Post by Eli Brayley on Dec 11, 2010 13:51:44 GMT -7
This is probably one of the greatest things ever written outside of the Bible.
------------
"Further, the death involved in faith is repeatedly defined by St. Paul as a death to the law, or to law in general (Galatians 2:19; Romans 6:14 and 7:4). There is undoubtedly something paradoxical in this, and it is the point at which St. Paul's gospel, from the beginning, was most misunderstood and most assailed. On the one hand, when Christ died, justice was done to the law of God, both as an imperative and as a condemning law, as it had never been done before. The will of God had been honored by a life of perfect obedience, and the awful experience of death in which God's inexorable judgment on sin comes home to the conscience had been borne in the same obedience and love by His sinless Son. On the other hand, when this death evokes the faith for which it appeals, the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in the believer; the law gets its clue in his life also, or, as the apostle puts it, it is established by faith. How is it, then, that faith involves a death to the law? It is through the assurance, given to faith at the cross, that so far as doing the will of God is concerned, a new and living way has been found. It is not the law in its old legal form -- the law of statutory injunctions and prohibitions -- which is to generate goodness in sinful man; it is the law glorified in the atonement. The whole inspiration of the Christian life lies here, and it is an inspiration, not a statutory requirement. Nothing is to count in the life of a Christian which does not come with perfect freedom from this source. This explains the extraordinary emphasis which St. Paul everywhere lays on liberty. Liberty is the correlative of responsibility; man must be perfectly free that the whole weight of his responsibilities may come upon him. But this weight of responsibility cannot be faced, and would not sanctify even if it could be faced, in vacuo; it can be faced only when we know God in Christ crucified; and it does sanctify, when the constraint of the atonement, with its awful homage, to the holiness of God, descends upon the heart. But this is all that is required, for this is too great to be compromised by alliance with anything else. Perfect freedom, with entire responsibility to the Redeemer -- the obligation to be a law to oneself, with the power of Christ's passion resting upon the spirit -- that is the death to law which St. Paul contemplates. No statutes, no traditions of men, no dogmata, intellectual or moral, no scruples in the consciences of others, are to have legal obligations for us any longer. Not even the letters written by the finger of God on the tables of stone constitute a legal obligation for the Christian. All that he is to be must come freely out of the atoning death of Christ. He is dead to the law -- in the widest sense of the word, he is dead to law -- through the body of Christ. From this freedom we are always being tempted to relapse. We are always establishing for ourselves, or letting others impose upon us, customs -- whether intellectual, as creeds; or ethical, as the conventional ways of being charitable or of worshipping God -- which though good in themselves, tend to corrupt the world just because they are customs -- in other words, we are always tacitly denying that the death of Christ does full justice to law in every sense of the term, and that for those who believe in it law exists henceforth only in the divine glory of the atonement, and in the life which it inspires."
-- James Denney, The Death of Christ
------------
"Further, the death involved in faith is repeatedly defined by St. Paul as a death to the law, or to law in general (Galatians 2:19; Romans 6:14 and 7:4). There is undoubtedly something paradoxical in this, and it is the point at which St. Paul's gospel, from the beginning, was most misunderstood and most assailed. On the one hand, when Christ died, justice was done to the law of God, both as an imperative and as a condemning law, as it had never been done before. The will of God had been honored by a life of perfect obedience, and the awful experience of death in which God's inexorable judgment on sin comes home to the conscience had been borne in the same obedience and love by His sinless Son. On the other hand, when this death evokes the faith for which it appeals, the righteous requirement of the law is fulfilled in the believer; the law gets its clue in his life also, or, as the apostle puts it, it is established by faith. How is it, then, that faith involves a death to the law? It is through the assurance, given to faith at the cross, that so far as doing the will of God is concerned, a new and living way has been found. It is not the law in its old legal form -- the law of statutory injunctions and prohibitions -- which is to generate goodness in sinful man; it is the law glorified in the atonement. The whole inspiration of the Christian life lies here, and it is an inspiration, not a statutory requirement. Nothing is to count in the life of a Christian which does not come with perfect freedom from this source. This explains the extraordinary emphasis which St. Paul everywhere lays on liberty. Liberty is the correlative of responsibility; man must be perfectly free that the whole weight of his responsibilities may come upon him. But this weight of responsibility cannot be faced, and would not sanctify even if it could be faced, in vacuo; it can be faced only when we know God in Christ crucified; and it does sanctify, when the constraint of the atonement, with its awful homage, to the holiness of God, descends upon the heart. But this is all that is required, for this is too great to be compromised by alliance with anything else. Perfect freedom, with entire responsibility to the Redeemer -- the obligation to be a law to oneself, with the power of Christ's passion resting upon the spirit -- that is the death to law which St. Paul contemplates. No statutes, no traditions of men, no dogmata, intellectual or moral, no scruples in the consciences of others, are to have legal obligations for us any longer. Not even the letters written by the finger of God on the tables of stone constitute a legal obligation for the Christian. All that he is to be must come freely out of the atoning death of Christ. He is dead to the law -- in the widest sense of the word, he is dead to law -- through the body of Christ. From this freedom we are always being tempted to relapse. We are always establishing for ourselves, or letting others impose upon us, customs -- whether intellectual, as creeds; or ethical, as the conventional ways of being charitable or of worshipping God -- which though good in themselves, tend to corrupt the world just because they are customs -- in other words, we are always tacitly denying that the death of Christ does full justice to law in every sense of the term, and that for those who believe in it law exists henceforth only in the divine glory of the atonement, and in the life which it inspires."
-- James Denney, The Death of Christ