Section II. Positive Divine Law

Besides the natural law, there are certain positive precepts which God has imposed on mankind. These are known to us from the manifestation of the divine will which we have in revelation, and especially in the Old and New Testament. Theologians divide the positive laws of the Old Testament into ceremonial, judicial, and moral precepts, The ceremonial precepts had reference to the system of religious worship established by God under the Old Law, the judicial regulated the civil polity of the chosen people of God, and when the old dispensation gave place to the new at the coming of our Lord both ceased to have binding force. Our Lord, however, by no means abolished the moral precepts contained in the Old Law; on the contrary, he promulgated them anew and perfected them.

In the New Law of Christ there are no new moral precepts except such as follow from the truths of faith which our Lord made known to us, and from the institution of the sacraments. We are under moral obligation to believe explicitly in the Blessed Trinity and in the Incarnation, as well as in other articles of the Christian faith. We are bound to receive the holy Eucharist and other sacraments instituted by Christ. But besides such as these, it is the common teaching of theologians that the Christian dispensation contains no new moral precepts. If our Lord called his precept of love new, he did not mean that the great commandment did not bind under the Old Law, but only that he urged it anew, gave us new motives to practise it, and especially his own divine example and wish. He also corrected some false interpretations of the moral law, which were current among the Jews of his time; he developed what was implicitly contained in the moral precepts of the Decalogue, and he added to the precepts counsels of great perfection, which he proposed as the ideal of the Christian life, but which he did not command all to follow under pain of sin. In moral theology we abstain as a rule from treating of what concerns perfection; it is our task to distinguish between what is sinful and what is not, for the use of the confessor in the sacred tribunal of Penance.

The law of Christ is meant not for a particular nation, but for all men. Christ commanded his followers to preach to the whole world, to teach all men to observe whatsoever he had commanded, and the new dispensation was not to be merely temporary, like the old, but it was to last to the end of time.¹

¹ Matt. xxviii 19.