If Christ Be Not Raised… We’re Fine?

I was able to have a substantial conversation with a fellow student on campus today. He considered himself ’spiritual’ rather than religious. In addition, he made sure that I knew that he was familiar with Christianity, having spent most of his life in a Lutheran Church.  Throughout our conversation I began to wonder more and more whether he even understood the gospel. When I finally posed the question he was indignant. Rather than offer any reply he went off about how it was wrong for me to question his beliefs, that it was wrong for me to judge him and that Jesus’ one command (that he happened to accept) was not to judge others. After I reassured him that I had no ill-intentions but was asking an honest question he finally replied. In a significantly less assertive tone he answered that Christianity was a set of moral teachings given by Jesus. After a few more minutes of talking he went on to deny Christ’s resurrection, and considered the existence of Christ a matter of interpretation. At the end of our conversation he, in essence, denied the ability to have certainty in any matter (except those matters that were convenient to him). The discussion was obviously going nowhere so we decided to stop.

I walked away from that conversation with a lot on my mind. What got me more than anything is the fact that this guy has no clue what the gospel was despite his life spent in Church. Maybe he had bad ears or maybe the gospel wasn’t coming from the pulpit, hopefully it was the former. His ‘gospel’ is no gospel at all, in fact, it sounds more like Gnosticism.

The Gnostic doctrine was set forth as a timeless message in which reference was made not to past events as the basis of salvation but to certain general religious ideas, presented in mythological form.
- Bengt Hägglund, History of Theology (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House), 410.

 

Law and Gospel According to Luther

The Law tells us what we are to do, under the threat of punishment. The Gospel, on the other hand, promises and provides the forgiveness of sin. Just as one must differentiate between the righteousness which is acceptable before men and that which is acceptable before God, so one must also distinguish between the preaching of the Law and that of the Gospel. One task of the Law is to compel men to act, to promote the good and prevent the evil. As such it therefore includes all public order and activity on the different levels of life. Luther called this the civil use of the Law (usus legis civilis). But when it comes to a man’s relation to God–his righteousness in a higher sense–the task of the Law is completely different. The Law cannot produce a single good work, and man is here referred to the Word of the Gospel, which offers him forgiveness of sin for the sake of Christ. In this context the function of the Law is simply to reveal sin and to make the threat of wrath real–the wrath under which man stands because of his sinful nature. Luther called this the theological or spiritual use of the Law (usus theologicus seu spiritualis).
Law and Gospel characterize two kinds of preaching which simultaneously exert their effect: the Law accuses and judges, while the Gospel awakens faith in the heart and thereby raises man up and re-creates him so that he can begin to love God and his neighbor–i.e., so that he can live in the frame of mind which the command of love demands.
…With respect to justification itself, good works must be as clearly distinguished from faith as possible. For this has to do with faith alone. As Luther expressed it, the Law must not be permitted to force its way up in the conscience. The man who has been crushed by the Law, and recognizes himself to be a sinner, can be raised up only by faith. He must look only to the cross of Christ, and not to the Law or to his own works, as though they could make satisfaction for his misdeeds. On this point, therefore, faith and works are mutually exclusive.
- Bengt Hägglund, History of Theology (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House), 224-28. 

Marcion Was A Heretic

The early church fathers considered Marcion to be the most difficult of heretics. Among the heresies that he propagated was his radical separation of Law and Gospel. As sad as it is Marcion’s theology is not too different from what many Evangelicals believe today:

The basic point of departure in Marcion’s theology is to be found in the distinction he made between Law and Gospel, between the Old Covenant and the New. Paul spoke of the Christian’s freedom from the Law, and Marcion interpreted that to mean that the Law had been vanquished and that the Gospel was to be preached without any reference to the Law. The Law, he said, had been replaced by a new order. The Gospel, to him, was a new, previously unknown message, which not only replaced the Law but stood in opposition to it. Tertullian characterized this attitude in the following words: “The separation of the Law and the Gospel is the characteristic and principal work of Marcion.” (Contra Marcionem, 1, 19)
…The Most High God, as Marcion conceived of Him, was not so much an abstract spiritual essence, an infinitely transcendent God; He was rather the unknown God who revealed Himself to the world in Christ. Marcion thought of Him as the God of grace and mercy, the God of pure love. This God, said Marcion, fought against and conquered the God of law and justice and, out of pure grace, saved those who had faith in Him. This facet of Marcion’s theology was a biased (or one-sided) and therefore distorted interpretation of Paul’s concept of justification. According to Marcion, the God of love had nothing at all to do with the Law. He made a radical distinction between justice and mercy, between wrath and grace.
- Bengt Hägglund, History of Theology (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House), 40-41.

