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This is an astonishingly profound and helpful summary of Luther’s understanding of the significance of God’s “Law”. I commend it especially to preachers. A warning though: Don’t try to read it on the run. You need some time and space to digest it properly. Luther On Law – Jono Linebaugh. PS Jono is a former colleague of mine. From The Briefing:
One lazy afternoon in 1999, travel writer Bill Bryson discovered a shop that sold pet supplies and pornography.1 It was at the far end of the main street of an unassuming Australian country town called Young. The front of the shop contained rather mundane supplies of flea powder, fish flakes, and other pet accessories. But at the back of the shop, behind a small wooden gate, there was a whole section devoted to the sale of explicit pornographic material. Bryson was apparently baffled by the existence of such a bizarre establishment. But I think I can explain what it was doing there. If memory serves me correctly, there was a period during which various local planning laws existed to get rid of the ‘adult’ industry in Australian towns. The lawmakers didn’t ban small stocks of pornography in shops that existed for other purposes (e.g. newsagents2). But they did try to make sure that all such stocks were strictly controlled. No shop was allowed to have pornography comprising more than a certain small percentage of its total stock. Therefore, no dedicated ‘adult’ stores could exist. The laws were designed to create a safe and wholesome town environment by ensuring that the sale of explicit material couldn’t become a business in its own right (remember, at this point the internet was still taking off).3 But what actually happened? Did the laws work as intended? Not quite. Instead, bizarre shops started to spring up, shops like the one Bryson encountered. The shops still had pornography as their real core business, but to get around the planning laws, the stores put up not-very-subtle ‘fronts’. A shop that advertised pet supplies out the front could ‘legitimately’ claim that it was not really an adult store, since its main purpose was something else. And since there were more individual packets of cheap flea powder and fish flakes on the shelves than there were magazines out the back, the stocks of pornography technically came under the legal limit. But everybody knew what the shops were really for. The laws, despite their good intentions, had failed. This is a clear illustration of a problem that crops up whenever we try to use laws to make things better. These planning laws were good. They were worthy manifestations of our community’s desire to uphold marriage as the proper context for healthy sexual expression, and to limit the harm and exploitation that arises when this context is ignored. I’m glad the lawmakers did what they did. But the legislation couldn’t, by itself, get to the heart of the problem. The laws couldn’t make men love their families more. They couldn’t convince people that being a real ‘adult’ is about care and responsibility, not self-gratification. The letter of the law did nothing to make people love the spirit of the law. It just brought about grudging compliance and tragically comic workarounds that exploited loopholes. A good law doesn’t make people good. This isn’t just a problem for Australian planning laws. In fact, the problem also crops up when we try to put God’s law at the centre of our lives. In Romans 2:17-24, the apostle Paul has a debate about this very issue. Paul and his debating partner were Jews. This means they were law-people, and glad of it. The God of the entire world had especially revealed himself to Israel through the law of Moses. Jews had a fantastic privilege: they knew God’s will in the law. They knew what was good and right and proper, because the Creator himself had told them all about it. Jews were also equipped to teach other people all about this great revelation of God’s will. But Paul insists that God’s law-revelation has a fundamental problem. It’s not that the law is bad; actually, the law is great. But the problem is that the law won’t change the heart. God’s good law doesn’t make God’s people good. In fact, as Paul goes on to show in Romans 3, the law does something else entirely. In the end, the law makes our sin and hypocrisy crystal clear. It silences every mouth, and holds us accountable to God (Rom 3:19-20). The law doesn’t save us. Instead, it shows up our failure, and points to something greater: the forgiveness and transformation that we find in Jesus Christ, through the word of the gospel and the Spirit of God. A heart that relies on the law to find salvation before God is a bit like that store at the end of the main street in Young. It might look respectable and well-ordered. It might seem quite attractive to a casual passer-by. It might have a plentiful stock of law-compliant good deeds on the shelves. And yet there are those sealed sections, the bits at the back. At one level, these sealed sections might seem small or insignificant compared to the much more obvious good deeds that can be pointed to as examples of that heart’s own inherent goodness. But in fact, it is these back sections that truly show up the heart’s real orientation. And if we admit it, there’s a bit of that hypocrisy in all of us, isn’t there? Simply knowing God’s character and will, even his character and will as expressed in the pages of the Bible itself, will not solve our biggest problem. If we want actual forgiveness, salvation, and transformation, we need something far more radical and powerful than God’s law. We need God himself to forgive us. We need the cross of Christ. And we need God to change our hearts, imperfectly now, and soon our whole heart, soul, and strength perfectly on that last day. 1 Bill Bryson, Down Under, Black Swan, London, 2001, pp. 109-110. 2 Newsstands to American readers. 3 I’m relying on my memory of news reports. I’ve tried hard, but haven’t been able to track down the laws that were in effect twelve years ago. Comments at The Briefing.“The debate is over” – this is an argumentative gambit I’ve noticed quite a few people using recently around the web. It’s a subtle rhetorical device, designed to make people who disagree with you sound petty and ill-informed. The three debates that I’ve noticed it being used in are as follows:
Here’s how the device is used:
When you use this device, you are implying two things:
I don’t like this device, and I think it should should stop. Why?
