LAW AND GOSPEL OR GLAWSPEL? IT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. PART I
Drifting is rarely detected. Once lying on a raft in a large lake I fell asleep in the hot sun. When I awoke many minutes later I realized I had moved a long way off shore. The current wasn’t particularly bad that day and so I paid no attention to it. So often we drift away from our moorings without even knowing it. I wonder if this is the story of American Evangelicalism. Let me explain.
The evangelical church with which I once identified, has long been drifting in a dangerous direction. The evangelical movement itself has long been a mystery as to its beginnings and its goals. For the purpose of this article we will speak of evangelicalism as that theological movement that brought the church back to orthodoxy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and which stood in opposition to the Theological Liberalism and Cultural Secularism of the day. The movement was attached to no denomination in particular and was a many headed affair that had many moving parts. Its one uniting factor was that it held to the sole authority of the word of God and power of the gospel message for the salvation of sinners. I was saved in evangelicalism and owe it a great debt to my spiritual growth.
For me this will be a sad post. What I have to say is observational, born from a burgeoning conviction that the movement with which I once identified has slowly drifted from its moorings. As I said, in the beginning its mission was honorable. It boasted good men who tried to bring the church back to its original reformation moorings. Names like Carl Henry, Harold Ockinga, Wilbur Smith, John Edward John Carnell, Billy Graham, John Stott and others grace its wall of fame. As to convictions, the movement defended Creationism, the Deity of Christ, the Virgin Birth, the Inerrancy of Scripture, and most importantly, a thoroughly God-centered (monergistic) soteriology that held firmly to God’s sovereignty in salvation. Yes, the movement had auspicious beginnings. My sadness comes from the fact that it has slowly drifted away from its original convictions.
Evangelicalism was a heroic movement that stood against modernism much like the Reformation stood opposed to the Medieval Church. In each case at the heart of the matter was the sole authority of Scripture verses a relativistic or humanistic approach to truth. And God blessed the evangelical movement just as He did the Reformation. Many people, especially the young who were choking on the dry crusts of Liberal Christianity, were now hearing a refreshingly new message that hinged itself to a book and preached an objective salvation that occurred many hundreds of years ago in a remote corner of the earth. The movement opposed all forms of man-centered theology. It promoted and worshipped a big God. It held to the spiritual impotence of man and the supreme power of a God who works alone in salvation and who does whatsoever He pleases.
Inadvertently there were seeds of weakness being sowed in the movement. Its robust doctrines triggered a rugged individualism that rested on gifted personalities instead of creeds, and an ecclesiastical model that was often unhinged from the church of bygone days. Without those ancient moorings, the movement began to shift from a solid preaching of the power of God in the gospel, to the power of the Christian lifestyle that would move the world. It is not surprising that when we look at evangelicalism today the words we often used to describe it are very man centered concepts, such as showmanship, relevance, cuteness, marketing, pizzazz, emotionalism and corporate marketing. In other words evangelicalism has moved from a relatively uninspiring God-centeredness to a awe-inspiring man-centeredness. This man-centeredness is not only seen in a soteriology (doctrine of salvation) that drifts more and more toward Christian morality, but man-centered in the sense that it so quickly creates heros whose words often becomes more inspired than those of the Bible. Where the evangelical movement is headed, no one knows for sure. The energy is still high but is there anything real in it? Suffice it to say that in this buzz of ecclesiastical excitement, many have begun to experience a spiritual weariness that comes by constantly trying to keep up with the newest innovations in order to keep ahead of the competition.
But what is at the root of this slow defection? We tend to look at the visible changes and criticize them, but there is always a principle that lies at the root of it all. What explains this slow drift away from the gospel of grace into programs, marketing enterprises, organizational proficiency? And what explains the many who are beginning to drop out of the evangelical rat race altogether? Indeed, there are far too many issues that could be examined. But this author believes that at the root of it all is hermeneutical shift concerning the clear distinction of law and gospel. The evangelicalism of old understood it; the newer, contemporary version has lost its way.
To support our point, let us go backwards and take a look at how the original evangelical (gospel) movement, the Reformation, viewed law and gospel. Scholars mainly agree that the formal cause of the Reformation was the authority of Scripture. Scripture alone was the treasury of all truth. Evangelicals then and now still hold to that. But now let us look at the he material cause of the Reformation, that practice that brought all the latent issues to the surface. In the sixteenth century that would be the sale of indulgences. At the root of the indulgence controversy was the issue of merit. How could man do something that earned him the favor of God. The medieval church came to believe that man could do certain works that God would consider righteous even if not done perfectly. Law could be toned down to keeping the sacraments, doing certain works of piety and depriving oneself certain desires so that God will reward you at the end. As to the gospel, the church held that Christ and His death on the cross was the basis of forgiveness, but the cross, though the foundation, needed good works sprinkled in to save a soul. The cross was important but not everything. The Reformers, as we will discuss shortly, came to see that law was always law and could not be manipulated and the gospel was a free gift that needed no augmented works from man. Each side had its biblical texts to support its view. Ultimately, the issue came down to one of hermeneutics. Specifically, I would like to argue that the Reformation was really a revolution of interpreting the Bible through the lens of law and gospel.