What the Law and Gospel Have in Common

1. Law and gospel do not denote absolutely separate parts of Scripture. Moses and Jesus both preached law and gospel. This is why Reformed theologians consistently quoted Jesus’s response to the lawyer in Luke 10:28–”do this and live”–as the prototypical example of law. One could just as easily cite the prologue to the Decalogue (Exod 20:2) as the prototypical example of the gospel word: “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” The question is not so much where these words occur in the canon, but the mood (imperative or indicative) with which they speak and the conditions attached to their promises.
2. As Wollebius noted, both the law and the gospel urge obedience using promises and curses. They differ in their “proper material” (propria material). That is, the stuff of gospel is not stuff of law. The law is about our “doing” (facienda), and the gospel is about our “believing” (credenda).
3. It is not that the law is strict and the gospel is lax. Rather both law and gospel require “perfect obedience.” The law demands it of us, and the gospel announces that Christ has accomplished it.
4. Both words are directed at sinners, but, again, with different consequences and conditions or instruments.
5. Both moods glorify God, and both seek to foster Christian virtue in believers. The law, however, is powerless to justify or sanctify; only the gospel achieves those ends. For the unregenerate, law and gospel are antithetical. To believers, however, for whom Christ has satisfied the righteous requirements of the law, the law is “subordinate” to the gospel. In other words, the gospel is the power of life and sanctity, and the law serves to structure Christian sanctity.
   - R. Scott Clark, “Letter and Spirit,” in Covenant, Justification and Pastoral Ministry (ed. R. Scott Clark, Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Company), 349-50. 

The Instrument of Justification: Faith Alone

The true biblical doctrine of justification by faith has to be formulated with great precision and care to teach both the glorious free justification that we have in Christ and its fruit in holiness. True doctrine is like walking a tight rope. One can fall off the tight rope of justification in two directions: the antinomian direction and the neonomian direction. Both the antinomian and the neonomian miss the biblical doctrine of justification.
… Paul declared that Christians should enjoy a sense of peace with God through faith in Christ. Any claim to teach or preach the gospel that does not lead to such peace is no gospel at all. So Luther was right in understanding Paul: “A man is justified, not by the works of the law, but by faith alone.” 
- W. Robert Godfrey, “Faith Formed by Love or Faith Alone?,” in Covenant, Justification and Pastoral Ministry (ed. R. Scott Clark, Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Company), 280-84. 

A Relaxed Law and a Strict Gospel

Rome, too, affirmed the need for forgiveness and grace, with its own provisions for sin through sacrifices and penance. Furthermore, the Reformers never argued that Paul’s opponents had no place for grace, forgiveness, and sacrifice. Rather, they were convinced that, like the medieval church, the Jewish believers in Galatia had confused law and gospel, grace and works, promise and conditionality, Abraham and Sinai. Justification is either by works or by grace, but it cannot be both.
…Monocovenantalism old and new attempts to combine merit and grace, and the result is that both concepts are weakened… both the justice of God in upholding his righteous law and his mercy in satisfying its conditions himself are eclipsed–or, better, both his justice and his mercy are relativized by each other instead of being held together simultaneously in their integrity. The end product is a relaxed law and a demanding gospel.
- Michael S. Horton, “Which Covenant Theology,” in Covenant, Justification and Pastoral Ministry (ed. R. Scott Clark, Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing Company), 199-201.

My Feet Had Almost Slipped

The prosperity of the wicked is a mere illusion and in any case temporary, while the righteous, even in their deepest suffering, still enjoy the love and grace of God. (Ps. 73; Job). The suffering of the faithful is frequently rooted not in their personal sin but in the sin of humankind, and has its goal in the salvation of humankind and the glory of God.
- Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, 618.

