that outlawed films deemed “sacrilegious” by state-appointed censors. At issue was The Miracle, an Italian film about a peasant girl who, after being seduced by a man she believed to be St. Joseph, gives birth to a son she believes is the Christchild. New York banned the film, but the Supreme Court reversed, rejecting the argument that motion pictures were a unique “evil” that lay beyond First Amendment protection. While new means of communication may present their own “peculiar problems,” the Court said, “the basic principles of freedom of speech and the press … do not vary.” Those principles “make freedom of expression the rule,” not the exception.

The very text of the First Amendment embodies this rule. When the founding generation secured protection for the freedom of both “speech” and “press,” they were protecting not only the content of ideas but also the means of communicating them. The printing press was, after all, the mass communication technology of the day.

Today, a similar debate is playing out with AI. Some fear its ability to supercharge misinformation or enable harmful practices, prompting a surge in regulation. California’s recent law targeting “deceptive” AI-generated political content is one such example. The law was swiftly blocked for violating the First Amendment, highlighting that even in the face of new technologies, free speech principles don’t change.

The Promise and Peril of Data Privacy Laws

Nowhere is the tension between regulation and freedom more evident than in the realm of data privacy. Legislators in at least 19 states have enacted laws restricting how organizations collect, process, and share personal data. While these laws aim to protect individuals, they create unique challenges for religious organizations that increasingly depend on data.

Under many data privacy laws, the simple act of outreach—communicating with a data subject—may require explicit, advance consent. Activities like sharing data between ministries or collaborating on outreach campaigns now risk violating privacy laws unless strict consent procedures are followed. Ministries and denominations with large databases face heightened regulatory burdens, particularly for data that relates to the religious beliefs of members, donors, and congregants.

New data privacy rules unintentionally single out religious organizations and their data for disfavored treatment. This complicates their operations and raises serious constitutional questions about religious exercise and speech.

The stakes are high. If religious organizations cannot freely communicate with their constituents or collaborate with other ministries due to regulatory hurdles, their missions are severely hindered. To avoid compliance costs and liability, they may steer clear of certain practices altogether. This chilling effect is exactly the harm the First Amendment seeks to prevent.

The Double-Edged Sword of AI Regulation

Beyond data privacy, the regulation of AI itself presents new challenges. Colorado’s law banning “algorithmic discrimination” is a case in point. The law prohibits AI systems from making decisions in areas like hiring, housing, and education that result in differential treatment based on protected characteristics such as race, religion, or gender. While well-intentioned, the law could inadvertently entangle religious organizations in compliance battles. Other states are considering similar laws.

We need balanced regulation that addresses the legitimate potential harms of AI while respecting religious freedom. As faith-based organizations increasingly adopt tools like AI chatbots for evangelism, prayer, and counseling, new legal questions arise: Is expression generated by a chatbot a form of protected speech? Just as pressing, who bears responsibility if an AI system generates biased, inaccurate, or harm-inducing responses?

These are uncharted waters. Legislators and courts will need to sort through the implications, but religious organizations must contend with the risks now. Missteps create legal exposure, operational challenges, reputational damage, and even theological dilemmas.

Harnessing AI for Good

Despite the risks, AI’s potential is vast. AI-driven tools are already accelerating scientific discovery, and similar breakthroughs are happening in religious contexts. AI-powered Bible translation is making Scripture accessible to more people worldwide, while religious chatbots are helping individuals explore questions about faith.

This gets to another important constitutional principle. The First Amendment not only protects a speaker’s right to convey information—it also protects a listener’s right to receive it. More generally, the First Amendment protects the “free flow” of information and ideas, something the Supreme Court has called “essential” in a democratic society. The First Amendment thus secures more than an individual right to speech. It also functions as structural safeguard for the marketplace of ideas—regardless of who’s doing the speaking or listening. Under this view, any technology capable of contributing to humanity’s common stock of information is within the ambit of First Amendment protection.

Where freedom of expression is the rule, AI is no exception. Yet these advancements are possible only if speakers (religious and otherwise) can freely harness AI without fear of regulatory overreach. Just as the printing press fueled the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution—and thus gave rise to the First Amendment itself—and just as the internet democratized access to knowledge, AI has the potential to revolutionize how humanity accesses, organizes, and discovers information. For religious groups, innovative technologies are an opportunity to spread their message and contribute to the broader quest for knowledge, truth, and ultimate meaning.

A Call for Thoughtful Regulation

At the intersection of emerging technology and constitutional freedoms, lawmakers must strike a careful balance. Overregulation risks stifling innovation and undermining rights, while underregulation leaves room for misuse and harm. Beyond basic free speech principles, policymakers must consider the unique needs and roles of religious organizations. New laws should both promote technological progress and protect core constitutional rights.

Existing laws on fraud, defamation, and discrimination are sufficient to address some of the harms associated with AI and data misuse. Where new regulations are necessary, they must be narrowly tailored to avoid infringing free speech and religious exercise.

Through centuries of technological change—from the printing press to motion pictures to the internet—the First Amendment has safeguarded Americans’ right to expressive and religious freedom. It can do so again in the age of AI. By reaffirming its principles, we can ensure that innovation and freedom go hand in hand—that technology serves not as a threat to faith and expression, but as another tool for human flourishing.

The literal sense of religious liberty, then, is the freedom to be bound, or more precisely, freedom from one set of constraints in order to be bound to another. It is a tethered liberty—liberty that involves an allegiance. At its root, it is not freedom from constraint but freedom for the purpose of constraint. It is the freedom to honor one’s highest loyalties and fulfill one’s deepest moral obligations.

In his 1785 Memorial and Remonstrance, James Madison expounded on the political implications of the religious liberty paradox. Because man’s ultimate duty is to God, Madison wrote, every other obligation becomes relativized. So, even when man enters society and submits himself to civil government, he does so “with a reservation of his duty”—a “saving of his allegiance”—to God.

Religious liberty, in the Madisonian sense, is a reservation of one’s ultimate allegiance. It is freedom to do not what one wants but what one ought. It is never self-referential, never liberty for its own sake. Religious liberty has a telos. Being bound to a higher sovereign (religio) necessarily requires freedom from lesser authorities (libertas). This is the essence of religious liberty: freedom for the sake of something more deeply binding.

