Editor’s Note: This essay is Part 2 in a series aimed at giving a voice to the center in the current theological debate within the Presbyterian Church U.S.A.
The General Assembly’s Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church has called us to the task of theological dialogue, and its report has given us a lead in starting the discussion. We might be tempted merely to re-polarize around this report, as some have done. A more constructive response is to reconfigure the issues with which we are dealing, and press forward–together.
The Law and Gospel issue is one such issue. This issue focuses on whether or not we have to do something in order to obtain salvation, i.e., God’s love for humanity. The Law side says that we must strike a bargain or a contract with God–do something or be good enough–for God to love, justify,or approve of us. The Gospel side says that God alone is good (Mark 10:18) and that life with God (= salvation) is a gift pure and simple, the gift of participating in God’s goodness but not possessing or dispensing it as our own. At stake, of course, is the classical Protestant concern for works–righteousness and the integrity of the gospel, i.e., that salvation is the work of Christ alone (God as a human being), through faith alone (the work of the Holy Spirit uniting us with Jesus Christ and his righteousness), by grace alone (both the work of Christ and the believing are gifts).
Fully six of the eleven documents in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Book of Confessions date from the Reformation period, and the issue of Law and Gospel is central to all six documents. The intervening years, however, have blunted our grasp of this pivotal issue. On the Law side, American Christians today commonly hear the Gospel as a new law that tells us what we have to do to be saved. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is an offer, so it goes, and all we have to do is … [fill in the blank:] receive it, repent and believe, make a decision for Christ, believe certain things, do certain things, obey, make a proper response, love others from the heart, love all people inclusively, prove authentic faith by our good deeds, pursue peace with justice, etc. Thus do we make the Gospel into a bargain or a contract, in which we have to do our part or lose the benefits of the contract.
On the Gospel side, American Christians today commonly hear that the Gospel of God’s love in Jesus Christ supersedes the law. With the love of Christ in our hearts, so it goes, either nothing further is required of us; or we are enabled to do what is expected of us and can no longer do any wrong.
So, at worst the Gospel (as Law) becomes a blatant calculation of rewards and punishments, appealing to raw self-interest. At best the Gospel (as Gospel) becomes mere permissiveness, justifying the sin as well as the sinner and making the Gospel meaningless in the formation of human life.
Presbyterians on all sides of the present discussion are at risk of falling into these pitfalls.
For Paul and the Protestant reformers, however, the problem of the Law for sinners was idolatry, not legal demands forced upon unwilling human subjects. Yes, the Law does show us particular places–sins–where we have gone wrong (Romans 3:20). But a larger problem emerges when, having repented of our sins, we actually try harder to do what the Law requires of us. As admitted sinners, we now try to produce ourselves the goodness that the Law requires. In the process we make God and God’s goodness irrelevant. Focusing more and more upon the Law and what we have to do to keep it, for what we’re going to get out of keeping it, we pay less and less attention to the Lawgiver. We thus put the God-given Law in the place of God (= idolatry) and compound the simple sin of violating the Law into a condition of sinfulness from which there is no human avenue of escape. The harder we try to keep the Law, the more we distance ourselves from God. If we quit trying, we prove ourselves to be the sinners we were at the start. At one point Paul actually calls the Law “the power of sin” (I Cor. 15:56. See also Romans 5:20, Romans 7, and Gal. 2:15-3:14 in the KJV) and cries out for release from “this body of death” (Romans 7:24, I Cor. 15:57).
For Paul, the Reformers, and the Presbyterian confessions, the Gospel has to free us from the bondage of a sinfulness that attaches itself above all to what we have to do. The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ fulfills all the requirements of the Law (Matt. 5:17f; Gal. 3:13). He was born according to the Law. He lived by the Law. He taught the Law. He died to the curse of the Law upon sinners. And he rose again from the dead, with a humanity that lives before God as God intended in the beginning, i.e., through the law. In all these ways Jesus Christ replaces the Law with himself (see John 15:10, Romans 10:4) and refocuses our attention upon God. Notice here, too, that Jesus is more than a means of revelation or salvation. He is God as a human being. While the Law is God-given and tells us much about God, the Law is not God and never will be. United with Christ by faith, Christ re-directs our attention toward God … because he is God as a human being.