Now don’t panic if you don’t understand what I mean. The rest of this post and the posts to follow will be my feeble attempt to explain how the Bible is to be interpreted through a law/gospel hermeneutic. The point I wish to make here is that the law/gospel hermeneutic is at the heart of the divide between older evangelicalism and its modern counterpart. Evangelicals of a bygone generation understood the great difference between how the law and the gospel intersected their lives in different ways. Today these categories have become so muddled that many evangelicals today don’t understand how the law and the gospel work in important but separate ways. This blurring of categories causes confusion in hearts and causes them to throw up their hands and leave the church.
So again let us return to the Reformation in order to get a better grip on this law/gospel shift modern evangelicalism. So we ask, why did the Reformation happen in the first place? There are many answers to this and this paper has no intention of listing all of them. Certainly one of the chief issues of the Reformation was the recapturing of the gospel against the backdrop of a holy God who must judge the world. The reformers discovered that the gospel was not just a tiny bit of good news about Jesus who will help us on our way to heaven, but God’s amazing solution to an unsolvable problem. The gospel once again became God’s free gift without reference to the works of the creature. God saved by Himself and for Himself. The solas of the Reformation were a manageable summary of this truth. The final sola, Sola Deo Gloria, was not a cute little postscript to round off an amazing list, but an apt summary of the entire Reformation. The Law of Moses always killed while the gospel of Jesus Christ always saved. And the two must never be mixed. The medieval church mixed the two and this was her paradigm for interpreting truth. The Reformers, on the other hand, saw the wall between law and gospel and interpreted the Bible in that light.
So what do we mean when we say that all scripture is categorized by law or gospel?
First let us describe law. Law is not a synonym for commandment. Law is a mindset, an economic way of doing business. It is much more than what God tells us to do. Law is a paradigm that employs the language of give and take, obligation, justice, compromise and bi-partisanship, or the word we love to use the most, merit. Thus in the Bible law is:
Everything that emanates from God’s nature as holy.
All proclamations that come from God’s position as King.
All God’s commands to His creatures.
Everything God expects His creatures to do.
Anything that requires man’s response, man’s payment, or man’s conformity.
Any dealings between God and man which are transactional.
Gospel, on the other hand is simply anything that God gives to the creature without any cause in the recipient. In the Bible the gospel is:
Anything that God promises to do for the creature.
Anytime God offers to give a gift without condition.
Anything that derives from God’s nature as compassionate and gracious.
Law texts are characterized by giving and giving back, doing and doing in return, demanding and responding. They can exist in biblical narrative, poetry, proverb, or in any other literary genre. Law texts are those which accord with the ways of natural man. Law texts can come in the form of statements, commands or questions. Law texts always reveal man’s desire to act on his own while displaying his inability to do anything good. Law texts often leave the reader in a state of self-congratulation or despair.
Gospel texts are characterized by God’s gracious giving while expecting nothing in return. Gospel texts are His promises made without condition. Gospel texts give things because God is gracious not because man is anything. Gospel texts always leave the reader in wonder, love and praise.
The core concept that differentiates law from gospel is merit. Merit bears the idea of worthiness. We merit something because we have done something of worth or because we are by nature worthy. Such it was in the medieval church. Over many years the church had come to believe that salvation was only possible when the sinner was able to perform meritorious works. The church distinguished between two kinds of merit. If the deed was absolutely perfect, God was required to reward that act. This put God in the person’s debt. It was called condign merit. The Medieval Church believed that Jesus’ life was so perfect that it demanded God’s merit. For the average Christian this kind of merit was unattainable. There was a second kind of merit that God could bestow, not on deeds that were perfect but deeds that were so good that it was ‘fitting’ or ‘congruous’ for God to bestow merit in such places. God was not obligated to bestow this kind of merit but because He was by nature merciful, the church believed it was congruous for Him to do so. Thus, the medieval church called this congruous merit. It was the acquisition of this kind of merit that medieval system of salvation rested upon.
The medieval church denied that a person was declared righteous solely by faith in Christ. Instead they taught that Christ’s death put the sinner in a salvable position wherein he then became righteous by accruing merit. Obtaining congruous merit was the way people in the pew could merit eternal life. This meant that the life of the Medieval saint was centered around stockpiling enough merit to achieve heaven. Those who didn’t do enough were consigned to a place called purgatory where remaining sin was purged from their lives. As we shall see congruent merit could be acquired by a living saint and applied to the account of a deceased relative in order to shorten their time of suffering.