The paradox is vividly illustrated in the fifth chapter of the book of Exodus. This biblical passage, recounting Moses and Aaron’s initial appearance before Pharaoh, contains history’s first recorded demands for religious liberty.

Moses, having been called by God to deliver the Israelites from slavery, stands before Egypt’s king and says: “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’” Pharaoh refuses, and Moses reasserts the demand, though phrased differently: “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.” This time, Pharaoh not only refuses but retaliates against the Israelites, increasing their workload and punishments.

Two aspects of Moses’s demands deserve attention. First, the demands for freedom are specifically tied to religious obligation: “Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to [God] in the wilderness,’” or later, “that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God.” These are not demands for political liberty as such. Moses does not say, “Let my people go, that they may establish their own form of government.” This is not a Jeffersonian call for national independence. While national sovereignty is in Israel’s future, here in Exodus 5, freedom isn’t justified on those grounds. Rather, it is tethered to religious worship.

Second, in Exodus 5, the conception of religious liberty is corporate, not individual. Moses demands that an entire people be set free in order to worship in the way God has commanded. Properly conceived, religion is always a corporate enterprise. It binds a people together, binds them to their God, and commits them to a particular way of life. Religious liberty is congruent to these ends. It is more than simply an individual right to religious self-expression. Rather, libertas for the sake of religio means the freedom to bind oneself to a community and to a set of obligations that are larger than and beyond oneself.

Thus far, we have treated Moses’s demands monolithically, but they are not the same. Reflecting on their differences yields further insights.

Rewind a couple of chapters. In Exodus 3, God gives Moses precise instructions on how to approach Pharaoh and what to say: “You and the elders of Israel shall go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God’” (3:18).

Yet Moses fudges things a bit. When he goes to Pharaoh in Exodus 5, he doesn’t take the elders of Israel with him; only his brother Aaron accompanies him. His opening demand identifies the deity as “The Lord, the God of Israel” rather than “the God of the Hebrews.” The phrase “Let my people go” is a Mosaic innovation. And he initially portrays the religious obligation as absolute and unlimited rather than a simple three-day journey.

By contrast, Moses’s second demand hews more closely to God’s instructions. And herein lies a puzzle. Moses’s second demand seems far more modest than his first one. It begins with “please.” It seeks a time-limited religious accommodation. And Moses even appends “lest [God] fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword,” perhaps appealing to Pharaoh’s self-interest in productive labor. Yet it is the second demand that sets Pharaoh off. Pharaoh responds to Moses’s first demand with a simple, almost bored refusal. He responds to the second with furious retaliation.

Why? Why does the seemingly more modest demand infuriate Pharaoh so?

The answer lies, I believe, in Moses’s verbal pivot from the “God of Israel” to the “God of the Hebrews.” The latter implies a bolder political claim, even a radical one.

To understand why, put yourself in the ancient Egyptian mind. Pharaoh was the god-king—the living embodiment of Egypt’s gods, maintainer of cosmic order, the source and summit of civic and spiritual life. No surprise, then, that Moses’s initial appeal to “the Lord, the God of Israel” landed flat. There was no such deity in the Egyptian pantheon. At best, Moses was relying on some foreign, local god with no power in Egypt. It was perfectly rational for Pharaoh to respond as he did: “I do not know this god. I do not answer to him.” One can imagine a dismissive wave of the pharaonic hand.

But when Moses says—as God had instructed him to say—that “the God of the Hebrews has met with us,” that was something different. In the original language, the key word here, “Hebrews,” is Ivri. The literal sense is the “people from beyond” or the “people who cross over.” This is not some local deity, Moses is suddenly saying. This is a God who crosses jurisdictional boundaries, who watches over His people wherever they may be found. A God unconstrained by geographic limits must stand above the local Egyptian pantheon. Moses’s second demand is positing a different kind of God—a God of gods, a God over all.

Pharaoh is going to learn this lesson the hard way through the experience of the plagues, each of which is designed to reverse some aspect of Egyptian cosmology and demonstrate the supremacy of Israel’s God. As Moses’s father-in-law Jethro will later proclaim, “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods” (Ex. 18:11).

Yet before any of this occurs, here in Exodus 5, Pharaoh instantly grasps the implications of Moses’s second demand. A localized and distant “God of Israel” is one thing. But a transcendent and present “God of the Hebrews” is quite another. Pharaoh’s reaction is angry, swift, and punitive.

This brings us to a third lesson this passage teaches: by its very nature, religious liberty limits the power of the sovereign. Pharaoh thought of his own power as both divinely ordained and absolute, subject only to the geographical limits over which he could extend it. Yet in Exodus 5, Moses proclaims a God who transcends all of that. When Moses says, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us,” he is not simply upending the foundations of Egyptian political order. He is forever reframing the way human beings will think about political order at all. If indeed there is a God who stands above every human authority, then that God is worthy of one’s ultimate allegiance—an allegiance higher and more fundamental than human authority can ever command.

It would have been easy for Pharaoh to permit Israel a short religious festival. Yet to grant this specific demand meant conceding a more general principle: it meant accepting inherent limits on pharaonic authority. It meant relativizing his rule. This, Pharaoh was unwilling to do. As the rest of Exodus unfolds, it’s clear this was God’s plan all along: Pharaoh’s recalcitrance becomes the very opening God needs to demonstrate his cosmic supremacy.

Pharaoh may be the first ruler in history to bristle at divine limits on his earthly power, but he will not be the last. Nearly every king, Caesar, governor, and legislator after him will chafe at the demand for religious liberty in much the same way. In a sense, every contest over religious liberty is downstream of the showdown between Moses and Pharaoh in Exodus 5.

This brings us back to Madison. What is remarkable about the United States—what is perhaps most distinctive about our constitutional republic—is that the very men who, at the founding moment, held political authority not only acknowledged limits to that authority but actually locked them in. Constitutional protection of religious liberty supplies the paradigmatic example.

Attend to Madison’s reasoning in Memorial and Remonstrance and it is impossible not to hear the Mosaic echo: “[Religious] duty is precedent … to the claims of Civil Society,” Madison asserts, because religious man is bound to something that transcends political authority. In Madison’s telling, we owe ultimate allegiance to a “Universal Sovereign.”

