a critique of "But I Say Unto You", John Reisinger (http://www.soundofgrace.com/butisay/butisay.html, 1997), reviewed by Joseph M. Gleason
OUTLINE
The New Covenant Theology (NCT) movement suggests that Jesus is a new and better lawgiver than Moses, and that He established this position with His "but I say unto you" statements in the Sermon on the Mount. According to NCT, Jesus extended, changed, and abrogated various elements of Old Testament Law. In 1997, John Reisinger wrote "But I Say Unto You" to support these claims of NCT. This paper is a critique of these NCT claims.
“How are we to understand Christ's teaching in the Sermon on the Mount as it relates to our present relationship to the Law of Moses? Is Christ contrasting His teaching with the Law of Moses . . . ? Or, is He only contradicting the Pharisee's interpretation of Mosaic Law?”
The above questions are posed by John Reisinger in his work, “But I Say Unto You”. Reisinger’s questions are valid, and are at the very heart of the debate between Covenant Theology and New Covenant Theology.
Multiple times in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus quotes Mosaic laws. He follows each quotation with the phrase, “But I say unto you . . . .” Then He goes on to speak in greater detail about that particular aspect of God’s law. What are we supposed to make of this? Covenant Theologians say that Jesus was merely explaining Old Testament law more clearly. New Covenant Theologians like Reisinger say that Jesus was “contrasting” His teaching with Old Testament law, and that Christ was actually instituting new law which had never been revealed before.
Reisinger makes a very clear blanket-assertion in his final chapter:
"Christ is saying things that were not stated in the law in the Old Testament Scriptures nor can all of the things that He said be 'logically deduced' from that covenant or those Scriptures. Some of the truth that Christ taught cannot be known apart from the New Testament Scriptures."
It is this specific point that I wish to address. I do not propose to respond to every statement made by Reisinger in his article. But I do want to respond to this one. Is it really true that some of the truth that Christ taught in the Sermon on the Mount cannot be known apart from the New Testament?
After two chapters of introductory material, Reisinger directly discusses the various “But I say unto you” passages in chapters 3 through 6. In chapter 3, he starts with the section on adultery:
Matthew 5: [27] "You have heard that it was said, `You shall not commit adultery.' [28] But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
In this “But I say to you” passage, was Jesus giving a new command that was unknown in the Old Testament? Under the Mosaic covenant, did no one understand that lust was wrong? The reader is invited to consider the following statements from Solomon and Job:
“Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let her capture you with her eyelashes.” (Proverbs 6:25)
Notice that Solomon did not only condemn physical illicit sexual relations. Solomon also knew that lust itself was wrong. And here, he gives a direct command to the reader, revealing that it is morally wrong to lust. The law against lust was made clear in the Old Testament. Does this therefore mean that Solomon was a “new and better lawgiver” than Moses? Of course not.
“I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I look upon a virgin?” (Job 31:1)
If lust was not immoral, then why would Job say such a thing?
It is interesting that many scholars date the writing of this book to pre-Mosaic times, making this the oldest book in the Bible. If that is the case, then Reisinger is put into the strange position of suggesting that Moses introduced a lax, looser, more lenient standard of God’s moral law than already existed. On the other hand, if this book was written after the Mosaic books, then it just proves that Job understood lust was wrong while under the Mosaic covenant and law. But either way you slice it, we can clearly see lust was explicitly immoral in Old Testament times.
“If my heart has been enticed to a woman, and I have lain in wait at my neighbor's door; then let my wife grind for another, and let others bow down upon her. For that would be a heinous crime” (Job 31:9-11a)
Note that Job mentions two sins here:
Job says that it would be a “heinous crime” to commit either one of these two sins. Here, Job doesn’t only say that he will refrain from lust, like he did in 31:1. In this passage, Job explicitly states that lust is a “heinous crime”, and is an abomination to God. Does this condemnation of lust make Job a “better lawgiver” than Moses? Certainly it does not.
Reisinger titled his 3rd chapter, “New Lawgiver or Master of Logic”. He suggested that Covenant Theologians could only make sense of Christ’s statements by supposing that He applied rigorous logic (like that of Thomas Watson) to the Old Testament. But as we have seen above, Jesus could have conveyed the same moral message by simply quoting from Proverbs or Job. Thus, when Reisinger says that “Some of the truth that Christ taught cannot be known apart from the New Testament Scriptures”, his suggestion is proved inapplicable to Christ’s statements against adultery and lust.
