Law and gospel

The word that demands, the word that gives

Law and gospel are not another name for the Old and New Testaments; both are found in both. The law says, "The man who does these things will live by them" (Galatians 3:12); the gospel says, "Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved" (Acts 16:31). One tells us what we must do, the other what God has done in Christ.

For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

John 1:17

The law is holy and good, but it cannot give a sinner life: "the law merely brings awareness of sin" (Romans 3:20). "The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2 Corinthians 3:6). Yet the law is not the last word: "But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed" (Romans 3:21). That is the gospel. On Christ as the end of the law, Wesley writes that "he alone gives that pardon and life which the law shows the want of, but cannot give" Wesley.

Nor was the gospel first heard in the New Testament. The Heidelberg Catechism says that we know our misery "Out of the Law of God" (Q. 3), and asked how we know of our deliverance, it answers:

From the Holy Gospel, which God himself first revealed in Paradise, afterwards proclaimed by the holy Patriarchs and Prophets, and foreshadowed by the sacrifices and other ceremonies of the law, and finally fulfilled by his well-beloved Son.

Heidelberg Catechism, Q. 19

Luther's pillar

Martin Luther made this distinction a pillar of his theology. In his Lectures on Galatians he held that whoever knows how to distinguish law and gospel rightly is a true theologian: the law terrifies and humbles the conscience and drives it to Christ, while the gospel comforts it with the free promise of forgiveness for Christ's sake alone Luther, Lectures on Galatians. Confuse the two, and the gospel becomes one more law and the conscience loses its comfort; separate them, and what remains is cheap comfort without repentance. So in the later 1530s Luther opposed Johann Agricola, who taught that since repentance comes from the gospel the law need not be preached in the church; Luther insisted that the law must still be preached.

Where the traditions differ

Lutherans make the distinction the key to reading and preaching Scripture, and stress that the law goes on exposing sin even in believers. The Formula of Concord also confesses a third use, the law as a rule of life for the regenerate Formula of Concord, art. 6. Reformed churches hold the distinction just as firmly where justification is concerned, but, as the Heidelberg Catechism places the Ten Commandments under gratitude, they more often speak of the law as the rule of a thankful life within the covenant of grace. Matthew Henry writes that for the awakened sinner "the law, by the teaching of the Holy Spirit, becomes his loved rule of duty" Matthew Henry. Some, like Karl Barth in the twentieth century, reversed the order to ‘gospel and law’, treating the law as the form the gospel takes.

The Wesleyan tradition has preached the law to awaken sinners and the gospel to comfort them, and teaches that for the justified the law becomes the path of a holy life. The Catholic Church does not set the two against each other in this way; it describes the gospel as the ‘new law’, the law of love written on the heart by the grace of the Holy Spirit Catechism of the Catholic Church. For all these differences, Christians agree that no one is justified by works of the law, and that the gospel "is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16; see justification). See the lessons Law and covenant and Luther: the theology of the cross and justification.