Why should anyone (check: let's restrict this to Christians, why do *we*)
want to find "commandments" in the books regarded as scripture?  What's
going on? I will pass on psychologizing answers (whether dismissive or more
open) as not the kind of issue to deal with here -- the question is what is
the *theological* point involved?  And it has been quoted "at" me often
enough by those who don't believe I take it seriously, that Jesus (is said
to have) said, "If you love me, you will obey my commands."  [John 14:15]

I am, like any Christian, the slave of Christ, and it is my will that I
should do as He wills me to do.  I am (also, or instead) His younger brother,
but still under His direction, though we both call God "Abba."  Christians,
therefore, will try to find what it is that their Lord commands them, and
discovering it will feel obligated to do it, or to confess their failure.
Readers here may set aside the theologizing jargon (such as "slaves of
Christ") -- the point is that adherents of a religion *will* read the texts
(whether classified as "inspired" or not) that are held up as models, in an
effort to find application to their own situations.  This practice ranges
from "devotional" reading of sermons and the like to the exegesis of canon-
ical scripture as "the Word of God."  And at the highest pitch, this leads
to a question of whether we *can* find in inspired scripture something that
can act as "absolute" guidance for our actions.

The problem is in finding out just *what* it is our Lord commands.  I am
going to set aside for this essay one major direction in which Christians
have looked for these commands, namely Christian tradition.  That is not
because *I* reject tradition, but because my primary audience in this essay
is Protestants, who deny tradition a determinative value, in favor of the
witness of Scripture.  The question I want to deal with is, WHAT commandments
can we find from our Lord in Scripture?  And that turns out to be a hard
question.  [ If any of my Protestant Inquisitors would *like* to turn the
discussion to the authority of tradition, I can accomodate them :-), unlike
*most* Protestants, Episcopalians admit claims from a) Scripture b) Reason
and c) Tradition on roughly equal standing. ]

Earlier in John than my quote above, we read [John 13:34] "I give you a new 
commandment: love one another."  This is the ONLY place in the NT where
Christians are given an explicit commandment, with the context commenting
on its imperative mode pronouncement by Jesus.  At the same meal [so we
*readers* infer, since it is *not* in John, but in the Synoptics] Jesus
says, "Take this [bread]; this is my body."  [Mark 14:22, cf. Matthew 26:26,
Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24]  The mode is imperative (Greek _labete_),
and hence this, too, is a "commandment."

In *both* cases we have to *infer* that the command is directed to a wider
circle than the immediate collocation of disciples -- because we judge the
evangelist's point in mentioning it (with the disciples by then mostly or
entirely dead) is that *we* are expected to follow this as a commandment
from our Lord.  In the case of communion, Paul's mention (at least; this
is probably true of the evangelists also) implies an ongoing ritual liturgy
in which these words operate to "bind" Christians to the original command
to his disciples, as a continuing commandment to the Christian community.

I am entirely comfortable with this inference, but I *must* point out that
it is THERE, between us and the occasion on which Jesus spoke the command.
I take it as a clear inference, at the very least the EVANGELIST'S notion,
that *all* Christians are called to love one another, in Jesus' command
directed at the disciples.  But I have to call attention to the inference.
The command CANNOT apply to me without the generalization from the specific
context of its statement to my own context as a "disciple" of Christ.

All reading of scripture has to make such inferences, to get any sense out
of the text whatsoever.  This is a general problem in reading these texts
-- we cannot read them at all without our *own* understanding of our native
languages in which we (normally) read the (translated) texts, and without
*some* appreciation of the original context (and at points, the original
languages, when English misleads us.) I am going to presume, in what follows,
that we have the *general* problem of how to read scripture under control
[ I don't *really* think this is true, but it will suffice for my current
purposes. ]  I will address ONLY the issues that arise when we have already
coped with the understanding of a 2000 year old text from another world
than the one we live in.  Questions at THAT level only introduce MORE reser-
vations about the commandments issue than will be found stipulating that we
can read the texts as the original audience might have done.

Among the reasons we have for seeing John's _agapate allelou_ as a *general*
commandment (not merely an instruction by Jesus to this disciples on that
one occasion), and one linking it to the Synoptic "Great Commandment" is
that we have criticism, from Jesus, about limiting our love to those whom
we congenially associate with.  In Matthew 5:43ff we read, "You have learnt
say to you: love your enemies."  In fact, the Leviticus context quoted
does NOT say 'hate your enemy' -- it is merely the common human presumption.
(And Leviticus is at pains to say that the "love" should extend to strangers
amongst the people of Israel.)  Luke, in expanding on this same Q context,
goes on to have Jesus say. "Even sinners love those who love them." [6:27]
All of this suggests [quite strongly, I'd say :-)] that *limiting* the
scope of the "new commandment" is not quite what Jesus has in mind.  In
short, inference *leads me* to generalizing the actual text to a command
that is "in force" on Christians, and with objects not limited to other
Christians.

