Law and gospel go together in Paul’s thought, and having been shown the truth of the gospel and having trusted God in light of it, we are then to show the sincerity of our faith and to realize the law’s temporal purpose and the rest of God’s predestined will for us (Eph. 2:10) by obeying the law as a way of love for redeemed persons (Rom. 13:8-10; Col. 3:1-14; 1 Jn. 2:3-5). Law convicts, gospel reconciles, and law informs and sanctifies the redeemed life.

In a recent article I criticized an anonymous group of Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) agency heads for using the phrase “gospel imperative that ‘love does no wrong to a neighbor (Romans 13:10)’” that had also appeared in a 2016 denominational resolution. Central to my objection was that the phrase spoke of the gospel while quoting a section of Romans that deals with the law – the rest of v. 10 states “therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (emphasis mine) – and thus conflated what ought to have been distinguished. In a subsequent response a professor and PCA member, Chris Bryans, expressed uncertainty as to my meaning, saying:

I am not sure where Mr. Hervey is going in his brief comment about Romans 13:10. In attempting to separate law and gospel he believes that Paul is not discussing the gospel but the Law. The author is correct but only in a limited sense.  And, as I am sure Mr. Hervey will recognize, although Paul lays out the gospel in Romans chapters 1-11, the applications of the gospel present themselves in the beginning of chapter 12 and continue to the end of the book. 

And elsewhere:

What Mr. Hervey also means by the “separation of law and gospel” is as unclear to me as some of the issues of the Statement seem to be to him. How the separation of law and gospel relates to the issue at hand is also a puzzle to me. The same statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is part of law AND gospel. This needs further elaboration and I look forward to it.

In answer to the professor’s objections, and also because of correspondence which informs me that ministers doing important denominational work regard the law/gospel distinction as peculiarly Lutheran, I offer this response.

In the first case, I did perhaps speak poorly in saying that a “separation” should be maintained between law and gospel, which might suggest they are utterly antithetical. It is noteworthy, however, that I had earlier said (in my “brief comment about Romans 13:10”) that “as a rule the law and the gospel should be carefully distinguished, and each appealed to in its proper place”; i.e., the separation in view is really a clear distinction that puts each in its proper sphere and in the right relation to the other. I will concede that I could have been clearer, but I do not wish for Professor Bryans or anyone else to believe that a believer can so fully separate law and gospel that he can deal with only one rather than both, or that they ought to be regarded as exclusive of each other.

What is the law? In its widest sense it means God’s revealed will for human behavior. In this sense it includes the moral law which is impressed upon human conscience through God’s common grace operating in society (Rom. 2:14-15).[1] In a narrower sense it refers to the special revelation of this will in the Old and New Testaments, hence it sometimes refers to the whole Old Testament (Jn. 10:34), while in other cases it refers specifically to the Mosaic Law (Matt. 7:12), and in yet others it refers to the way of love as taught and exemplified by Christ and his apostles (Jn. 15:9-17; Rom. 13:8-10; Gal. 6:2; 1 Jn. 4:21-5:3).[2]

What is the gospel? It is the good news of the kingdom of God which has appeared with the incarnation of Christ (Matt. 4:23; 9:35), and which has been raised against the oppressive kingdom of sin, death, and devil that afflicts people with misery and separates them from God (Lk. 11:14-22; Jn. 12:31). God’s kingdom is built upon the redeeming work of its king, who has atoned for the sins of his people and broken the power of death and the devil by dying in their place and rising from the dead (Rom. 4:25; 1 Cor. 15:20-22; Heb. 2:14-16). This redemption is received by faith (Mk. 1:15; Rom. 1:16-17; 3:21-26), and so the gospel is then the message of God’s kingdom and of how to enter it by a faith that receives and rests on the king who has accomplished redemption by his work.

The distinction between law and gospel is not per se a distinction between the Old and New Testaments, between grace and judgment, or between commands and promises. Both law (Matt. 5:17-19) and gospel (Gen. 3:15; 15:6; Ps. 32:1-2; comp. Rom. 4:3, 6-8) are present in both testaments, albeit with different degrees of clarity.[3] Both are of grace, as God could have left us to wallow in the darkness of our own sin. Both have to do with judgment (Rom. 2:12, 16). Both relate to sin and have a part in the lives of both believers and unbelievers, being to the former a blessing and to the latter a source of condemnation (2 Cor. 2:15-17). Both contain commands – “do” and “do not” in the case of the law and “repent and believe” in the case of the gospel (Mk. 1:15; 6:12; Acts 2:38; 3:19; 17:30; Rom. 16:25) – as well as promised rewards for obedience (Deut. 28:1-15; Acts 16:31; Rom. 10:9-13) and warnings and punishments for disobedience (Deut. 28:15-68; Heb. 6:4-6; 2 Pet. 2:20-22).

