LAW AND GOSPEL OR GLAWSPEL? IT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. PART II
We continue now our analysis of the revolutionary hermeneutical principle (way of interpreting the Bible) the Reformation discovered as it grappled with the medieval church. This understanding of the law and gospel I believe is single most important gift given to the church by the Reformation. Up until the days of Luther, the church uniformly believed that the Christian life was a mixture of devotion to Christ, His cross and one’s consequent necessity to follow His example for salvation. Even the early church fathers had missed the beauty of salvation by faith alone. Thomas Torrance, an influential Presbyterian theologian of the twentieth Century, wrote a critique of the doctrine of grace (the gospel) in the apostolic fathers. In it he came to the conclusion that the early church father basically held to a salvation by grace mixed with merit. He summarized the patristic era this way, ‘‘the gospel carries with it an eternal indicative, but Post Apostolic Christianity labored only under an imperative’ (The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers, pg 134). The prevalent view was that Christ’s death was necessary for salvation as the grounds for man’s effort to achieve a status of righteousness before God. Christ’s grace and one’s high ethic were the two legs upon which the faith stood. As always, the ethic slowly began to consume the grace. Torrance goes on to say,
‘The Christian ethic was codified, and the charismatic life under the constraining love of Christ reduced to rules and precepts. Law and obedience, reward and punishment these were the themes of their preaching’ (ibid pg 138).
This emphasis on law and obedience was the backbone of the righteous life. As the patristic age evolved into the middle ages (around 450), this view that emphasized man’s participation in salvation led to a highly complex sacerdotal system. Salvation came to be a crass mercantile system whereby the sinner accrued grace by a series of religious acts endorsed by the church. Grace became a commodity given by God through the mediation of the church. In essence the church ultimately determined who was saved. Again Torrance,
‘Grace was taken under the wing of the church in an official way. The church was regarded as endowed in some way or other, with this spiritual power which made the believer godlike, and in fact united him to God’ (ibid, pg 140).
The church’s teaching that she could co-opt the free grace of God was rooted in the conviction that man still lived under a covenant where works played a huge role in the salvation of a soul. In other words salvation was a natural process governed by the laws of merit and reward. As Francis Schaeffer has often pointed out, the things of nature always swallows up grace, In this instance, the church’s system of law swallowed up grace and the gospel that rested on it.
So at the time of the Reformation the church was steeped in a natural and humanistic scheme of salvation. Her complex system was a total confusion of law and gospel. Man was saved said to be saved by grace but added to that was the necessity to ascend to glory upon the ladder of merit, usually in the form of church-designation ‘means of grace.’ Though salvation was guaranteed to no one (remember God was not required to bestow congruent grace) the more one followed the church’s prescribed pathway the greater the chance of entering heaven.
In addition the medieval church’s theology mingled together the Old and New Covenants. Altars were the place of worship, priests were raised from their Old Testament graves to serve the people, incense, lavers, and even an actual bodily sacrifice (the Mass) became part of medieval worship.
In time Luther would see the dangerous inconsistency in this. Having been convinced by the Bible that salvation was solely a work of God apart from the works of the law (Rom 3:20). Luther began to construct a new paradigm that changed Christianity forever. The Law could guide the Christian but it could have no place in his salvation. All the things the medieval church required could only add to man’s guilt. Only the gospel, the free gift of God apart from these vain efforts of man could save. It was this separation of Law and Gospel that was to become the bedrock of this new movement called the Reformation. Many have thought that Luther’s gripe was against the selling of indulgences. But one must look behind that issue to see what the real problem was. Indulgences represented a way for man to control his own destiny (or the destiny of relatives) rather than rely on the pure grace of God. The proper use of Law and Gospel, this author will argue, was the core issue that separated the medieval church and the burgeoning movement spearheaded by Luther.
The Reformation stream of Christianity more or less held to this distinction of law and gospel over the next few centuries. But that has all changed in the modern era. For a variety of reasons the church slowly moved away from free grace and began to subtly add duty and Christian morality to her message. The evangelical movement followed this same patter. And this reminds us that whenever the church becomes skittish to proclaim the message of free grace, the void is always filled by a law-based message. This message takes on many forms, surfaces under many different expressions. In this article we are only interested in how the conflation of law and gospel as has captured the current evangelical movement. To present my case, I will list six evidences that they evangelical movement is moving away from a law/gospel distinction. I am sure there are more.
