Yeshua Explored
17th April 2023
Modern Commandments
How do we live our lives?
As society in the West became less Biblically-motivated and more inclined towards man’s perceived needs than God’s suggestions, the impact of the Ten Commandments as religious statements began to dwindle. We enter the age of the modern philosophers.
Thomas Hobbes, in the sixteenth century, saw the Commandments as political, to help the rulers to establish peace and keep the population in order. He was the son of an Anglican priest and, despite being the tutor of Charles II, rebelled to a sufficient degree to have his books banned by the Catholic Church and Oxford University. He had no care for the inner life and the salvation of the soul, his view of the Commandments are simply as practical rules that the dutiful citizen was obliged to follow, as interpreted by the King. He had a high view of the King but a pessimistic view of the life of the common man, “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short”. His philosophy even gave powers to the King to decide the choice of religion for his people, so it is clear that he had little grasp of Biblical faith and the free will of man.
John Locke, in the seventeenth century, was the best known of the English philosophers. He was one of the architects of the Glorious Revolution, the plot to install William of Orange as Protestant king of England, to keep the Catholics at bay and also one of the brains behind the Constitution of the United States. He was an empiricist, who test everything and rely on practice rather than theory. His interpretation of the Ten Commandments was as a set of moral imperatives, his catchphrase would be do this and live. The emphasis was not on acts of a born-again believer, but rather conduct brought about through a rational mind. He could see the English Constitution, the legal underpinning of our Nation, as a set of statutes that owe their origin to the Commandments, if not their current form.
In the Eighteenth Century Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu had both a grand name and grand designs on formulating a moral code for the society in which he lived. His plan was a pragmatic one, to compare various religious and secular codes and decide which would work for the best. Which was the most useful religion for a stable society? He plundered the Ten Commandments without quoting from them and, with input from the Noahic and Essene codes, mixed with the ancient Greek Stoics, formulated a moral code containing fourteen principles, some of them a bit woolly and obscure to our modern ears; to observe justice, to do no ill to anyone, to keep faith, to hate injustice, to command with modesty, to always be truthful, to avoid unlawful gain, to carry that which signals true greatness, to despise pleasure and pain, to be a good citizen, to regard riches as vanity, to labour for the happiness of mankind, to exercise one’s duties and to honour the sacred spirit within all. There is, in common with the thinking of the day, little ‘God’ element in this list.
Immanuel Kant was the great rationalist at that time. Although raised as a Christian, the central principals of his thoughts were … his thoughts. He paid lip service to the Commandments only in the sense of the Gospel summary, love God above everything and thy neighbour as thyself. Thomas Jefferson, in the USA around the same time, was a bit more generous but still saw everything, even the Commandments, through the lens of his own rational mind. He would particularly stress three of them, not to murder, steal or bear false witness but was dismissive of the rest of them.
Later in the eighteenth century came Jeremy Bentham, one of the fiercest critics of the Ten Commandments. He was the founder of the Utilitarian Movement, where right actions are judged by their usefulness and consequences. Do they produce pleasure or pain was one consideration? The greatest happiness for the greatest number, was another. Bentham was unimpressed with the use of the Commandments as a basis of the human laws of England, despite Alfred the Great getting the ball rolling all of those centuries earlier. His was a rejection of God at the outset, rejecting God’s laws was just a consequence of this. Hegel, in the same century, was also no friend of God’s laws. He created a philosophy of history that viewed the Ten Commandments as a primitive, tribal and exclusive code of a superstitious Oriental people (the Jews).
In the Nineteenth century, Arthur Hugh Clough, a noted poet and assistant to Florence Nightingale, wrote the following satirical poem about the Ten Commandments, the Latest Decalogue:
Thou shalt have one God only; who would tax himself to worship two?
God’s image nowhere shalt thou see, save haply in the currency:
Swear not at all; since for thy curse thine enemy is not the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend will help to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all from whom promotion may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive officiously to keep alive:
Adultery it is not fit or safe, for women, to commit:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat, when ’tis so lucrative to cheat:
False witness not to bear be strict; and cautious, ere you contradict.
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition sanctions the keenest competition.
As with all satire, it speaks cuttingly into the cultural climate of the day and this poem served to show up the hypocrisy and lip service to moral issues that prevailed in those times in England.
Also in the Nineteenth Century, the empty-souled Friedrich Nietzsche, the man who declared God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him carries on this destructive trend. He had a twisted trust that Man would create universal goals to supplant God’s laws, which turned out an impossibility as eternal truths have to be viewed objectively and anything that comes out of the mind of flawed man is always going to be subjective, biased and self-serving. This has given us the horrendously evil morality of Marxism and Nazism and countless other dangerous ideas in the 20th Century. Nietzsche also said, “each one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes if it mistakes his own duty for the concept of duty in general”. In other words, we all decide what is right and what’s right for you may not be right for me. The Ten Commandments, with its absolute truth, runs counter to this and no wonder Nietzsche hated it and called it an affront to man’s freedom to choose.
Our current postmodern society follows on the trend started by the rationalist philosophers, then further developed by Nietzsche and Marx, providing an environment where objective truth is so undervalued that the Ten Commandments are seen as having no validity at all and have morphed into an upside-down parody, The Sinners Charter.
This is an extract from the book, Sinner’s Charter: Are the ten commandments for today?, available for £10 at https://www.sppublishing.com/the-sinners-charter-260-p.asp
