The relationship between law and gospel is one of the trickiest things to understand and explain. (As you point out, “Law” has multiple meanings. In chapters 1-8 of Romans, it is used in at least 3 or 4 different ways.) I feel that I am only starting to understand them now. If we approach the Bible from a standpoint of platonic dualism, reading it as a book of timeless principles and teachings, then it is very hard to reconcile law and gospel, because as principles they appear to conflict. But if we approach the Bible from a historical/relational standpoint — viewing it as a narrative of God’s salvation work and his dynamic relationship with the human race — then the pieces start to fall into place. There are many books that explain this really well. One superly duperly awesome book is Scripture and the Authority of God by N.T. Wright (2005), which I wish every UBF Bible teacher would read. The central thesis of this book is that, despite Protestant assertions of sola scriptura, final authority does not rest in the text of the Bible but in the person of Jesus Christ (Mt 28:18). When we talk about “the authority of Scripture,” that is really just a shorthand expression for “the authority of Christ exercised through Scripture.” It may sound like obscure theological hair-splitting, but it is not. It makes a world of difference when we start to understand that everything about the Christian life, and everything period, is centered on the person of Jesus.

Everything has always emanated from Christ (John 1:1-5). But it is only in New Testament times that this has been made clear to us (Heb 1:1-3). If we do what Jesus taught his disciples to do in Luke 24:27, to adopt a radically and ridiculously Christ-centered approach to reading the whole Bible, then everything starts to take on a new flavor. For example, we begin to see that the commands given by Jesus are of a different nature than most commands appearing in the OT covenant of law; although we call them commands, they are impossible to obey unless we invite the Holy Spirit to operate on us and allow Jesus himself to obey the commands through us.

A great example is the one you mentioned in John 13:34, the command to love one another. Apart from the gospel, this command is pure nonsense. Love is an inner orientation that is not under our control. Suppose I command my wife to love me. Can she possibly do that? She cannot make her love flow. Suppose I try to win her heart by writing love letters, buying gifts, showering her with attention and affection. It might work, but it might not. It might cause her to reciprocate and be nice to me out of sense of duty, guilt, or pity, but still that is not love.   Love is a mysterious inner response that cannot be generated by us; if it flows from human effort or will then it is fake. Real love ultimately flows from God and must be awakened by him. So when Jesus said, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another,” he was talking about what he was going to do for his disciples after his glorification. He was going to send the Holy Spirit upon them and generate his own love in them as a fruit of the Spirit.

I predict that we will be discussing these things a great deal on UBFriends in the weeks ahead.

I totally agree that the point of Christianity is to follow and love Jesus the person and not to be enslaved to legalistic rules. But is it fair to identify Torah with legalistic rules, or with “our methodology, our procedure and protocol, our etiquette, our traditions, our practices, etc.?” Can we say that Paul was “against the law” when he so often reasoned from the law even in defending the gospel (e.g. Abraham’s example in Romans 4 comes from Torah)? And isn’t there a sense in which the Law is just the same as the Gospel?

Joe, you said that we are commanded to leave the law behind, and in one way this makes sense to me; but in another I still feel uncomfortable about it, especially in light of the passage from Matthew’s gospel I quoted above. Might we actually be talking about two different things when we use the word “Law”?

Law 1: Torah as (often mis)interpreted by man
Law 2: Torah as intended by God to reveal and lead us to Christ

Jesus himself quoted Torah a lot and arguably His spiritual formation as a man was thoroughly shaped by Torah, no? Jesus spoke with his disciples in a long, post-resurrection walk during which “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” (Lk 24:27) Jesus also did not shy away from issuing commands – see especially John 13:34 (read this with 13:12-17 in the background, and as the discourse continues this theme in 14:15-24, and again in 15:9-17). The words “command” and “obey” are all over the place – and this is the gospel!

Is something like this what you were getting at, Joe, when you said that “Without the Torah, the gospel doesn’t make any sense. Gospel-believing Christians can never dispense with the Torah, nor can we ignore the truths revealed through the giving of the law…”? It’s all the Word of God, even if it’s easy enough to turn it into our own misunderstood body of rules and customs, as the Pharisees did. I just feel a worry that in throwing out human rules incorrectly based on Torah, we miss the force Torah still had for Jesus, the apostles, and for us (as this has to be understood, of course, in the context of the whole Bible and especially the revelation of Christ). And no one yet commented on the meaning of the text I quoted in my first response, from Matthew 5.

As Joe said, it’s so much easier to think/feel ourselves righteous when we do what “everybody else in the church is doing.” Then before we realize it, we begin imposing and expecting everyone who comes to church or Bible study to “do the same thing.”