Trickier than the _agapate allelou_ or Institution of communion, there is
the case of the "Great Commission" where (Matthew 10, Mark 6) the Twelve
are sent out to evangelize, "Proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is close
at hand."  The verb is imperative (_ke:russete_), but the context is rather
specific to the Twelve, and there are further specifiers (as in "Do not
turn your steps to pagan territory, and do not enter any Samaritan town"
-- the Lukan parallels are even more specific to Jesus' final journey to
Jerusalem) which make it harder to see this generalizing to all Christians
than the previous examples.  That hasn't prevented Christians from MAKING
such an inference; what I have to call attention to is that such inference
is NOT justified in the text, nor (unlike the first two cases I cite) by
the rhetoric of the evangelist urged on the reader.  Still, Paul seems to
have felt obliged to "proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is close at hand"
even (contrary to Jesus' instructions to the 12 :-)) to the gentiles, to
the ends of the earth.  So, Christians after him have also taken this as
a "commandment" in the sense of John 14:15.  Do I "accept" this?  I don't
know.  It is surely rather speculative.  But you see how the ripples of
inference spread out from the text that is the pretext -- Christians (may)
infer a general commandment, applicable to all, from what is presented in
the gospels as a specific occasion.  I do not (necessarily) object to this
kind of generalization -- but I *insist* that people who make it *must*
have an understanding that they are *reasoning* (at some considerable
length) from what we actually *have* in scripture.  There are *assumptions*
involved in this reasoning, and *these* are *not* themselves scriptural
(though people will do their best to "justify" their assumptions by OTHER
references to scripture -- which simply adds MORE inference into the mix!)

Let's move on to the "Great Commandment" -- that we should love God with
our whole hearts and minds and souls.  This is, perhaps, the Synoptic
"equivalent" of John's _agapate allelou_.  And yet,  it is not PRESENTED
as a commandment, in our texts.  Rather, the context is controversy with
the Pharisees.  To cite Matthew [22:34ff]

	"But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees
	they got together and, to disconcert him, one of them put a question,
	"Master, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?"

It is by no means obvious here (though I accept it as such) that Jesus'
answer is meant to be a commandment *to Christians*.  He is answering a
polemic from his enemies.  [ Mark's account, in  12:28-34 casts the answer
in a far more positive light as (so the "scribe" in this version says)
"far more important than any holocaust (I need to point out that this word
originates in the context of animal sacrifice; forget the Nazis for this)
or sacrifice."  Luke is intermediate -- he has a lawyer posing the question
"to disconcert" Jesus, and gets the Good Samarian parable for his pains
[ Luke 10:25-37 ].  The contexts here are so confusingly various that one
could be forgiven for drawing *no* inferences :-)  In *no* account is this
said as if it were obviously to be taken as a commandment binding on
Christians -- though I think it an entirely reasonable conclusion in each
case that Jesus thinks it to be so.  The point is that our mental gears
HAVE to grind a cycle or so to get to any conclusion from all of this about
what WE are commanded to do, by Jesus.  And all of this is contingent on
our understanding the point of Jesus' use of the Torah in the (all quite
different) gospel accounts, and the application of such a context to *us*.

The different contexts among the Synoptics are curious.  It should be noted
that ONLY in Luke do we get the "fixing" of this command by the parable of
the Good Samaritan.  We may look for an analogous *intent* in Matthew, where
7:12 gives the "Golden Rule" as "the meaning of the Law and the Prophets"
(and where we may also hear an echo of Hillel saying the same, a generation
before Jesus.)  If we make these associations (which I think are entirely
reasonable), we are -- again -- indulging in inference.  The texts do not
*explicitly* support us; rather, we *read* the texts as having this kind of
inter-relationship.  Current literary theory calls this "intertextuality."

My discussion of why the _agapate allelou_ "has" to apply beyond the 
community of the disciples, and beyound the circle of Christian believers,
applies again here, to buttress a conclusion that this *is* (despite the
presentation not saying so explicitly) a "commandment" to Christians.
Few Christians would disagree with my conclusions -- but I *must* point
out that they *are* conclusions, they *depend* on rather elaborate chains
of reasoning that are simply NOT present in the texts, themselves.

The contextual problem keeps coming up, more and more severely as we look at
those sayings of Jesus that are NOT so universally taken by Christians as 
commandments.  And we get some really hard cases.  Take divorce.  Mark is 
pretty clear, "The man who divorces his wife and marries another is guilty
of adultery against her."  [ 10:11, cf. Luke 16:18 ] -- except that Matthew
has an escape clause [ "except in the case of fornication", 5:31 ]. This
seems to be a rather clear "commandment" (whether or not we take Matthew's
reservation); and some Christians, to this day, take it so.  But some don't,
at least in practice.  This is rather peculiar; it is not as if Jesus were
not explicit about this (whereas He says nothing at all about some of the
things people gnash their teeth over.)  How is it possible, if the commands
of Christ are clear, that Matthew can so disagree with the other evangelists
of the synoptic tradition?

I'm going to continue this examination, into ever-murkier waters, but this
is enough to start with.  The theme is: "finding commandments in scripture
is an exercise in inference; our inferences are informed by OUR assumptions,
that is, our own cultural biases."  I have, so far, identified a very few
"commandments" that are generally accepted by all Christians -- and yet in
these, already, some of the difficulties start to surface.  It is these
difficulties I want to discuss in my next essay on this topic.  The divorce
commandment already strikes at some of the difficulties: I see almost no
evidence that the people who are so eager to find commandments to condemn
*me* with, spend any time at all writing nasty screeds to soc.couples or
misc.legal about the horrors or viciousness of divorce, or demanding that
US law refuse to allow it, or refuse "unrepentant divorcees" places in
their churches.  [ That is not to say that divorce *doesn't* enter into 
consideration in general -- it is most definitely a matter of concern, in
even the most "liberal" church circles.  For example, a (wildly) liberal
Episcopalian priest of my aqauintence, in a (wildly) liberal diocese, has
recommended to a couple who approached him to marry them that they have a
"private" secular ceremony before a judge, so that the "public" ceremony
he celebrated need not go through an agonizing "examination" by officials
who would just as soon NOT take on this role of interpreting the commands
we are faced with as Christians.  This, in a church that was effectively
CREATED by a famous divorce! ]