In chapter 4 of “But I Say Unto You”, Reisinger moves to the section in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus spoke out against vengeance and retribution:
Matthew 5: [38] "You have heard that it was said, `An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' [39] But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; [40] and if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; [41] and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. [42] Give to him who begs from you, and do not refuse him who would borrow from you.
Concerning this passage, I am rather amazed by Reisinger’s bold statements:
"First, nowhere in the Old Covenant legislation can anything be found that is similar to Christ's clear statements. If all Christ is doing is showing what Moses really taught, and if Moses did indeed teach the same thing that Christ said in His contrast, then why did not Christ simply quote the Old Testament texts that proved His point? As we mentioned earlier, why did He not do with the Pharisees as He did with Satan in Matthew four? When Satan misapplied an Old Testament text, Christ quoted another Old Testament text that proved Satan was wrong."
First of all, even if Jesus did speak differently here than He did “with Satan in Matthew four”, that proves nothing. From a human perspective, Jesus often “changed up” His ways of dealing with similar situations. For example, Jesus healed many blind men, but seldom in the same way. Sometimes He just spoke, and they were healed. Another time he touched a guy’s eyes twice. Another time, he spit on a guy’s eyes! Jesus is God, and has every right to deal with any situation in a way that He sees fit. He has no obligation to deal with similar situations in identical ways. So even if Jesus did speak differently here than He did with Satan, it does not prove that He had no Old Testament Scriptures in mind when He spoke.
I reject Reisinger’s claim that Jesus was ignoring the Old Testament. Jesus didn’t say anything here that He hadn’t already revealed in the Old Testament Scriptures. In particular, consider this statement He made: “Do not resist one who is evil. But if any one strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Did Jesus have an Old Testament passage in mind when He spoke these words? I believe He did! Take a look at this excerpt from a passage written by the prophet Jeremiah:
“Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him” (Lamentations 3:30).
In the context of this Lamentations passage, Jeremiah tells individuals to be patient, and to wait on God’s deliverance, rather than taking matters into their own hands. The Lex Tallionis (the “eye for an eye” law of retribution) was applied in the Old Testament for matters of jurisprudence, but Jeremiah reminded individuals that they weren’t supposed to take matters into their own hands. But was Jeremiah a “new and better lawgiver” than Moses, because Lamentations 3:30 somehow “heightens” and “contrasts” with Mosaic law? Of course not.
Surprisingly, Reisinger sneaks the Lamentations 3:30 quote in the back door, at the end of this chapter. Of course he says nothing about its close connection with Matthew 5:39, because that would destroy his argument that Jesus was really teaching something “new” here. He has to admit that there was a distinction in the Old Testament between the law for a judge and the law for a private individual, but he is still determined to find a way to present Jesus as having “obliterated” the law:
So, then, ancient ethics were based on the law of tit for tat. It is true that law was a law of mercy; it is true that it was a law for a judge and not for a private individual; it is true that there were accents of mercy at the same time. But Jesus obliterated the very principle of that law, because retaliation, however controlled and restricted, has no place in the Christian life.
I would have no problem with that last sentence if it were restricted to the lives of private individuals, and was not in reference to jurisprudence. But Reisinger’s entire paragraph above necessarily applies to ALL facets of life, including judicial proceedings. If Reisinger were merely saying that New Testament Christians should not practice vigilante retribution, but should leave it up to the courts, then he would be tacitly admitting that no change has taken place from the Old Testament to the New. On the contrary, Reisinger freely admits the legal/private distinction in Old Testament law, and then boldly asserts that Jesus “obliterated the very principle of that law”. So when he says that “retaliation . . . has no place in the Christian life”, he is necessarily speaking about legal/judicial matters, because in the Old Testament, it was only via the courts that a person had such recourse anyway.
