The law is good, used lawfully, after all. Through it, we learn the precepts of right and wrong. And by meditation upon it, we learn its deeper truths—there, we find a well of wisdom both knowable and yet never fully comprehended, for God is its author and source.

We tend to think of law as an algorithm. If we do wrong, there is one precise consequence. So our relationship to law approximates if-then causality. Sometimes, we can be a bit more sophisticated, knowing that laws have various caveats and nuances. But as a whole, we cannot help but see law as rules that come to us outwardly to limit our choices.

How We View Law

While not unique to us per se, historian Lorraine Daston, in her book Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, explains that we have tended to prioritize algorithms in our culture. According to her, rules can be models like the Rule of St. Benedict, algorithms that use metrics, or principles that require expert judgment. We prioritize algorithmic rules today, and so we experience law like a set of rules.

In Morality, Servais Pinckaers points out that during the medieval era, philosophers tended to think of law as external to us, given by divine command, and so our relationship to law aimed at aligning our choices with divine commands. This led to thinking about law as limiting our freedom, and morality as casuistry, or cases of conscience where one decides to do one action over another.

Both of the large-scale changes contributed to specific ways we now view freedom and law. Of course, it would be a fool’s errand to try to pin our current views of freedom and law on our preference for algorithmic rules and medieval voluntarism. But it is fair to say these two patterns of thinking help to explain why we intuit law as an eternal standard that limits our choices today.

And it further explains why we read biblical commands and laws as proscribing our freedom by limiting what we can and should do. Many of us think of the Bible as giving a list of dos and donts which we learn by discerning God’s will in each command and aligning our wills (choices) with divine command.

So the Torah of Moses, for example, appears to us to be about rules that we must obey. And the evangelical commands of Jesus or the apostles feel like external commands that we simply must obey. Certainly, we may say that the Spirit empowers us to obey God’s will. But the paradigm remains largely the same: law comes to us as an external standard that we must will to obey.

Biblical Law as Wisdom

But I do not think this is how we should understand biblical law. In fact, biblical law is more like wisdom than it is algorithmic rules. When Moses describes the statutes and rules he had given Israel (Deut. 4:5), he says, “Keep them and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people’” (Deut. 4:6, emphasis mine here and throughout).

The lawgiver describes the statutes and rules as productive of wisdom and understanding. This explains why, for example, God tells Joshua, “You shall meditate on [the Torah] day and night” (Josh. 1:8). It also makes sense of why Psalm 1 says of the happy person: “his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night” (Ps. 1:2). The Bible invites meditative reading of the Torah of Moses, which reading results not just in wisdom and understanding but also delight.

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