Example #1. Law/Gospel conflation is evident when the manner of the Christian life or the concept of ‘walking in the Spirit’ is equated to a righteousness before God.
Heavens! You might say. Isn’t walking in the Spirit the goal of the Christian life? Almost all evangelicals would agree that this is the very mark of the New Covenant. Well, yes, but let us analyze this further by asking a question: ‘Is walking in the Spirit the same as living a life of righteousness before God?’ Or to ask it another way, ‘Is walking the Spirit part of justification or sanctification?’ It is clear in the Scripture that walking in the Spirit falls under the rubric of sanctification. It is a reality for every New Covenant believer after they are saved. Can we then talk about it in the language of righteousness? We say categorically, no. According to Galatians 5:22-23, walking in the Spirit is what produces fruit in the believer; love, joy, peace, and so on. These virtues, as beautiful as they may be, can never constitute a perfect righteousness before God. After all, fruit unlike obedience to the law, is not a legal category. One is not condemned for not loving or not being joyful. Law is black and white; either you do or you don’t. Like a light switch obedience is either on or off. This is the black and white truth of justification. One has either obeyed the law perfectly or he has not. Sentiment, motives, intentions, or any other subjective category has nothing to do with law. Just as the rich, young, ruler. But can we say the same for the fruit of the Spirit? Can love be quantified as perfect or imperfect? Can a legal standard be applied to joy and peace? No! These are not legal categories, but ethical categories arising out of the Spirit’s work in a person. Love has gradations. It’s not all or nothing. Thus, some Christians have a lot of love, some have less. What Paul is saying is that every Christian will produce some of the ‘love fruit’ in his life. No doubt this fruit will grow throughout the Christian’s life. But it never takes on the identity of being perfect.
The upshot of this? Quite simple. There can be no talk of perfection in connection with Spirit’s sanctifying work in the life of a believer. No fruit of the Spirit can be the basis of one’s justification before God. Yet all too often Evangelical preachers lift up the sanctified life as that which is perfect and accepted by God. When evangelicals make statements such as, ‘he is such a loving person therefore he must be holy before God’ or ‘if a Christian has no peace he cannot be saved’ or any other such statement that confuses one’s standing with God with the quality or quantity of one’s fruit, they have mixed together the sacred categories of law and gospel.
This is so important that I will try to illustrate it in a different way. The bible talks about saints being righteous before God and the saints pleasing God. These are not the same thing. Righteousness (δίκαιος = dikaios) is used for that legal righteousness of an innocent person before a judge, meaning one is without fault as far as the law is concerned. We find this in Romans 3:10 where Paul says there are none righteous, no, not one.’ If one could be righteous they must be perfect ‘doers of the law’ as it says in Romans 2:13. Righteousness is a category of perfection before a legal standard. The bible makes it clear that no human stands before the Law of God perfectly and for this reason all are guilty. In Romans 5:9 Paul makes a further point that through the death of One, who is Christ, ‘many were made righteous.’ In other words it is the substitutionary death of the Righteous One and the conferral of His righteousness to the guilty sinner that brings one into a state of rightness with God. Righteousness falls into the general theological category of conformity to a law.
Contrast that to a life that pleases the Lord. This is a category of relationship and falls under the general sphere of sanctification. The author of Hebrews gives his benediction as follows,
‘Now may the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you complete in every good work to do His will, working in you what is well pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever’ (Hebrews 13:20-21).
The justified Christian is perfect before the law court, while the sanctified Christian is pleasing (but not perfect) before the Father in the family room. To confuse the two relationships is to obscure the dual nature of the Christian life. On the one hand Christian’s are law breakers who are declared innocent by the righteousness of another. On the other hand Christians are precious sons and daughters to God whose Spirit-led actions are pleasing to the Father. Neither of these relationships changes the stringency of the law. The law always demands perfection, it never changes. Understanding these two realities is the key to unlocking the mystery of the Christian life as taught in the epistles. In the front end they talk about the believer’s righteousness in Christ. At the back end of these epistles the authors generally speak of the life of the justified man that pleases God. These are two different realities that must be distinguished. To teach that those things that please God by the Christian determine his standing with God is to confuse these two beautiful realities. But this is often done from many pulpits. All too many sermons infer that the Christian’s righteous standing before God is the production of spiritual fruit. In other words the sermon treats the back end of epistles as if there salvation issues. This is not only a bad hermeneutic but engenders angst in the souls of many sincere Christians.