A great post from Michael Jensen today about Abraham, Sarah, doubt and faith (I’m presuming it was originally a Moore College chapel sermon): The Doubting Believer I – Abram & Sarai An excerpt:
It seems to me that certain American preachers like John Piper have recently been eliciting a strangely disproportionate fascination and emotional commitment amongst Aussie evangelicals. So I thought I’d reiterate my previously published misgivings about Piper’s view of justification. Please don’t read this and assume I’m pitching my tent in some kind of “anti-Piper” camp against some kind of “pro-Piper” camp. That would be an infantile and foolish way to think (1 Cor 3:1-4). Rather, I’m just saying that Piper isn’t the bees knees on the doctrine of justification. He’s worth listening to for his passion, his graciousness, his pastor’s heart, his deep piety, his commitment to God’s glory, and his desire to defend the biblical gospel. However, at this (very significant) point, I think he’s confused. So you need to be careful about his theological discussions of righteousness and justification. Often he’s spot-on, but sometimes he can be very confusing. Here’s what I said in my post:
In the discussion on this post, I also commented:
And in a further comment:
Nobody could every seriously accuse John Piper of lacking a passionate commitment to God’s glory. The church should be deeply grateful to him for this aspect of his preaching. However, John Piper is not the person to turn to when trying to come to grips with key soteriological doctrines like justification. Outline(Reading from Romans 6) Intro: Faith and Works
I preached this three-part series recently at a church weekend away for those in their twenties and thirties. Thanks to Sandy Grant for the title and idea for the series. Outline
As a side-project, I’m engaging in a small quest for greater semantic clarity in regard to the biblical word-group related to “justification” and “righteousness”. I’m not just trying to engage in pedantic nit-picking; I think it’s important to clarify the meanings of these really important words that are used by the apostle Paul in key places in his letters, in order to understand and proclaim the realities of our relationship with God more accurately. In this post, I want to make a simple observation that should be obvious, but is too often neglected. The observation is this: in the forensic context, “justification” and “righteousness” are words that are related in meaning, but they are not identical. It is certainly true that “justification” and “righteousness” are very closely related to each other. Even though the words look very different in English, in Hebrew and Greek they are based on the same root. This observation is often made (e.g. Wright 2009, 67-69), and it is an entirely valid and helpful observation as far as it goes. Unfortunately, however, too often, once this observation has been made, the two words are then illegitimately assumed to be interchangeable. They are not. Here’s a table which maps out the various relevant words used by Paul, most of which are also quite common in the Greek Old Testament (LXX) and other Greek sources. I have also provided a definition, which summarises the meaning of the word when it is being used in a forensic (lawcourt) context (both in Paul’s letters and and elsewhere). The terminology seems to be fairly consistent when it occurs in forensic contexts. My definitions are based primarily on the standard lexicon BDAG (see bibliography), which I’ve checked and nuanced slightly by looking at the word usage in the NT and LXX. I have already discussed most of these definitions in more detail in another related post; this table, however, is more comprehensive because it includes all the relevant Greek words. NB A number of these words also occur in other (non-forensic) contexts, but this table is restricted to forensic contexts
The fairly obvious conclusion from this table is that the “righteousness” of a defendant and the “justification” of a defendant are not the same. Righteousness, in the normal forensic usage, is a quality that the defendant possesses on the basis of something which is not strictly dependent upon the courtroom – it means being in line with moral / legal standards. “Righteousness” is a quality, not a status. Justification is the outcome of the courtroom process, if the courtroom finds that such righteousness is indeed present. Therefore, in its noun form, “justification” is a status conferred by the court. * A number of people claim that Paul is using the word “righteousness” (e.g. Phil 3:9) in a way that is completely different to the normal usage found in the Greco-Roman and Jewish sources (esp. the LXX) – that is, they claim that Paul means “righteous status” (i.e. “justification”), not “righteous quality” (i.e. the normal meaning). Contrary to such claims, I claim that Paul uses the word “righteousness” in a way that is consistent with the normal usage of everybody else in his context (i.e. “righteous quality”), but extends the idea by finding the source of such righteousness in Christ, not in himself (or in any Christian). See my post on imputation. Sadly, these basic dictionary definitions are often ignored. For example, Wright (2009, 69), speaking particularly about the Hebrew background to the term ‘righteousness’, says:
