The Reformers’ Attitude to the Law of God

By Geoffrey H. Greenhough

Cheadle, Cheshire, England

This essay was awarded first prize in the Johnston Essay Competition conducted by the Protestant Reformation Society, England.

The Subject of the Law of God figures very large in the writings of theologians in the Reformed tradition. Calvin wrote extensively on the Law in his Institutes; his contemporaries Bullinger and Hooper both devoted whole works to an exposition of the Ten Commandments, as did the English puritans Watson, Hopkins, and Andrewes; the value which these men saw in the Decalogue, as a concise summary of the Law, has been appreciated by Reformed scholars in later centuries, witness the writings of Charles Hodge and expositions of the Decalogue by Dale, Pink, and Wallace.

But recognizing the value of the Law of God was no innovation by the Reformers. Irenaeus had seen it; Augustine knew it well; the medieval schoolmen, of whom Aquinas was the best exponent, considered at length the application of the Law to the Christian. But it is to Martin Luther that the historian must turn for the first expression of the distinctive emphasis of the Reformation about this doctrine: to Luther one turns because he was first in time, and also because his works were widely read, and had a considerable effect on later Reformers; to Luther also because his writings have ever since been widely available, and so have continued to exercise an influence on Christian doctrine.

Within three years of its publication in 1522, Luther’s New Testament in German had been reprinted, prefaces and all, in many editions and had been circulated throughout Western Europe. Had not the printing press come into use some sixty years previously, Luther’s New Testament might have achieved but little. But the new ground that Luther struck, combined with the wide circulation that the presses gave it, meant that Luther’s ideas were disseminated to a continent whose theologians had for the most part hardly begun to inquire beyond mystical medievalism.

In his prefaces, Luther set Law over against Gospel. To him, there were two kingdoms, the earthly, natural, civil kingdom and the kingdom of the heavenly, the gracious, and the redeemed. The heavenly kingdom was typified by grace, freedom, and love, in which the function of the law was to drive men in desperation to Christ, to seek salvation. The only righteousness of this kingdom was the righteousness of faith—”faith alone,” as in Luther’s embellishment of Ephesians 2:8. The earthly kingdom, on the other hand, enjoyed God’s providential care, for he was the Creator of it. To this kingdom belonged moral values, humanitarianism, civil and political justice. The two kingdoms were not to be confused: earthly moral endeavour was not to be viewed in terms of merit in the heavenly kingdom in which the Gospel alone gave justification. So, theologians were not to consider Jesus, as did à Kempis and medieval mystics generally, as a law-giver or an example to follow. This was the theme which Luther gave to the Prologue of the 1522 New Testament, and which he worked out in the Prefaces.

* * * * *

Tyndale had Luther’s New Testament very soon after its first publication. By 1525, he had produced an English New Testament with his own redaction of Luther’s prefatory material. Confiscatsed while still on the presses in Cologne, only a fragment of Matthew, with its preface, remains; but the complete work, printed in Worms in 1526, yield a wealth of information about Tyndale’s theology at this date. In translating Luther, Tyndale made significant textual changes, especially to the parts relating to the Law and the Gospel. These emendations show us where Tyndale consciously wanted to express his differences from Luther. But Tyndale greatly expanded the Prologue, giving it a distinctive theology of his own and indicating to us the weightier emphasis that he wanted to lay on the whole subject.

Tyndale and Grace

First, he was completely at one with Luther on the uniqueness of the Gospel: in the 1526 Prologue to Romans he emphasized that justification is by faith in Christ alone; should a man depend on his own efforts, he is relying on what Scripture calls the Works of the Law, that is, what a man can do “of his own free will, of his own proper strength.” But he is incapable of justifying himself in this way, because inwardly he still has “unlust,” that is, his heart is not with his actions.[1] This theme is carried on in Tyndale’s later works. The Prologue to Genesis, published in 1530, shows how law-keeping and ceremonial “neither…justified in the heart before God.” These Old Testament ordinances had a good purpose, to make sin manifest and to create a thirst for salvation:

He that goeth about to quiet his conscience and to justify himself with the law, doth but heal his wounds with fretting corrosives. And he that goeth about to purchase grace with ceremonies, doth but suck the ale-pole to quench his thirst.[2]

