Jack Schutt

Every command in the Old Covenant—including those we conventionally label “moral” (paradigmatically the Decalogue)—is, as a command, a formal part of the Mosaic covenant. That covenant was a temporary, redemptive-historical administration given to Israel at Sinai. When the New Testament speaks of the “old covenant” being obsolete, fulfilled, or set aside (e.g., Heb 8:13; 2 Cor 3; Gal 3–4), it is speaking of the covenant as a formal whole. Therefore the commands that belonged to it do not continue to bind Christians as Old-Covenant commands. Their formal Mosaic character has passed away with the covenant itself. The classical Protestant (especially Reformed) tripartite/threefold division of the OT law was never intended to claim that the “moral” subset of the Mosaic Law continues formally as Old-Covenant legislation. On the contrary, the division presupposes the opposite: that the Old Covenant as a formal covenant has been abolished. Precisely because that premise is granted, the division is then employed as a hermeneutical tool to ask a different question: Which of the Mosaic statutes embodied material (i.e., substantive, abiding) moral norms that reflect the unchanging character of God and therefore continue to obligate human beings outside the temporary administration of the Mosaic covenant? Whenever the tripartite division is critiqued and/or rejected on the grounds of the old covenant not formally binding the new covenant Christian, it is misunderstanding the very reason the threefold division was/is employed.