III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God.In human government, while law is an expression of the will of the governing power, and so of the nature lying behind the will, it is by no means an exhaustive expression of that will and nature, since it consists only of general ordinances, and leaves room for particular acts of command through the executive, as well as for“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon.”Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon”all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity:“English law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands. A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king's conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These chancellors' courts were called courts of equity, and redressed wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times law and equity are administered for the most part by the same courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at another time as a court of equity.”“Summa lex, summa injuria,”is sometimes true.Applying now to the divine law this illustration drawn from human law, we remark:(a) The law of God is ageneralexpression of God's will, applicable to all moral beings. It therefore does not include the possibility of special injunctions to individuals, and special acts of wisdom and power in creation and providence. The very specialty of these latter expressions of will prevents us from classing them under the category of law.Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith:“The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace.”(b) The law of God, accordingly, is apartial, not an exhaustive, expression of God's nature. It constitutes, indeed, a manifestation of that attribute of holiness which is fundamental in God, and which man must possess in order to be in harmony with God. But it does not fully express God's nature in its aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy.The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of[pg 548]the divine essence, is equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can be nothing above and beyond it.”This is a denial of the transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb:“As the cartwheel follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.”Denovan:“Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified [without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole penalty of the law.”(c) Mere law, therefore, leaves God's nature in these aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy, to be expressed toward sinners in another way, namely, through the atoning, regenerating, pardoning, sanctifying work of the gospel of Christ. As creation does not exclude miracles, so law does not exclude grace (Rom. 8:3—“what the law could not do ... God”did).Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires, not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.”Campbell, Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of God.”C. H. M.:“Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the‘ten words.’Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God”(John 1:17—“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”). So there is more in man's heart toward God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or glad-tidings.(d) Grace is to be regarded, however, not as abrogating law, but as republishing and enforcing it (Rom. 3:31—“we establish the law”). By removing obstacles to pardon in the mind of God, and by enabling man to obey, grace secures the perfect fulfilment of law (Rom. 8:4—“that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us”). Even grace has its law (Rom. 8:2—“the law of the Spirit of life”); another higher law of grace, the operation of individualizing mercy, overbears the“law of sin and of death,”—this last, as in the case of the miracle, not being suspended, annulled, or violated, but being merged in, while it is transcended by, the exertion of personal divine will.Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the law of nature.”The truth is midway between the Pelagian view, that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God, there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of an effect.”Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them irrevocably.”So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes' Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but grace is above and beyond nature.Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible utterance:“Nature always checkmates, without haste and without remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest allowance for ignorance.”Bradford then remarks:“This is Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace,[pg 549]but grace brings salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.”God revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; seeDeut. 1:6, 7—“Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain”—the mountain of the law;“turn you and take your journey”—i. e., see how God's law is to be applied to life.(e) Thus the revelation of grace, while it takes up and includes in itself the revelation of law, adds something different in kind, namely, the manifestation of the personal love of the Lawgiver. Without grace, law has only a demanding aspect. Only in connection with grace does it become“the perfect law, the law of liberty”(James 1:25). In fine, grace is that larger and completer manifestation of the divine nature, of which law constitutes the necessary but preparatory stage.Law reveals God's love and mercy, but only in their mandatory aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul:“I spoke as I saw. I report as man may of God's work—All's Love, yet all's Law.”Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος), but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command (dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen). The Christian λόγος is λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and effective word, as that of creation.”Chaucer, The Persones Tale:“For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.”S. S. Times, Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.”Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.
