I recently got into a bit of a debate over at All Too Common, a pretty conservative blog. You can see the post that started it with the comments here (scroll up to see the post itself). I'm making this response here because it is rather long and I figured it would be impolite to fill up the space he has with long responses. So without further ado, lets plunge in.
Sorry, Andy, apparently I wasn't clear when I talked about making distinctions between the types of the law. What I meant was that making this distinction when looking at the law makes sense to us now, not that it makes sense to believe that the Fathers were making this distinction.
Can we obey the Moral Law? Not without the assistance of grace. On the other hand adding grace makes the mix more complicated. I'm not familiar enough with Luther's work to say with certainty how good he thought we could be with grace's help, but in saying we cannot obey the law he may have been talking about what we can do on our own. The Fathers, on the other hand, were clearly talking about what we can do with the help of grace. If the Fathers and Luther were addressing different questions, and they would be if Luther was talking about what we can do without grace, then they may well have agreed on what we can do with the help of grace.
Why is it more reasonable to believe that Origen was talking about Law vs. Grace, given that he uses the phrase "works of the law" rather than "man's works apart from God"? "Man's works apart from God" has three parts (more or less), sins, things indifferent, and works of the law. Of the three no one has ever claimed that sins or things indifferent can earn a person salvation. However, emphasizing works of the law to the exclusion of grace (in the most extreme forms of this position) has had its proponents from time to time; the Pelagians are an example perhaps. No one wastes words warning people to avoid something no one wants to do, so the works of the law is the only set of actions people need to be warned against relying on.
Did Luther see a huge divide between the two Covenants with one being Law and the other Grace? I doubt that he did, at least that is not entirely consistent with his placing the New Covenant Moral Law in the same category as the Old Covenant. It is consistent with seeing a divide between Law in both Covenants and Grace (which can also be found expressed in both Covenants, albeit in different ways). A more interesting question is whether the Fathers see the New Covenant Law as replacing the Old. My initial instinct is to say that they don't, not least because they see the two Covenants as forming a continuous whole. If one part replaces another it isn't quite right to view the two pieces as being continuous in anything other than a historical sense (ie the one came from the other). On the there hand, there is clearly a change in the way the law is understood in the New Covenant, Galatians 3 is a prime example of this. My sense of the texts, based in part on my understanding of what the word "Law" means in scripture*, is that with the coming of Christ, and especially with the Passion and Resurrection, the meaning whole of the Law suddenly became clear. I think the clearest way to say it is that the whole Law was radically relativized by Christ and (hopefully this makes sense) relativized to Christ. I'll try it another way Christ is the meaning of the Law which we can only understand clearly after Christ became incarnate, so understanding the Law requires understanding Christ and any understanding of the Law that does not lead one straight to Christ is a false understanding. In this case Law is all the Law (ceremonial, covenantal, and moral) that is found in both testaments. One result is that reading the Old Covenant Law, even the ceremonial parts, can be very deeply formative and informative provided we keep the point (Christ) in mind and relate the laws either to Him directly or to laws that the one studying has related to Him.
Where does this leave the Moral Law? First, it should be clear that it is in no way abolished. It does not remain in its same position, however. This brings us round to justification (and Galatians 3 conveniently), since that is a major (the primary?) purpose of Christ's incarnation. Paul is clear in Galatians 3:24 that we are justified by faith. He doesn't say faith and works of the law or faith and actions; he just says that we are justified by faith. Is this the same thing as Sola Fide? It depends on what Sola Fide means. It does suggest, however, that the law does not come before justification, especially since Paul has just finished telling Galatians how foolish it is to carefully obey the law. When Paul says "the law", does he mean only the Old Covenant or does he include the Moral Law found in the New Testament? Paul does not make that distinction, so we ought to be very hesitant to read that distinction into the text. This is, in fact, consistent with what the CCC teaches. It says that "Our justification comes from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us . . ." (CCC, 1996). From this it is clear that the Moral Law is uninvolved in the initial justification. Does this mean the Moral Law is unimportant? Certainly not, Paul is clear elsewhere that being justified is no excuse for continuing to sin. The easy way to hold these two pieces together is to assume that justification leads one to follow the Moral Law rather than the other way round. This is also consistent with the CCC, since the CCC says that "On man's part it [justification] is expressed . . . in the cooperation of charity with the prompting of the Holy Spirit" (CCC, 1993).
Where does this leave us? It appears that we are justified by faith without any reference to obedience to any law, even the Moral Law, and once we are justified we strive to follow the Moral Law since it points us to Christ. This means that Luther's expression of Sola Fide is correct and agrees with the Fathers, at least to the extent that both teach that we are justified by faith alone and that striving to do good is part of the response to justification.
