From the Decalogue to the Ten Commandments: A Reflection on the Sacred Text as a Source of Questions (Rather Than Answers)

The aim of this essay is to reflect on a particular form of violence, that caused by the short circuit between faith and religious ethics, between the liberating dimension of the experience of God's love and the need to derive from it a practical ethic that promotes human coexistence and is an expression of that love. In the Christian experience—but also in Judaism and Islam—it is possible for a reversal to take place whereby ethics ends up preceding and judging faith. This is a form of moralism, very similar to religious fundamentalism, made possible by the reversal between the purpose of faith (to live the experience of God's love to the full) and the ways and expressions that should express and realize it in practical life. This reversal occurs when moral action is an end in itself and has lost the criteria of judgment through which moral discernment is achieved. Through the interpretative story of the Decalogue (Ex 20:1-17), the thesis argued in this essay is that moralistic rigor enacts a true form of violence both against the religious tradition it claims to protect and against the believing community, preventing or limiting its dialogue with the challenges of the present that would allow it to keep the experience of faith alive.