Principles are more succinct than rules

Principles concentrate on conveying intent, allowing the individual to figure out ideal behavior in any situation instead of overtly prescribing it in every particular situation. You can imagine commandments as a signal coming from God with a slider that modulates between intent and means. The more you describe the intent of a commandment, the more the commandment becomes a principle. The more you specify the means of achieving the intent, the more the commandment becomes a set of rules.

Principles are richer and more succinct than the rules derived from them. Because principles apply over every circumstance and at every scale, a single principle may subsume many rules without any loss of information. Principles are succinct because they only describe intent, while rules describe a means to accomplish that intent in a specific situation. A rule contains everything you need to know to obey it, but obedience to a principle requires knowing its intent. The spirit of the law cannot be applied without understanding why the law was given, including the cost and benefit of obedience, disobedience, and any alternatives.

In order to live a principle, you need to understand more about reality than you do with rules. A principle is implementable across the full spectrum of awareness of reality. The more about reality that you correctly understand, the more effectively you can pursue a principle.

The power of a principle is in how many rules it can absorb. Jesus demonstrated the brevity of principles by collapsing the more than 600 rules in the law of Moses down to 44 verses of principles in the Sermon on the Mount, and then condensing those down to the two great commandments. Jesus said that the entirety of the law of Moses and the teachings of the prophets emitted from the principles “love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and mind,” “love your neighbor as yourself.”¹ On another occasion, he said all of the law and prophets are answered by the principle “treat others as you wish they would treat you,”² showing that you fulfill the first great commandment by living the second great commandment.³ Every instruction God has ever given or will ever give aims to this supreme end: We are to be like Jesus is,⁴ which is like the Father is,⁵ by loving as he did.⁶