Pharaoh was presented with this same argument and couldn’t accept it. America’s founders, by contrast, made it a cornerstone of our system of government.

• The responsibilities of self-government

• Civic virtue

• Political equality

• Representative democracy

• Limited government

• Respect for minority rights, including religious freedom and free speech.

These are essential features of our constitutional republic—the conceptual and institutional structures on which our law and political culture are built. Without them, the United States would not be what it is. And without an understanding of them, the American people can neither sustain their republican experiment nor carry it forward.

The trouble is, while the institutions of our national civic life require a particular kind of citizen, they do not themselves create such persons. Nor should they be expected to. They were not designed that way. As Yuval Levin puts it in his recent book American Covenant:

“Our politics requires a kind of person it does not produce by itself, and so it must depend on other institutions of our society to produce that person.”

These other institutions include the family, community, religious tradition, and other civic and educational institutions. (Whether these institutions are today fulfilling that responsibility is a separate, albeit crucial, question.)

To understand American political institutions, the natural starting point is of course the Constitution itself. It’s a fair bet that most Americans haven’t ever read the document in full. They should. It’s only about 4,400 words—7,500 if you count all 27 amendments. (When I taught constitutional law and First Amendment to college undergrads, I gave them all a free copy of the Constitution, and their first reading assignment was to read the thing cover to cover.)

But the Constitution’s meaning isn’t always self-evident or intuitive. To truly understand it, one must know the problems it aimed to solve, the debates it did (and did not) resolve, and the philosophical commitments that drove it. One must know something about the political culture in which it arose.

Almost from the beginning, Americans have looked to The Federalist—sometimes called The Federalist Papers—to better understand their National Charter. These were a series of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay under the pseudonym “Publius” and published in various newspapers, primarily in New York, between October 1787 and May 1788. Their purpose was to advocate for ratification of the new Constitution—sometimes called the “Plan of the Convention”—and to explain, almost line by line, the intent behind its provisions.

The Federalist in a Year

Constitutional lawyer though I am, and despite fancying myself a student of Madison’s thought in particular, I have never actually read all of The Federalist. I’ve read several of the essays in depth; I’ve dipped into various others; but I’ve never read them all.

In 2025, I intend to remedy the defect. Call it “The Federalist in a Year.” At two essays a week, I would be done by October, but I plan to read faster than that.

Of course, the challenge isn’t just to read the essays, but to absorb and be shaped by them. I tend to journal when I read, taking notes, noting quotes. But I plan to do something a little extra. For each essay, I’ll compose a small poem to summarize and help me remember what it’s about. The poems won’t always follow the same format. Some iambic pentameter here, a limerick or haiku there.

Here’s what I cobbled together for Federalist No. 1, which is Hamilton’s general introduction to the essays:

Federalist No. 1

The proposed Constitution is a test of our people
Whether history will repeat or change its course—
May government be founded on reflection and choice,
Or be subject always to accident and force?

Views will be mixed. Be guided by truth.
(Everyone’s tainted by their own ambition.)
Let me lay my own cards on the table:
The necessity of Union is my highest conviction.

On two things does good government depend:
Energy (the means) and Liberty (the end).

A Tradition of Federalist Poetry

As it turns out, what might be called “Federalist poetry” has a venerable history. Here’s the last stanza of “Our Liberty Tree: A Federal Song” published in the Massachusetts Centinel on December 29, 1787:

Then from east to the west let our Patriots convene,
Determin’d their country to free,
Our Constitution confirm—it firmly shall fix,
Its idol—our Liberty Tree.

Or consider stanza IV of “The Fabrick of Freedom,” published on March 8, 1788, with echoes of Madison’s Federalist No. 10:

Thus is our constitution rear’d,
On Freedom Strength and Peace;
By Virtue lov’d, by Faction fear’d,
For faction’s self must cease.
Contented now we’ll happy live,
While Industry and Trade shall thrive.

Finally, there is what might be my personal favorite: “The New Constitution: A Song.” It’s a kind of constitutional Screwtape Letters. Published in the Virginia Herald on January 10, 1788, the poem envisions Satan and his minions—alarmed that “[a] wonder, a good constitution” has “lately appeared”—stalking about, sowing chaos and deception to defeat the project. The poet urges his countrymen to resist the devilish plot:

Then let each honest man
Do the best that he can,
And establish a firm resolution,
All their schemes to oppose,
And to harrass the foes,
Of this happy and good constitution:

I hope to publish insights from my readings of The Federalist—and more poems—as the year progresses.

Later, the same angel appears to a young woman with stunning news: she, though a virgin, will bear a son. The woman also asks, “How…?” For her, the angel offers a candid explanation and assures her that “nothing will be impossible for God.”

Both the old man and the young woman seek explanation for a miracle. Yet the old man is seemingly punished for his question, while the young woman isn’t. Why?

These stories are part of the first chapter of Luke, where the angel Gabriel announces the births of John the Baptist and Jesus to their parents, Zechariah and Mary, respectively. Luke doesn’t tell us why the angel responds differently to each. We are left searching the text for clues.

Old Man vs. Young Woman

The most obvious distinction between the two annunciation stories lies in the identity of the recipients. The man Zechariah is “advanced in years” and his wife Elizabeth is past childbearing age, while the woman Mary is young, newly betrothed to Joseph, and still a virgin.

Perhaps God favors youth over old age, or women over men, or both. Thus is Zechariah punished for asking “How?” while Mary is not.

This explanation is too superficial to be satisfying. Identity-based favoritism might sync with modern notions of “equity and inclusion” or “affirmative action,” but nothing in Luke’s text or in the biblical tradition suggests that is what’s going on here. We have to go deeper.

The Nature of the Question: A Demand for Personal Assurance vs. Humble Faith

Both Zechariah and Mary seek an explanation for the miracle (“How…?”), but their questions are not the same. When the angel announces the birth of John, Zechariah points to the biological impossibility—Elizabeth is old—and he asks, “How shall I know this?” Mary also highlights biological impossibility—“I am a virgin,” she reminds the angel—but she asks a different question: “How will this be?”