In his (later) exposition of 1 John, Tyndale writes, concerning the text 1 John 1: 1–4,

[No-one believes in Christ] except Moses have him first in cure, and with his law have robbed him of his righteousness.[3]

The following year, Tyndale published his translation of Jonah, in the Preface to which he summarised the purpose of the three divisions of Scripture:

1. the law, “to condemn the flesh”;
2. the Gospel, “promises…mercy for all that repent and acknowledge their sins at the preaching of the law”;
3. the historical parts, “the sure and undoubted examples that God so will deal with us.”[4]

Tyndale on Law and Sanctification

These examples of Tyndale’s understanding of the law as leading to the Gospel are part of the theology which he held in common with Martin Luther. This understanding he shared also with the main stream of Reformation writers. Where Tyndale takes a distinctive stance is in his application of the law to the Christian. This stance is adumbrated in the Worms New Testament, but is expressed much more clearly in Tyndale’s Prologue to Jonah, published in 1531 and renamed “A Pathway to the Holy Scripture.” It finds expression also in his later works, and particularly well in the Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount:

[Christians] of a very thankfulness…love the law…and submit themselves to learn it and to profit therein, and to do tomorrow what they cannot do today.[5]

On Matthew 5:17–19 he comments:

So fast shall they of the kingdom of heaven cleave unto the pure law of God.[6]

And in the “Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue,” Book III:

I find in the Scripture (Jeremiah 31 and Hebrews 8) that all the children of God, which only are the true members of the church, have every one of them the law written in their hearts; so that if there were no law to compel, they would yet naturally, out of their own hearts, keep the law of God; yea, and against violence compelling to the contrary.[7]

Tyndale on Contract

These instances serve to indicate how Tyndale viewed the law. To him it was firstly the way in which the Holy Spirit drove the sinner to the cross, but secondly, and equally as valid, it was the divinely appointed rule of life and growing sanctification for the regenerated soul. Law-keeping was for the Christian the evidence of his new birth and the vehicle of his sanctification. This concept constituted a rejection of Lutheran theology for Tyndale, for Luther could only accept the first part of the use of the Law. Clebsch considers[8] that Tyndale “puritanized” Luther by giving to Luther’s concept of sanctification, a new life of love to God and to one’s neighbour, a schematization in an obedience to the law. There is some evidence for this in the early pages of Tyndale’s Prologue to the Sermon on the Mount. But this is not “puritanization.” Tyndale’s acceptance of the place of the Law in the Christian life must really be seen as a radical departure from, not an adaptation of, Luther’s theology.

There is some other, some non-Lutheran, basis for Tyndale’s characteristic concept. That basis was Tyndale’s understanding of the idea of contract. The concept was that regenerate man was bound to live in conformity to the loving purposes of God, purposes made known to men in the Old Testament revelation of God’s covenant. The Old Testament covenant was reaffirmed under new forms in the New Testament (where circumcision becomes baptism, passover becomes the Lord’s supper, and so on). In Christian baptism, man entered into the covenant relationship with God, and so bound himself to a spiritual faith, the promise of mercy, and a “consent to the law, that it is righteous and good.” It was Tyndale’s understanding of the place of contract and covenant that produced the subtitle to his exposition of 1 John (1531): “Except a man have the profession of his baptism in his heart, he cannot understand the Scripture,” and the subtitle of his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount: “…Containing the whole sum of the covenant between God and us, upon which we be baptized to keep it.” This particular exposition, says Trinterud, is the key to Tyndale’s expositions of all the Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, and James. The theology of contract became central to his understanding of the law as a whole.[9] Clebsch says that “revised his theology around the controlling notion of covenant, understood as a moralistic contract between God and man.”[10] Clebsch is not sympathetic to Tyndale’s thought at this point, and writes accordingly. Even so his findings are true, if put antagonistically. But he goes too far in claiming that Tyndale’s resultant Gospel was that “God will deal kindly and lovingly with those who love his law and believe in Christ.”[11]

Tyndale’s Originality

It has been noted that Tyndale had a basic commonality of evangelical belief with Luther, and that his view that the Law was the basis of the believer’s life in Christ was in direct opposition to Luther. But this was no new theology. He was very much in the line of Protestant Reformed thought being expounded in Basel, where Oecolampadius taught covenant theology in his work on Isaiah, first published about 1525. The same theology was heard from Zwingli in Zurich and from the lips of Capito in Strasbourg. From these Rhineland centres of the Reformation, Bullinger, Bibliander, Bucer, and Peter Martyr were propagating the same covenant theology that Tyndale was making plain in England. And the cross-fertilization of thought was fostered and furthered by the subsequent political occurrences which followed on the successive deaths of Henry VIII and Edward VI, and later, on the end of the Marian persecution.

