I found the chart you see below in an essay by Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., in the first volume of Readings in Christian Ethics, edited by David Clark and Robert Rakestraw. Kaiser's essay focuses on how Christians can derive contemporary ethical principles from the specific commands of the Old Testament law. This, of course, has always been quite a debated issue among Christians. Well some are eager to argue that the Old Testament law is no longer binding on us, Kaiser rightly argues that "Old Testament law is not so esoteric or so culturally bound that it cannot aid contemporary Christians with their [ethical] problems" (198).

The laws of the Old Testament, he writes, derive their moral and theological principles from the Ten Commandments, summed up in the two greatest commandments (Matt. 22:36-40). As a result, "the interpreter of Scripture must search for that legal principle, usually embodied in a text like the Ten Commandments, before applying this principle to a new and contemporary situation" (199). His example is that which you see below, Paul's argument that preacher's are worthy of their pay (1 Cor. 9:11-12), derived from the Old Testament prohibition on muzzling an ox (Deut. 25:4). Kaiser writes that the original intention of this specific law in the Mosaic administration was not just to be kind to your oxen, but to recognize the duties moral beings have to each other.

Kaiser employs the term "ladder of abstraction" to refer to this process of working from a low level of generality to greater degrees of specificity. He recognizes the need to exercise a great deal of caution in applying this methodology. To begin with the general principle may be profitable on a theoretical level, but it will leave people wanting in terms of concrete applications. To start from either end of the ladder, however, may cause us difficulty in determining the general principle. Nonetheless, the process of working through an ethical issue in this way, though often difficult, is beneficial—and, I would add, essential.

For obvious reasons, Kaiser cannot offer a rule that can be applied in all situations. For myself, though, seeing this laid out in a chart format was helpful. Any thoughts?