We might reflect on these questions and what they tell us about the mindsets of the questioners. Zechariah’s question differs from Mary’s in at least two ways: it is self-focused and it is knowledge-centric. “How shall I know?” he asks. Zechariah wants personal assurance of the miracle, an evidential guarantee, something he can use to push back against the doubters who will inevitably question the veracity of his account. Zechariah seems more worried about his reputation in the community than awed by the angelic announcement.

Mary’s question, by contrast, is not a demand for personal assurance. It is a question of humble faith: “How will this be?” Mary seems unconcerned with herself and her reputation—though as an unmarried pregnant woman, she had more to lose than Zechariah. She accepts that the miracle “will be,” yet is courageous enough to ask “How?” The purity of her faith is underscored in her final words to the angel: “I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

The Nature of the Miracle: Old vs. New

Perhaps the different nature of the two miracles explains the angel’s divergent responses. The miracle announced to Zechariah fits a biblical pattern. Throughout the Bible, God repeatedly “opens the womb” of childless women, including the 90-year-old Sarah, and blesses them with children. So, while it’s surely a miracle that Zechariah’s elderly wife will bear a son, it is a “predictable miracle,” so to speak. It’s the sort of thing God has done before.

But the miracle announced to Mary is something new. It breaks the mold. There’s no biblical precedent for a virgin conceiving a child. It’s an unpredictable miracle, the sort of thing God had never done before.

Zechariah, a man steeped in biblical tradition, receives the easier announcement, yet he struggles with belief. Of all people, he should have “known.” He didn’t need further assurance. Mary, on the other hand, receives the more difficult announcement. Her miracle was harder to believe in, yet her instinct is to respond in faith rather than doubt.

Religious Ritualism vs. Authentic Faith

A final possibility is that all of the above dichotomies are in play, that Luke is using a complex layering of contrasts to point to deeper truths in the story as a whole. Luke’s first chapter recalls an older biblical story: that of the Eli the priest’s encounter with Hannah, a prayerful mother-to-be, in 1 Samuel 1.

The childless Hannah is at the temple of the Lord in Shiloh, weeping bitterly and praying for a son. She prays silently “in her heart”—“only her lips moved”—but Eli, who is eavesdropping nearby, doesn’t realize it. He thinks she’s drunk and openly scolds her.

How is it that Eli—a religious official whose entire existence is devoted to divine service—cannot recognize the sincerity and pathos of Hannah’s prayer? His lifelong focus on religious ritual has so blinded him to authentic faith that he can no longer distinguish a heartfelt petition from a drunkard’s babble.

But God knows the difference. He hears Hannah’s prayer and blesses her with a son. Eli, meanwhile, will lose his sons and his own life, his entire spiritual legacy cut off.

Authentic faith over religious ritual is a key theme of First Samuel, and Luke picks this up. At one level, he wants us to see the parallels between Hannah and Mary—their two songs of praise are remarkably similar, for example—and between Eli and Zechariah. Luke stresses Zechariah’s role as priest, carefully noting that his encounter with the angel occurs inside the temple—the most holy place on earth. Here, God’s presence dwelt in a kind of ongoing, miraculous encounter of the divine and the human. To stand in the temple was to stand in the presence of God. This is exactly the angel’s point in responding to Zechariah’s question: “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God.”

It’s as if the angel is saying, “Look where we are, man! This is the place where heaven meets earth. It’s literally an embodied miracle. And you have the audacity to ask how?!” As with Eli, a life of religious ritual has blinded Zechariah to authentic faith. His physical muteness becomes a real-life manifestation of his spiritual blindness.

But there’s more to this story, because Luke also wants us to see that Zechariah is not like Eli. We’re told that Zechariah and Elizabeth are both “righteous before God” and “blameless”—accolades never applied to Eli in First Samuel. In other words, Zechariah is a person of authentic faith. In that sense, he is actually more like Hannah.

Herein lies the deeper symbolic significance of Zechariah’s sudden inability to speak, for in his muteness, he will recapitulate Hannah’s story. Hannah’s silent prayer both expresses her genuine faith and presages a divine blessing: soon after, she will bear a son and burst forth in song. “My horn is exalted in the Lord … because I rejoice in your salvation,” her opening lines declare (1 Samuel 2:1).

In the same way, unable to speak, Zechariah would have been disqualified from performing many of his priestly rituals. Over several months, he could do nothing but pray silently in his heart, with only his lips moving. He was, in other words, more penitent than priest—more Hannah than Eli. It would have been a constant reminder to Zechariah of what genuine faith in God really is. And his silent prayers will also presage divine blessing: soon, Zechariah’s wife will bear a son and he, too, will burst forth in song: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he … has raised up a horn of salvation for us,” his opening lines declare (Luke 1:68).

The parallels here are impossible to miss. Thus understood, the angelic response to Zechariah isn’t punishment at all. It is a chastening blessing, a means of reminding Zechariah that God’s ultimate concern is with the state of our hearts and not the rectitude of our rituals.

But Luke’s complex narrative also wants us to see that God’s salvation, in the newborn Messiah, is good news for everyone: old and young, priest and penitent, doubter and believer. As Zechariah himself sings:

[T]he sunrise shall visit us from on high
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Amen ve’amen. Merry Christmas.

Last week I was in Palm Beach and had the privilege of visiting Raptis Rare Books. Its beautiful gallery space is filled with books—rare, signed, some beautifully rebound—tucked into floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves and cabinets. One of the most expensive items on offer is a first-edition Hobbit inscribed by the author, priced at $475,000. For more than double that price, you can own an original (one of only two) of George Washington’s 1775 commission from the Continental Congress appointing him Commander in Chief of the United Colonies.

My ambitions were far more modest. I purchased a 35th anniversary edition of Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, original dust jacket, inscribed by the author. It’s one of the cleverest children’s stories you’ll ever read and equally entertaining for adults.

In the spirit of my rare book digression comes this week’s Two Things.

(1) Smells Like Teen Mozart

The Strad reports that a string trio dated to Mozart’s early teenage years has been rediscovered in a library in Leipzig, Germany:

A previously unknown string trio from Mozart’s early years has been discovered in the archives of the music library of the Leipzig Municipal Libraries, according to a statement from the institution, one of the largest public music libraries in Germany.