* * * * *

Lutheranism, English Reformed Protestantism and Calvinism all stem from the three giants of the Reformation period. Luther, the eldest of the three, outlived Tyndale, and Tyndale was martyred before Calvin published his first edition of the Institutes. This means that an interaction of ideas between Luther and Tyndale was to be expected, as also between Luther and Calvin, but that there can be no conceivable dependence of Tyndale on Calvin.

It has been proper up to this point to consider Tyndale’s distinctive departure from Luther’s teaching on Law. But the ongoing Reformation, in the formulation of doctrine, worked over its history time and time again, and drew from the thoughts of many theologians. In the days of the Reformation the giants were as yet unrecognized and were indeed still winning their spurs, so to speak. It is noteworthy, therefore, that Calvin drew at the same well as Tyndale when he came to formulate the doctrine of the Law. Like Luther, he also saw law as restraining sin: this was the “usus politicus,” for determining state law and regulating communal behaviour. Like Luther again, Calvin recognized the work of the Law as driving men to Christ: this was the “usus pedagogus.” But like Tyndale, and unlike Luther, Calvin recognized the “usus normativus” of the Law, determining the conduct of believers. On this third use, Calvin wrote that “the office of the law is to excite them to the study of purity and holiness, by reminding them of their duty.”[12]

There is also in the Institutes the same emphasis which is apparent in Tyndale’s work, that is that the regenerate man obeys the Law because the Holy Spirit, in his work of sanctification, gives him a love of the Law and a desire to fulfil it: “being free from the yoke of the law itself [human consciences] voluntarily obey the will of God.”[13]

Calvin’s great contribution to the Reformation was his ability to analyse and codify principles which had been already developed and expounded by others, but not properly incorporated into a systematic theology. In the Institutes Calvin expounds the Law at length. At the Fall, man lost his love of God, the divine gifts, and the divine image. Subsequently, when his God-given conscience pointed to his guilt, man refused to listen. Therefore God gave the written Law to accuse man of his sin. Jesus fulfilled the Law positively in that he unfailingly kept it, and negatively in that he paid its penalty on man’s behalf. The Decalogue is expounded as being relevant to the believer to teach him love,[14] but not to bind him. He cannot be found guilty according to the Law because of his standing in Christ, nor can he be bound to obey the Law because of his freedom in Christ. But the indwelling Holy Spirit calls him “cheerfully and readily” to respond to the Father’s love, and to love the law.

* * * * *

Covenant, then, was a concept evident in Luther, but basic to both Calvin and Tyndale. It became the foundation of the English Reformers’ understanding of the relationship of the Law to the Gospel and to sanctification. It stands too as the key to the understanding of Puritan theology.

Tyndale’s Immediate Successors

Several of Tyndale’s contemporaries took up the dual purpose concept of the Law of God.

Miles Coverdale expounded the condemnatory value of the Law, driving a man to seek salvation by means other than his own good works. The Law, he wrote, teaches us “right from unright” and causes us to learn that right is not in our power.[15] Like Tyndale, Coverdale saw the Law in its three parts:

1. The ceremonial law. This directed the Jews towards faith in their Messiah. The ceremonial law is now fulfilled in Christ.
2. The judicial Law. This is not binding on Christian governments, but is the model for civil use, encouraging good government and peace.
3. The Moral Law. This is enduring, and still applicable to all Christians.[16]

Coverdale considered the moral law to be well summed up in the Decalogue, in which “is comprehended all that serveth for a godly life.”[17] He saw the Sermon on the Mount as the “absolute intensification of the divine law,” alienating the sinner from God’s standards, then offering salvation by driving the sinner to seek grace in Christ, and then being the “rules of right living for men who, once enlisted into Christianity through baptism, would be enabled to live rightly.”[18]