At this point, Reisinger might have considered quoting Romans 12:19, which says, “Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is mine to avenge; I will repay, says the Lord.” But unfortunately for Reisinger, quoting this passage would have defeated his argument, since Paul himself was quoting from Moses. When Paul tells Christians not to take revenge, he bases his very argument on the Old Testament. After saying, “it is written”, Paul quotes from the writings of Moses in Deuteronomy 32:35, where God said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay.”
At the end of the day, Reisinger pits Moses against Moses. Or more to the point, Reisinger pits Jesus against Jesus, since Christ is the second Person of the Trinity, and was therefore involved in revealing the law to Moses in the first place. Furthermore, I could point out that Moses himself was a Christian, based on Hebrews 11:26, but that would just open up the can of worms even further.
If Matthew 5:39 and Romans 12:19 make retribution unacceptable under any circumstances under the New Testament, then Lamentations 3:30 and Deuteronomy 32:35 must also have made retribution unacceptable under any circumstances under the Old Testament. However, the “eye for an eye” passage (Exodus 21:23-25) obviously shows that retribution was allowed, in accordance with legal proceedings (but not via personal vigilantism). Is there any evidence for similar legal stipulations in the New Testament? Certainly! For example, the apostle Paul spoke in the New Testament about the legal power of law enforcement that God gives to the State. Speaking of an authorized enforcer of the law, Paul said, “he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” And it doesn’t take much thought to realize that the “sword” is not an instrument of discipline . . . it is an instrument of wrath and judgment. It is the instrument of an executioner. And yet Paul calls such a man “the servant of God”. Just as retributive punishment was ordained in Genesis 9, so it was ordained in the Lex Tallionis of Levitius 21, where we read the “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth” command. And it is still ordained in the New Testament, right here in Romans 13.
It has always been wrong for individual vigilantes to carry out personal vengeance and retribution. But long before Moses, and long since Moses, it has been morally right for legal officers of the State to carry out retribution. Nothing about this changed when Christ came. So when Reisinger says that Jesus was “taking the responsibility for these actions totally out of the hands of the court and the judges”, he is sorely mistaken.
In chapter 5, Reisinger comments on Christ’s final “But I say to you” passage in the Sermon on the Mount:
Matthew 5: [43] "You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' [44] But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, [45] so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
Now, if any statement of Jesus is truly “new” it would seem to be this one. I myself have spoken with people who believe that the Old Testament says nothing at all about loving our enemies. The second most important commandment (loving your neighbor as yourself) is made clear in the Old Testament (Leviticus 19:18), but where do the Old Testament Scriptures say anything about loving our enemies? Interestingly enough, Moses himself wrote about it:
Exodus 23: [4] If you meet your enemy's ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it back to him. [5] If you see the ass of one who hates you lying under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it, you shall help him to lift it up.
How much clearer did Moses need to be? He specifically commanded God’s people to do good to their enemies, and even to offer help & assistance when possible. At this point, would Reisinger suggest that Moses was a “new and better lawgiver” than Moses? I would certainly hope not. I don’t think Moses had multiple personalities.
King Solomon also was very clear on the subject of loving one’s enemies. Even though he lived under the Mosaic covenant, and even though he never got to hear the Sermon on the Mount, Solomon clearly understood God’s requirement for His people to love their enemies. In fact, Jesus very well may have had this Scripture in mind when He was speaking on the Mount:
If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink (Proverbs 25:21)
Was Solomon a “new and better lawgiver” than Moses? I think not. Solomon understood what Moses said in Exodus 24. If Moses and Solomon had heard Christ’s preaching in Matthew chapter 5, I don’t think they would have been surprised by anything they heard. They probably would have said (in Hebrew), “Yup. You already made that stuff clear to us a long time ago.” There was nothing “new” about the law Jesus gave in the Sermon on the Mount.
But oddly, Reisinger doesn’t bother to quote or comment on Exodus 24:4-5 or Proverbs 25:21 in this chapter. Instead, he spends a lot of time talking about the evils of centuries past, when Christians put other Christians to death for various doctrinal differences. I certainly agree that it was a tragedy, and I don’t know of any Covenant Theologian alive today who would disagree. So I fail to see why he thinks that this appeal to history supports his claim. We agree that some of the Reformers and Puritans were gravely mistaken in their jurisprudence. Enough said. He can bash the use of capital punishment during the Reformation all he wants, and he can bash Thomas Watson’s use of logic all he wants. But I would personally be much more interested to hear Reisinger deal with the texts of Scripture which throw a monkey wrench into his position: places like Exodus 24 and Proverbs 25.