Consisting of seven miniature movements for two violins and bass (including two minuets) and lasting a total of some twelve minutes, the C major trio ‘is thought to have been written in the mid to late 1760s’, the researchers posit – likely during the composer’s earliest teenage years and pre-dating his first visit to Italy in 1769….

The source was evidently Mozart’s sister, and so it is tempting to think that she preserved the work as a memento of her brother. Perhaps he wrote the Trio specially for her….

(Thanks to Brad Hale for the pointer to this story.) The Strad goes on to report that the musical piece, which has been named Ganz kleine Nachtmusik, “received its much-belated modern premiere on 19 September 2024 in Mozart’s native Salzburg.” This was followed “by the German premiere at Leipzig Opera on 21 September, with Vincent and David Geer playing the violin parts and Elisabeth Zimmermann on cello.” Watch it here and listen to the end, where the piece becomes even more lively and light-hearted:

(2) Most ancient Hebrew book, discovered in Afghan cave

The Free Press has this one:

In 2019 a curator from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and an elderly scholar from Jerusalem were at work on an odd manuscript: a pocket-sized Hebrew book of uncertain age and origin….

Some of the pages contained a previously unknown poem for the Jewish festival of Sukkot. On one page, an untrained scribe, perhaps a child practicing lessons, wrote out the Hebrew alphabet. Other pages had a version of the Haggadah, the text read by Jewish families at the festive Passover meal.

The Jerusalem scholar, Malachi Beit-Arié, had a hunch that the book’s story was other, and older, than it seemed…. When the radiometric results finally came back from the lab, they proved him right: The parchment dated to between 660 and 780 CE. This result didn’t mean a minor chronological adjustment. It meant that the mysterious little book had just been catapulted into a different league of antiquities.

The new date meant that the text of the Passover Haggadah wasn’t just ancient—it was the most ancient known to scholars. The book predated the first standardized Jewish siddur, or prayer book, by more than a century. The research team was holding, in fact, the oldest bound Hebrew book ever discovered.

Just as remarkable as the age of the codex is where it was found:

The book’s true place of origin, it seemed, was not Cairo, or Babylon, as some scholars thought, but Bamiyan, in the Hindu Kush 80 miles northwest of Kabul.

Bamiyan served for centuries as a stop along the great east-west trading routes known collectively as the Silk Road, and unlikely as this may seem now, Jews once lived here as a minority, not among Muslims but among Buddhists. At the same time the book was made by artisans cutting, folding, and binding animal skins in the 700s CE, Islam was surging across the region from Arabia, but had yet to conquer these mountains.

It goes on display, starting tomorrow, at the Museum of the Bible.

Other Things

• Mark your calendars for Wednesday, October 30, at 6:00 p.m., when Dr. Brad Hale delivers a lecture on C.S. Lewis as part of a First Pres lecture series.

• Scholars continue to “virtually unwrap” ancient scrolls using X-ray tomography and computer vision. A trove of charred scrolls at Herculaneum (near Pompei) is a gold mine.

• Hezbollah has begun targeting Nazareth and Galilee, “threatening countless holy places.” Cue the Christian condemnations? Not so much. Leftist Anglican clerics still think the problem is … (do I need to complete this sentence?).

Hope to see you Friday.

I write on September 11, 2024, the 23rd anniversary of that horrific day that changed the world, and the United States’ relationship to it, in ways that history is still unfolding. The anniversary this year comes on the heels of Hamas’s despicable murder of six hostages, including an American, Hersh Goldberg-Polin (may their memories be a blessing). That tragic event deserved more elevation in the public conscience, but it was quickly overshadowed by Tucker Carlson’s interview of a historian (so-called) sounding in historical revisionism, Holocaust denialism, and Nazi apologetics. Then there was last night’s presidential debate, in which we gained little additional insight on either candidate except perhaps that Vice President Harris is capable of clearing the exceedingly low bar that has been set for her.

And onward we march through the increasingly chaotic political present, which leaves me groping for waymarkers, the sort of “You Are Here” analyses that offer historical perspective and situate us in the moment and the place we find ourselves. I try not to “do politics” in this newsletter, but I do seek to understand the cultural, civilizational undercurrents that undergird our politics. So, this week’s Two Things is really many things grouped under two headings.

(1) 10/7, 9/11, and WW2

Today, The Free Press reprints, under the title “What September 11 Revealed,” a November 2001 essay by Jonathan Rosen, prefaced with the bracing observation: “Today it is possible to see the outline of the October 7 massacre nested in the mass murders of September 11, and to recognize, in the justifications and celebration of October 7, the portents of future barbarism.”

Stretching further back, the same outlet last week published an essay by (actual) WW2 historian Niall Ferguson on “The Return of Anti-History,” refuting in detail the claims of Tucker’s interviewee:

I have spent most of my adult life writing history books, most of them addressing in one way or another what still seem to me among the central questions of modern history: Why did the Germans, who in the 1920s appeared to be the most scientifically and culturally advanced people in the world, fall under the spell of Adolf Hitler and perpetrate the most odious crime of all: industrialized genocide? Why did the economic and intellectual success of the Jews after their nineteenth-century emancipation arouse such hatred? And why did the British Empire, for all its flaws, not succumb to the seemingly irresistible force of Nazism in 1940?

“I have never argued that Churchill was a saint,” Ferguson continues, but he “was the savior of Western civilization. Had he not stiffened British resolve … the repulsive, blood-drenched empire that was the Third Reich might conceivably have won the war.” And yet Ferguson cannot help but fear for the future:

It is surely the epitome of professional failure to have spent more than three decades writing, teaching, and speaking about these matters, and to have achieved so little that a nasty little Nazi apologist like Darryl Cooper can win an audience of millions. But that is apparently what happens when podcasts drive out books and anti-history drives out history.