There is not a shred of evidence in Holy Writ that the work of the Spirit in us is the basis of our innocent standing before God. The law stands as a witness of condemnation against any work that is less than perfect and the process of sanctification is imperfect. Spiritual disciplines or any other application of Christian truth can never present a sinner as righteous before God. The only perfect act happened two thousand years ago on a tree standing outside the gate of Jerusalem. And it is that act and that act alone that can bring a sinner into a right standing with God. This gospel message is what the church must ever proclaim to desperate sinners. As to the familial relationship? It is a glorious truth that highlights God’s mercy to sinners who adopts them into His family and considers them the apple of His eye.
Evidence #2. The Law/Gospel distinctive is blurred when many evangelicals sees Romans Chapter 2:6-7 as converted Gentiles who keep the law.
Many new theologies have arisen in our day that stress man’s participation in salvation. We are thinking now of N.T. Wright’s Covenantal Nomism (see: https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/paul-and-covenantal-nomism), Federal Vision (see: https://learn.ligonier.org/guides/the-federal-vision), Christian Theonomy of Doug Wilson, (See https://www.watchagtv.com/videos/the-law-is-not-the-gospel-adriel-sanchez-responds-to-doug-wilson) and John Piper’s view doctrine of final salvation in which he asserts that,
..at the ’ final salvation at the last judgment, faith is confirmed by the sanctifying fruit it has borne, and we are saved through that fruit and that faith’ (see https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/does-god-really-save-us-by-faith-alone.)
At the root of these theological systems is the conviction that man must maintain his justified status by what he does. In other words, the Christian can earn merit, congruent merit (see the previous post), for his sincere acts of obedience as he plods through in the Christian life. From where do these movements get their teaching? Very often they draw their argument from a serious misreading of Romans chapter two.
To begin let us consider the larger context of this chapter and then we shall move to the specific text at hand. In Romans chapter two Paul’s is addressing Jews after having found all Gentiles guilty before God in chapter one. The Jews at Rome would certainly applaud Paul’s assessment about the Gentile dogs. This people believed that were exempt from God’s judgment insofar as they were custodians of God’s Law. But in verses 1-6 Paul drops a bomb shell asserting that the Jews are subject to the same terms of the Law as the Gentiles. Their ethnic identity would not spare them from judgment. Rather like everyone else they will be judged by their deeds (vs 6). If they broke God’s law, they will face the same punishment as the Gentiles. Paul has now brought all humanity before the bar of God and found all to be equally guilty under the Law. In Romans 3:9 he will sum up his argument; ‘for we have previously charged both Jews and Greeks that they are all under sin.’
Now in verses 7-10 Paul seems to switch gears by intimating that men can attain to glory through their works. We quote this section beginning at verse 5,
‘But in accordance with your hardness and your impenitent heart you are treasuring up for yourself wrath in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, who “will render to each one according to his deeds”: eternal life to those who by patient continuance in doing good seek for glory, honor, and immortality; but to those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness—indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, on every soul of man who does evil, of the Jew first and also of the Greek; but glory, honor, and peace to everyone who works what is good, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.’
He begins by informing his Jewish brethren that their hypocrisy has slowly but surely built up God’s wrath against them. They, like the Gentiles, will be judged by their deeds and not by their special status. Paul then speaks of a class of people who by their obedient living will gain immortality. He identifies this group as those who gain eternal life ‘by patient continuance in doing good’ and who ‘seek for glory, honor, and immortality.’ If Paul has made the point that all men are guilty then who are these people he now describes? Many today believe that Paul is thinking ahead to chapter 8 where he speaks of saved men who are filled with the Spirit of God. In other words, Paul is referring to Christian Gentiles who by their Spirit-filled gospel lives will attain to glory. In contrast, the Jews who have hard and impenitent hearts will only receive God’s wrath. In other words in the midst of this section on the universality of God’s justice and the guilt of all mankind, Paul will suddenly begin to speak about a group who will achieve immortality under the New Covenant? (Wright, Schreiner, and many modern commentators).
How preposterous! How completely out of line from Paul’s logic!