III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God.In human government, while law is an expression of the will of the governing power, and so of the nature lying behind the will, it is by no means an exhaustive expression of that will and nature, since it consists only of general ordinances, and leaves room for particular acts of command through the executive, as well as for“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon.”Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon”all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity:“English law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands. A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king's conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These chancellors' courts were called courts of equity, and redressed wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times law and equity are administered for the most part by the same courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at another time as a court of equity.”“Summa lex, summa injuria,”is sometimes true.Applying now to the divine law this illustration drawn from human law, we remark:(a) The law of God is ageneralexpression of God's will, applicable to all moral beings. It therefore does not include the possibility of special injunctions to individuals, and special acts of wisdom and power in creation and providence. The very specialty of these latter expressions of will prevents us from classing them under the category of law.Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith:“The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace.”(b) The law of God, accordingly, is apartial, not an exhaustive, expression of God's nature. It constitutes, indeed, a manifestation of that attribute of holiness which is fundamental in God, and which man must possess in order to be in harmony with God. But it does not fully express God's nature in its aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy.The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of[pg 548]the divine essence, is equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can be nothing above and beyond it.”This is a denial of the transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb:“As the cartwheel follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.”Denovan:“Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified [without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole penalty of the law.”(c) Mere law, therefore, leaves God's nature in these aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy, to be expressed toward sinners in another way, namely, through the atoning, regenerating, pardoning, sanctifying work of the gospel of Christ. As creation does not exclude miracles, so law does not exclude grace (Rom. 8:3—“what the law could not do ... God”did).Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires, not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.”Campbell, Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of God.”C. H. M.:“Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the‘ten words.’Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God”(John 1:17—“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”). So there is more in man's heart toward God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or glad-tidings.(d) Grace is to be regarded, however, not as abrogating law, but as republishing and enforcing it (Rom. 3:31—“we establish the law”). By removing obstacles to pardon in the mind of God, and by enabling man to obey, grace secures the perfect fulfilment of law (Rom. 8:4—“that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us”). Even grace has its law (Rom. 8:2—“the law of the Spirit of life”); another higher law of grace, the operation of individualizing mercy, overbears the“law of sin and of death,”—this last, as in the case of the miracle, not being suspended, annulled, or violated, but being merged in, while it is transcended by, the exertion of personal divine will.Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the law of nature.”The truth is midway between the Pelagian view, that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God, there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of an effect.”Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them irrevocably.”So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes' Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but grace is above and beyond nature.Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible utterance:“Nature always checkmates, without haste and without remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest allowance for ignorance.”Bradford then remarks:“This is Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace,[pg 549]but grace brings salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.”God revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; seeDeut. 1:6, 7—“Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain”—the mountain of the law;“turn you and take your journey”—i. e., see how God's law is to be applied to life.(e) Thus the revelation of grace, while it takes up and includes in itself the revelation of law, adds something different in kind, namely, the manifestation of the personal love of the Lawgiver. Without grace, law has only a demanding aspect. Only in connection with grace does it become“the perfect law, the law of liberty”(James 1:25). In fine, grace is that larger and completer manifestation of the divine nature, of which law constitutes the necessary but preparatory stage.Law reveals God's love and mercy, but only in their mandatory aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul:“I spoke as I saw. I report as man may of God's work—All's Love, yet all's Law.”Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος), but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command (dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen). The Christian λόγος is λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and effective word, as that of creation.”Chaucer, The Persones Tale:“For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.”S. S. Times, Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.”Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.
III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God.In human government, while law is an expression of the will of the governing power, and so of the nature lying behind the will, it is by no means an exhaustive expression of that will and nature, since it consists only of general ordinances, and leaves room for particular acts of command through the executive, as well as for“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon.”Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon”all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity:“English law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands. A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king's conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These chancellors' courts were called courts of equity, and redressed wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times law and equity are administered for the most part by the same courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at another time as a court of equity.”“Summa lex, summa injuria,”is sometimes true.Applying now to the divine law this illustration drawn from human law, we remark:(a) The law of God is ageneralexpression of God's will, applicable to all moral beings. It therefore does not include the possibility of special injunctions to individuals, and special acts of wisdom and power in creation and providence. The very specialty of these latter expressions of will prevents us from classing them under the category of law.Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith:“The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace.”(b) The law of God, accordingly, is apartial, not an exhaustive, expression of God's nature. It constitutes, indeed, a manifestation of that attribute of holiness which is fundamental in God, and which man must possess in order to be in harmony with God. But it does not fully express God's nature in its aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy.The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of[pg 548]the divine essence, is equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can be nothing above and beyond it.”This is a denial of the transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb:“As the cartwheel follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.”Denovan:“Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified [without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole penalty of the law.”(c) Mere law, therefore, leaves God's nature in these aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy, to be expressed toward sinners in another way, namely, through the atoning, regenerating, pardoning, sanctifying work of the gospel of Christ. As creation does not exclude miracles, so law does not exclude grace (Rom. 8:3—“what the law could not do ... God”did).Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires, not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.”Campbell, Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of God.”C. H. M.:“Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the‘ten words.’Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God”(John 1:17—“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”). So there is more in man's heart toward God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or glad-tidings.(d) Grace is to be regarded, however, not as abrogating law, but as republishing and enforcing it (Rom. 3:31—“we establish the law”). By removing obstacles to pardon in the mind of God, and by enabling man to obey, grace secures the perfect fulfilment of law (Rom. 8:4—“that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us”). Even grace has its law (Rom. 8:2—“the law of the Spirit of life”); another higher law of grace, the operation of individualizing mercy, overbears the“law of sin and of death,”—this last, as in the case of the miracle, not being suspended, annulled, or violated, but being merged in, while it is transcended by, the exertion of personal divine will.Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the law of nature.”The truth is midway between the Pelagian view, that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God, there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of an effect.”Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them irrevocably.”So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes' Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but grace is above and beyond nature.Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible utterance:“Nature always checkmates, without haste and without remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest allowance for ignorance.”Bradford then remarks:“This is Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace,[pg 549]but grace brings salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.”God revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; seeDeut. 1:6, 7—“Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain”—the mountain of the law;“turn you and take your journey”—i. e., see how God's law is to be applied to life.(e) Thus the revelation of grace, while it takes up and includes in itself the revelation of law, adds something different in kind, namely, the manifestation of the personal love of the Lawgiver. Without grace, law has only a demanding aspect. Only in connection with grace does it become“the perfect law, the law of liberty”(James 1:25). In fine, grace is that larger and completer manifestation of the divine nature, of which law constitutes the necessary but preparatory stage.Law reveals God's love and mercy, but only in their mandatory aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul:“I spoke as I saw. I report as man may of God's work—All's Love, yet all's Law.”Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος), but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command (dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen). The Christian λόγος is λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and effective word, as that of creation.”Chaucer, The Persones Tale:“For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.”S. S. Times, Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.”Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.
III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God.In human government, while law is an expression of the will of the governing power, and so of the nature lying behind the will, it is by no means an exhaustive expression of that will and nature, since it consists only of general ordinances, and leaves room for particular acts of command through the executive, as well as for“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon.”Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon”all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity:“English law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands. A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king's conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These chancellors' courts were called courts of equity, and redressed wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times law and equity are administered for the most part by the same courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at another time as a court of equity.”“Summa lex, summa injuria,”is sometimes true.Applying now to the divine law this illustration drawn from human law, we remark:(a) The law of God is ageneralexpression of God's will, applicable to all moral beings. It therefore does not include the possibility of special injunctions to individuals, and special acts of wisdom and power in creation and providence. The very specialty of these latter expressions of will prevents us from classing them under the category of law.Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith:“The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace.”(b) The law of God, accordingly, is apartial, not an exhaustive, expression of God's nature. It constitutes, indeed, a manifestation of that attribute of holiness which is fundamental in God, and which man must possess in order to be in harmony with God. But it does not fully express God's nature in its aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy.The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of[pg 548]the divine essence, is equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can be nothing above and beyond it.”This is a denial of the transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb:“As the cartwheel follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.”Denovan:“Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified [without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole penalty of the law.”(c) Mere law, therefore, leaves God's nature in these aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy, to be expressed toward sinners in another way, namely, through the atoning, regenerating, pardoning, sanctifying work of the gospel of Christ. As creation does not exclude miracles, so law does not exclude grace (Rom. 8:3—“what the law could not do ... God”did).Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires, not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.”Campbell, Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of God.”C. H. M.:“Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the‘ten words.’Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God”(John 1:17—“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”). So there is more in man's heart toward God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or glad-tidings.(d) Grace is to be regarded, however, not as abrogating law, but as republishing and enforcing it (Rom. 3:31—“we establish the law”). By removing obstacles to pardon in the mind of God, and by enabling man to obey, grace secures the perfect fulfilment of law (Rom. 8:4—“that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us”). Even grace has its law (Rom. 8:2—“the law of the Spirit of life”); another higher law of grace, the operation of individualizing mercy, overbears the“law of sin and of death,”—this last, as in the case of the miracle, not being suspended, annulled, or violated, but being merged in, while it is transcended by, the exertion of personal divine will.Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the law of nature.”The truth is midway between the Pelagian view, that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God, there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of an effect.”Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them irrevocably.”So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes' Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but grace is above and beyond nature.Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible utterance:“Nature always checkmates, without haste and without remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest allowance for ignorance.”Bradford then remarks:“This is Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace,[pg 549]but grace brings salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.”God revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; seeDeut. 1:6, 7—“Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain”—the mountain of the law;“turn you and take your journey”—i. e., see how God's law is to be applied to life.(e) Thus the revelation of grace, while it takes up and includes in itself the revelation of law, adds something different in kind, namely, the manifestation of the personal love of the Lawgiver. Without grace, law has only a demanding aspect. Only in connection with grace does it become“the perfect law, the law of liberty”(James 1:25). In fine, grace is that larger and completer manifestation of the divine nature, of which law constitutes the necessary but preparatory stage.Law reveals God's love and mercy, but only in their mandatory aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul:“I spoke as I saw. I report as man may of God's work—All's Love, yet all's Law.”Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος), but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command (dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen). The Christian λόγος is λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and effective word, as that of creation.”Chaucer, The Persones Tale:“For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.”S. S. Times, Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.”Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.