In chapter 6, the apparent clincher of Reisinger’s argument focuses on Matthew 5:32, where Jesus declares divorce to be morally wrong in all cases, with the exception of adultery:
Matthew 5: 31"It has been said, 'Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.' 32But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery.
Reisinger assumes that Moses condoned divorce in Deuteronomy 24, and therefore feels that he has a rock-solid case for pointing out Christ’s “change” in the law here. Apparently Reisinger believes that divorce made no one guilty of sin in the Old Testament, but that the law was given a sharper “edge” by Jesus in the New Testament. Of all the arguments made by Reisinger, I believe this one is the strongest. Nevertheless, even this one fails to meet the burden of proof. One of Reisinger’s mistakes is his failure to adequately deal with Christ’s parallel statements in Matthew 19, regarding marriage and divorce:
Matthew 19: [3] And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?" [4] He answered, "Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, [5] and said, `For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? [6] So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder." [7] They said to him, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?" [8] He said to them, "For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. [9] And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery."
In Christ’s rebuttal to the Pharisees here, it is notable that He appeals to the writings of Moses. In verse 4, Jesus quotes from Genesis 1:27. And in verse 5, Jesus quotes from Genesis 2:24. And based on these two Mosaic quotes, Jesus makes a moral conclusion: “What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” So concerning the wickedness of divorce, Jesus is doing exactly what Reisinger claims He cannot be doing: Jesus is quoting Moses, and then interpreting him perfectly.
Yet Reisinger claims that “Christ changed and added to the Law of Moses.” How could this be? He tries to justify his assertion by claiming that in the New Covenant “there are different rules simply because Christ is dealing with regenerate saints on the basis of grace.” What? Was no one regenerate on the basis of grace in the Old Testament? How about Moses himself? Reisinger needs to read Hebrews 11:26 again, not to mention Genesis 15:6, Romans 4:3, Galatians 3:29, and numerous other similar texts. If different rules are needed for regenerate people, then Reisinger still stands contradicted, because regenerate people have existed throughout both the Old and New Testaments.
But if we accept Reisinger’s dichotomy between “Laws For Sinners and Laws For Saints”, his argument caves in upon itself, because we then must ask, “Was Deuteronomy 24 written for “sinners”, or for “saints”? Jesus answers the question: “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives” (Matthew 19:8). And Reisinger himself agrees that there are no regenerate people who are simultaneously “hard-hearted sinners”. Therefore, if Jesus said Deuteronomy was written for those with hard hearts, then it stands to reason that it was not written to give any excuse to those with regenerate hearts. There is a dichotomy between what Moses wrote in Genesis 2:24, and Deuteronomy 24. But the answer is not that OT Israelites were unregenerate, and that all NT church members are regenerate. A cursory reading of Hebrews 11 and Romans 11 should dispel both of these myths. There were both regenerate and unregenerate people in OT Israel. And Jesus states in Matthew 19:8 that Deuteronomy 24 was written for the unregenerate: those with “hardness of heart”. Reisinger’s assumption that divorce was truly not immoral in the Old Testament is totally unacceptable, and makes a mockery of passages like Malachi 2:
Malachi 2: [13] And this again you do. You cover the LORD's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor at your hand. [14] You ask, "Why does he not?" Because the LORD was witness to the covenant between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. [15] Has not the one God made and sustained for us the spirit of life? And what does he desire? Godly offspring. So take heed to yourselves, and let none be faithless to the wife of his youth. [16] "For I hate divorce, says the LORD the God of Israel, and covering one's garment with violence, says the LORD of hosts. So take heed to yourselves and do not be faithless."
God did not wait until the Sermon on the Mount to reveal His hatred for divorce. He made Himself clear in both Genesis 2:24 and Malachi 2:16. Was Malachi teaching some “new law” of God that could not have been gleaned from a reading of Moses? Was Malachi thus a “new and better lawgiver” than Moses? Of course not. God’s plan for marriage was clear in both the first and last books of the Old Testament. It is man’s duty to love what God loves, and to hate what God hates. If God hates something, then that something is wrong. God hates divorce, so divorce is wrong. Any soft-hearted, regenerate person in the Old Testament should have understood that. The Sermon on the Mount was not even preached until over 400 years after Malachi explicitly said that God hates divorce.