(2) The West’s Civilizational Moment

At Providence, Robert Nicholson begins a fresh look at Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, a book whose last sentence in 1996 foretold that, “[i]n the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.” It was an idea widely panned at the time but which, Nicholson argues, history is bearing out:

To see civilizationally is to see the currents, not the waves. And with threats mounting on every side, we can’t afford to do otherwise. The Russia-Ukraine war; the Israel-Iran conflict; the rise of China; the self-immolation of the Islamic world; the nativist-migrant struggle in Europe; the identity crisis here in the US—in all these cases, a civilizational analysis does more than merely explain. Applied to real situations, it offers the basis for better policy.

Nicholson extends his analysis in a second installment at Providence, critiquing Netanyahu’s July 24 speech to Congress in which he called the Israel-Iran war “not a clash of civilizations” but “a clash between barbarism and civilization.” For Nicholson, this is a “small erro[r] in perception” that promises “huge strategic mistakes.” The aftermath of 9/11 is a case in point:

The simple awareness that bin Laden’s call for jihad against “crusaders and Zionists” was anything but fringe, being grounded in mainstream Islamic theology and popular among regular Muslims, would have helped President Bush grasp the limits of his freedom agenda without total victory and long-term occupation.

In the aftermath of 10/7, will we make the same mistake? “Our enemies are not barbarians. They are highly-intelligent defenders of a rival civilization,” Nicholson writes.

There are pragmatic reasons to pretend that hatred of Israel and the US isn’t ubiquitous in the Islamic world and to portray our enemies as deranged philistines raving at the gates of progress. The implications of the alternative are certainly depressing. But in a moment of global upheaval, it is much better to build our foreign policy strategy on a sober assessment of the truth….

Most societies are organized around some spiritual tradition which constitutes the moral core of a transnational civilization…. To pretend as if hundreds of millions of Muslims who see the Hamas massacre as morally justified—and who condemn the US preoccupation with Israel’s security—are depraved savages is to insult both them and ourselves.

Finally, deepening our engagement with the history of the West more broadly, two new projects are worthy of mention. The first is a new podcast from Tikvah, The Pillars, a weekly, two-year-long exploration of “Jerusalem, Athens, and the Western Mind” covering “the profound impact of Abraham and Moses, the enduring legacy of Hesiod and Homer, the philosophical inquiries of Plato and Aristotle, the virtues of Cicero and the vices of the Roman Empire, the intellects of Maimonides and Aquinas, the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, the literature of Shakespeare and Cervantes, the music of Bach and Mozart, and the poetry of Blake and Byron.” At every turn, Rabbi Rocklin examines “how the Jewish understanding of man as covenantal, sacrificial, and redeemable”—concepts central to Christianity, too—“was integral to the development of Western civilization.”

Second, the Daily Wire serves up Foundations of the West, a 5-part documentary series with Dr. Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Spencer Klavan, Jonathan Pageau, and Bishop Robert Barron exploring the ancient cities that shaped the West—Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome—and seeking to “uncover the profound legacies of these civilizations and their lasting impact on the modern world.”

As our public spaces increasingly become a great battlefield of civilizational war, we are being forced to confront anew the question that Lincoln posed nearly 161 years ago: whether our nation “or any nation” conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality “can long endure.”

Hope to see you at coffee.

(1) Into the religious void

Over the summer, I was struck by Russ Roberts’ account of his recent trip to Prague, in which he mourns the decline of Judaism and Christianity in the cultural life of Europe. “It’s a bit ironic for a Jew to sit in a church in Prague and reflect on what has been lost with the demise of Christianity in Europe,” Roberts writes. “You look at the statuary and the frescoes and you see an attempt to inspire human beings to rise above themselves and aspire to greatness. You see a vision of what humanity can be and of a better world…. Christianity was a revolution in how we human beings see ourselves.” But now, he notes, “the soaring music and soaring cathedrals are, like the synagogues of Prague, ancient history, a remnant of what once was.”

Paul Kingsnorth picks up the same theme in an essay last month titled “Into the Void.” The West isn’t “repaganizing,” he argues. It’s worse than that. We no longer believe in anything.

Say what you like about modern paganism, but however you quite define the word, it implies religious belief…. If we were really ‘re-paganising’, then, we would be returning to the worship of the old gods. And yet, despite all the Satanic witchery of popular culture, we are not actually doing so. What we are seeing [instead] is an aesthetic. Nobody would die for it. Nobody would fight for it. It is LARPing and play-acting. Rather than signifying a sinister new development or threatening new faith, it is a flimsy veil drawn over a gaping void.

“Exhibit A” for Kingsnorth is the drag-queen parody of the Last Supper from the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. The creators of this grotesque display aren’t pagans, he argues, because when criticized, they backtracked and crawfished:

They did that because they did not, in fact, believe in or respect the ‘gods’ that they were portraying. They were just playing with images that meant nothing to them, … blaspheming against the God of a long-dead culture, but not believing in the ones they pretended to put in its place….

In the West today, that means that we have to live in a culture without faith. Without faith in the Christian God, obviously, but without faith in anything else either. We are not pagans because pagans, like Christians, believe in something. We believe in nothing….

[N]o, this is not an atheist age either. It is not, I would say, any kind of ‘age’ at all. It has no shape. It has no centre. Nobody sits on its throne. It is, taken in the round, simply a vacuum. There is nothing here at all.

It is a void.

(2) Plankton, “atoms of the ocean”

Moving from the big ideas that form and deform civilization, we zero in on the tiny, unseen building blocks of ocean life: plankton. Ferris Jabr writes in The Guardian that “[p]lankton are so tiny and ubiquitous, they sometimes seem less like creatures within the ocean than atoms of the ocean itself. Without plankton, the modern ocean ecosystem – the very idea of the ocean as we understand it – would collapse.”

Plankton are also literal building blocks:

In fact, the vast majority of chalk and limestone formations on Earth, including large sections of the Alps, are the remains of plankton, corals, shellfish and other calcareous sea creatures. Every imposing edifice that humans have constructed with limestone, including the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colosseum and the Empire State Building, is a secret monument to ancient ocean life.

And they play a key role in our planetary thermostat:

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continuously dissolves into the ocean’s surface, where sun-loving phytoplankton incorporate it into their cells during photosynthesis…. When they die, they bump into each other, form little clumps and begin to sink, along with the fecal pellets of zooplankton, carrying carbon to deep, cold, dense water, where it may remain for thousands of years…, accumulating in layers of muck that eventually petrify and trap carbon for millions of years.

