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ROYALISTS, REPUBLICANS, FIFTH MONARCHISTS AND LEVELLERS
abiding transcendent principles from Old Testament
commands using this method. As Kaiser frames it, how
do we confront “the problem of how one derives
principles, “middle axioms,” from these specific
commands of God that were originally addressed to a
people in another culture, another time, and another
situation than ours?” 352
The issue of the high level of specificity of Old
Testament commands must be boldly faced,
for much of the Old Testament law comes to
us not as moral absolutes and in a book of
moral, social, and legal abstractions. Instead,
it comes as a host of specific enactments
distinctively relevant to particular times,
persons, and places. It is the awkwardness of
this obviously “dated” material that threatens
to doom our whole discussion to failure.
But the problem of particularity and specificity
were not meant to prejudice the universal
usefulness of these portions of the Bible;
rather they were intended in many ways to
reduce our labours by pointing directly to the
concrete, real, personal, and practical
application of the injunctions proffered. Since
the text was given primarily for the common
people, the message was relayed on a level
where they would find it easiest to grasp. Had
the truth been confined to abstract and
theoretical axioms, the prerogative would have
been confined to the elite and the scholarly. 353
The “particularity and specificity” of the law did not
prevent its further application outside those initial
situations which the law originally aimed at, as
evidenced by Old and New Testament illustrations.
Since there is a single underlying principle and
since a particular law uniquely aimed at a
particular situation could be repeated two or
three times in the Torah, for quite different
applications, it is clear that one and the same
law had multiple equity or applications even
while it retained a single meaning. 354
Our concern is with political and governmental material
embedded in Old Testament commands of a moral and
civil, and possibly ceremonial nature. What is the
procedure for teasing out or abstracting political
principles or middle axioms from an assortment of
specific commands? The short answer is that it is the
same as that for deriving any other matter of wider
societal application. Kaiser states that “Scripture itself
must supply” these principles, which in turn, “must not
be so general and so all embracing that they give very
little guidance in dealing with specific applications.” 355
As part of this principalising process, we must recognise
that the Bible contains “four levels of generality and
particularity,” beginning with God’s supreme command
of absolute devotion and obedience to Him as
demanded in Deuteronomy 6:5 and Matthew 22:37,
and moving to the next relational level of neighbourly
love as commanded in Leviticus 19:18 and
Matthew 22:39. The Decalogue represents a more
specific application of these two primary commands in
“ten parts,” and the numerous cases in turn “relate to
one or more of the Ten Commandments.” 356
The next step renders the specificity of the case laws
into “the generality of middle axioms or universal
principles,” and does so “by observing the morality and
theology that undergirds and informs each law.” To find
this substance, it must be determined if a “theological or
moral reason is explicitly given”; if any “direct citations or
indirect allusions, or historical references” are associated
with any situations or lessons which predate the
command; if any potential analogous passages which
more clearly reveal “dependence on moral law and
theology” exist, and then practice the “principle of
legitimate inference or implication to extend what is
written into a series of parallel commands, where the
moral or theological grounds for what is written and
what is inferred remain the same.” 357
The emphasis of the principalising approach is upon the
divine perspective and intention for human
relationships and conduct. It assumes that God has,
fundamentally, delivered propositions, prescriptions
and ethical commands to order Israel’s relationships
and ours, all of which are universal and absolute in
nature, not time-bound and antiquated. The specificity
of commands does not result in interpretive paralysis,
but provides a means of moving outward towards a
universal principle for re-application to modern issues.
Kaiser’s summary says it well:
But the fact that the Old Testament prescribes—
and what it prescribes has an internal
consistency with the whole Old Testament
canon, which has often been derived from
what are specific injunctions in which can be
discerned general or universalisable principles—
forms the heart of the case for the possibility
of Old Testament ethics. 358
355
Ibid., 157.
352
Ibid., 149.
353
Ibid., 155.
354
Ibid., 156.
356
Ibid., 159.
357
Ibid.
358
Kaiser, Toward Old Testament Ethics, 29.
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