Does the New Testament abolish the whole Mosaic law, or only its ceremonial part?
A viewer asks whether St. Thomas Aquinas gives a good explanation of the Catholic doctrine of justification in his commentary on Romans, which leads Robert to explain what the New Testament means when it says we are not saved by the law.
Answer
Yes, because Thomas catches the point that when the New Testament says we are not saved by the law but by faith, it is talking about the whole law, the whole Mosaic law as a legal entity. This is very important. Like saying this country is run by the Constitution, it is not just parts of it but all of it as a legal entity; that is how Paul uses the law. Now the law had parts: ceremonial law, such as circumcision and sacrifices; civil law, such as an elder settling a land dispute; and moral law, such as You shall not commit adultery. The issue is whether one or all of them were abrogated when the New Covenant came, and Thomas gives the answer, following Augustine: all three, ceremonial, civil, and moral, are gone as a legal entity; they are off the table. Some Catholics have been caught in the trap of saying only the ceremonial law was abrogated and the moral law still stands because we still keep the Ten Commandments, but that is not correct. The law as a whole legal entity is gone. It is like the Magna Carta: our Constitution contains elements of it, and we obey those elements, but we obey them because they are in the Constitution, our authoritative document, not because they came from the Magna Carta. In the same way, we obey the Ten Commandments because Paul places them in the New Covenant, in Romans 13, as our authoritative document, except for the fourth commandment about the Sabbath, since the Church moved the day of worship to Sunday. The old covenant is not authoritative anymore; it had good laws, but only the New Covenant binds us legally.