III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God.In human government, while law is an expression of the will of the governing power, and so of the nature lying behind the will, it is by no means an exhaustive expression of that will and nature, since it consists only of general ordinances, and leaves room for particular acts of command through the executive, as well as for“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon.”Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon”all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity:“English law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands. A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king's conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These chancellors' courts were called courts of equity, and redressed wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times law and equity are administered for the most part by the same courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at another time as a court of equity.”“Summa lex, summa injuria,”is sometimes true.Applying now to the divine law this illustration drawn from human law, we remark:(a) The law of God is ageneralexpression of God's will, applicable to all moral beings. It therefore does not include the possibility of special injunctions to individuals, and special acts of wisdom and power in creation and providence. The very specialty of these latter expressions of will prevents us from classing them under the category of law.Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith:“The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace.”(b) The law of God, accordingly, is apartial, not an exhaustive, expression of God's nature. It constitutes, indeed, a manifestation of that attribute of holiness which is fundamental in God, and which man must possess in order to be in harmony with God. But it does not fully express God's nature in its aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy.The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of[pg 548]the divine essence, is equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can be nothing above and beyond it.”This is a denial of the transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb:“As the cartwheel follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.”Denovan:“Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified [without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole penalty of the law.”(c) Mere law, therefore, leaves God's nature in these aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy, to be expressed toward sinners in another way, namely, through the atoning, regenerating, pardoning, sanctifying work of the gospel of Christ. As creation does not exclude miracles, so law does not exclude grace (Rom. 8:3—“what the law could not do ... God”did).Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires, not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.”Campbell, Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of God.”C. H. M.:“Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the‘ten words.’Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God”(John 1:17—“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”). So there is more in man's heart toward God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or glad-tidings.(d) Grace is to be regarded, however, not as abrogating law, but as republishing and enforcing it (Rom. 3:31—“we establish the law”). By removing obstacles to pardon in the mind of God, and by enabling man to obey, grace secures the perfect fulfilment of law (Rom. 8:4—“that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us”). Even grace has its law (Rom. 8:2—“the law of the Spirit of life”); another higher law of grace, the operation of individualizing mercy, overbears the“law of sin and of death,”—this last, as in the case of the miracle, not being suspended, annulled, or violated, but being merged in, while it is transcended by, the exertion of personal divine will.Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the law of nature.”The truth is midway between the Pelagian view, that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God, there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of an effect.”Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them irrevocably.”So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes' Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but grace is above and beyond nature.Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible utterance:“Nature always checkmates, without haste and without remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest allowance for ignorance.”Bradford then remarks:“This is Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace,[pg 549]but grace brings salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.”God revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; seeDeut. 1:6, 7—“Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain”—the mountain of the law;“turn you and take your journey”—i. e., see how God's law is to be applied to life.(e) Thus the revelation of grace, while it takes up and includes in itself the revelation of law, adds something different in kind, namely, the manifestation of the personal love of the Lawgiver. Without grace, law has only a demanding aspect. Only in connection with grace does it become“the perfect law, the law of liberty”(James 1:25). In fine, grace is that larger and completer manifestation of the divine nature, of which law constitutes the necessary but preparatory stage.Law reveals God's love and mercy, but only in their mandatory aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul:“I spoke as I saw. I report as man may of God's work—All's Love, yet all's Law.”Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος), but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command (dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen). The Christian λόγος is λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and effective word, as that of creation.”Chaucer, The Persones Tale:“For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.”S. S. Times, Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.”Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.
