In my most recent post responding to Green Baggins’ review of my book, I briefly discussed my understanding of law and gospel. As a result of that, a discussion broke out in the comments section of my blog here, and so I want to follow up on a couple of things that came to mind. One is the question is whether the Gentiles were “under the law.”
And the answer is yes, kind of. They were not under Torah in the sense that Gentiles were not part of the priestly nation. But they were part of the world that this priestly nation represented before God. The outer court of the Temple was the court of the Gentiles. It was the place where the law said the Gentiles were to offer their prayers to the true God. It was this court where the merchants set up their wares for the worshippers, thus forcing the Gentiles out of their rightful place. Jesus attacked the Jews for this, saying, “Is it not written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer . . .” (Mark 11:17)
To be brief, the Gentiles of the Old Testament are not really equivalent to the non-Christians of the New. List the saved Gentiles of the Old Testament: Melchizedek, Namaan, Jethro, Joseph’s Pharaoh, the inhabitants of Ninevah at the time of Jonah, and so on. Name the saved non-Christians of the New. Ummm.
Now the Gentiles did not have to keep the priestly obligations of Torah, any more than a member of the tribe of Benjamin had to become a priest of Levi. But there was still a priesthood operating on their behalf in the world, and this means that there was “a law” that was relevant to them. They had specified obligations to the true God. The obligations were not as tight, but they were nevertheless clearly there. Because the Gentiles (for the most part) disregarded what God required of them, they were under sin (as defined by the law). If Gentiles were sinners, this meant that they were disobedient. Sin is lawlessness, and so death reigned from Adam to Moses. God gave greater priestly instruction to Israel, and so when they fell into sin, they were falling from a greater height. To whom much is given, much is required.
The Gentiles did not have to keep the ceremonies of Israel. The Gentiles did not have to keep the laws that were unique to the legal structures of Israel (inheritance laws, for example). But the Gentiles most certainly did have to honor the character of God as it was revealed in what we call the moral law. Why were the Canaanites ejected from the land? Because they had defied the law that God enjoined Israel to remember (Lev. 18:24-27). Why was Sodom destroyed? Because of their unlawful deeds (2 Pet. 2:8). Examples of the prophets of Israel denouncing the sins of Israel’s surrounding neighbors could be easily multipled. And so we come to Paul’s great staging of his premises in his epistle to the Romans. Chapter one: Gentiles are sinners. Chapter two: Jews are sinners. Chapter three: Both of them together are sinners in the same way. God has shut them both up under sin so that He might have mercy upon all. But there is no way, in Pauline thought, to be under sin and condemnation without also being under the law. Gentiles were under the law differently, but no less effectually.
We, in the grip of a very popular misunderstanding, think that being “under law” means for Paul that you don’t get to sin, when it in fact means that you can’t stop sinning. “For sin shall not have dominion over you: for you are not under the law, but under grace” (Rom. 6:14). Grace doesn’t mean that you get to sin, while law means you can’t. Law means that you can’t stop, and grace means you are freed from the dominion of sin. So, to the extent that Gentiles were in bondage to sin, to that same extent they were under law in an important Pauline sense. No Gentile was under the wrath of God because he failed to show up for his priestly rotation at the Temple, or because he ate bacon, but he was under the wrath of God because of his adultery, sodomy, theft, lying, and so on. Bondage to sin in this sense was a bondage that Jew and Gentile shared. You don’t have to be a Jewish priest, or a member of the tribe of Dan, to be a Gentile skunk.
One last comment on this point. We must really take care to remember that Paul likes to use words with more than one meaning, frequently within the confines of one sentence. Nomos (law) is one of his favorites. Any attempt to take Paul as using nomos in one fixed sense is, in my view, doomed to hopeless confusions and entanglements.
The second issue concerns whether the division between law and gospel is in the text or in the human heart. The law/gospel approach as a hermeneutic falls into the same mistake that the medieval quadriga did. There are legitimate applications of Scripture that were not in the mind of the writer at all. They cannot be unpacked as one of “his points,” but nevertheless there are legitimate ways to apply the Scriptures to new situations. For example, Paul tells Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach and his frequent ailments. Now, I might be able to apply this text in an honest way in a discussion with a teetotaler — and I can do so with every confidence that such an application of his words never entered Paul’s head. Exegesis brings out of the text the meaning that is there. Application is another matter. Now it should be application of the text rightly understood, but the application is a different thing altogether.
The quadriga was a distorted hermeneutic because it confounded exegesis and application. The literal meaning is what the text is saying — exegesis, and what that amounted to would depend on what the text is saying. But the tropological or ethical meaning is usually an application. The allegorical or doctrinal meaning is usually an application. The same with the anagogical or eschatological meaning. But the quadriga in effect treated Scripture as though it had four sedimentary layers throughout, and if you had the right shovel you could dig down through all four. The law/gospel approach as a hermeneutic does something very similar. It determines beforehand what you are going to find in the text, and then finds it. What we should do is learn what the text is saying, and then turn to see what we will say with it — in our lives, in our systematic theologies, and so on.
Law and gospel are applications, and, as such, depending on the condition of the person hearing the text read, the same text can strike him completely differently — having a law effect, or a gospel effect, depending. Let me illustrate this with a simple sentence that might occur in a sermon, and which one person could legitimately apply to himself in one way, and another person in another way. “Jesus Christ died to save the worst of sinners, those who believe in Him . . .” One person hears “the worst of sinners,” and reasoning from this realizes there is such a thing as sin, as gradations of sin, and that he fits that description. This sentence is functioning as law to him. It is a law-application. Another fellow, sitting right next to the first, hears, “Jesus Christ died to save . . .” He hears a statement of the provision God has made for sinners, and believes to the saving of his soul. This is a gospel-application. The statement in itself is true, but it has legitimate applications both as law and as gospel. But if I had a hermeneutic that insisted that the text had to be one or the other, I would wind up hopelessly confused. It is not one or the other — it contains both. The applications vary, depending on the hearer.