Jon
*I'll post a longer response on the meanings the term "Law" has in exegesis later. I'm a little busy at the moment, and would like to give it a little more thought before I post it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Jon, thanks for your reply. It is a fascinating and complicated topic, I must admit.
"I'm not familiar enough with Luther's work to say with certainty how good he thought we could be with grace's help, but in saying we cannot obey the law he may have been talking about what we can do on our own."
That is the way I understand him and is the overall accepted understanding. I am very familiar with Luther, having spent a good four years reading his works, and this is most certainly his point: Grace (faith) is how we are saved since we can in no way obey the law even close to perfectly. The law was given in the Old Covenant, which Christ fulfilled, and so the law was sent only to condemn, not to aid. So now we in the New Covenant should not trust at all in works, but in faith alone. This is what Luther argues, all the while equating all actions, besides faith (as it is a gift of God), as works of the law. So nothing we can do besides believing/trusting in God can save us. Nothing. This is Luther's stand.
"The Fathers, on the other hand, were clearly talking about what we can do with the help of grace."
Absolutely. Yet actions, or works, could be achieved by us, with the grace of God. So it is a synergism, as opposed to Luther's monergism.
"If the Fathers and Luther were addressing different questions, and they would be if Luther was talking about what we can do without grace, then they may well have agreed on what we can do with the help of grace."
I think this is certainly true in a broad sense. A good example of this would be the Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on Justification, composed in 1998. This was one of Ecumenism's crowning acheivements, simply because they picked up on what you did. And this was my foundational supposition in writing "Are Catholic's Christians?".
"Why is it more reasonable to believe that Origen was talking about Law vs. Grace, given that he uses the phrase "works of the law" rather than "man's works apart from God"?
[...]
However, emphasizing works of the law to the exclusion of grace (in the most extreme forms of this position) has had its proponents from time to time; the Pelagians are an example perhaps. No one wastes words warning people to avoid something no one wants to do, so the works of the law is the only set of actions people need to be warned against relying on."
But this is again, the issue you and I seem to be disagreeing upon: What about Origen, et al.? The Pelagian controversy was not about works of the law, for that was the Judaizer controversy. Pelagianism denied original sin as well as Christian grace. So for Pelagius, a person could be perfect if he chose not to ever sin. That was certainly something akin to Law vs Grace, but it was not the same thing as the Judaizer problem with "works of the law," which stressed the necessity of circumcision to be a Christian.
And what I think you are mistakenly doing is reading the writings of the Fathers with Pelagian-Augustinian / Catholic-Reformation lenses in your historical bifocals. It is similar to how Luther and Calvin read the Book of Revelation and saw the Pope as embodying the anti-Christ and the Catholic Church as the "Synogogue of Satan." They just read the text through the wrong lenses, certainly not the lense that St. John the Revelator wrote the book in. It is also exactly what Luther did after he formulated his theory on justification. He began to interpret the "law" in relation to faith alone and then read the Fathers in that light and could not escape it.
There are my thoughts. I do not mean to offend, but it is just my observation of why, I think, we are disagreeing. Just my 2 cents -- take it as nothing more.
Thanks for the stimulating interaction!
God Bless,
Andy
I don't know much about camps, but I've always preferred to go looking for truth without worrying what camp the person expressing it may be in.
That said, I see the core of the debate as being around the question of what the phrase "the Law" means in scripture and the Fathers, and what that means for Luther's teaching. My guess is that the phrase means all the types of law, including the Moral Law. Certainly the Fathers never explicitly say that the moral law is not included. This is why it makes sense to me to say that the Pelagians were favoring works of the law. In teaching that we can earn heaven by following the Moral Law, the Pelagians are really just repeating the Judaizers' heresy although they give the car a new color exterior.
At the same time genuine antinomianism is excluded by other parts of scripture. This is leads us to things like that Lutheran-Catholic agreement. justification by faith comes first and leads us to obey things like the Moral Law. This not because the Moral Law justifies, however; it is because the Moral Law really is good and really does point us back to Christ.
Where does this leave Luther? The question to ask Luther is what a Christian life looks like after one has been justified by faith. If he agreed with the view put forward in that Lutheran-Catholic statement, I would expect him to teach that Christians ought to obey their princes in the world and obey the laws of the state. I seem to recall him supporting the authority of the princes, but I haven't really read anything of his in depth. Hows about you tell me, did he think Christians should obey the laws of the state?
Jon
Post a Comment