According to Christ’s words in Matthew 19:8, Moses made a provision for divorce in Deuteronomy 24, for those unregenerate people with “hardness of heart”. It is worthy of note that the apostle Paul makes a similar provision in 1 Corinthians:
“But if the unbelieving partner desires to separate, let it be so; in such a case the brother or sister is not bound. For God has called us to peace.” (1 Corinthians 7:15)
Paul says that a Christian may permit divorce to take place if an unbelieving partner desires to leave, because “God has called us to peace.” If we replace the word “unbelieving” with the phrase “hard-hearted”, it is interesting to notice how similar Paul’s concession matches Christ’s assessment of the concession given by Moses. And just like Moses, Paul never commands divorce. He just recognizes that the hard hearts of unregenerate people will necessarily bring about divorce in some cases.
When we look more closely at Matthew 19, it becomes even clearer that the Pharisees truly were misunderstanding and misinterpreting Moses. In verse 7, they said, "Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce, and to put her away?" But Moses never gave such a “command” in Deuteronomy 24. As Jesus clearly said, Moses only gave that concession because of hard, unregenerate hearts. But Moses never “commanded” or condoned the practice. God hates divorce, and has always hated divorce. Malachi was written over 400 years before Matthew. And Genesis 2 was written long before that. Divorce was wrong in the Old Testament, just as it is in the New Testament.
Jesus is certainly greater than Moses. He is the Second Person of the Trinity, and so He is certainly greater than the angels, greater than Moses, and greater than the Levitical priesthood. The book of Hebrews is clear on all of these counts. But Jesus is not a “new lawgiver”. And this fact certainly does not mean that Christ was merely “rubber-stamping Moses”, as Reisinger suggested. On the contrary, Jesus couldn’t change the moral law He revealed in the Old Testament, because Jesus Himself is the one who revealed the law to Moses and other Old Testament saints in the first place. When Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and others walked the earth, God revealed His law to them. Why should we expect Him to change it when He preaches it Himself during the Sermon on the Mount? Moses didn’t arbitrarily make up law in the Old Testament. He just repeated what He learned from God. So in truth, Reisinger is not pitting Jesus against Moses. Rather, He is pitting Jesus against Himself. He is pitting the God of the New Testament against the God of the Old Testament. In truth, Moses was not so much a law “giver” as a law “repeater”. In the Old Testament and the New, it is God and God alone who gives the law.
Reisinger is correct to draw a dichotomy between matters of law in the state, and matters of law concerning one’s personal morality before God. But he is incorrect to that the Old Testament only focused on jurisprudence, while the New Testament focuses on the heart. He said, “The two systems of rule simply cannot be in force over the conscience of the same people at the same time even though the same basic moral content may pervade both.” On the contrary, the dichotomy exists in both the Old Testament and the New. Before Christ, some aspects of the law (like “eye for an eye”) were intended for legal matters of the state, while other aspects of the law (like “offer his cheek to one who would strike him”) were relegated more to a level of personal moral responsibility before God. The dichotomy is there, and has always been there. Nothing changed in this regard when the New Testament rolled around.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus does speak with authority. He is the God-man, and does not need to quote the Old Testament in order for His words to be binding. Nevertheless, He gives no “new” moral laws that were not already revealed in the Old Testament:
Reisinger said that some things Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount are “new” and “cannot be known apart from the New Testament Scriptures.” What should we make of this claim? Clearly, we must reject it. God was the lawgiver in the Old Testament, not Moses. And when God came to earth to preach the Sermon on the Mount, He did not change his moral laws.
Critique written by Joseph M. Gleason – June, 2005
Want to read some excellent books on Covenant Theology? --- For a great easy-to-understand introduction, I recommend A Simple Overview of Covenant Theology by C. Matthew McMahon. --- For a terrific, detailed, exegetical look at Covenant Theology, I highly recommend The Economy of the Covenants Between God and Man by Herman Witsius.
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