Robert Barnes was such an exponent of the doctrine of justification by faith that he initially rejected the teaching of the Epistle of James (as also did Luther). After his imprisonment in 1529, at which point Latimer became the leader of the English Reformers, Barnes composed his “Supplication to King Henry VIII,” published in 1534. In this document, Barnes reaffirmed the doctrine of justification by faith but also reconciled the teaching of James with this doctrine. He wrote:

[Works are not] done to justify the man, but a just man must needs do them…not by them to be justified but alonely in them to serve his brother [following the example of Christ] for he hath no need of them as concerning his justification…[Works are] an outward declaration and testimony of the inward justification by faith.[19]

Barnes saw the church as a “covenanted society,” declaring its justification by faith by means of a life of good works based on the Law of God.

The theology of John Frith was at first very Lutheran. He opposed Tyndale’s views that good works were a necessary following of faith in Christ. Later, however, he wrote the Revelation of Antichrist. In this book Frith described the place of the Law: firstly, the Law of God was written on the regenerate heart, then the Holy Spirit acted as “exhorter” to the Christian, calling him to walk according to the Law. Christ was seen as the new giver of the Law, affirming in the New Testament what the Old Testament had laid down as the standards of right behaviour. For “[Christ] hath not delivered us from the Law, but from the power and violence of the law.”[20]

George Joye and Simon Fish followed Tyndale’s lead in seeing the Law in the context of a covenant relationship with God. John Hooper, in his Declaration of the Ten Commandments, cast his argument in the framework of the three “uses” of the Law:

1. The usus politicus. This is external in applicability and civil. It prohibits and punishes (1 Tim 1). “The Law is given to the unjust.”
2. The usus pedagogus. According to this use, the Law informs and instructs the heart and the conscience. It preaches damnation, accuses and points to a Saviour.
3. The usus normativus. By this use, the Christian is shown what God requires. There is no other standard “that we should feign works of our brains to serve him withal.”[21]

Hooper uses concepts which in later Reformed writings become commonplace illustrations. He speaks of the Law as our “accuser,” “promising life to the observers thereof, and death to the transgressors of the same.”[22] Like almost every other author reprinted in the Parker Society volumes, he uses the two Pauline metaphors of the “glass” and the “schoolmaster”: the Law is a mirror in which a man beholds himself and sees his guilt; and the Law is a schoolmaster which teaches the man, who has recognized his guilt, that the way of salvation is through Christ.

The Reign of Edward VI (1547-1553)

John Bradford’s writings appeared after Henry’s death, and serve to illustrate well the continuity of Reformed thought through the short reign of Edward VI. Bradford was above all an evangelist, and his writings amply illustrate the fact. In his sermon on repentance, printed in 1553, he wrote of three ways to turn the negligent and sluggish mind to Christ:

1. Pray
2. “Get thee God’s Law as a glass to toot [i.e., look] in, for in it and by it cometh the true knowledge of sin, without which knowledge there can be no sorrow…”
3. “Look upon the tag tied to God’s Law [i.e., the penalty]”[23]

Even so, Bradford also has the Law as the guide to the Christian life. Though he was an evangelist who sought to win hearts for Christ in a true repentance and faith, he looked beyond conversion and saw that the Law serves “to keep the old man from carnality and security, and to stir [the Christian] up to diligence and fortitude.”[24]

The Swiss Reformer, Henry Builinger, published a series of fifty sermons, the “Decades,” during Edward’s reign, and these were circulated among English Reformers. In a sermon on the moral law, Bullinger differentiated, as did Tyndale, between the ceremonial, the judicial, and the moral law, and showed how the moral law still endured. The Decalogue, which summed up the moral law, was “the very absolute and everlasting rule of true righteousness and all virtues, set down for all places, men, and ages to frame themselves by.”[25]

Like so many of the Reformers, Bullinger wrote extensively on the Commandments, applying them minutely to the social structures of his day. He linked the Old Testament ceremonial laws to Christian church ceremonial: “holy rites belonging to the ministers of religion.”[26] This interpretation was not taken up by mainstream Reformers. But Bullinger’s sermon “on the use, fulfilling, and abrogation of the Law” preaches standard Reformed doctrine. The moral law, “leadeth us by the hand to Christ.” The saints of the Old Testament “used the Law and ceremonies as a guide and schoolmistress to lead them by the hand to Christ their Saviour.” The Law teaches Christians “what to follow and what to eschew.” The first table of the Ten Commandments teaches us “what we owe to God and how he will be worshipped”; the second table “frameth the offices of life, and teacheth us how to behave towards our neighbour.” The judicial laws “teach the government of an house or a commonweal, so that by them we may live honestly among ourselves and holily to God-wards.”[27]