Eventually, even though we say we believe in Jesus, and we say we believe in the gospel, but practically and functionally we believe in our methodology, our procedure and protocol, our etiquete, our traditions, our religious practices, etc. We assume the gospel, and then expect others to conform to our religous expression “according to the law,” just as the Judaizers expected the Galatian Gentile Christians to be circumcized, keep their dietary food laws, special holy days, etc.

When I wrote about a “Torah-free gospel,” I now realize that this could be easily misunderstood. The Torah — the first five books of the Bible  — lay the foundation for the whole Bible. Without the Torah, the gospel doesn’t make any sense. Gospel-believing Christians can never dispense with the Torah, nor can we ignore the truths revealed  through the giving of the law, the failure of the Israelites to live up to the law, God’s prophetic promises to them in the midst of their disobedience, etc.   All of those things anticipate the gospel and set the stage for the  coming of the Messiah. Many Christians present the  gospel in a way that ignores the Torah, jumping from the Fall in Genesis 3 directly to the coming of Christ, as if the history and experience of Israel doesn’t matter. That is a big mistake.

The expression  “Torah-free gospel” was meant to represent the kind of message that Paul taught in Romans 8.  It’s  about how the death and resurrection of Christ has fulfilled the requirements of the law, bringing us into a new reality of direct interaction with God through the Holy Spirit rather than following a written code. We Christians are not merely freed from the written law; we are  required to leave the law behind and follow the person of Jesus Christ through the leading of the Holy Spirit.  This sounds so dangerous and subversive  that  many Christians simply do not want to go there.  We feel way more comfortable  standing in the shallow water  of  rules, practices and disciplines than  we do swimming out into the deep ocean of dependence upon the Spirit who, as the Scripture promised, would replace the written law and write God’s requirements directly upon our hearts.

If we  are honest, I think we will find that much of our tendency to return to the practice and teaching of the law stems from
* our desire to appear righteous in the sight of our peers  and not look like lawbreakers,
* our insecurity about not knowing how to interact with the Holy Spirit, and
* a kind of laziness stemming from the fact that it’s far easier to follow a few commandments (especially if everyone else in the church community is following them) than it is to pursue a deep personal relationship with God characterized by intimacy, love and two-way communication.

I will contend that the gospel demands nothing less than a vital, living relationship with God that depends on Christ to fulfill the law for us. The gospel requires us to stop basing our self esteem  on our personal adherence to principles, laws, and behaviors which (however good they may be) can never substitute for Christ. And it requires us to consider, “What is the Immanuel God, who is alive and working in my life, saying to me and asking me to do right now?”

This has been an awesome read, and I really appreciate the new windows being opened up and the fresh wind of ideas blowing in on how to think about evangelism and election. As I read, a number of questions arose in my mind. I’ll start with a personal one: Sometimes I feel that my problem is not so much an inability to learn from others as it is an inability to be confident in what I myself know. Maybe part of this is just being Canadian (for those of you who don’t know, Canadians generally don’t have a very clear identity, besides the fact that we are multicultural and diverse, and we like beer, hockey, and canoes). I’m not saying I’m exempt from the problem of pride and superiority complex. But there is an issue on the other side of the coin that I think I personally struggle with more – namely living and speaking with a sense of conviction about what I actually believe myself. To make this a bit more general – how do we balance a deep conviction that the Jesus we know is Lord, with a deep humility about the limits of our understanding of Him?  

A second question – this one directed more to understanding what’s going on in Joe’s posts: At various points, Joe, you made comments to the effect that one of God’s reasons for hardening the hearts of most 1st century Jews to the gospel message was to ensure that a Torah-free gospel could be preached. I find myself enthusiastically agreeing with alot of what you’ve been saying, but I feel a need for greater clarity about this point.

For one thing, is it even right to think of the gospel as Torah-free? I’m thinking of passages like Matt 5:17-20, where Jesus claims that “not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” A face-value reading of this seems to me to indicate that in some way Torah is going to remain a very important part of the church’s message – and even in the sense that its commandments need to be practiced and taught – right up until Jesus’ return.  

Of course, we know from lots of other places that we are in some ways “free from the law” – but how do we get a sense of freedom from the law that at the same time involves paying very careful attention to practicing and teaching the law (even to “the least stroke of a pen”)?

Just something I’m wondering about. I guess I have some of my own (partially worked out) ideas about how to understand this out but I thought I’d throw this out to others first to see what people think. Also I think this is getting way too long for a comment…