Jesus and the Word by Rudolf Bultmann
Chapter 3: The Teaching of Jesus: The Will of God
I. Jesus as Rabbi
3. The Jewish Ethic of Obedience
For Jewish legalistic religion as well as for Jesus, the statement holds that not adherence to the Law but understanding of the Law is the characteristic element. For Jewish religion as for Jesus the multifarious laws of the Old Testament had in great part lost their original meaning. This is clear from the fact that the Old Testament Scripture -- laws, historical books and prophecies -- were for Judaism a unity, that the distinction between different stages of Old Testament religion and morality was not felt at all.
In the Old Testament the stages of national and cultic religion and their regulations are found confusedly mingled. The standpoint of national religion appears in the utterances in which
God’s interests are identified with those of the people, when for example Israel’s war is assumed to be God’s war, Israel’s honor God’s honor, Israel’s country God’s country. It is shown also in the social laws, which were to keep the life of the people healthy and vigorous. The standpoint of cultic religion appears not only in the legislation for temple and sacrifice, but also in all the ritual regulations which burdened the life of the individual. The primitive conceptions of clean and unclean lie at the bottom of these rules; there are certain things and certain events in natural human life (like birth and death) which bring man under the influence of mysterious dæmonic forces; there are actions and situations in life which are full of these dangerous powers or are threatened by them. For all such cases complicated rules are necessary in order to avoid the dangers connected with them. Thence arise the regulations about sacrifices, cleanness and uncleanness, marriage, dead bodies, and the rest.
In later Judaism the laws of the national code had largely lost their original meaning under the pressure of the wholly changed political conditions and partly changed economic conditions.
God was no longer the God of the holy land, but the Lord of the world. The regulations for cult and ritual were no longer understood in their original sense. But all the old regulations were preserved; they were sanctified by the authority of Scripture, and they were to be scrupulously observed because they were commanded by God. Obligation to obedience depended no longer upon content but upon formal authority; not what was commanded determined the will of the person acting, but the fact that such and such was commanded. This attitude could endure, because along with these national and cultic laws the Old Testament contains also an abundance of universal ethical precepts for the permanent relationships between man and man, for
situations of life which remain essentially the same in all ages. Thus the verdict of the moral consciousness expressed itself in precepts such as are formulated in the decalogue, or in the preaching of the prophets with their demand for justice and righteousness, instructions of
universal validity which were obeyed not only because of the formal authority but because they command a morality consistent with conscience.
It cannot be said however that the religion of later Judaism was determined by the prophetic preaching. For its peculiar characteristic is the conviction that because of the formal authority of Scripture all the commands of the Law are equally binding. Also Palestinian Judaism did not avail itself of an allegorical interpretation of the mass of incomprehensible and impracticable commands in order to find in them an intelligible moral meaning This method was used only in Hellenistic Judaism under the influence of Greek thinking, as it was later in the Christian church, when it needed to come to terms with the Old Testament laws. Rather, the commandments were kept because they were commanded. Perhaps here and there the idea entered in, that through such laws as those of circumcision and the Sabbath the chosen people was separated from the Gentiles and designated as belonging to God. But that is not the main point; the fundamental desire is to be obedient to the sacred Law, without reference to what it commands. Obedience is the essence of Jewish morality. This is well expressed in the words of a rabbi, who declines to discuss any critical question on the content of the law of purification, explaining that the content is irrelevant: "Death does not make unclean, nor water clean. But the Holy One has said, I have established a Law, have fixed a decree; you are not to transgress my decree, which is written;
this is the distinguishing mark of my Law."
As an ethic of obedience the Jewish morality was not designed from the human standpoint; that is, its purpose is not the realization of an ideal of man or of humanity. It is definitely opposed to all humanistic ethics, for in it not man but only the glory of God is important. A basis for what is good and is therefore required of man cannot then be established by reference to some
conception of man, by derivation from the rational ideas which are inherent in the mind of man.
Hence the idea of moral personality is lacking, and there is no real doctrine of virtue, like that which developed in connection with the Greek conception of man, and which Philo was soon to make acceptable to Alexandrian Jews under the influence of Greek philosophy. The true Jew does not know the concept "virtue" at all, and has no word for it. Hence the notion of an ideal of human society, which is to be realized through human activity, is wanting; there can be no
analogy here to the Greek idea of the State. Obviously there can be no so-called value-ethic here either, where nothing has value in itself. Only obedience gives an action its significance.