Hugh Latimer was a popular preacher, in the best sense of the term, and several times was called to preach before the Court of Edward VI. In a sermon on Matthew 6:10 that has been preserved Latimer explained his text, “Thy will be done,” as meaning that “he will help and strengthen us, so that we may keep his holy law and commandments.”[28] Latimer takes up the “looking glass” concept, so popular with many of the Reformers, and noted already in the writings of Hooper and Bradford. In his sermon on Romans 13:8, 9 he uses it to illustrate the power of the Law to convict of sin: “The law of God, when it is preached, bringeth us to the knowledge of our sins; for it is like as a glass….”[29] In the Edwardian Catechism of 1553, the Law is again seen as a glass to “behold the filth and spots of our soul (that) we might the more fervently long for our Saviour Jesus Christ.”[30]

The Marian Exile

The death of Edward VI caused many to fear greatly for the future of the Protestant Reformation in England, and some Reformers left England for the comparative safety of the Continent. The subsequent persecution during Mary’s reign proved that their apprehensions were justified: several leaders of the Reformation were martyred for their faith whilst others kept alive the pure doctrine of Christ by joining their brethren in Europe. Thomas Becon was one of those Imprisoned in the Tower, but he was subsequently released (due, according to Foxe, to mistaken identity) and fled the country.

Just as in Henry’s reign, Peter Martyr, Martin Bucer, and other European scholars had come to England, so now, by political expediency, England’s leading Reformers, clergy and laymen, joined their European counterparts in Geneva, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, and Marburg. The cross-fertilization of thought which ensued gave griste and marrow to the Reformation in England. That which Calvin was systematizing in successive editions of the Institutes was commonly held doctrine among English Reformers. Cranmer, in the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI, had already spelt out the doctrines of total depravity, unconditional election, irresistible grace, and the final perseverance of the saints. Nor was Thomas Becon any innovator when, following the Marian exile, he described the function of the Law as

1. to declare the will of God, to reveal sin, and to lead us as a schoolmaster to Christ;
2. for Christians to obey.[31]

Becon later expanded this in his book News out of Heaven, published in 1560. He said here that the purpose of the Law was

1. to “prove the obedience of your heart;”
2. to “keep you in an honest and godly trade of living;”
3. to “refrain you from wicked doing;”
4. to “repress idolatry, swearing, ungodliness…;”
5. to “set before your eyes your abominable wickedness”;
6. so that “you may learn to know yourselves (and) make more haste to approach unto God’s mercy.”[32]

James Pilkington also spent the period of the Marian exile abroad, in Geneva, Zürich, and other Reformation centres. He was a staunch friend of Calvin, and it was to Calvin’s advice that he turned when offered the See of Durham. Calvin encouraged him to accept this, even though it entailed the wearing of episcopal vestments, for the sake of the Gospel. Pilkington’s concept of the nature of the Gospel can be judged from his exposition of Haggai, where he describes the Law as a schoolmaster, and also where he has the delightful metaphor of the Law as a shoemaker’s needle, going first through the hole, and then drawing after it the strong thread of God’s mercies.[33] In the same work Pilkington strikes hard at those who would preach Christ without having first preached the Law:

…by preaching the Law and threatenings unto them, that they which were afore so forgetful of their duties, now hearing the great anger and vengeance of God that hanged over their heads…stirred them up to do their duties and fear God. Thus may we here see the fond and tender ears of them, that would not hear nor have the law preached, but altogether the sweet comfortable promises and mercies of Christ; nor can abide the anger of God….[34]