This claim is quite central to Wright’s entire theology of justification. However, it is simply wrong. It disagrees with the lexical research (see above); and Wright does not provides any evidence for his claim, either from the texts themselves, or from any other scholars. Furthermore, I cannot find any evidence that would unambiguously support Wright’s claim. If any of my readers can find any evidence that might support this claim, I would be grateful to receive it. Bibliography
From the Sola Panel One of the aims of the Sola Panel is to go back to basics, to remind ourselves of the importance of the ‘solas’ (i.e. scripture alone, faith alone, Christ alone, grace alone, glory to God alone). This post will look at one way in which these solas all fit together. I’m currently reading through Timothy Ward’s very helpful book Words of Life: Scripture as the Living and Active Word of God (Inter-Varsity Press, Nottingham, 2009). It’s a good and highly accessible exposition of the Reformed doctrine of Scripture, which avoids many of the petty caricatures that are sometimes thrown about, and deals well with a number of modern objections. I highly recommend it as a book to put near the top of your reading list this year. Early on in the book, Ward seeks to ground our doctrine of Scripture in the even more fundamental doctrine of the ‘word of God’ (or the ‘speech of God’). Ward points out that God’s speech is, and always has been, exceedingly powerful. This is seen especially when it comes to God’s justification of the ungodly. In this very significant case, God’s speech doesn’t just inform us about God’s salvation; it actually brings salvation to us:
This is a pretty good exposition of some of the important connections between God’s word/speech and our salvation. But it’s important to remember that God’s ‘speech-act’ of justification is only one part of the story of salvation.1 We must always remember that when the Bible talks about God justifying us, it never talks about this justification as a mere declaration that occurs all by itself. It’s not the case that God simply says to us out of the blue, “I deem you to be justified”, and that act of speech alone brings about our salvation. Of course, God’s speech is mightily powerful. But when it comes to our salvation, God’s justifying speech-act is connected to other highly significant powerful actions of God. The first aspect of God’s saving work that we must always remember when we think about justification is the atonement. God’s justification of sinners is based squarely on the death of Jesus Christ for our sins—that one supreme act of love and grace whereby Jesus paid for our sins and satisfied the wrath of God. Paul, who of all the biblical authors spells out the idea of justification most fully, never talks about justification in a vacuum. Paul brings the concepts of justification and atonement together. He tells us that we “are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom 3:24). The purpose of Jesus’ atoning work (Rom 3:25) is to enable God to be ‘just’ and to be the “justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom 3:26). Without the atonement, God could not remain true to his own just standards as creator and judge, and therefore could not justify us. You see the same thing in Galatians—Paul’s strong defence in Galatians is that God’s justification of sinners doesn’t stand alone, but it is based on the fact that Jesus “gave himself for our sins” (Gal 1:4). Justification and the atonement go together; justification without atonement would be nothing and would mean nothing. The second thing that must not be forgotten when it comes to justification is that those who are justified are united to Christ through faith. This isn’t to say that our own faith is itself some wonderful meritorious action that secures a reward from God. What it means is that when God justifies us he’s not issuing some arbitrary declaration that makes no sense of the reality of our own personal sin. It’s not the case that God one day decides to say to us, “You are righteous”, when patently we are, in fact, miserable sinners. No, God’s declaration of us as ‘righteous’ is based on the fact that he, by his Holy Spirit acting through his word which brings about faith, has actually united us to his righteous Son. This means that our own sins are truly cancelled by Jesus’ death, and that we truly share in the righteousness that by rights only belongs to Christ. For example, Paul speaks about being “found in him [i.e. Christ], not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Phil 3:9). In other words, the Reformation ‘solas’ all go together. God, through the supreme authority of Scripture alone, addresses us, speaks the gospel to us, declares that we are justified, and so brings salvation to us sinners. But this can only be true because Christ alone has performed that once-for-all atoning sacrifice for sins. By faith alone, the sacrifice of Christ is applied to our own reality. All of this is an act of God’s grace alone—to the glory of God alone. You can only go so far talking about one or the other of the solas in isolation. They really are a package deal. 1 I’m not disagreeing with Timothy Ward here, just clarifying a possible misunderstanding. I’m pretty sure that he would agree with what I have to say here, since in the passage I’ve quoted, he cites Romans 5:8 (about Jesus’ death), and goes on to discuss the “effectual calling” whereby God’s word creates saving faith. Comments on the Sola PanelJohn Smuts is asking me some good hard questions about my view of “righteousness” as a quality (rather than a substance or a status). I’m finding the interaction very helpful. |
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