In parallel, carbon dioxide spewed by volcanoes combines with water vapour in the atmosphere, forming carbonic acid that falls to land in rain. Due to its slight natural acidity, rainwater reacts with and dissolves the planet’s crust. The chemical reactions involved in this weathering produce various minerals, salts and other molecules, which flow to the ocean via rivers, nourishing marine life. Certain types of cyanobacteria, plankton, corals and molluscs use calcium and bicarbonate ions produced by weathering to construct shells, sheaths, skeletons, reefs and stacked microbial mats called stromatolites. When such creatures die, their carbon-rich remains gradually accumulate in layers of compacted limestone sediment on the seafloor. Over great spans of time, tectonic activity subsumes and transforms the sediments, returning the carbon they contain to the planet’s surface in the form of new mountains or erupting volcanoes, thereby completing the cycle.

If Earth enters a torrential hothouse state, intense and frequent rainfall weathers rock more quickly than usual, flooding the ocean with minerals, nourishing life in the sea and removing carbon from the atmosphere faster than volcanoes can replenish it. Over hundreds of thousands to millions of years, this feedback loop cools the Earth.

Conversely, if ice smothers most of the sea and land, the water cycle effectively stalls, the productivity of plankton and other ocean life drops, and carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, eventually warming the planet. This entire process is therefore largely controlled by life and ultimately allows life to exist on Earth….

Another treat of perusing this piece: the magnified images of microscopic plankton, and a sideways journey into Ernst Haeckel’s mesmerizing 1904 book Art Forms in Nature, which you can browse in full here.

Other Things

• Sky2K: Airlines are running out of flight numbers.

• Magazines are dying, and so are book publishers as authors become more independent.

• Radio Caroline, the pirate radio station broadcasting from sea, turned 60 years old this year.

• Christian virtue class starts next Thursday night, September 12. Sign up here.

(1) The anti-Israel ideology behind the campus protests is coming for America.

The canard that Israel is a “settler colonialist” state is easy enough to refute if one knows even a little history. But the broader theory of settler colonialism is less easily dislodged. At the Wall Street Journal, Adam Kirsch explains that “in recent years, theorists and writers inspired by the idea of settler colonialism have created what amounts to a new countermyth of American history,” one that aims “to change the way Americans understand the history of their country”:

For a long time, Americans were taught that the creation of the United States was a great and providential event. More was at stake in American history than America itself; … it was a test of the human capacity for self-government….

Of course, … the land of freedom was built in part by enslaved people from Africa, on territory conquered from Native Americans. But these parts of the American story were tacitly agreed, by the official tellers of that story, to be inessential. That was the price of sustaining the belief that the history of America was synonymous with the history of liberty.

For the ideology of settler colonialism, too, the United States is the hinge on which world history turned. The difference is that, for this new school, it was a turn toward damnation, not redemption…. Because settlement is not a past event but a present structure, every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population is, and always will be, a settler, rather than a legitimate inhabitant.

Lurking behind this ideology is Rosseau’s concept of the “noble savage” and an ahistoric fundamentalism. After all, people do not sprout from the land like so many plants. They always come from somewhere—by design, by accident, because they were driven out or drawn in. They mix their labor with the land so that it yields its increase. They build societies that are, by degrees, just or unjust. They protect and defend their land; sometimes they abandon it for another place. They conquer and are conquered.

These are the real and complex facts of human history that explain and justify patterns of migration, settlement, civilization, and flourishing. Settler colonialism flattens all of it into the same sort of binary—oppressed/oppressor, inhabitant/settler—that characterizes so much of faddish academic theory. Kirsch highlights the broader political currents, too:

It is no accident that the ideology of settler colonialism is flourishing today at the same time as right-wing populism. Both see our turbulent political moment as an opportunity to permanently change the way Americans think about their country. And as is often the case, the extremes of right and left are united in disparaging the compromises of liberalism, which they see as weakly evasive. In the case of settler colonialism, this means rejecting the understanding of American history that has been mainstream since the mid-20th century—that it is a story of slow progress toward fulfilling the nation’s founding promise of freedom for all.

(2) Fertility is contagious.

Speaking of population growth and decline, it turns out that infertility is socially contagious. At the Washington Examiner, Timothy P. Carney criticizes the notion, common among economists, that low birthrates will self-correct. “[A]ll recent history around the world points in the opposite direction. The past few decades have shown us that low birth rates cause even lower birth rates.” It’s not hard to understand why: “A culture with fewer children … is a culture less welcoming to children.”

But fertility rates can also spiral upward:

[There are] subcultures that are resisting the trend — where more babies lead to more babies. In these places, pregnancy seems to be contagious.

Israel or Utah are two such places where larger families seem endemic. Obviously, the values of Judaism and the Church of Latter Day Saints nudge women and men to be more open to parenthood and large families, but even non-Jews and non-Mormons in these places are abnormally fecund.

Secular Jews in Israel have lower birthrates than the more religious Israelis, but with a birthrate of 1.96 in 2020, they still have far higher birthrates than the average European woman…. [L]ikewise, … Catholics in Utah have a higher birthrate than the Catholics in any other state.

Kemp Mill is a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., anchored by two modern Orthodox synagogues. Kemp Mill looks very different from other neighborhoods in Montgomery County, not only because the residents eschew driving on Saturday but also because families of six, seven, or more are a common sight.

… If you pass through Kemp Mill on a weekend or a summer afternoon, you will see little gangs of children roaming the neighborhood and this hints at the feedback effects. The more children roaming the streets, the easier it is for any individual parent to let his or her children roam the streets, which makes parenting easier and makes having a little platoon of your own more imaginable.

Also, the more neighbors and friends you have who have a toddler and a newborn, the easier it is to have a semblance of a social life while you have a toddler and a newborn. Coffees planned around naptime replace lengthy boozy brunches, and playground picnics replace dinners at fancy restaurants.

Other Things

• Virtues in the Christian Life: Adam Pelser’s Thursday night course runs September 12 - October 24, 6:30-8:00 pm at The NLD Commons (332 N. Tejon St.). Sign up here.

