People from the time the law was given have looked at it as a series of categorical imperatives – things that one must abide by no matter what and regardless of the reason. It becomes more about the action itself than the spirit behind it. It was exactly this thinking that led Jesus to rebuke the Pharisees for adhering to the letter of the law while completely missing its spirit (Mark 2:23-28).
The law, as I have said before, is only an approximation of how the regenerate person acts. It approximates by detailing actions that correspond to values – values which are more fundamental than the actions. It is for this reason that Jesus said that the greatest commandment was “you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”, and the second, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:35-40): First, God is the highest value. And second, we are not special: if we value ourselves and our own happiness, then we must necessarily value others and their happiness just as much. These are the two most fundamental values under which the rest of the law can be placed as more specific manifestations of these general values: “on these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets”.
1) You shall have no other gods before me / 2) You shall not make for yourself a graven image. God is the highest value, and we are not to value anything more highly than God.
3) You shall not take the name of the Lord in vain. The name of the Lord is valuable.
4) Remember the sabbath and keep it holy. Rest is valuable.
5) Honor your father and mother. Reproof and correction are valuable (c.f. Proverbs 15:32), or, the family itself is valuable.
6) You shall not murder. Human life is valuable.
7) You shall not commit adultery. Purity is valuable (compare images of the Church as the bride of Christ).
8) You shall not steal. Fairness is valuable (c.f. Jeremiah 22:13).
9) You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Truth is valuable.
10) You shall not covet. Material possessions are not valuable.
Looking at it in this way, standard moral dilemmas that pit one categorical imperative against another become soluble. Why is truth valuable, for example? Because people act based on knowledge, and to bear false witness is to cause them to act on misinformation. Lying is a lack of love for the person lied to. If then I am hiding Jews and a Nazi soldier comes to my door looking for them, the question is not “do I lie or tell the truth?”, as Kant would have it, but “do I value the life of my fugitives or the welfare of this soldier more?”. Most people would intuitively know to lie, but moral philosophers have a way of muddying the waters here. Categorical imperatives in these cases drive a wedge between “right” and “moral”. But within a system of values, there is no such thing as morally “taking one for the team”. There is no guilt in the higher valuation of life than welfare, and we don’t have to resort to consequentialism (the ends justify the means) as most would do to justify the action.
Ultimately, consequentialist morality is just as bankrupt as imperative morality: as the latter focuses on the nature of the action, the former focuses on the result. Neither gives any regard to the spirit of the law, nor the spirit of the doer. It is the spirit that Jesus was concerned about in questions of morality – the process of sanctification cleaning the outside by first cleansing the inside. A consequentialist morality produces ruthless pragmatists, and a categorical imperative morality can only produce whitewashed tombs. Only a morality from proper internal valuations may produce a Christian.
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