CRN.Info and Analysis

It has long been noted that one of the primary sources of fallacious orthopraxy during the Second Temple period was the usage of ‘hedges’ by religious Jews. In order to avoid dishonoring Torah and inadvertantly sinning, the teachers and religious authorities build fences around scriptural prohibitions.

For example, with the commandment to “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy,” there came a whole slew of hedges - how far you could walk on the Sabbath; how much food you could eat; what you could (and couldn’t) do to prepare it; etc. Even today in Israel, pushing buttons on the Sabbath is considered “work”. So, if you want to ride an elevator, it will stop on each floor for a set amount of time before closing and going to the next floor, etc. so that you don’t have to push the button to open the door or select a floor.

The end result of these ‘hedges’ - originally set up to honor God by keeping His commands - has been to make men slaves to the laws of men and to completely miss the intent of the Torah - to help man exist in harmony with God. The root cause, as recently noted by Brendt, is that man added to the Word of God.

One of the books I received for Christmas was Meet the Rabbis by Brad Young. In his introduction, Young notes that while the primary pitfall of the religious leaders of the first century was to build hedges around the Torah, the pitfall of Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) has been to build hedges around the church.

One perfect example of this that has come up a number of times in recent memory has been the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW). While this creed was created out of a desire to honor God in worship, it is basically an extra-biblical “hedge”, little different than the ones build by the Pharisees 2,000 years ago. Rather than allowing the Truth of the Word to exist, systems and creeds like this simply make men slaves again to the laws of men. Instead, we should strive to hold to what is in scripture - without adding to it (like with the RPW) or taking away from it (like with graven images of Mary).