How God Updates His Commandments

This afternoon, during a conversation with my brother, I shared a video about the Divine Command Theory of ethics, which video I've blogged about before. The video defines the Divine Command Theory as "The belief that what's moral, and what's immoral - is commanded by the divine." I subscribe to this theory, as does just about ever theist I've ever met. It basically means that God tells us what the rules of morality are. At the start of the video, the narrator listed a few of these rules, with many of his examples coming from the Law of Moses. Later in the video, he poses the question "How do we know what God commands? . . . How do we know which commands are binding and which ones God retracted somewhere along the way?" Thankfully for me and all other Latter-Day Saints, we have an answer.

All Christian religions look to the Bible for moral guidance, and most of those religions recognize that some of the commandments God gave His children were specific to particular people at particular times, with the Law of Moses being the most obvious example. To know which commandments are still binding and which commandments have been redacted, we need a version or source of the word of God that gets updated whenever God wants to update His Commandments. Thankfully, we have such a source.

Since the very beginning, God has given us prophets that relay God's word to us. These prophets have historically been God's mouthpiece when relaying information about new, revised, or redacted commandments. As long as there has been a prophet on the Earth, people willing to follow God had a person they could turn to for specific, up-to-date information on how they could do that. Ancient prophets wrote the Old and New Testaments, and they included many updates and revisions to many of the commandments that had been given before them. After the death of Christ's Apostles, there was a long period of time when the word of God wasn't being updated. No new scripture was given, and no new clarifications or revisions were made to existing commandments. (At least, no new clarifications or revisions that were sanctioned by God were made to the existing commandments.) But this period of spiritual silence, thankfully, ended.

Nowadays, we have prophets who can rely God's word, including any and all updates to His previous commandments, on a regular basis. Through modern revelation, we can know which commandments were specifically meant for others and which commandments are specifically meant for us. With modern prophets regularly relaying the updated word of God, we can know what God commands and which commands are binding and which commands have been redacted. We don't need to wonder which commandments do or do not still apply, because we get reminded about many of them (especially including the commandments we are to follow) every six months.

Some philosophers still see problems with the Divine Command Theory of ethics, and as I study it in my philosophy class, I may find some more questions or problems to work through, but so far, I haven't felt much need to reevaluate my stance on the subject of ethics. I've had answers to many of the questions that have plagued philosophers for centuries, and, not surprisingly, many of those answers have come to me through modern revelation.