It was into this world that a tormented Augustinian monk tried to make sense of it all. He possessed an overactive conscience that reminded him constantly that he was altogether steeped in sin in every part of his being. If there was such a thing as congruent merit how could he ever get enough? He knew that God required perfection from His creatures and that even one deflection from His holy law demanded eternal punishment. Luther’s only hope was to constantly appropriate for himself the sacrament of Penance which brought him temporary forgiveness of sin. Not surprisingly the monk would spend hours in a confessional box trying to remember every little sin he had committed throughout the day. To accrue further merit Luther would perform acts of self-denial, like self-flagellations and severe fasting which he believed pleased an angry deity. But what Luther discovered was that no matter how much he confessed his sins or denied his flesh, he could never quiet a guilty conscience. There would always be some unconfessed sin that might condemn him at the last. For Luther, salvation by merit was an utter impossibility. What could the sinful heart of man ever do to that was meritorious? Knowing his sinful heart and the unbending requirements of God caused Luther to fall into deep despair. Ladder climbing to heaven was a system that could save no one for sinful man had no hands or feet with which to climb. Religion to Luther was a dead-end street and this made him angry at everything. So when he saw a priest selling merit in the form of indulgences to sinners for the drop of a coin, Luther was incensed. From his own experience he knew that these indulgences were a sham. This inspired the monk to pick up the pen and write Ninety Five Theses, or propositions for debate, that challenged this abusive system. Thus, the Reformation was in essence a debate about the possibility of human merit in salvation. Though to this point Luther did not have a clear idea about salvation resting upon the work of Christ, what he did know was that this medieval system was offering desperate sinners a false security, and that for a price. Unbeknownst to Luther the battle lines were being drawn.
And this was the battle: the medieval church holding tenaciously to the idea that man could do and even purchase meritorious works before God. While Luther and those who would eventually follow him saying that no salvation could rest on the myth of human merit. Either there was another way that God saved sinners or there could be no salvation at all.
When Luther finally came to the truth concerning the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to sinners he was able now to formulate a cohesive system. First he realized that the commands of God were never lowered to suit the abilities of man. The law never changed. It always held a standard of perfection. It was always holy, just and good. Second, he realized that one could be righteous only by being garbed in a perfect righteousness that was not his own. In his reading of Paul, especially chapters three and four of the Epistle to the Romans, Luther discovered that there was a righteousness possible for man, not the righteousness of God’s character, but the righteousness of His gracious gift of Jesus. This divine requirement for man’s obedience he called law. This gift of righteousness to sinners he called the gospel. So was born the law-gospel hermeneutic.
In thinking through this newly discovered paradigm, Luther realized he was solving the mystery that the medieval church struggled to reconcile. If God required good works and man was inveterately sinful, then who could be saved? The only answer the church could come up was that God must accept imperfect works as meritorious, the idea of congruent merit. Luther, however, knew that congruent merit wasn’t real. God was perfect and could only accept perfection. The law/gospel paradigm solved the problem. The law always condemned man and the sentence of condemnation could never be lessened. The law texts condemned all men everywhere with no exception. But the Bible was also filled with gospel texts. These ran parallel to law texts and offered complete forgiveness of sins, not based on human merit but on the free grace of God. The grace did not change the fact that the recipient was a sinner under law. The law was still broken when he sinned. But it did mean that the sinner’s status was changed. To describe this state of being Luther came up with the Latin phrase ‘simul justus et peccator’ (simultaneously just and sinner). At last Luther understood the Christian life and understood how he could fall short of the law and still be right with God. Peace flooded his soul at last. Luther called this gospel message, life. He called the medieval church, legal fiction.
So how does this bear upon the evangelical movement in America? It is my opinion that much of evangelicalism has a theology that mirrors the theology of the medieval church. The parallel may be hard to detect at first. Hopefully when I am finished with these blogs, many will see the similarities. The medieval church preached a gospel that was heavy with law. The law was not preached to drive sinners to Christ, but law was preached to scare people back to mother church and to cooperate with the church for their salvation. In this way the sinner could perhaps gain congruent merit and eventually go to heaven. If looked at closely, one can see that this was a system centered around man’s efforts. Why this was such a popular message was because man by nature loves to contribute to his own healing. Natural man will jump at anything he can do that gives him partial control over his fate. In other words man loves to put the Creator God in his debt by doing things that require reward. Adam and Eve found some fig leaves to entice God to accept them and man has been grasping at fig leaves ever since. But whenever man tries to find something that will please God he necessarily must lower the absolute standard of perfection in the law. Some call it sincere obedience, some partial obedience, some Holy Spirit energized obedience. In the medieval church they would have called it sacramental obedience. But whatever it is called, it comes from the same filthy well of human works. And whenever the works of man are inserted into the equation of salvation, the law itself is diminished and the gospel is lost.