Elizabeth’s Reign: The Early Puritans

Puritanism properly began with Elizabeth’s reign.[35] That it flourished on a solid theology of Reformation teaching can be seen from the vigorous production of puritan writings from 1553 onwards. That it began with the massive support of the returning Marian exiles is also plain: indeed, it would have been a complete hiatus in historical development had it not been so. But it cannot be said that the theology of puritanism was secondhand Calvinism, brought back by the exiles. Rather, those exiles had left England because they were already convinced about the doctrines of the Reformation, convinced too that they were important enough to suffer exile for. The support of a larger fellowship, that of the Continental Reformers, had strengthened their beliefs; Calvin’s expository writings and his Institutes had given to those beliefs a more robust schematization; but they were to be found squarely in Tyndale’s prologues, his later writings, and in the writings of Latimer, Bradford, and Hooper; and, under Mary several Reformers had preferred martyrdom to a recantation of their faith. Those early Reformers stood with Zwingli, Bullinger, Oecolampadius, Bucer, and many others in the Rhineland cities of Basel, Strasbourg, and Frankfurt. The pedigree goes back indeed to Augustine.

The puritan successors to these giants of the Reformation were Jewel, Whitaker, Nowell, Rogers, and Whitgift. Jewel, created bishop of Salisbury in 1560: defended Cranmer’s theology in the Second Prayer Book. Regarding the place of the Law, he showed how it brought men to faith, and then schooled them to the “full, perfect man.”[36] William Whitaker, who was chiefly responsible for the Lambeth Articles of 1595 and whose distinctive Calvinism shows clearly in them, saw the law as “the will of God…plainly revealed to us in the Scripture.”[37]

Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul’s, wrote in his Catechism of 1570 that the Law is full and perfect, and that nothing is godliness apart from it. The Law forbids and commands; it has an inward application as well as an outward one in that it commands “gentle sincerity.”[38] It has a two-fold target: it condemns the ungodly, and for Christians it provides “a mark for them to level at, a goal to run unto.”[39]

Thomas Rogers wrote an exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles which he published in 1586. On Article 7 he propounded the Christian relevance of the three parts of the Law. In this work he modified somewhat some of the more extravagant utterances of earlier Reformers. He said:

1. “Christians are not bound at all to the observation of the judicial ceremonies;”
2. “the judicial laws of the Jews are not necessarily to be received or established in any commonwealth” (this Rogers deduced by reference to the New Testament injunction to obey Gentile rulers);
3. “no Christian man whatsoever is freed from obedience of the moral law.”[40]

This particular exposition is in the best tradition of the making of Reformed theology: it compares scripture with scripture, and weighs carefully the previous conclusions made by men of faith. Rogers’ formulation of the value of the Law was espoused by Archbishop Whitgift in his Defence of the Answer.[41]

The Reformed doctrine of the Law in this reached its final redaction for many generations. It stood as common ground between the bishops of the Church of England and the puritan divines throughout the reign of Elizabeth. It is an integral part of the doctrinal outlook of the Westminster Confession. And the incorporation of the Thirty-Nine Articles into the Book of Common Prayer in 1662 gives testimony to the fact that, historically and officially, the teaching of the Church of England is truly Reformed, both generally and in the particular instance of the doctrine of the Law of God.

* * * * *

The Reformers and their immediate successors strove with the Scriptures, and from them rediscovered the great truths of law and grace. By the Puritan period, these two truths had been nicely distinguished and well related to each other. As a result, the traditional Reformed view from then onwards has presented a thoroughly biblical way of salvation and growth in Christian daily living. Regrettably, but perhaps inevitably, the careful balance needed in order fairly to present the function of the Law has often not been maintained. Polarization has resulted, one side presenting the so-called “social gospel” and the other a facile “easy gospel” of third-rate evangelicalism. But, in the goodness of God, there has been a succession of able theologians who have continued to propound the Law in its true relationship to grace, and so maintain the equilibrium so typical of the Christian Gospel.

At the turn of the present century, S. H. Kellogg wrote, in his introduction to Leviticus, that “the book is of use for today, as suggesting principles which should guide human legislators who would rule according to the mind of God.”[42] This is a distinct echo of Bullinger’s Sermon III. A modern writer, Alan Cole, put the Decalogue firmly in the context of grace and of the covenant, when he stressed that God’s people are bound by God’s law: “it is because of his redemptive work that God has a right to command.”[43] Martin Lloyd-Jones, writing in 1959 on the Sermon on the Mount, struck a truly reformed note: “We are not told in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Live like this and you will become a Christian’; rather we are told, ‘Because you are a Christian live like this.”[44] Here Dr. Lloyd-Jones makes obedience to the Law the resultant of receiving grace, and incidentally he tugs the foundations away from the “social gospel” as well as from the easy evangelicalism so prevalent in his hey-day. In a later passage in the same book, he shows how the work of the Law is also to prompt the sinner to seek grace: “Nothing shows me the absolute need of new birth, and of the Holy Spirit and his work within, so much as the Sermon on the Mount.”[45] Professor J. N. D. Anderson made the same point in his book, Morality, Law, and Grace (1972): “The moral law reveals not only our transgressions and failures, but the essential sinfulness of the human heart. So it drives us to regeneration [that is, to grace] as the only remedy.”[46]