Dreadful Decree

The acceptance or rejection of a degree of reprobation, therefore, should not be explained in terms of a person’s capacity for love and compassion. The difference between Augustine and Pelagius, Calvin or Castellio, Gomarus and Arminius is not that the latter were that much more gentle, loving, and tenderhearted than the former. On the contrary, it arises from the fact that the former accepted Scripture in its entirety, also including this doctrine; that they were and always wanted to be theistic and recognize the will and hand of the Lord also in these disturbing facts of life; that they were not afraid to look reality in the eye even when it was appalling. Pelagianism scatters flowers over graves, turns death into an angel, regards sin as mere weakness, lectures on the uses of adversity, and considers this the best possible world. Calvinism has no use for such drivel. It refuses to be hoodwinked. It tolerates no such delusion, takes full account of the seriousness of life, champions the rights of the Lord of lords, and humbly bows in adoration before the inexplicable sovereign will of God Almighty. As a result it proves to be fundamentally more merciful than Pelagianism. How deeply Calvin felt the gravity of what he said is evident from his use of the expression “dreadful decree.” Totally without warrant, this expression has been held against him. in fact, it is to his credit, not to his discredit. The decree, as Calvin’s teaching, is not dreadful, but dreadful indeed is the reality that is the revelation of that decree of God, a reality that comes through both in Scripture and in history. To all thinking humans, whether they are followers of Pelagius or Augustine, that reality remains completely the same. It is not something that can in any way be undone by illusory notions of it
- Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, 394-5.

What Exactly Is Meant By “Holy”?

Holy is that which has been chosen and set apart by YHWH; divested of its common character by special ceremonies, it has received a character of its own and now lives in this new condition in accordance with the laws prescribed for it. Israel is a holy people because God has chosen it and set it apart; it has been incorporated in a covenant and must now live in conformity to all his laws, including the ceremonial. Holy is that which in all things conforms to the special laws God has ordained for it. Holiness is perfection, not only in a moral sense, but in the comprehensive sense in which the unique legislation of Israel conceives it: a religious, ethical, ceremonial, internal, and external sense.
…The holiness by which YHWH put himself in a special relation to Israel and which totally claims Israel for the service of YHWH is finally supremely manifest in that in Christ God gives himself to the church, which he redeems and cleanses from all its iniquities.
- Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: God and Creation, 219-21.

Should We Employ the Hermeneutics of the New Testament Writers?

Something that’s been on my mind quite a bit has been the whole issue regarding the utilization of a strict grammatical-historical hermeneutic. Namely, ought we utilize a strict grammatical-historical hermeneutic at all times? Or should we seek other approaches as well, seeing that many times the New Testament writers did not follow such a hermeneutic. This is important since one’s hermeneutic is the lens through which Scripture is viewed. For instance, a strictly literal hermeneutic will render a Premillenial eschatology. Even Berkhof grants this. But Berkhof, for this reason does not join the Premillenial camp. On the other hand, a redemptive historical understanding of Scripture will produce a different view of Israel and its relation to the Church. The question is not whether a literal hermeneutic will constitute a separation between physical Israel and the Church, the question is, rather, whether a strictly grammatical-historical hermeneutic should be applied to Scripture through and through.

In regards to the apostolic usage of the Old Testament it is quite clear that they did not employ a strictly literal hermeneutic. Read through any book of the New Testament and this will become plain. And this is a fact that is, for the most part, accepted all around. Thus various solutions have been presented. Since those who follow a strict grammatical-historical hermeneutic will not utilize the apostles’ hermeneutic, their response might be that the apostles’ were inspired in their usage of the Old Testament. Still others, such as Richard Longnecker, recognize the utilization of a different hermeneutic, but do not think that we should seek to imitate.

The main question regarding this whole issue, which Dan McCartney poses is this: “If we do not get our hermeneutic from the apostles, then where do we get them?”

Here are some quotes from his article. (You can read the whole thing here):

Hence there is a sense in which we must emulate the exegetical practice of the New Testament writers. If we do not adopt the viewpoint of Jesus and the apostles that Christ’s death and resurrection is the key focus of the Old Testament, that Christ is himself the centerpiece of all God’s promises, that Christ is the true Israel, true Son of God, that the meaning of the biblical texts for the present-day people of God has to do with our relation to God in Christ, then how can our interpretation be deemed in any sense Christian?

Just as a good mystery writer knows the solution to the puzzle even as he lays out the material, so the Bible’s divine Author knew the end of the story before he set out the process of revealing the story in time. I vigorously and whole-heartedly believe that Jesus was absolutely correct when he told the disciples in Luke 24 that the Old Testament was about him, his death and resurrection, and the offer of the gospel to the nations. And from our post-resurrection perspective, we can see it. But I have difficulty in seeing how one can aver that an ordinary time-bound human, believer though he be, could have seen it prior to the event. Where, in a strictly grammatical-historically understood Old Testament, is the death and resurrection of Messiah? Jesus and Paul and Peter all say that Jesus’ death and resurrection is not just predicted but lies at the core of the meaning of the Old Testament, yet not a single Old Testament passage, when viewed strictly from its ostensive grammatical-historically determinable meaning, unambiguously states that the messiah will die and rise three days later. We can only see it after the fact. A genuine “first reading” of the story allows for a surprise element. Or as Paul calls it, a mystery which is now revealed.