The purpose of this article and the ones following is to show that evangelicalism’s mixture of law and gospel in salvation follows the same path as the medieval church. The law is lowered while the remedy of the gospel made altogether human. The law is often explained as a gospel exercise that keeps God happy. The gospel is often preached with the added conditions of man’s obedience. What is missed is the sad fact that when the church comingles law and gospel she diminishes them both.
We conclude this first installment by showing that the reformers uniformly held to this law/gospel distinction. In part two we shall give examples where this conflation of law and gospel can be clearly seen. In part three I propose to go through some Bible passages to show how this paradigm of law and gospel can help the reader interpret the sacred book. Now for quotes. We begin with Luther himself,
“The other word of God is not Law or commandment, nor does it require anything of us; but after the first Word, that of the Law, has done this work and distressful misery and poverty have been produced in the heart, God comes and offers his lovely, living Word, and promises, pledges, and obligates himself to give grace and help, that we may get out of this misery and that all sins not only be forgiven but also blotted out and that love and delight to fulfill the law may be given besides. See, this divine promise of his grace and of the forgiveness of his is properly called Gospel. And I say again and yet again that you should never understand Gospel to mean anything but the divine promise of his grace and of the forgiveness of sin. For this is why hitherto St. Paul’s epistles were not understood and cannot be understood by our adversaries even now; they do not know what Law and Gospel really are.” (Luther’s Sermons, trans. John Nicholas Lenker and Eugene F. A. Klug, 7 vols Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000, 1.99).
His right hand man Philip Melanchthon said succinctly,
“All of Scripture is either Law or Gospel” (Loci Communes, 1521 pg 94).
John Calvin had the same conviction about the distinction between law and gospel,
“For the doctrine of the law being far above human ability, man may view the promises (gospel) indeed, from a distance, but cannot gather any fruit from them” (Inst 2,7,3).
He added,
“A man may raise this objection: the law was given by God, so therefore it cannot be placed in opposition to faith, which also proceeds from God. The answer to this is simple. God made both the day and the night, water and fire, cold and heat. Surely, the day is not in opposition to the night, but rather God in his goodness and wisdom has arranged that they appear in a suitable order; man has the brightness of the sun in which to do his work by day, and by night the sun hides itself away so that man may take his rest. Therefore, although day differs from night, there is no disharmony between them. The same applies to fire and water. Every created thing has its function — and fire and water complement each other very well; however, if we were to mix them together, then they would indeed clash! This is true of the law and the gospel. Those who believe that we are justified by the law as well as the gospel are confusing everything; it is as if they are crashing heaven and earth together! In short, it would be easier to mix fire and water than to say this: that we can merit a measure of the grace of God and yet also need the aid of the Lord Jesus Christ. If we consider what the law is and why it was given, we will discover that there is no discrepancy with the gospel, nor with faith, but that there is perfect harmony between them. This objection is thus dealt with. If we say that both faith and the law proceed from God, we are right; but we must give some thought (as we will do shortly) to the reason why God originally instituted them both.’ (Sermon on Gal 2:15-16; 1558).
Beza, Calvin’s successor in Geneva, added,
“We divide this Word into two principal parts or kinds: the one is called the 'Law,' the other the 'Gospel.' For, all the rest can be gathered under one or the other of these two headings. What we call Law (when it is distinguished from Gospel and is taken for one of the two parts of the Word) is a doctrine whose seed is written by nature in our hearts...What we call the Gospel ('Good News') is a doctrine which is not at all in us by nature, but which is revealed from Heaven (Mt.16:17; Jn.1:13), and totally surpasses natural knowledge. By it God testifies to us that it is his purpose to save us freely by his only Son (Rom.3:20-22), provided that, by faith, we embrace him as our only wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption” (1Cor.1:30).’( Beza Confession De Foi Du Chretien, published in Geneva in 1558.)
Theologian Louis Berkhof adds,
"There is law and gospel in the Old Testament and there is law and gospel in the New. The law comprises everything in Scripture which is a revelation of God's will in the form of command and prohibition, while the gospel embraces everything, whether it be in the Old Testament or the New, that pertains to the work of reconciliation and that proclaims the seeking and redeeming love of God in Christ Jesus." (Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979, pp. 612-613).
The Reformation was a great work of God because it kept law and gospel in their respective places. But this distinction has been lost among many evangelical churches today. And without this guiding light of a law/gospel hermeneutic a confused gospel is often preached. Many today in evangelical churches have no idea where they stand with God because they see Him as a gracious God who still holds law over the head as a condition of their salvation. This fosters doubt, spiritual unsteadiness and confusion and often drives people out of church because they have no idea who this God really is.
In the next segment I will be more specific on the ways in which this law/gospel confusion penetrates to the very core of the evangelical movement.