So there are many problems that attend to this view and we are compelled to note them. First, nothing in this section speaks of the gospel. Paul’s point in the first three chapters is that all men are guilty under the law because they are lawbreakers. Of course Paul knew that the Old Covenant had always said that perfect obedience alone would merit eternal life (Deut 28:1; Joshua 1:8). Paul is simply restating that truth. Knowing this, Paul will state that no one can keep the law and all are guilty. Paul’s challenge to both Jew and Gentile is, ‘if you want to be saved by your works, go ahead and try. But to do so you must live a life that continually does good and one that seeks glory, honor and immortality all of its days.’ But no one can do this and Paul’s conclusion in chapter three supports this. You can’t be saved by obeying the law!
But there might be an objection to Paul’s argument. If not keeping the law perfectly merits judgment, then what do we do with those who have no law? Are they innocent because they have no law to break?
Paul now addresses this in verses 14-16. He makes a startling statement that even those who have never had the law live under their own law of conscience which they can’t keep. In other words, all men break the law. He says,
‘For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do the things in the law, these, although not having the law, are a law to themselves, who show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and between themselves their thoughts accusing or else excusing them) in the day when God will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, according to my gospel.’
Here’s the point; the Jews had God’s revealed law and they broke that; the Gentiles are under the law of their God-given conscience and they have broken that. In other words, all men have law and all men have broken that law. Thus, God’s judgment of all men is just. That is Paul’s point in 3:10 when he makes that grand summary statement, ‘there are none righteous, no, not one.’ In other words the entirety of chapter 2 is to prove that all men have fallen short of the law they know and that God will judge them according to the same standards, ‘for there is no partiality with God’ (vs 11).
How then does this Scripture impact the issue of law and gospel? Simply because the way one interprets this section reveals how one thinks about law and gospel. If one believes that verses 7-10 are talking about Gentile Christians who walk in the Spirit, then that person must believe that a Christian can fulfill the law of God in their life. And if one believes that human works can be acceptable to God in the same way that congruent merit was acceptable in the Medieval church than that person has confused one’s standing in justification and the outworking of one’s life in sanctification. In other words if it is believed a man is saved by ‘patient continuance in doing good seek for glory, honor, and immortality’ then all our theology will be focused on searching for fruit in the life of the Christian to validate their standing before God. And this focus always leads us away from the doctrine of the imputed righteousness of Christs.
We are seeing that the human heart is always looking for a way to state righteous before in one’s own obedience. And man is always looking for a more ‘humane’ God in order to stand before God with an imperfect obedience. This idea is similar to that ‘sincere obedience’ outlined by Walter Marshall in his seminal book The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification. Marshall points to this text in Romans 2 as that which can be easily construed to support a salvation by sincere obedience. He says,
‘Those who endeavor to procure Christ’s salvation by their sincere obedience to all the commands of Christ, act contrary to that way of salvation by Christ, free grace, and faith discovered in the Gospel… They grossly pervert those words of Paul, Romans 2:6-7, “Who will render to every man according to his deeds; to them, who by patient continuance in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, eternal life?” where they will have Paul to be declaring the terms of the Gospel when he is evidently declaring the terms of the Law, to prove that both Jews and Gentiles are all under sin’ (pg 100; 102).
Indeed. Marshall is correct. Roman’s chapters 1:18 to 3:20 are one long argument that all men are condemned under the law. And it is only against this backdrop of complete and utter hopelessness for the human race that the apostle will then begin to expound the glorious news of the gospel in 3:20. But hear me true: when you lower the demands of justice and allow men to achieve spiritual life through a sincere obedience, you destroy both the law and the gospel; you lower the one and vitiate the beauty of the other.
Evidence #3. The law/gospel distinctive is blurred when the church is preoccupied with morality and moral issues.
The gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ always produces morality but it is not about morality. In fact it is not about anything man does or doesn’t do. This is a difficult truth for man to embrace. By nature we all want to be part of the solution. The gospel is foolishness to the world because the gospel renders man impotent. In Paul’s day the gospel was dismissed by both the Jews and the Greeks: the first group because it saved apart from the law, the second group because it saved apart from human speculation. Both Judaism and Greek philosophy had this in common: salvation was achieved by something in man. The medieval church of the sixteenth century rested on the same teetering foundation. Through his studies before an open bible an Augustinian monk discovered that the righteousness needed for man to enter glory could never come from man or a man-centered institution. Salvation came to man ‘apart from law’; apart from any human effort. So radical was this concept that it took several years for Luther to understand its implications. Augustine had come close to this idea a thousand years earlier but had never quite understood Christ’s imputed righteousness to sinners. Through his study of Romans and Galatians Luther came to see that salvation rested on God’s grace alone and this de facto must negate the works of man. He realized at once that Christianity could not be defined by what man did, for he could do nothing, but what man believed. This truth was the spark that lit the conflagration of the Reformation.
