Is There a Place for the Ten Commandments?

Theology Today, Jan 2004 by Miller, Patrick D

A further unresolvable tension is found in the fact that the Commandments belong both to the church and synagogue and to the culture. They are a sacred text from the Scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. In the nurture of children, they are taught in both religious traditions. They are undeniably a religious text belonging to religious traditions. At the same time, however, they have come to have influence beyond the more limited scope of religious life, precisely because they are meant, in some sense, to encompass all of life. From the start, elaboration of the Commandments in Torah dealt with how they affect those who do not necessarily belong to the religious tradition-the resident alien and the foreigner-because these others are also neighbors. The good neighborhood that is good in part because it is governed by these directives is also a culture. Apart from invoking a theocracy, the polities that include these Commandments are cultures that are not to be equated with the religious communities who share the story and the text as a part of their tradition. So the question here is: Can we learn to live with the Ten Commandments as a revelatory center of Jewish and Christian faith that embodies the heart of divine instruction for our lives as much as any text we know, while also acknowledging their role as a broader cultural icon with very wide appeal-and can we do this in such a way that the history, context, and actual meaning of the Commandments do not become lost, distorted, or misappropriated precisely because they are so widely held?

A second consideration in thinking about the place of the Commandments in our culture is the recognition that there are, within the culture, impulses toward their display but also reasons to resist their display. How we regard these contradictory forces will vary from individual to individual and group to group, but we can think better about the proper place of the Commandments by becoming more aware of them.

The impulse to display the Commandments publicly and broadly arises out of several concerns. One is the widespread sense of moral decline in our society. Whether formal studies exist to substantiate that perception, there is surely enough general apprehension of moral decay within the culture that one cannot simply dismiss it for lack of available historical or statistical evidence. Out of that fear of moral decline, but also out of wider concerns within the family, the neighborhood, and the community of faith comes a desire to instruct the next generation in the moral life and a feeling that whatever may help us do that is worth trying. Surely few people believe that simply posting the Commandments in public will bring about increased moral rectitude, but many believe that constant reminders-like the reminders of parents to their children-may have some impact, however modest, for the common good. Underneath this lies a general consensus that all of us share at least some basic guidelines for the moral life and that a number of these are found in the Ten Commandments. They function, to some degree, as what David Tracy has called a "classic." Their publication, therefore, has a cultural appropriateness apart from any specific religious commitment.