Cole Sear: I see
dead peoplelaw and Gospel.
Malcolm Crowe: In your dreams?
[Cole shakes his head no]
Malcolm Crowe: While you're awake?
[Cole nods...]
Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them?
Cole Sear: All the time. They're everywhere.
It is starting to feel that way....
This evening at church the preacher argued that there were two essential attitudes for prayer:
- helplessness
- faith
Law and Gospel, I thought. You can view everything through that lens!
unintentionally but potentially controversial comment coming up:
ReplyDeletedo you think it's helpful to treat "law" and "gospel" as abstract terms, abstracted from torah and euangelion? (I don't)
eg Albert Wolters' book Creation Regained - despite some very helpful theology, my main gripe is his terminology - he uses the word "law" to refer to God's sovereign interaction with creation, and let's face it, he couldn't have picked a more loaded term. I remember scribbling a note, "if he goes on to contrast this with gospel, I'll go nuts". Even "decree" would have been better helpful - but the more and closer I'm reading the New Testament (Ephesians in particular), the more I feel the baggage of preconceived ideas about "law", "world", "predestined", "saints", "nation", that are abstracted from "torah", "age", "OT promise", "God's holy (family)" etc
...not to undermine the doctrines behind these words but in order rather to safeguard those doctrines from suspicion, I personally would rather not use such loaded biblical terms. Especially in the context of NPP criticism, it strikes me there's a danger of missing the light that they may be shedding on biblical terms if we refuse to budge on the terms instead of the doctrine behind them.
I basically agree.
ReplyDeleteI'm having trouble working this out myself.
I am using law and gospel as abstract terms which have a relationship with, but don't equal, how they are used in the NT.
The trouble is I think the the concepts that the abstract terms refer to are massively helpful, and yet the terms themselves are unhelpful because they can distort (and have distorted) our reading of the NT.
So I have thought about various other terms you could use but none of them are comprehensive enough or link you into the history of theology behind them.
I think I've said this to you before, but I don't often use the terms 'law and Gospel' except in my own head and on this blog (which is an extension of part of my head!... I don't write this blog for others really, but I keep it public because of the valuable interaction and discipline it creates). In conversation I use all sorts of other terms, but none of them really work. Perhaps I could start calling them Bob and Jean, but I don't feel I'm the sort of person that could go coining terms.
In my head I have a post comparing Melanchthon and Calvin on repentance. Melanchthon is brilliant in one sense. I love it. There is a clarity and understanding of the human situation which Calvin doesn't have.
In the Institutes Calvin briefly describes the approach of Melanchthon but then he says "Though all this is true, yet the term repentance (in so far as I can ascertain from Scripture) must be differently taken." And he is right. Just as you are right. It is unarguable that scripture uses the term in a different way.
But which way to go? Lose the power and clarity of the theology rightly understood but with the risk of misunderstanding, or remove the danger of misunderstanding but loose the focus?
At the moment I am adapting to my field of discourse, which is an unhappy situation but will do until I work out something better.
Carson has an interesting essay in Justification (ed Husbands and Treier) on this subject but relating to the term 'imputation' which suffers in the same way. He also mentions 'sanctification'.
What would you do, given you wouldn't use the terms 'law' and 'gospel'?
NB the second generation after the Reformers were already grappling with similar questions as you can see in the Formula of Concord, and Melanchthon also saw that there was gospel in the law and law in the gospel!
PS
ReplyDeleteThe reason for my unusually light-hearted post was that I do feel a bit like Cole with this.
One of the reasons I feel like Cole is that I am seeing things in this way, but I'm not able to properly communicate it.
Anyway, I must do some law this evening. Not Torah, but the Partnership Act 1890.