But this is not the theology of all evangelical scholars. Michael Green, who writes very much as an apologist as well as an evangelist, deals with the Sermon on the Mount in his latest popular book, New Life: New Lifestyle. In Chapter five he emphasizes the need to rely on the Holy Spirit to live a life pleasing to Christ. He makes the point that one needs to reason out what Christian behaviour should be in any given situation, and goes on to ask if in fact Jesus was really laying down legislation in the Sermon. He continues: “Not really….Literal obedience to the command completely destroy the principle behind the command…Thank God we are not called to obey a code but to please a person.”[47] Canon Green has unnecessarily juxtaposed precept and principle here. The point he is making carries weight; but in making it he has blurred the edges of Christian norms of behaviour by placing the biblical text subject to reason, rather than the reverse.

Hymns, as they are known today, were not part of the church’s worship at the time of the Reformation. But since the eighteenth century revival they have played a significant role in both reflecting and moulding the theology of Christian folk. Wesley’s hymn books greatly affected the development of Methodism; the Olney hymns similarly played their part in the revival within the Church of England; and Youth Praise is having its effect on worship today.

One of John Wesley’s hymns prays,

Open our eyes, and let us see 

The wonders of thy law.[48]

Another, by Charles Wesley, declares,

All who read or hear are blessed 

If thy plain commands we do.[49]

John Newton’s Olney congregation sang of true holiness:

To walk as children of the day, 

To mark the precepts’ holy light 

To wage the warfare, watch and pray….[50]

Bishop Wordsworth’s hymn on the Scriptures begins,

Lord be thy word my rule.

The hymn is in the first edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern, and was retained in the Revision. But the modern supplement, One Hundred Hymns for Today, includes Patrick Appleford’s hymn “Lord Jesus Christ,” which affirms,

All your commands I know are true.

Though neither of these two hymns carries the word “law,” yet in each there is an implication of obedience in the words “rule” and “commands.”

The Anglican Hymn Book, published a decade ago, has a number of hymns referring to the power of God’s Law. In Isaac Watts’ hymn “Lord I have made thy word my choice” there are the lines,

I’ll read the histories of thy love 

And keep thy laws in sight.[51]

Charles Wesley’s hymn “Come, O thou all-victorious Lord” is taken from the Methodist Hymn Book. It speaks of the power of the Word to convict of sin:

Strike with the hammer of thy word 

And break these hearts of stone.[52]

Youth Praise offered to the church of the late 1960s a good number of new hymns, many of them speaking of sin and its remedy. Regrettably, some hymns imply by their silence on the law that sin is instinctively recognized by the sinner:

Sometimes when you’re feeling all alone and blue, 

Jesus can come in and help to pull you through; 

Sometimes you just know that you need Jesus too, 

So come on, sinner, come to him, He died for you, 

A sinner such as you, a sinner such as me, 

He came to save from the grave….[53]

This verse is from a hymn that is trying to answer the problem of loneliness. But it answers loneliness with forgiveness. Youth Praise, 269, also tackles this well-known problem of contemporary society, but answers it with the offer of walking with Christ. Young’s hymn, “Jesus grant that we may follow” is one of this collection’s best examples showing the place of God’s Law:

Lord we know we cannot follow 

Till you save us from our sin, 

May the fullness of your Spirit 

Give us risen power within. 