The pitfalls are not over, however. The question remains: What happens to the law after Christ, i.e., after we have become united with him through faith?
The Protestant reformers dealt with four answers to this question, two of which sound like the false alternatives presented earlier. For some (the antinomians) the Law after Christ has been superseded; now only the Gospel applies. Trying to sweep away the Law along with the Old Testament, ironically they turn the Gospel into a new law. For others (the Counter Reformation) the Law was reintroduced after Christ, variously as faith working through love, good works as the demonstration of true faith, or keeping the Law as something the Gospel enables Christians to do after Christ that they couldn’t do before Christ. The Law remains thereby the final measure of the Gospel. For still others (the Lutherans) the Law retains its importance–negatively–as the only way to set up the Gospel: continue preaching the Law to show the depth and breadth of human sin, then preach the Gospel as the answer of God’s grace to human need. This alternative at least does not re-erect the Law after Christ (Gal. 2:18).
The fourth option claims that in fulfilling every demand of the Law and substituting himself for it, Jesus Christ transforms the Law itself. This is the option taken by John Calvin and the PC(USA) confessions (= Calvin’s “third use of the Law”). It recalls that every command points back to the one who commanded it. The command of God redefines each moment in terms of the presence and activity of God, telling us what God is like (what kind of God wants us to act this way?), what God is doing at any given moment (God keeps the commandments, too!), and where we who love God will want to be, in fellowship with God (sharing things together with God and with one another). Calvin and the Westminster catechisms bring out the positive intent of each commandment, to show that God is loving, merciful and gracious. For people who love God, to do anything contrary to the manifest activity of God is simply unthinkable. We are driven–positively–to fellowship with God in whatever God is doing at the moment, whether in deeds of justice, peace or simple goodness. Like the rules of a game that detail the field of play, relationship and interaction, the force of the commandments after Christ is descriptive, not prescriptive. The result is neither legalistic nor permissive, but nevertheless promotes profound ethical vigor.
One more pitfall remains. We could assume that, with the issue of Law and Gospel laid out plainly before us, all we need to do is grasp it and apply it to the life of the Church like any other doctrine. Once again, however, if we make the doctrine depend upon what we do with it, we turn the Gospel into another Law, something we have to do–a bargain, a contract, or a calculation, with specific demand requirements.
For the Reformed Tradition (Calvin’s third use of the law) the Gospel contains an underlying gift character, which goes something like this: When we find ourselves in fact actually doing such things as believing it, loving one another, and seeking peace with justice–probably to our great surprise and amazement–we will also find ourselves in the presence of the living God, who is doing the same things, and with whom to live is life itself. The gospel, that is, is more than an offer. Our acceptance of it or response to it, including the whole Christian life, is also part of the gift. For Calvin, the PC(USA) confessions, and Paul (I Cor. 12:3) alike, the faith that unites us with Christ is the Holy Spirit at work (see also John 3:8). The gift extends to our good works as well, as Paul points out in Ephesians 2:8-10: God creates and prepares our good works as occasions for participating in God’s activity at the moment. I would even say that the “if” of Romans 10: 9 and John 15:10 is probably better translated “when in fact …” (see the explanation of John 3:16 in vv 17ff). So the Gospel, which is the true root of the Law, puts the Law in its proper place. The Gospel–along with all fellow Christians (including Presbyterians) who embrace it–belongs to and remains forever God’s gift to us, beyond all calculation or manipulation, and the more precious because of it!
Merwyn S. Johnson is director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Erskine College/Theological Seminary in Due West, S.C. He holds a BA from the University of Virginia; B.D. and Th.M. from Union Theological Seminary (Va.) and a D. Theol. from the University of Basel.
