Torah: Restoring Biblical Perspectives

by

Dr. Princess Esther Sellassie Antohin

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, resisting the pressures of Hellenization and Latinization, has preserved a historical Torah-observant expression of Christian faith.

Western Christendom has been dominated by one exclusive exegetical school which has been termed "Pauline Theology" be cause of its emphasis on concepts extrapolated from the Pauline epistles rather than from other apostolic writings. This school of thought has been advanced and promoted in Byzantium and Europe throughout virtually the entire two thousand years of church history. Many, perhaps most Christians in Europe and the New World are unaware of the existence of an equally historical school of New Testament exegesis that parallels Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant interpretations. The respective distinctives of both historical Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions are two great variations on the same theme in Western Christianity that are paralleled by other equally historical Christian traditions.

The theological framework of the Palestinian Jewish Church, of many Early African Churches, of Early Celtic Christianity, and, still today, of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo Church was what has been termed "Johannine Theology," with the focus on the Gospel and Epistles of John. Of these traditions, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo Church is the only remaining historical representative of pre-Hellenized Christianity and the only authentic African Christianity that was never filtered through European thought processes. Our church is God’s contradiction to the Nation of Islam’s oft-repeated assertion that Christianity is a "white man’s religion."

In one particular detail the Johannine theology of Ethiopian Christianity stands at sharp variance with the so-called "Pauline theology," of Western Christianity. It is free of Marcionism. A cogent presentation of the tenets and practices of Johannine theology is entirely germane in the quest to restore the Hebraic roots of Christian faith throughout the world. If the thinkers and pastoral shepherds of the Radical Reformation in Europe had known of the existence of Johannine theology, their zeal would likely have focussed on restoring the church to the faith of the first Jewish believers, to its prototype in Early Celtic Christianity, or to reconciliation with the historic Church of Ethiopia.

Exegetical Accuracy

The classical Jewish writings, including both the Tanakh ("Old Testament") and the New Testament, are the literary products of a dynamic process of divine inspiration. That is to say, the Bible is the divinely inspired Word of God. We all must agree, however, that no man is above error and that historic mistakes in translating and interpreting the Bible may have occurred, at times in direct contradiction to the texts themselves. Some of this aberration has resulted in the "Hellenization of the Gospel" in Western Christendom.

It is always true that one’s personal walk with God derails the moment vanity and arrogance seduce one into the assumption that definitive answers to metaphysical/existential questions are at all reducible to tightly- crafted, logically-sound sets of dogma bound into the second dimension, i.e. ink on paper, ". . . for the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life." (2 Corinthians 3: 6b)

In seeking to provide an alternative, exegetical model that will help us rediscover the beauty of the Hebraic roots of all Christianity, an analysis of Johannine theology will be of more than passing interest for the Restoration Movement. If we truthfully seek to reconsider a few cherished arguments of Western Christendom, purifying our theological positions from the inherited Greco-Roman dross of the ages, then can proceed, for "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8: 32.)

The center of gravity in the Parable of the Prodigal Son is one of ecstasy vanishing before the threshold of the ego. To an extent, but only to an extent, it is the parable of the return of all Christianity to its Hebraic roots, the return to the elder brother and to the Ways of our Heavenly Father. How exquisitely excruciating it will seem when we finally let go of all the petty Greco-Roman pieties, those familiar, accommodating niches to which Western Christians have scurried when challenged by the "mysteries of the Church" and the violence against our God-given minds.

Torah and "Pauline Theology"

In all probability, Paul himself would have vehemently disagreed with a number of points pivotal to the exegetical system Western Christendom has come to call "Pauline theology." Before the elders of the Jerusalem Church (Acts 15), he strongly argued against the necessity of Torah observance for non-Jewish believers, but he never taught that the Torah had been destroyed/abrogated by Jesus for his own Jewish people. The compromise reached between the "normative Christianity" of the Jerusalem Church, represented in the New Testament by "Johannine theology," and Paul’s great innovation for non-Jewish believers, was minimalist in extremis, requiring only "that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from things strangled [referring to ‘non-kosher’ meat] and from blood."

The elders of the Jerusalem Church, under the leadership of Jesus’ own (half-) brother, James, listed only these four negative precepts as mandatory for Gentile believers, but they left open the voluntary option of a life fully observant within the Biblical guidelines of the commandments, such as they themselves led. Yet, throughout the subsequent development of Latin and Greek Christendom and its ecclesiastical derivatives, even these four minimalist mitsvot (ethical requirements) were systematically ignored, particularly in matters of diet.

Paul, we recall, was a most learned rabbi, a student of Rabban Gamliel, fluent in Greek and Hebrew. Listen to his words: " ‘Men, brethren, and fathers, hear ye my defense which I make now unto you.’ (And when they heard that he spoke in the Hebrew tongue to them, they were the more silent.) And he said, ‘I am verily a man who am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city of Cilicia, yet brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of our fathers, and was zealous toward God, as ye all are this day. . . .’ " (Acts 22: 1-3) ". . . Paul answered for himself: ‘Neither against the law of the Jews, nor against the temple, nor yet against Caesar have I offended anything at all.’" (Acts 25: 8) We may fairly ask, did Paul, shamelessly lying, testify against himself here, or did he answer from within the integrity of his own spirit, affirming that he had never committed an infraction against the Torah or the temple? Consequently, following restoration of his sight from his life-changing trip to Damascus, either he "saw" the annulment of the Torah or he did not, and if so, could he then have continued its observance until this moment of his binding testimony? Contrary to the reasonings of medieval scholastics in Western Christendom, Paul here and throughout his life confirmed the Torah and his adherence to it.