But the evangelical church today seems to have departed from its Reformation roots. Over and over again evangelicalism has demonstrated its affection for a Christianity weighted with morality. Man-centered songs that speak more about what I feel than what Jesus did dominates our worship. Scriptural interpretation is often centered on how the text changes one’s life. Books that deal with political, social and moral issues are the top sellers of the day. Strong Christians are those who are active in service and good works. The church loves what it focuses on, and it focuses on man’s behavior more than the cross. This is tragic and telling. The history of the church demonstrates that she goes back and forth between movements where God is exalted as supreme Savior followed by movements that emphasize man’s contribution. So we have battle between Augustine and Pelagius, Luther and the medieval church, the English Puritans the ritualists of Anglicanism, the American Presbyterians and the revivalists, the early evangelical movement in America and the social gospel. Evangelicalism today is in one of those slow drifts towards a man-centered system. It is a disparate movement that infiltrates many different denominations and has many different faces. But its marks are unmistakable. Sermons become the tonic for felt needs, biblical texts are narratives about ‘my life’, good works are extolled as that which proves one’s Christianity is real, and on it goes. The tragedy is that there seems to be little of what Paul seemed to get excited about, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and a lot about what man must do.
At the root of this drift toward morality is the confusion of law and gospel. When the church begins to judge the work of God by what it produces in man, she has begun to veer off into strange territory. Salvation can never rest on anything in man but on an historical event outside of man. The reason should be obvious. First, man has an evil nature whether redeemed or not redeemed and therefore anything that flows from the fountain of his heart must be tainted with evil. Second, works are subject to subjective quantification. How many works are enough to save? Third, works are external things that belie what is really going on in the heart. To rest your destiny on works is resting on quick sand from which there is no escape.
The church must again return to the clear preaching of Christ crucified and turn away from moralistic messages that equate spirituality with human works. Preaching what man must do to be right with God comingles law and gospel and is therefore to be abandoned. A message that mixes the two together never leads men to holiness but actually drives them from it. Preaching Christ crucified alone saves souls. As Scottish preacher Chalmers once said,
“When I preached mere morality, I preached sobriety till they were all drunkards; I preached chastity till it was not known anywhere; I preached honesty till men grew to be thieves;” but, he says, “ as soon as ever I preached Christ there was such a change in the village as never was known.”
Evidence #4: The law/gospel distinction is blurred by adding to simple faith the act of repentance, a commitment to Christ’s Lordship, a vow to maintain one’s standing in the covenant, or one’s promise to practice spiritual disciplines.
The Reformers were clear that saving faith was itself a simple matter. They described it as the empty hand receiving, the mouth eating, and the soul resting. Faith itself was the soul weary of sin falling on Christ. The reformers understood that faith must understand something of the sinners need and the Savior’s sufficiency. But faith need not understand all that lies ahead in the Christian life in order to be real. The women with the issue of blood, the Syro-Phoenician woman, the Philippian Jailer or even the Ethiopian Eunuch believed because they saw a desperate need and the One who could heal them. They knew little else. Understanding who Christ is in all of his glory and the nature of the Christian life and the extent to which one must be committed to Christ are all categories of sanctification and not part of the initial trust in the Savior. This is why the Reformation was careful to maintain that faith alone, or sola fide, saved a soul. The reformers knew that adding moral requirements to faith was adding law to gospel.
Adding moral weight to faith is seen in some of the leading preachers in evangelicalism. For example, John MacArthur, one of the foremost leaders of this movement (and highly used of God) espouses the doctrine of Lordship Salvation. In his book, The Gospel According to Jesus, MacArthur says;
‘those who teach that obedience and submission are extraneous to saving faith are forced to make a firm but unbiblical distinction between salvation and discipleship… Are we to believe that when Jesus told the multitudes to deny themselves, to take up a cross and to forsake all and follow Him His words had no meaning whatsoever for the unsaved people in the crowd?” (The Gospel According to Jesus, 1988 Zondervan, pg 35).
