2 of 5

After much cajoling and some well-placed pastoral guilt, I recruited 21 people from our congregation to become Levitical guinea pigs for a month. The idea was not for us to recapitulate ancient Israelite existence. Our attempt at living Levitically would be done as New Testament Christians in 21st-century America.

Customarily with the Old Testament, Christian readers distinguish between what to mind and what to dismiss through a New Testament grid. Jesus' sacrifice on the cross ended any need for animal sacrifice, and the anointing Spirit of Pentecost rendered obsolete the need for a special priesthood. Yet in making such judgments, the tendency is to overgeneralize. We often conclude that because the Law was written to Old Testament Israelites, and because "Jesus fulfilled the Law," we're free to disregard it all.

The problem is that when you turn to the New Testament, some of the commandments you thought you could ignore are still in force. For instance, in the Book of Acts, Gentile converts are told that while they don't have to be circumcised, they should still "abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality" (Acts 15:29). The prohibition against sexual immorality we're familiar with, but no rare steak? Clearly, Christ's fulfillment of the Law was not a total exemption from keeping it. Ergo, the interpretive challenge.

Our church's participants were each left to sort out their own interpretive approach. As a result, some chose to keep only those commandments in Leviticus that the New Testament expressly affirms, while others, wanting to be safer, decided to obey everything in Leviticus that the New Testament doesn't specifically nullify. Some made their decisions by consulting commentaries. Others consulted their Jewish friends. One woman followed a translation of Leviticus written for children. Because we didn't foreclose on a particular interpretive angle as a group from the outset, participants were freed to try things they might otherwise pass up.

Next came putting the words into practice. It would not be enough to figure out what Leviticus meant. You had to live it—which went a long way in helping to clarify what Leviticus must have really meant. Some people in the group ate kosher and wore linen trousers (in January no less). Just about everyone did a version of Sabbath keeping. Several men didn't shave. Another went as far as to build a tabernacle in her 600-square-foot apartment as a reminder of God's presence. One woman remarked how getting dressed each morning suddenly became a very slow and intentional process. "Fast girls aren't holy," she discovered.

Other participants tried to figure out corresponding contemporary practices. For instance, if it is the case that a beard in the ancient Near East distinguished you from clean-shaven pagans, then I decided that maybe wearing a huge cross would approximate that in our day. Another person kept the food laws by only purchasing food locally farmed and humanely prepared. Several people, deciding that burnt offerings suggest a need to be aware of sin in a way that we typically aren't, wrote down their sins for the month, and then ceremonially burned them as a sign of God's forgiveness.

If the rest of the congregation were to learn from our experiment, they had to be able to observe it beyond just hearing about it in sermons. Therefore, each participant opened a Facebook account and joined a Facebook group we named "Living Leviticus." Participants posted journal entries, photos, comments, and videos. Daily online activity reminded us that we each were part of a (virtual) community of obedience. Because Facebook is a social networking site, a couple hundred people also joined the group and many more from all over the world logged in to read and comment. A cluster of Messianic Jews even got ahold of our page and began offering their own advice on how to keep Torah.

next page... |  2 of 5

share this page

August 2008, Vol. 52, No. 8