I am continuing to interact with Greenbaggins’ review of my book, “Reformed” Is Not Enough.
When I draw a distinction between a law/gospel hermeneutic (which I reject) and a law/gospel application (which I accept), this is what I mean. With a law/gospel hermeneutic, each text is either demand or promise, and it is the job of the interpreter to find out which one it is, and then apply it according to its nature. Certain verses are the carrot and the other verses are the stick. Misapplication would be to use the carrot as a stick, or the stick as a carrot.
Law/gospel application depends upon the hearer. To a “law-hearer,” the Bible is all demand. Do this, do that, do the other thing. Believe in Jesus. Get baptized. Tithe. Go to church. Be faithful to your wife. All that. The law-hearer receives all this as law. The legalist thinks he can do it. The rebel doesn’t care to do it, and rejects it all. But they both hear it as demand. Do this and live.
The gospel-hearer listens to Christ say, “Follow me,” and it strikes him as a glorious privilege and invitation. It is good news. The ten commandments are heard as further grace from the one who brought us out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. And when someone is converted, they are being converted from a law-hearer to a grace-hearer. There is a transition from the one condition to the other.
Now, to the point of Lane’s disagreement, now that a person is converted, can we make distinctions in the text? Certainly we can distinguish imperatives from indicatives, laws from promises, and so on. But now that I am saved, everything is contexualized within that grace. That grace surrounds everything, making it lovely. It is in that grace that we now stand. I can tell grammatically when God issues a requirement for His people. This is the vase of demand, on the mantlepiece of law, situated in the middle of the house of grace. And I live in the house, not on the mantle.
And when we are doing evangelism, we will encounter people who don’t have the context of that “house of grace.” For them, everything is a stench. Law condemns. He would not have known what sin was if the law had not said, “Do not covet.” But equally, the glories of grace strike him the same way. The name Jesus gives him the creeps just as much as no drunkenness or no fornication do.
The next thing is my egg/omelet analogy. Lane says this:
“If Doug is willing to say that in terms of the invisible church, reprobate eggs are not part of the omelette, then I am just fine with the illustration. The corporate omelette, considered in terms of the visible church, has good eggs and bad eggs. The corporate omelette, considered in terms of the invisible church, has only good eggs in it.”
Now this is where analogies get really helpful, as well as silly. First, I agree with Lane here, and I know what he is getting at, but would point out that this analogy doesn’t work as well as we might like. There is no such thing as an invisible omelette. But suppose we tried historical omelette and eschatological omelette? The cook is a master cook. In the historical omelette, we have some reprobate, stinky eggs in there. But this cook is so good that by the time of the eschatological breakfast, He will have snaked all of those eggs out of there. I trust this makes the point, but it is not a good analogy because ordinary cooks never get rotten eggs out of the omelette after the cooking starts.
But that is not true of the scriptural analogy for this. Gardeners do prune fruitless branches. And the historical vine really has fruitless branches which the eschatological vine will not have. And the gardener knew the entire time which branches were going to go, and which were going to stay.
On the point about Post-Reformation scholasticism, I went back and looked at my quotations from Joel Garver in chapter five. I am not sure where he has changed his views since then, but those quotations still represent my views. I do believe that the Reformed scholastics had to fight off a lot of bad stuff, and that they used a certain rationalistic approach to do so. This was necessary, but cautions are always in order. As I put it there, “Such lawful interpretations can require technical and high flown language. This is not necessarily bad, so long as we remember what we are doing” (RINE, p. 55, emphasis added). My concern is not so much with them, as with some of their curators.