MacArthur evidently believes that obedience and submission to Christ is a necessary quality of saving faith. What MacArthur fails to realize is that obedience and submission are part of the ongoing growth of the Christian life. Again, here we find a confusion of law and gospel. Another major evangelical leader, John Piper, in His book Faith in Future Grace speaks often about moral qualities in faith,
‘Loving God and delighting in God and drawing near to God mean looking to God as beautiful, worthy and precious. Waiting for God and taking refuge in God and hoping in God and crying out to God mean looking to Him as valiant rescuer. In fact, as you meditate on these conditions they begin to look less and less like separate and distinct requirements and more and more like different ways of describing the heart of faith…. Elements of each are woven into what faith is’ (Pg 252).
Once again Dr. Piper believes that faith is more than a simple falling on a Savior, but a moral act with conditions. Why do these evangelical leaders insist on loading moral conditions on faith? No doubt MacArthur, Piper and others are worried about the spurious faith that bears no fruit found everywhere in the contemporary church. But the biblical answer to this sad condition is not to preach more law but to go back to the preaching of the gospel and bringing sinners face to face with the glory of Christ and see them ‘being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit’ (2 Cor 3:18). Adding more to faith than what faith can bear is a more serious problem than what first appears. To mix in the fruit of sanctification to faith almost always has the effect of casting the sheep into a spiral of despair as they try to measure to a faith they cannot achieve. Worse still, such preaching chases away sinners who feel they can never make those life changes that guaranteed in sanctification but not in saving faith.
This adding an unseemly moral weight to faith is found everywhere in modern evangelicalism.
Evidence #5: The law/gospel distinction is blurred in the rise of a New Evangelical Pietism.
It seems that modern evangelicalism is drifting more and more into an experiential Christianity rather than one rooted in historical-redemptive events. An emphasis on Christian experience has turned the faith inward a faith which is defined by personal conversion, a radically changed life and an emotional verification. While these inward realities are not bad, if they are not checked by historic reformation theology they can lead to a Christianity unhinged from the objective truths of the cross. This reminds us that there have always been two historic movements that vie for the soul of evangelicalism. Both are German; Pietism and the Reformation. One stresses the inward life (Pietism) the other the objective truths of God’s acts in history (Reformation). When the Pietistic strain becomes dominant one in the Christian world, it leads to is a confusion of Law and Gospel. The roots of Pietism and it cousin, Revivalism, go back to German commune, Herrnhut and an American city, Oberlin. In the 18th century, German Lutheranism had cemented itself into a cold, formal, lifeless religion. In reaction to this, men arose who reclaimed the need for a personal relationship with God and an emphasis on spiritual disciplines. The book that best summarized this spiritual movement within Lutheranism was Pia Desideria (pious desires) written in 1675 by Lutheran Pastor Philipp Jakob Spener. The book was a guide to a revitalized spiritual life with God. It became an instant success among many Lutherans who had been drying up in a spiritually cold Lutheran orthodoxy. Many in this ‘pietistic’ movement came under the sway of a German nobleman, Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. In 1722 he established a community at Herrnhut in Saxony. Their influence grew and they soon became known as the Moravians. The movement was characterized by spiritual warmth, music, piety, confession of sin, and care for the poor. (This group would later go to America and were instrumental in the conversion of John Wesley). In America specifically, their zeal for evangelism and their ‘spirit filled’ preaching drove them to the outer reaches of the colonies. Their methodology settled into a form of worship called Revivalism. This movement reached its pinnacle in the Second Great Awakening (1795-1835). The emphasis of this movement was not on objective doctrines but on passion, preaching, and personal devotion. Though the movement had some good effects on the spiritual life of the colonies, its fervor eventually went off the rails doctrinally. This declension can be best seen in the ministry of an Ohio lawyer turned Preacher named Charles Finney. Finney who hailed from the town of Oberlin had a radical conversion and almost instantly gave up everything to preach the gospel. A charismatic figure, Finney relied on an abundance of manipulative tactics to stir up the crowds who came to hear him. The doctrinal deviances of Finney have been well chronicled and a discussion of them falls outside the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that his apparent ‘success’ in learning how to manipulate emotions has become one of the hallmarks of many evangelical preachers.
