Digital Logos Edition
In this volume, Patrick D. Miller studies the Ten Commandments as both an ancient document and as a contemporary guide. With careful attention to each commandment in its original context, this book shows readers the modern relevance of these basic principles, as well as how the ideas of each commandment influenced the New Testament. More than an intellectual exercise, The Ten Commandments applies the call of the commandments to modern-day issues.
“The Commandments depend from the start on a particular story and communal memory of that story as the ground for obedience’ (Miller, ‘Is There a Place for the Ten Commandments?’ 1). One of the oft-neglected but implicit assumptions of the Decalogue is that it is a whole and one cannot take part of it without the whole. Especially one cannot claim authority for the second table apart from the first.” (Page 4)
“In this book, the focus is on the way in which the whole of Scripture—New Testament as well as Old—opens up the meaning of the Commandments and informs us how to live and act—and think—in the light of them.” (Page 7)
“The Commandments cannot play a role in the lives of Christians unless they are learned and taken to heart.” (Page 9)
“All this means that the way of the Commandments is the way to live in both freedom and subjection. That freedom is not a kind of implicit or natural freedom as human beings. Those who live this way are not a free people but a freed people. That freedom is not inherent: it is a gift and it shapes everything that follows. The ethic of the Commandments is as much an ethic of gratitude and response as it is an ethic of obligation and duty (cf. the appendix below).” (Page 16)
“It is rather an exposition of the Commandments in depth, seeking to give not only a reading of each commandment in its context but also to lay out the trajectory of its movement and place in Scripture.” (Page xi)