Paul lived and died a Torah-observant Jew and expected the same high standard of ethical conduct from his own Jewish people. Yet he forthrightly denounced his fellow Jewish believers who taught that salvation was dependent upon acceptance of ’ol ha-shamayim, "the yoke of heaven," the practical performance of the 613 Biblical commandments. Paul’s keen rabbinic insight had penetrated to the heart of the matter. The divine relationship between God and Israel had always been expressed in the "if A, then B" logical construction: "If you will keep My commandments and statutes, then I will be your God." Paul also knew that this formula could not have implied "if you keep all My commandments), for, though, in his generation the Temple was standing and fully functional, still the important commandment of the Jubilee (Leviticus 25: 8-17) had not been proclaimed since the Assyrian deportation of the ten northern tribes and indeed could never be celebrated again without all of the tribes of Israel reunited on their ancestral soil.

Paul knew it was impossible to comply with all the stipulations of the Torah and as a mature student of Rabban Gamliel, he equally knew that God, in His omniscience and in His love for His people, Israel, could not have a priori foreordained a moment in history wherein His people would have been precluded from relationship with Him through non-compliance with all His commandments. Moreover, as if to reinforce this principle even from the beginning, among the 613 commandments of the Bible there is one outstanding case of a "double-bind": "Remember what Amalek did unto thee on the way, when ye had come forth out of Egypt . . . thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Am-alek from under heaven: thou shalt not forget." To comply with the command not to forget is to remember; to blot out the remembrance is to forget. One cannot do both, and God knew that from the beginning.

If then, it were a priori impossible to comply with all the commandments, Paul’s profound rabbinic insight led him to two inescapable deductions: God in His omniscience intended that the Jewish people be sanctified unto His covenant: "And Moses went up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying, ‘Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel: "Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you unto Myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed and keep My covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine. And ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." ’ " (Exodus 19: 3-6)

Torah Observance and Justification

Paul understood, however, that it was not punctilious, legal compliance with the Torah in all its details that was the focus in "walking before God," for indeed the Walk with the Lord for mankind was simple enough: ". . .he hath shown thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:8.)

Israel’s sanctifying Walk with God was forever to be seven-fold: "And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways [the committed, ideal process], to love Him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and [to serve Him] with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord, and [to keep] His statutes which I command thee this day for thy good?" (Deuteronomy 10:12)

Paul persistently stressed: "Therefore the Torah is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good." (Romans 7:12) He constantly sought to make clear; "Is the Torah then opposed to the promises of God? God forbid!" The second of the two deductions Paul made was inevitable. It was painfully obvious to Paul that, contrary to the pronouncements of men of lesser rabbinic learning in his generation, man could not hope to acquit his misconduct through appeal to Torah observance, for his attempted compliance with all of God’s commandments was a priori deficient and there was nothing whatsoever he could do about it. "For as many as are of [rely on] the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written: ‘Cursed is everyone who continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them’ [and we are precluded from proclaiming the Jubilee year] But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God is evident, for ‘the just shall live by faith.’ " Paul consistently tried to explain this crucial distinction: Observance of the Torah is not about justification, but rather "the man who doeth them shall live in them." (Galatians 3: 10-12)

Paul saw that it was the emphasis that was misplaced in the contemporary Torah observance of his generation. It had never been the objective of "the Ways of the Lord" to justify man’s inadequacies before God: "Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe to do according to all the law, which Moses My servant commanded thee. Turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest prosper whithersoever thou goest . . . For then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success." (Joshua 1: 7, 8b) No, man could not look to his own Torah observance for justification. That had never been its intent and, moreover, that philosophical position did not go forth to become a tenet of normative Judaism. Torah was ab origine a down-to-earth, pragmatic, God-given social system, designed by the Architect of existence to assist man in his brief, three-dimensional life on earth. Torah could sanctify man’s life; it could bring God’s blessings into his daily routine; but it could not justify man’s mortal deficiencies before His maker: ". . . whosoever of you claim justification by the Torah, ye are fallen from grace." (Galatians 5:4b) Not man’s righteousness, not man’s faithfulness, but God’s righteousness, God’s faithfulness is man’s hope. "So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God who showeth mercy." (Romans 9:16) Paul was left with only one possible deduction: "For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith; as it is written: ‘The just shall live by faith.’" (Romans 1: 17)

The profundity of Paul’s rabbinic learning led him from these two deductions to a single, inescapable conclusion, as he noted in his letter to the believers in the Jewish community of Rome: "Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the Torah. Is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also, seeing it is one God who shall justify the Circumcision by faith, and Uncircumcision through faith. Do we then make void the Torah through faith? God forbid! Yea, we establish the Torah." (Romans 3: 28:31)

Princess Esther Sellassie-Antohin was terrorized along with the rest of her family in the coup-d’-etat of the Mengistu regime that overthrew her great grandfather, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Sellassie I. A professor of Russian, her ambition is to bind up her nation’s wounds and to better the lives of all African-Americans, the spiritual children of Ethiopia in the African Diaspora. Princess Esther, her husband, Lord Anatoly Antohin, and their children Sasha and Alexei live in Alaska.

This article is excerpted from a series on Johannine Theology and the Torah which sets forth the perspectives of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo Church, the only ecclesiastical tradition that was never historically Hellenized and Latinized. For a complete account of this teaching, visit the Imperial House of Sellassie’s Website: http://sellassie.ourfamily.com/ and at the Website: http://www.50megs.com/sellassie

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