Since this obedience is obedience to a purely formal authority, in the late Jewish ethic there appears the commingling of moral and ritual laws, and the overemphasis on ritual and
ceremonial rules, which Jesus denounces in the statement that the Pharisees strain out gnats and swallow camels. (Matt. 23 :24) This is also the reason for the preponderance of prohibitions (there are 365 as compared with 278 positive commands), and for the infinitely detailed requirements, for the lack of broad moral principles, and for the total ignoring of important aspects of life. The ideal religious Jew is accordingly the man who studies the Law of the Lord day and night, who knows how to find, through ingenious interpretations of the Law, the
necessary rules of conduct for each situation of life and every relationship. Just because conduct is not determined by unified intelligible basic principles, but is regulated by the formal authority of the Law, the task of the scribe is to "make a fence around the Torah," that is, by endless acute deductions from Scripture to find rules for cases not foreseen in the Law, which nevertheless confront men in their present life.
It is indeed true that a way out of this multiplicity and diversity was striven for; the scribes at the time of Jesus discussed the question of the central requirement of the Law, and they sought to classify, to combine, or to set up certain moral principles as fundamentally important. "Love your neighbor as yourself" one rabbi cited as the quintessence of the Law. Another, "What you do not wish done to you, do to no one else." A third, "It is all one, whether a man does much or little, if only he turns his heart toward heaven (that is, toward God)." Simplicity and singleness of heart, that a man should completely will the good, is designated in a Jewish writing (the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs) as the true requirement of God. And there developed the formulation of universal ethical precepts which were valid also for the Gentiles, the "Way on earth."
Criticism of formal legalism also exists. From the rabbis a statement comes down to us similar to that which according to Christian tradition Jesus uttered, "The Sabbath is given to you, not you to the Sabbath." (Cf. Mark 2 :27) Among the rabbis too the principle is accepted that one may break the Sabbath in order to save a life. But when we read with what casuistic rules the
practical following of this principle is burdened, we see that the fundamental idea of the Jewish ethic, blind obedience, still dominates. The will of God is the formal authority of Scripture; ethic is therefore not distinguishable from law.
Along with this view, belief in the meritoriousness of conduct according to the Law easily established itself. In fact the dependence on good works, the pride in good works, evidently played a fatal part in late Judaism. The religious man expects to be able to call God’s attention to his merits, he believes that he has a claim on God. This comes to expression especially in the idea that over and above performance of duty there are some acts beyond duty -- good works, such as almsgiving, prayer, and fasting. The relation to God is thus conceived as a legal contract relation; God must reward the righteous and punish the wicked. An index of this conception is the absurd dispute in which several rabbis engaged: what will become of the men whose good and bad deeds are equal ?
At the same time we should utterly misunderstand the Jewish ethic if we supposed that it was entirely dominated by thought of reward. However popular this idea may have been among the lower classes, it does not give Jewish religion its peculiar character. Rather the fundamental trait of this religion is obedience. Obedience which is not the fulfillment of a contract, but which arises from reverence before the majesty of the holy God. That the conduct of man should not proceed from selfish aspiration after benefits, but from the fear of God, "in the name of " God, is again and again emphasized as a protest against the morality motivated by desire of reward. "If you have kept the Law, count it not merit, since for that you were created," runs a rabbinical maxim. And the word of Rabbi Antigonus of Socho (of pre-Christian times) has already been cited: "Be not like servants who serve their master because of the need of wages. Be rather like servants who serve their master without need of wages."
One should not, then, designate the Jewish ethic as an ethic of works and contrast it with an ethic of intention. For since finally only one thing, obedience, is required, the Jewish ethic is throughout an ethic of motive. It is not completely so, since in Jewish thought motive has no intrinsic value, is not viewed as an attribute of man or as an inherent tendency of the human will.
Obedience is not to be considered in this sense, as an attribute -- it is far more closely related to activity, thus it is not a quality of the ideal man (in which case man would again be regarded humanistically), but is actual only in the instant of action. Moreover obedience is possible only because man stands immediately under the authority of God. The motive of obedience is, then, something which a man dependent on himself, as the Greek conceived him, cannot possess, for he recognizes no authority to which there could be any question of obedience; he knows only the law of the perfecting of his own nature by his own achievement.