If all one expects of an Old Testament text is to tell us something about Israel’s past, or on occasion what a prophet thought about the future, then grammatical-historical interpretation gives the appearance of working just fine. But if one expects, along with the apostles, Jesus, the Jews of the first century, and the Christians of all ages (even the Antiochenes) until the Enlightenment, that the Old Testament text speaks to what for its writers were future generations, and if one thinks that all the promises of God, not just those the New Testament specifically interprets, are yea and amen in Christ, one will be unsatisfied with grammatical-historical interpretation (unless one fudges).

The fact that controls are personal does not mean they are purely subjective. The New Testament writers were not doing grammatical-historical exegesis, but neither were their interpretations arbitrary. Neither, I hope, is what I advocate arbitrary. The real “control” for the apostles and for us comes from at least three directions:
1. An assumption of coherency of God’s story.
2. The conviction that Christ is the endpoint of the story.
3. The promise of the Holy Spirit’s involvement.

Vern Poythress also wrote an interesting article on the Divine meaning of Scripture, which can be found here. Here is his conclusion:

In conclusion, let us ask what implications we may draw concerning scholarly grammatical-historical exegesis. By grammatical-historical exegesis I mean an approach like approach (a), which self-consciously focuses on each biblical book as a product of a human author, in a particular historical setting. On the positive side, we have seen that grammatical-historical exegesis has an important illumining role. Several points can be mentioned.

(1) In writing the Bible God spoke to people in human language, in human situations, through human authors. God himself in the Bible indicates that we should pay attention to these human factors in order to understand what he is saying and doing.

(2) On a practical level, grammatical-historical exegesis serves to warn the church against being swallowed up by traditionalism, in which people merely read in a system of understanding which afterwards is read out. It alerts us to nuances in meaning that we otherwise overlook or even misread.

(3) It serves to sensitize us to the genuinely progressive character of revelation. God did not say everything all at once. We understand him better the more we appreciate the wisdom involved in the partial and preliminary character of what came earlier (Heb 1:1).

On the other hand, grammatical-historical exegesis is not all that there is to responsible biblical interpretation. Again, we can summarize the results in several points.

(1) If grammatical-historical exegesis pretends to pay attention to the human author alone, it distorts the nature of the human author’s intention. Whether or not they were perfectly self-conscious about it, the human authors intended that their words should be received as words of the Spirit.

(2) God’s meets us and speaks to us in power as we read the Bible. God’s power and presence must be taken into account from the beginning, just as we take into account all that characterizes a human author of any human text. We cannot, with perfect precision, analytically isolate God’s propositional content from his personal communion. To attempt to perform grammatical-historical exegesis by such an isolating procedure is impious.

(3) It is legitimate to explore the relations between what God says in all the parts of the Bible. When we perform such a synthesis, what we conclude may go beyond what we could derive from any one text in isolation. Yet it should not be in tension with the results of a narrow grammatical-historical exegesis. (Of course, sometimes because of the limitations of our knowledge we may find no way to resolve all tensions.)

(4) We are not to despise laypeople’s understanding of the Bible. We are not to reject it just because on the surface it appears to “read in” too much. Of course, laypeople may sometimes have overworked imaginations. But sometimes their conclusions may be the result of a synthesis of Bible knowledge due to the work of the Holy Spirit. Scholars cannot reject such a possibility without having achieved a profound synthetic and even practical knowledge of the Bible for themselves.

(5) When later human writers of Scripture interpret earlier parts of Scripture, they typically do so without making fine scholarly distinctions concerning the basis of their knowledge. Hence we ought not to require them to confine themselves to a narrow grammatical-historical exegesis. In many respects their interpretations may be similar to valid uses of Scripture by nonscholars today.

(6) God intends that the Bible’s words should be applied in people’s lives today. In complex personal, social and political situations, we may not always be sure what the correct applications are. But applications genuinely in accord with God’s word are part of God’s intention. Hence, in a broad sense, they are part of what God is saying to us through the Bible as a whole. God continues to speak today. When we read the Bible aware that it is God’s word, we understand that he is speaking to us now. We are constrained to obey, to rejoice in him, and to worship.