Saviour, give us strength to follow 

Your example and your law; 

Loving You above all others, 

Others may we love the more.[54]

One feels that here, amid the relativity and subjectivity of much neo-evangelical preaching and belief, the objective reference point of the Law of God has been established in a modern hymnbook. One looks in vain for a similar note in the Sound of Living Waters collection by Pulkington and Harper.[55]

In a generation whose Christian public is following the general European trend of non-literacy, folk-singing and listening to folk-singers are growing in popularity. It becomes increasingly important, therefore, for Christian truth to be disseminated through the medium of hymns and songs. In this way it can be heard on record, on cassette, and live. In this way, Christian young people, who share in the general wealth of young people, buy records of Christian “groups,” play guitars, and sing the songs that these groups make popular.

To use the available means of propagation in this way is very much in line with the strategy of Wesley and Whitefield, who preached in the fields, Simeon who rented lecture halls in Cambridge, General Booth who opened soup kitchens, and Billy Graham who hired Haringay. Christian leaders through history have seized the opportunities of the day. Those who, like the Psalmist, love God’s Law have today available to them media for spreading a love of that Law and bringing to Christ Christians who are whole. Expository material in the Reformed tradition is no longer hard to obtain, as it was a generation ago. But those who read it are ministers and preachers. The medium of song is today available to Reformed poets and musicians, those whom God has given gifts in this field, and who are willing in his name to enter the fiercely competitive world of publishing, and place Reformed truth before the Christian public at large.

Notes

1. William Tyndale, Prologue to Romans (Parker Society Edition; Cambridge: The University Press, 1948), I, 487–488. (Further references to the Parker Society edition of the works of the English Reformers will be abbreviated PS, followed by the name of the appropriate author and the volume number of his writings.)
2. PS: Tyndale, I, 415–416.
3. PS: Tyndale, II, 146.
4. PS: Tyndale, I, 449–464.
5. PS: Tyndale, II, 11.
6. PS: Tyndale, II, 39.
7. PS: Tyndale, III, 137.
8. W. A. Clebsch, England’s Earliest Protestants, 1520–1535 (New H:ven: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 184.
9. L. J. Trinterud, “A Reappraisal of William Tyndale’s Debt to Martin Luther,” Church History, XXXI (1962), 36–40.
10. Clebsch, op. cit., p. 180.
11. Ibid., p. 171.
12. Calvin, Institutes, III, xix, 2.
13. Calvin, Institutes, III, xix, 4.
14. Calvin, Institutes, I, iii.
15. “The Old Faith.” PS: Coverdale, I, 43.
16. PS: Coverdale, I, 45–47.
17. PS: Coverdale, I, 40.
18. Clebsch, op. cit., p. 272.
19. Cited in D. B. Knox, The Doctrine of Faith in the Reign of Henry VIII (London: James Clarke, 1961), p. 68.
20. Cited in ibid., p. 55.
21. PS: Hooper, I, 281–282.
22. PS: Hooper, II, 26.
23. PS: Bradford, I, 54.
24. Letter to Hart, Cole, etc.; PS: Bradford, II, 196.
25. PS: Bullinger, I, 211.
26. PS: Bullinger, II, 125.
27. PS: Builinger, II, 242, 243.
28. PS: Latimer, I, 370.
29. PS: Latimer, II, 10.
30. PS: The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549 and A.D. 1552…Set Forth by Authority in the Reign of King Edward VI., 499.
31. PS: Becon, II, 496.
32. PS: Becon, I, 48—49.
33. PS: Pilkington, 104.
34. PS: Pilkington, 97.
35. E. F. Kevan. The Grace of Law (London: Carey Kingsgate Press, 1964), p. 21.
36. PS: Jewel, II, 615.
37. PS: Whitaker, 382.
38. PS: Nowell, 125.
39. PS: Nowell, 140.
40. PS: Rogers, 88–91.
41. See PS: Whitgift, III, 552ff.
42. S. H. Kellogg, The Book of Leviticus. The Expositor’s Bible (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1891), p. 25.
43. R. Alan Cole, Exodus. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1973), p. 25.
44. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1959), p. 17.
45. Ibid., p. 18.
46. J. N. D. Anderson, Morality, Law, and Grace (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 1972), p. 22.
47. Michael Green, New Life: New Lifestyle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973), pp. 74-75.
48. Methodist Hymn Book, 304.
49. Methodist Hymn Book, 306.
50. Olney Hymns, Book III, 71.
51. Anglican Hymn Book, 304.
52. Anglican Hymn Book, 482.
53. Youth Praise, 61.
54. Youth Praise, 247.
55. Sound of Living Waters (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975).