LAW AND GRACE

F.F. Bruce

In the reformed tradition derived from Geneva, it has frequently been said that, while the man in Christ is not under law as a means of salvation, he remains under it as a rule of life. In its own right, this distinction may be cogently maintained as a principle of Christian theology and ethics, but it must not be imagined that it has Pauline authority. According to Paul, the believer is not under law as a rule of life--unless one thinks of the law of love, and that is a completely different kind of law, fulfilled not by obedience to a code but by the outworking of an inward power. When Paul says, "sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace" (Romans 6:14), it is the on-going course of Christian life that he has in view, not simply the initial justification by faith--as is plain from the point of the antinomian retort which Paul immediately quotes: "What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace?" (Romans 6:15).

Again, it is sometimes said that Christ is the end of the ceremonial law (including not only the sacrificial cultus but circumcision and the observance of the sacred calendar) but not of the moral law. Once more, this is a perfectly valid, and to some extent an obvious, theological and ethical distinction; but it has no place in Pauline exegesis. It has to be read into Paul, for it is not a distinction that Paul himself makes.

PAUL: Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1977), pp. 192-193.

We have quoted Romans 6:14: "sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace." The implication of these words is as astounding for traditional theological ethics today as in the first century. To be under law--not only the law of Moses but the law of God--means to be under the dominion of sin. To be under grace--the grace of God brought near in Christ--is to be liberated simultaneously from the rule of law and the dominion of sin. So Paul had proved in his own life.

PAUL: Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1977), p. 193.

Christian holiness is not a matter of painstaking conformity to the individual precepts of an external law code; it is rather a question of the Holy Spirit's producing His fruit in the life, reproducing those graces which were seen in perfection in the life of Christ.

The Epistle of Paul to the Romans (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1975), p. 162.

This insistence on the law of love, instead of prudential rules and regulations, was felt by many of Paul's Christian contemporaries to come unrealistically near to encouraging moral indifferentism; and many Christians since his day have shared their sentiments. But, unlike Paul's contemporary critics, Christian moralists since Paul's day have tended to hold that, in insisting on prudential rules and regulations, they are following the implications of his teaching, if not his express judgments. But we should appreciate that Paul conforms no more to the conventions of religious people today than he conformed to the conventions of religious people around A.D. 50; it is best to let Paul be Paul. And when we do that, we shall recognize in him the supreme libertarian, the great herald of Christian freedom, insisting that man in Christ has reached his spiritual majority and must no longer be confined to the leading-strings of infancy but enjoy the birthright of the freeborn sons of God. Here if anywhere Luther entered into the mind of Paul: "A Christian man is a most free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian man is a most dutiful servant of all, subject to all." "Subject to none" in respect of his liberty; "subject to all" in respect of his charity. This, for Paul, is the law of Christ because this was the way of Christ. And in this way, for Paul, the divine purpose underlying Moses' law is vindicated and accomplished.

PAUL: Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1977), p. 202.