Why we must recover the biblical meaning of “law” and “gospel”
I have recently been engaging in a discussion regarding the importance of recovering the biblical meaning of terms like “law” and “gospel.” We Protestants have inherited a rather dominant tradition of using these terms in a rather abstract sense something along the lines of “law = any requirement God lays upon man.” “Gospel” has become virtually a technical term for forgiveness of sins apart from works. (Just as an aside: just as there is a typical Protestant use of these terms, there are also Roman Catholic uses that no doubt could be criticized. My aim here is not to say we Protestants are wrong, and Rome is right, after all; it is rather to engage in critique from within, so that we can correct things we ought to correct.)
Now, of course, God does lay requirements upon man, and God does grant forgiveness of sins apart from works. But the Bible’s use of the terms “gospel” and “law,” particularly in Paul’s writings, where Protestant discussion on these subjects tends to centre around, is very different from these definitions.
Paul always uses nomos (“law”) to refer to Torah, whether in the sense of “the Mosaic covenant” (by far his most frequent usage) or in the more general sense of “the five books of Moses.” In the second sense, his focus is on Torah as Scripture, as e.g. the Genesis narratives concerning Abraham are referred to as nomos in Galatians 4.24 and, given the immediately following context, likely in Romans 3.31 as well.
Similarly – and not surprisingly, given the content of the books we call Gospels – the term “gospel” is a very concrete term with definite historical connections (after all, it means “good news“). While free forgiveness of sins has always been God’s way of dealing with sinners, the term “gospel” is tied to God’s concrete and dateable historical actions related to what some scholars call “the Christ event,” with Christ’s death and resurrection at the center (see e.g. 1 Cor 15.1-4).
I have become increasingly convinced of the importance of abandoning the abstract usage of these terms, not because the general theological point is wrong; it is not. God saved us, out of His own sovereign mercy, not because of works of righteousness which we have done (Titus 3.5). But the problem with using the specific terms law and gospel in the way that we do means that inevitably those “synthetic” meanings get read into all the biblical texts where the terms appear. And that is not a good thing.
What follows is a lightly modified version of a private post I made on this subject. I have tried to clean up the style slightly, as well as eliminate points that were really germane only to a narrower discussion. To aid clarity, I have also added a couple of brief statements that distill thoughts I had made in the more extended discussion. I trust making this public will prove somewhat helpful in terms of clarifying the importance of the fight for biblical language.
Nobody in my sphere denies that one’s acceptance with God is not dependent upon anything they do, but rather God’s love in Christ. Not only do we not deny it, I doubt that anyone of us are the slightest bit unclear on it either.
That is not at all the point of my tirades regarding the terminology of law and gospel. My point is that by using the terms “law” and “gospel” to give this assurance (and ubiquitously, as people prone to use the terms generally do), the possibility of reading the texts correctly is effectively destroyed. And that does far more harm than anyone can imagine.
Now, taking Galatians as a sort of example. If we go to what Paul is actually talking about, where will we derive application? Is it really such a big deal that we skip the circumcision issue and jump right to “the heart of the matter”?
It’s all well and good to say that we don’t face the circumcision issue in our churches. But just because we need to make an extra step in application doesn’t mean that understanding the text properly to begin with is unimportant. To the contrary, the applications that would be much closer to the heart of the issue are completely lost because certain preachers think that all those Pauline texts are harangues about law and gospel, defined in their traditional Protestant terms.
There are all sorts of issues much closer to the surface application than dealing with some supposed merit theology that dwells in every man’s Pelagian heart. Frankly, paedocommunion and “close communion” are a lot more relevant to Galatians than is merit theology. Does paedocommunion have to do with assurance? Absolutely, but it’s a lot more practical and on the ground than the gospel-law treatment ever makes possible.
The whole matter of Jew and Gentile, which Paul broadens out explicitly into barbarian, Scythian etc – these are the immediate implications of the gospel, and if the churches had been preaching what Paul actually says rather than hammering on a pet doctrine, racism could never have taken hold anywhere.
Then too the use of “gospel” and “law” with a different, extrabiblical meaning and then reading that meaning into Scripture not only buries the native and should-be obvious applications. People express concern about the fine distinctions which systematic theology makes. Some of those distinctions are valid. Fine. But I worry about the distinctions that Scripture itself makes, distinctions which become not merely unaccented but unallowable because systematic theology’s forcible takeover of the key terms cannot allow the texts like James to say what they actually do say. They do not allow the texts like Galatians 5.4 to say what they actually do say. They do not allow the texts like Galatians 6.7-9 to say what they actually do say. Ad infinitum.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of implications that hardly anyone has even begun to think about. How does it affect the church that while the NT is all about Israel, it wouldn’t make a difference to most preaching if Jesus were born in Quebec?
I preach free grace clearly and quite consistently as well. I have no problem with that. But I will not bow to this confusion that has been wrought by distorting the biblical terminology. It has done more damage than we can possibly know.
Frankly, I increasingly think the ubiquitous law-gospel thing is a crutch. I wonder if where it’s preached most strongly is in fact where it least needs to be preached – where folks are much more prone to feel secure when they ought not, because they believe “the right thing” about justification.
In his new book Deep Exegesis, Peter Leithart warns about treating the actual words of Scripture as “husk” which we can safely discard as long as we have what’s really important, the “meaning.” (And all too often, “meaning” is boiled down even further, so that it is not even merely a summary of the text, but a systematic statement of the supposed “doctrine” we are to take from the text.)
If we actually understand the text, we can revisit in every generation and every situation and come back with a fitting application. But if we boil all the meat off and say it’s all about free grace in the abstract, we will lose any particular witness (or at least, the most biblically-relevant) on the ground to what the gospel is about.
The battles in the early church over the law were not about theological theorems. Every last one of them were battles over practical issues of
fellowship and exclusion, and if we learned those lessons, church life would be much different than it is in conservative Reformed-dom. The exclusivism of conservative Reformed and Lutheran churches bears eloquent witness to the fact that their law-gospel construct is a monumental hindrance to actually living by the letters that Paul really wrote.