‘In the pages that follow I do not aim at anything especially creative’ is probably not a sentence I would use to start my own book, but it does capture something of the unpretentious yet confident style that runs through Gilbert Meilaender's Thy Will Be Done: The Ten Commandments and the Christian Life. The author reflects on the Decalogue as a respected, elder theologian in a manner that merits our consideration. Much of the book revisits ethical issues Meilaender has written about throughout his career, topics like abortion, euthanasia, parenthood and same-sex marriage. Even so, the book is a little more creative and interesting than its opening sentence would lead readers to believe.
The first chapter focuses on ‘the law of Christ’. Here Meilaender adeptly handles a standard problem in Lutheran theology, namely, the problem of how to understand the place of the law in the Christian life. The gospel means Christians are free from the law, but that does not mean they can simply throw morality out the window. How then are they really free? Meilaender suggests the solution to this difficulty is to distinguish between works of the law, on which Christians must not rely, and the law as such, which Christians can accept and embrace. The law gives instruction about the shape of the Christian life, a shape which has both the form and substance of freedom.
Meilaender thus argues on behalf of what is often called the ‘third use’ of the law. This reviewer finds his argument compelling, although one might push on it by asking if the crucial distinction is really between works of the law and the law as such. The Christian life takes on a definite form in a way that resembles obedience to the law, but there is a difference between obeying the rules and obeying a person. The law is a pedagogue not simply in the sense in that it points out what we would do if we were without sin, but also, and more deeply, because it provides the scaffolding from which we encounter Christ himself. Christians are free from the law in every sense when they learn to hear and follow Jesus.
In the body of the book Meilaender uses the commandments ‘as an invitation to reflect upon the importance of five different “bonds” that unite human beings in community: the marriage bond, the family bond, the life bond, the possession bond, and the speech bond’ (p. xi). In terms of structure, this means the book's chapters are organised around the bonds which Meilaender has identified rather than individual commandments. Meilaender discusses the marriage bond first under which he places the sixth commandment; the family bond second under which he places the fourth commandment; the life bond next under which he places the fifth commandment; the possessions bond next under which he places the seventh, ninth, tenth and third commandments; and the speech bond last, under which he places the eighth and second commandments.
Some of these groupings may strike readers as, well, creative. Meilaender's decision to group the commandments against stealing and coveting together with the commandment to honour the sabbath looks odd at first, but actually leads to some interesting reflections. The seventh, ninth and tenth commandments invite us to think about the proper relation to the things we possess. If Christians have sometimes viewed material possessions as questionable or bad, the truth is more complicated. A ‘life marked only by renunciation and not also by enjoyment fails to see that our world remains God's good creation even when it is scarred and disordered by sin’ (p. 88). Learning to honour the sabbath frees us from the anxiety that might cause us to clutch at our possessions, by teaching us to trust in God and hand things over to him.
This reviewer did find Meilaender's decision to treat the marriage bond separately from the family bond somewhat puzzling. I suspect (admittedly without evidence) that Meilaender may have separated marriage from the family bond because he wanted to emphasis the importance of sexual differentiation to our co-humanity. Without disputing the scriptural warrants for that traditional view, I do wonder if the point gets overdone today in response to the controversies over gender and sexual orientation.
Without weighting this observation too much, I note that Meilaender considers the sixth commandment (which concerns adultery and the marriage bond) before the fourth (which concerns the family bond). Perhaps the sixth commandment is better viewed as subsequent to, and embedded in, the fourth commandment. This is not to criticise Meilaender's characterisation of marriage, but rather to pose a question about its relation to the family bond. The second table of the Decalogue begins by enunciating a positive obligation to honour our parents. By implication, one would think, we should honour our grandparents, our great-grandparents and, indeed, our extended family. We can think of marriage as embedded in a larger nexus of familial and communal relationships, and doing so would certainly cast the prohibition against adultery in a different light. It would mean that a man who commits adultery not only wrongs his wife, but also brings dishonour to his parents and shame upon his children.
That a book can raise these sorts of questions, however, is more of an endorsement than a criticism. Thy Will Be Done is quite suitable for church study groups and likely to serve as the starting point for good discussions.
