Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!princeton!njin!paul.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: gilham@csl.sri.com (Fred Gilham) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: The law for Christians Message-ID: Date: 7 May 91 04:34:56 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Computer Science Lab, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA. Lines: 66 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu There have been a few postings about this issue lately and I also read a couple of articles in Christianity Today about this. I found the articles in C.T. very disappointing; the authors, in my opinion, seemed not to have read Romans or Galatians. Here's the quotation from F.F. Bruce's book PAUL, APOSTLE OF THE HEART SET FREE, pg. 191-193, that I mentioned in my previous posting about this. I feel this puts things very well: ---------------------------------------- The traditional Lutheran doctrine of the threefold use of the law envisages it (i) as a means of preservation, (ii) as a summons to repentance, (iii) as guidance for the church. In so far as the first use involves the administration of the law by magistrates for the restraint of evil and the maintenance of good order, this is not an aspect of the gospel; what Paul has to say about this subject may be seen in Romans 13:1-7. The second use is recognized by Paul as a fact of experience -- ``through the law comes knowledge of sin'' (Romans 3:20) -- but not, it appears, as an aid to gospel preaching. It may be held, as a principle of pastoral theology, that confrontation with the law is a salutary means of leading the sinner to acknowledge his inability and cast himself on the mercy of God. But there is no evidence that Paul ever used the law in this way in his apostolic preaching. His hearers, whether Jews or Gentiles, were in bondage, as he saw it, and his message was one of liberation. In fact, when he urges his Gentile converts in the churches of Galatia not to ``submit again to a yoke of slavery'' (Galatians 5:1), he implies that by placing themselves under the yoke of the law they would be reverting to the same kind of bondage as they had endured in their pagan past. It appears, indeed that the angels through whom the law was ordained (Galatians 3:19) are equated with the ``elemental spirits of the world'' (Galatians 4:3, 8) which impose their yoke on the minds of men outside of Christ, whether they be Jews or Gentiles. As for the third use of the law, Paul's thoughts on the guidance of the church may sometimes be expressed by means of the term, ``law'', but when he speaks of ``the law of the Spirit'' or ``the law of Christ'' he uses ``law'' in a non-legal sense. In the reformed tradition derived from Geneva, it has frequently been said that, while the man in Christ is not under the law as a means of salvation, he remains under it as a rule of life (Calvin, Institutes II.7.12-15). In its own right, this distinction may be cogently maintained as a principle of Christian theology and ethics, but it should not be imagined that it has Pauline authority. According to Paul, the believer is NOT under law as a rule of life -- unless one thinks of the law of love, and that is a completely different kind of law, fulfilled not by obedience to a code but by the outworking of an inward power. When Paul says, ``sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace'' (Romans 6:14), it is the on-going course of Christian life that he has in view, not simply the initial justification by faith -- as is plain from the point of the antinomian retort which Paul immediately quotes: ``What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace?'' (Romans 6:15). Again, it is sometimes said that Christ is the end of the ceremonial law (including not only the sacrificial cultus but circumcision and the observance of the sacred calendar) but not of the moral law (Calvin, Institutes II.1.17). Once more, this is a perfectly valid, and to some extent an obvious, theological and ethical distinction; but it has no place in Pauline exegesis. It has to be read into Paul, for it is not a distinction that Paul himself makes. ---------------------------------------- -- -Fred Gilham gilham@csl.sri.com