Is There a Place for the Ten Commandments?

Theology Today, Jan 2004 by Miller, Patrick D

(2) Think about and obey the Commandments in awareness that they are simple rooms with a great deal of moral space for living under their direction. Both their simplicity and their spaciousness are features that should affect how people live by them.

(3) Affirm the symbolic power of the Commandments and learn how to "post" them afresh. We may, in fact, need to post the Commandments and erect stone monuments with the Commandments inscribed on them, in order to have them visible and continuously before us. The best place for doing that, however, is where Christians and Jews receive and learn these directives in the broader context of a life of faith-in the sacred spaces of our churches and synagogues, where we and our children learn how to serve the Lord our God and how the Commandments can help us with critical moral and theological issues. The display of the Commandments in the sanctuary is a very old tradition. While the early Puritan churches of this country were more austere, the Anglican churches of the colonial period customarily had-according to the canons of 1604-"the Ten Commandments . . . set up on the East end of every Church and Chapel, where the people may best see and read the same." The degree of controversy over the Commandments' public presence in our culture today may be in direct, if inverse, proportion to their absence from the religious context that is their proper home.

(4) Explicate the Commandments as the heart of catechetical instruction, as was the Christian tradition from early on. We should ask ourselves if we are giving more energy to guarding the Commandments than to teaching them, to worrying about whether they are "out there" than making sure they are "in here."

Patrick D. Miller

MARKING AN ANNIVERSARY

Without much ado but with gratitude to many people over the years, the editors of Theology Today note that, with this issue, the journal has completed sixty years of publication. That is not bad for a theological journal, we expect, though we have not tried to compare figures. The continued publication of Theology Today for that long would have been impossible without the institutional support of Princeton Theological Seminary. While editorial freedom has always been protected, the Seminary has provided resources of many sorts, from office space to financial support to wise counsel in the face of business issues, mail fraud, and the changes that inevitably confront a journal over time. Nor would we have survived in good health without the contributions of those who have written the substance of the journal throughout these years-writers, poets, and reviewers. Apart from the willingness of so many people to send us their essays and poems and to accept our invitations to write articles and review books, there would be no Theology Today.

In this issue, we would like to pay particular tribute and extend our special thanks to those who have served for nearly twenty years now as members of our Editorial Council. Their willingness to aid the journal with specific editorial help and counsel when called upon has given both substantive and moral support to our labors and to the quality of the journal. At this sixtieth anniversary of the journal's life and in anticipation of years to come, we are making some changes in our Editorial Council. Believing there may be value in being able to call upon persons for a limited period of time and then to draw in others who will provide different perspectives and fresh ideas, Theology Today is moving to a smaller Editorial Council with rotating, fixed-term appointments. The first new group of Council members begins its term with the new year and the second group will join us a year from now. We are grateful to all who have served over the past two decades and to those who are coming on board to help us in the future.