I said, "Pah! Lutherans! "Oh, how I hate your law", eh? Antinomians!"
Revd Glen Scrivner said (oh, I paraphrase a little bit, maybe): "Huh! If they are antinomian law-haters, are you willing to be called a legalist who thinks the law is the end of Christ?!"
I said (smiling): "Okay then, you bet! Why not?! Yeah. Bring it on. As long as I'm allowed to distinguish and ask "in what sense?""
So why I am a legalist:
Of course we are not saved by good works of the law. What a stupid blasphemous idea. How impossible.
The law is holy, righteous and good.
Some rules are good and happy: e.g. do not get drunk on much wine, do not have sex with people you are not married to.
Laws are not antithetical to relationship. They can express and shape and grow out of relationship.
Lots of the Bible is law.
Law is one of the main ways God relates to us.
Law (torah) is best understood as God's loving fatherly wisdom to his redeemed, saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone etc., children. We imagine ourselves sat on Daddy's knee as we read Ex 20.
And the law is the end of Christ. Yes. He did not come to abolish it: he fulfills it, he brings us a renewed, glorified law. The law leads us to Christ and Christ leads us back to the crucified and risen law. We keep the royal law of Christ, the law of love. We are saved for good works of the law-keeping. Sin is lawlessness.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
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2 comments:
:-)
I think the value of the sort of Lutheran view taught by folk such as DMoo or MHorton, is that the sort of godliness which the New Covenant draws us into, is of such a different nature and power to obeying a commandment, that it is best understood in categories other than 'law'. It is, as you know, a complex nuanced Biblical theological issue - but I believe that is the cash value to the view (wrongly) ridiculed as anti-nomism etc. God bless, P
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