Law and gospel are antithetical only on one point, and even there only insofar as there is human misunderstanding about the matter. It just so happens that this is the most important matter in any person’s life. In the question of salvation the law and gospel are opposed if a person believes that salvation comes from obeying the law, the misunderstanding of Judaism and of various groups throughout church history. If one is inclined to think along such lines, the answer is that the law is a failed, impossible way of gaining eternal life and serves only to condemn, whereas the gospel of God’s free grace in the person and work of Christ, received by faith, is the only means of obtaining the desired salvation. As regards salvation the law is death (Rom. 7:5, 10) and the gospel is life (5:10-21); the law increases sin (5:20) and the gospel compels to righteousness (5:21-6:14); the law is of works (Gal. 3:10-12) and the gospel of faith (Rom. 3:28; Gal. 2:16; 3:13-14); the law is condemnation (Rom. 3:19-20) and the gospel is grace and justification (3:21-26); the law is selfish (Gal. 5:2-4) and the gospel is Christ-centered (2:20-21).

Properly understood, law and gospel are distinct but complementary. The law convicts of sin and shows the insufficiency of all human efforts to earn eternal life, whereas the gospel shows God’s remedy for human depravity and guilt. For the redeemed the law shows the need for the gospel (Rom. 3:19-20), while the gospel provides the material knowledge which faith believes and which moves one to trust God for salvation (3:21-30). The gospel then sets one in the right relation to the law by making it a joyful guide for how to love God and Man (13:8-10), not a hopeless way to try to earn salvation (3:20), nor a condemning testimony to one’s own conscience (2:15) and at the Day of Judgment (2:16). For the reprobate both law and gospel serve to increase the guilt of those who have encountered and rejected them, while those that have not known them will be judged apart from them (Lk. 10:13-16; 12:47-48; Rom. 2:12; 2 Pet. 2:21.)

What makes all of this liable to confusion is that Paul uses the phrase “the law” in different ways, using it to refer especially to the Mosaic Law in the earlier chapters of Romans, and then in the later chapters meaning by it what he elsewhere calls “the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2), i.e. a way of living characterized by love for neighbor. Nonetheless, in its varied forms the law is one thing, the gospel another. Both go together to provide an accurate knowledge of Man’s sin, of his need for forgiveness, of how to obtain eternal life, and of how to live a life pleasing to God. But they are distinct and must be carefully recognized as such. To attempt to have law without gospel is to attempt to earn salvation – and to fail miserably. To attempt to have gospel without law is to become an antinomian and to open the door to hypocritically pleading Christ while living wickedly. To conflate the two is to convert the gospel into a new law, the error sometimes known as neonomianism, which changes the gospel from being about what God has done in Christ, the reconciliation which is received by faith, and makes it instead into a different set of directions for what men must do to please God.

Those that speak of a ‘“gospel imperative that ‘love does no wrong to a neighbor’” while appealing to Romans 13 make the error of mistaking gospel for law. Romans 13 is about law, not gospel: loving neighbor is therefore a legal imperative, not a gospel one. But Romans 13 is about law as a guide for proper conduct because Romans 1 through 11 are about gospel and about the law as a testimony to our own sin, our inability to save ourselves, and our need for God to redeem us.[4]

Law and gospel go together in Paul’s thought, and having been shown the truth of the gospel and having trusted God in light of it, we are then to show the sincerity of our faith and to realize the law’s temporal purpose and the rest of God’s predestined will for us (Eph. 2:10) by obeying the law as a way of love for redeemed persons (Rom. 13:8-10; Col. 3:1-14; 1 Jn. 2:3-5). Law convicts, gospel reconciles, and law informs and sanctifies the redeemed life.[5] That is the proper relation and order of law and gospel as revealed in Paul’s writings.

Those that fail to distinguish the two and regard as gospel what is really law open the door to further error, not least the errors of the so-called social gospel, which turns the Church’s message from the gospel of reconciliation to God by faith into an appeal for merely temporal philanthropy. That the phrase to which I objected occurred originally and subsequently in statements about social affairs should therefore move you to concern, dear reader. And while I do not think this indicates that the mistaken authors in view are heretics, nonetheless it betrays a sloppiness in scriptural exegesis and ethical and theological thought that ill becomes our denomination and its foremost men, a sloppiness that merits criticism (and amendment) lest it inspire further failures to rightly handle the word of truth (2 Tim. 2:15) that will lead us father away from the Church’s proper mission of making disciples by the means of grace and on into the abyss of socio-political activism in which so many other Presbyterians have foundered and died by abandoning the Great Commission for things that are more properly the province of other institutions.

Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Simpsonville, S.C.

[1] H. Bavinck, Reformed Ethics Vol. I, 218-226

[2] Of course what is recorded in the New Testament was, previous to its authorship, transmitted via other means (2 Thess. 2:15).

[3] This lack of clarity is especially as regards the gospel in the Old Testament. One of the purposes of the law was to show the depravity of sin and with it the need for a gracious redeemer to save man from sin’s dominion: thus the law was added to help clarify the gospel (Rom. 7:7-13; Gal. 3:21-26).

[4] On this point Professor Bryans and I agree, though implications is arguably a preferable term to his own “applications,” as it better communicates the fact that being in the right relation to the law is a consequence of embracing the gospel of salvation by faith in Christ.

[5] Hence we have historically distinguished between the three uses of the law, two of which are in view here. Its use in conviction is regarded as the second use of the law; its use in teaching love is its third use.