• Religious Freedom Institute launches Campus Faith Alliance to enable religious students to live out their faith and “model peaceful pluralism” on campus.

• Intelligent plants?

• After Most Reluctant Convert, a second Lewis movie aims to portray the middle period of his life, including his rise to fame and “strange” domestic setup.

Hope to see you Friday.

Let’s meet this Friday, August 23, at 6:30 am at Loyal North (Voyager/Ridgeline). It will be good to see many of you, catch up on your summers, and learn what fall has in store. We have some incredible newcomers who will be welcome additions to our number.

Remember our guiding principle of 0-1-2: zero commitment, one hour (or so), and Two Things. Let’s get to it.

(1) Lewis’s Life at Oxford

Given our love of Lewis, it seems only appropriate to inaugurate this season’s Two Things with a new book on his life as an Oxford don. At The Critic, Armand D’Angour reviews C.S. Lewis’s Oxford by Simon Horobin. Are there yet more stones of his personal and professional life to overturn and examine? It seems there are:

[Lewis] initially rejected the offer of the Cambridge professorship owing to a reluctance to leave his home in Oxford, … saying that he was precluded from moving by his “peculiar domestic setup”…. The domestic setup was indeed peculiar since, in addition to [his brother Warnie’s heavy drinking], the house was home to Mrs Jane Moore and her daughter Maureen, whose welfare Lewis had undertaken to oversee after Jane’s son, Paddy Moore, had been killed in action in 1918…. The nature of his relationship with Mrs Moore has been a subject of speculation….

Lewis was by his own admission less successful as an administrator than as a scholar. His year as vice-president of Magdalen in 1941 involved sitting on “all college committees”…. Lewis did not enjoy dealing with such minutiae…. He was required to write an official account of his term, and did so as a five-act drama in blank verse entitled “The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald”. It survives in the college archives, as does a large corpus of his letters and book drafts written in his neatly slanted handwriting (the illustrations in this book are a pleasure to peruse).

“Friendship was key to Lewis’s life,” writes Horobin. “His ideal evening was staying up late in a friend’s college room, ‘talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes’.”

(2) The Death of the Magazine

This account by Ted Gioia on why magazines, as a business, “almost always get smaller, not bigger” is an insightful look at the depressing economic trends and why even beloved periodicals are in a downward death spiral.

In the year 2024, the traditional magazine is rarely the best platform for serious journalism—and that’s true for both print and digital media. The legacy outlets are all chasing short form ‘content’ (ugh!) now, and have lost confidence in good writing.

But here’s the strange thing. Readers are hungry for the longer, smarter writing that these periodicals refuse to publish. As a result, readers increasingly bypass the magazine and deal directly with writers [such as via Substack and other platforms].

That’s the new reality in media. Readers are now more loyal to writers than they are to periodicals. They seek them out. They trust them more. The magazine as an aggregating concept is increasingly irrelevant….

So if you see a newsstand filled with magazines, go and enjoy it now. Because in the future, you will only see something like that in a museum of defunct media.

I’ll mourn their passing. But those who work in journalism can’t waste too many tears on these dinosaurs—these disappearing magazines of the past. That’s because we all need to get to work building something solid to take their place.

Other Things

• Thursday nights: Adam Pelser’s Thursday night course returns this fall, likely starting the second week of September. The book we’re studying is TBD, probably something on virtue ethics. Stay tuned.

• Biblical archaeology roundup: Giant Second Temple period quarry uncovered | Long lost church altar rediscovered, casually leaning against a wall | 3,300-year-old ship, the oldest ever found in deep seas, discovered off Israeli coast

• Re-enchantment: Apparently, record numbers of pilgrims are journeying to see holy sites around the world. Our little project here to document and visit Colorado’s holy places made some modest gains this summer. We hiked Notch Mountain to see Holy Cross in late June, and I added Christ of the Mines in Silverton, CO to the list.

Hope to see you Friday.

✟ Christian (Catholic) | Silverton, CO

Situated at the base of Anvil Mountain, at an elevation of over 9,300 feet, this impressive 16-foot statue of Jesus overlooks the historic mining town of Silverton, Colorado.

The statue was conceived in 1958 by the Catholic Men’s Club of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church under the leadership of Fr. Joseph Halloran. After selecting the site, they collected donations from Silverton’s citizens. Local stonemasons built the base and grotto with local stone. The statue itself consists of 12 tons of Italian Carrara marble, the same source as Michelangelo’s David. The figure of Jesus is depicted with outstretched arms, the Most Sacred Heart upon his breast and the crown of thorns at his feet.

The full structure was completed in 1959 and dedicated. The top plaque affixed to the base reads:

This shrine erected in honor of CHRIST OF THE MINES by the people of Silverton to ask God’s blessing on the mining industry of the San Juans 1958-1959

In 1978, a seeming miracle occurred. On June 4 that year, high in the mountains above Silverton, Lake Emma breached and flooded the caverns of the Sunnyside Mine. The water pressure was so intense that it shot mining equipment out of the portals and into the air. But June 4 was a Sunday—the miners were not at work. Not a single life was lost. In 1982, a new plaque was added to the base of the statue to commemorate the miracle:

In thanksgiving to Christ of the Mines for deliverance of entire work force when Lake Emma flooded Sunnyside Mine June 4 (Sunday, mine closed) 1978

St. Patrick Centennial
August 15, 1982

The shrine can be found on 15th Street / Scenic Drive in Silverton, a short drive along a smooth dirt road east of State Hwy 550 (the “Million Dollar Highway”) and then a brief hike up a steep hill.

A metal offering box, with three crosses on its hinged top, is located nearby, where pilgrims and visitors leave offerings, prayers, and devotional objects. Note also the shamrock, a symbol of St. Patrick.

Sources: Lynn Arave, Deseret News | Atlas Obscura | Catholic Travel Guide | Linda Wommack, Colorado’s Historic Churches (2019), pp.125-26 (incorrectly calling it “Christ of the Mountains Shrine” and differing with other sources on the height (“twelve feet”) and weight (“five tons”)).

Visit date: July 24, 2024.

» Part of the “Holy Places” series at Blessings of Liberty «