A Baptist View of the Ten Commandments

Toward A Baptist View of the Commandments

Over the years I have read more books on the Ten Commandments than I can count. One of the most significant realities about all those books is how different they are. No Christian author I have read has the same take on the commandments as any other. Sometimes those differences are minor having to do with how we count the commandments. Sometimes the differences are extreme and have to do with disagreements about the basic meaning of the words. It is stunning to me that Christians who love God and revere the commandments have found it hard to reach agreement on God’s law given at Sinai.

Christians have been disagreeing on these things for millennia, and I don’t expect to settle it until the New Heavens and New Earth. But lately I’ve been fantasizing about a more modest goal. As a Baptist minister, I would love for contemporary Baptists to reach a consensus on how to interpret the commandments. Baptists have had many disagreements about the Ten Commandments over the years, so I do not expect consensus to be easy. But I think we can get there.

One way to reach this Baptist view of the commandments begins with an understanding of Baptist distinctives.

A Few Baptist Distinctives

Baptists believe many things that we share in common with other faithful Christians. Truths like the inerrancy of God’s Word, the deity and humanity of Jesus, salvation by grace alone, and many others unite all genuine followers of Christ. When we talk about Baptist distinctives, we are talking about the truths Baptists embrace that make them uniquely Baptist.

That full list of distinctives is longer than I can manage in a blog of this size, so let me single out two of the most significant ones from history.

Perhaps the most obvious is Believer’s Baptism. Baptists do not just believe that Baptism is an ordinance instituted by Jesus that must be obeyed by Christians today. They believe it is an ordinance that must be practiced only on those who make a credible profession of faith and engage in the rite as an outward and public sign of what Christ has done in their hearts (Romans 6:1-4). Such a Baptism signifies the presence of real faith and is required for membership in the church.

That leads to the second distinctive I’ll mention here which is the autonomy of the local church. Baptists do not merely agree with all Christians that God is now forming his people through a worldwide organization he calls the church (Matthew 16:18). We believe that the New Testament recognizes that global reality in local congregations. These local congregations are named, receive apostolic correspondence, and are given instructions to appoint their own leaders and conduct their own affairs (e.g., 1 Corinthians 5:3-5; Titus 1:5).

Believer’s Baptism and local church autonomy are distinctly Baptist doctrines. They separate us from good Christian brothers like, say, faithful Presbyterians who believe Baptism can come to infants who have not demonstrated repentant faith and who think groups of local churches can be held underneath a common authority.

My point here is not to engage these ancient debates, but to take them for granted. I want to look at these distinctives and the underlying theological themes that unite them. Discovering those key themes will help in our task of developing a uniquely Baptist view of the Ten Commandments.

Underlying Theological Themes

Baptists have been working since the Protestant Reformation to develop a confessional identity that grounds our distinct theological emphases in the teaching of Scripture. When you examine Baptist distinctives, like the two I just surveyed, it is possible to find underlying theological themes that lead to those distinctives.

One crucial theological theme is the doctrine of progressive revelation. This doctrine teaches that God does not reveal biblical truth in one lump sum but pays it out in installments slowly over time. The doctrine also teaches that earlier portions of revealed truth must be interpreted in light of later revealed truth. An example of this progressive revelation is found in the prophet Jeremiah who puts God’s Old Covenant people on notice that God is going to bring about a New Covenant (Jeremiah 31:31-34). The book of Hebrews confirms that Jeremiah’s promise has now come with these shocking words, “In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13).

Of course, the mediator of this New Covenant is Jesus Christ. That points to a second theological theme which is the supremacy and centrality of Jesus Christ. The reality of progressive revelation and the truth that Jesus Christ is our only high priest and mediator changes the way Christians look back at the law. This change is explained in Hebrews 7:12, “When there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well.”

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that Baptists are the only Christians who believe in progressive revelation and the centrality of Jesus Christ. We are not. I am saying the fact that these themes lead us to our unique distinctives, means we embrace them with a seriousness, consistency, and even radicalism that is not true for other Christians who embrace them with more reservation.

Jesus and The Commandments

This all leads back to the Ten Commandments. Can we arrive at a uniquely Baptist understanding of these ancient words spoken from Mount Sinai? I think we can when we start with our Baptist distinctives and ask what theological themes lead us to those distinctives. Those theological themes are found at least in a consistent embrace of progressive revelation and a radical embrace of Jesus Christ as Lord.

When you do this, it leads to the fundamentally Baptist conclusion that Jesus, as our true High Priest gets to determine how we apply the Ten Commandments to contemporary society. The coming of Jesus as the fresh and full revelation of God to his people means that Jesus will not merely repeat God’s law (Hebrews 7:12). It also means Jesus will not abolish God’s law. He comes, instead, to fulfill God’s law (Matthew 5:17). That means we can only make faithful sense of the Ten Commandments by listening to the words and paying attention to the works of Jesus.

Understanding how Jesus makes sense of each of the Ten Commandments will require an examination of each commandment. That examination is one of the reasons why I wrote The Ten Commandments: A Short Book for Normal People. One of my prayers is that the book will help Christians to grow in an understanding of the commandments that is not only faithful, but uniquely Baptist.