The point here is that the spirit of Pietism has continued to find a safe harbor in evangelical circles. The emphasis on conversion, emotion in worship, appealing to the will, a preoccupation with self-evaluation all find their genesis in Pietism. This emphasis on what is happening in me rather than what happened to Jesus two thousand years ago is another manifestation of the conflation of law and gospel. That is, the spirit of Pietism causes saints to confuse the state of their hearts with the gospel. And because the state of one’s heart is never perfect, Christians are left trying to prove their worthiness to God leading to an unsettling spiritual paranoia.
Evidence #6: A law/gospel distinction if often blurred when churches adopt a Reformed Soteriology but maintain a man-centered Ecclesiology and Eschatology.
Many evangelical churches call themselves ‘reformed’ because the preach predestination. Many ‘reformed’ churches today preach the five points of Calvinism yet still operate in a way that places man at the center of his own salvation.
For example in Ecclesiology, many so-called reformed/evangelical churches hold to a flattened view of the sacraments instead of the robust view held by the Reformers. To be specific they celebrate the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as man’s decision under man’s evaluation. Again, a general movement toward man’s participation has led to this drift away from the reformer’s views of these sacred institutions. The reformers gave high reverence to the sacraments; believing they were sacred gifts of God, means of grace, and another efficacious voice of the gospel. Just as the word preached came and strengthened the soul of the listener by faith, so the sacraments strengthened the participants through the means of bread, wine and water as the saints received them by faith. When baptism becomes a time of personal testimony and the Lord’s Supper a time to reflect on one’s personal commitment to Christ, the God-centered focus is eliminated and like most other things in the service, becomes just another form of man adding his own efforts to the gospel of grace.
As to the issue of worship it seems that evangelical churches have intentionally turned the focus on worship from God to the needs of the congregant. Creeds that recapture the great historical truths about God are almost non-existent, and a time tested liturgy that focuses on God’s saving acts - redemption, forgiveness, adoption, regeneration - is seen as stiff, restrictive, and highly irrelevant for human issues of the day. Worship music with a few exceptions has turned its eye toward man’s feelings about God rather than God Himself, more about a celebration to a God who judges no one, than the awe inspiring fear that grips the heart when it hears about a God who dwells as a consuming fire. The sermon which was once the heart and soul of Christian worship has been transformed into a pep talk given by a gifted communicator who can lead the unsuspecting listener by verbal manipulation, often saying nothing about a biblical text but rather littering the sermon with inspiring illustrations that make people laugh or otherwise feel better about themselves. What is often missing in all aspects of worship are the themes that makes worship of God in Christ true worship; a constant recapitulation of the themes of man’s sin, and God’s free gift in the death, burial, resurrection and ascension of the Son of God.
As to eschatology, the firm adherence to a Dispensational framework that looks to the newspapers more than the bible has made prophecy of future events the great task of the modern day church leader. Playing off man’s fears rather than bringing comfort in God’s acts, many prognosticators of the modern church has pocketed millions in giving advice to Christians on how to prepare for the future. Whereas the church has always looked backward in history for its comfort, this new paradigm encourages believers to look forward into the dark mysteries of the future. Once again man has subtly taken center stage as the man actor in the drama of redemption is man who can unlock the secrets of redemption. The upshot is that salvation is no longer a message outside of us that must be believed, but a puzzle to unravel in order to survive future upheavals in a crumbling world. Once again, this is a dire confusion of law and gospel.
Conclusion.
I have tried to show that there is a great divide in understanding law and gospel that exists between Reformation Christianity and the modern evangelical movement. I have tried to show that there is a glacial slide of the evangelical church away from the traditional law/gospel divide. Rather evangelicalism is moving toward a more man-centered approach to the Christian life, subtly confusing what man ought to do (law) with what has already been done for him (gospel). I have tried to list several areas where I see this divide clearly though this list is in no way exhaustive. My only point was to show that we have visible evidence that the modern evangelical church is enamored with law and has incorporated human effort and works into the very fabric of the gospel. Continuance on this path can only be fatal to this movement in the long run. In the last and final installment of this series I will show how wrestling with biblical verses of various genres through this law/gospel hermeneutic will enable one to correctly interpret the Bible. Yes, the issue is that important.