"Write all these thy laws in our hearts": The Eschatological Vision of the Prayer Book Decalogue
The Decalogue within the Ante-Communion rite in the Book of Common Prayer is said in dialogue between the Presider and Assembly. After each of the ten words or laws, the Assembly responds with a petition recognizing their consistent failure to embody its intention. The law, here, must be understood in light of the Sermon on the Mount, not as narrow statutes, but as indicative of larger, deeper moral concerns — the point is the spirit not the letter. After the first nine, the assembly responds, “Lord, have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law.” The second half of this petition expresses the intention that the petitioner be transformed within to become the sort of person who can embody the spirit of the law. Finally, for the tenth petition — “Thou shalt not covet” — gets at the root of all the neighbor-harming, God-defying laws. To this the Assembly respond, “Write all these thy laws in our hearts we beseech thee.”
Several scriptures inform this final petition, which is the fulfillment or culmination of the petition to “incline our hearts.” Primarily, it alludes to Jeremiah 31:33 “But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people” (itself quoted in Hebrews 8:10). It also alludes to Ezekiel 11:19 “And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh” and Ezekiel 36:26 “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.”
The radicality of this petition and its eschatological vision should not go unnoticed. For the law to be written on our hearts is the abolition of the law. It is the abolition of morality as a prescriptive force, as a coercive instrument. Augustine terms this state non posse peccare, when people are unable to will ill, not by the suppression of their wills but by the full expression of them, the full flowering of human nature. The world that is passing away is characterized by struggle against sin; in the world to come, sin will be no more, a meaningless concept. This is what John saw or rather didn’t see in his Apocalypse: “I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof“ (Rev. 21:22). The culmination of John’s religious vision is the abolition of religion because all that religion aims to effect — the communion of man with God — will have come to be, not partially and imperfectly through preaching and ritual, but completely and fully in spirit and in truth.
“Write all these thy laws in our hearts” ties together the opening Mattins, the hard heart of the sentences, and the Ventie, with the eschatological vision of the post-communion prayers, Gloria, and blessing, the peace beyond all understanding that possesses the heart, so that God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28).