III. Relation of the Law to the Grace of God.In human government, while law is an expression of the will of the governing power, and so of the nature lying behind the will, it is by no means an exhaustive expression of that will and nature, since it consists only of general ordinances, and leaves room for particular acts of command through the executive, as well as for“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon.”Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon”all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity:“English law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands. A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king's conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These chancellors' courts were called courts of equity, and redressed wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times law and equity are administered for the most part by the same courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at another time as a court of equity.”“Summa lex, summa injuria,”is sometimes true.Applying now to the divine law this illustration drawn from human law, we remark:(a) The law of God is ageneralexpression of God's will, applicable to all moral beings. It therefore does not include the possibility of special injunctions to individuals, and special acts of wisdom and power in creation and providence. The very specialty of these latter expressions of will prevents us from classing them under the category of law.Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith:“The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace.”(b) The law of God, accordingly, is apartial, not an exhaustive, expression of God's nature. It constitutes, indeed, a manifestation of that attribute of holiness which is fundamental in God, and which man must possess in order to be in harmony with God. But it does not fully express God's nature in its aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy.The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of[pg 548]the divine essence, is equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can be nothing above and beyond it.”This is a denial of the transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb:“As the cartwheel follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.”Denovan:“Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified [without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole penalty of the law.”(c) Mere law, therefore, leaves God's nature in these aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy, to be expressed toward sinners in another way, namely, through the atoning, regenerating, pardoning, sanctifying work of the gospel of Christ. As creation does not exclude miracles, so law does not exclude grace (Rom. 8:3—“what the law could not do ... God”did).Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires, not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.”Campbell, Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of God.”C. H. M.:“Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the‘ten words.’Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God”(John 1:17—“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”). So there is more in man's heart toward God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or glad-tidings.(d) Grace is to be regarded, however, not as abrogating law, but as republishing and enforcing it (Rom. 3:31—“we establish the law”). By removing obstacles to pardon in the mind of God, and by enabling man to obey, grace secures the perfect fulfilment of law (Rom. 8:4—“that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us”). Even grace has its law (Rom. 8:2—“the law of the Spirit of life”); another higher law of grace, the operation of individualizing mercy, overbears the“law of sin and of death,”—this last, as in the case of the miracle, not being suspended, annulled, or violated, but being merged in, while it is transcended by, the exertion of personal divine will.Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the law of nature.”The truth is midway between the Pelagian view, that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God, there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of an effect.”Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them irrevocably.”So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes' Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but grace is above and beyond nature.Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible utterance:“Nature always checkmates, without haste and without remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest allowance for ignorance.”Bradford then remarks:“This is Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace,[pg 549]but grace brings salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.”God revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; seeDeut. 1:6, 7—“Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain”—the mountain of the law;“turn you and take your journey”—i. e., see how God's law is to be applied to life.(e) Thus the revelation of grace, while it takes up and includes in itself the revelation of law, adds something different in kind, namely, the manifestation of the personal love of the Lawgiver. Without grace, law has only a demanding aspect. Only in connection with grace does it become“the perfect law, the law of liberty”(James 1:25). In fine, grace is that larger and completer manifestation of the divine nature, of which law constitutes the necessary but preparatory stage.Law reveals God's love and mercy, but only in their mandatory aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul:“I spoke as I saw. I report as man may of God's work—All's Love, yet all's Law.”Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος), but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command (dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen). The Christian λόγος is λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and effective word, as that of creation.”Chaucer, The Persones Tale:“For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.”S. S. Times, Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.”Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.
In human government, while law is an expression of the will of the governing power, and so of the nature lying behind the will, it is by no means an exhaustive expression of that will and nature, since it consists only of general ordinances, and leaves room for particular acts of command through the executive, as well as for“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon.”
Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon”all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity:“English law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands. A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king's conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These chancellors' courts were called courts of equity, and redressed wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times law and equity are administered for the most part by the same courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at another time as a court of equity.”“Summa lex, summa injuria,”is sometimes true.
Amos, Science of Law, 29-46, shows how“the institution of equity, the faculty of discretionary punishment, and the prerogative of pardon”all involve expressions of will above and beyond what is contained in mere statute. Century Dictionary, on Equity:“English law had once to do only with property in goods, houses and lands. A man who had none of these might have an interest in a salary, a patent, a contract, a copyright, a security, but a creditor could not at common law levy upon these. When the creditor applied to the crown for redress, a chancellor or keeper of the king's conscience was appointed, who determined what and how the debtor should pay. Often the debtor was required to put his intangible property into the hands of a receiver and could regain possession of it only when the claim against it was satisfied. These chancellors' courts were called courts of equity, and redressed wrongs which the common law did not provide for. In later times law and equity are administered for the most part by the same courts. The same court sits at one time as a court of law, and at another time as a court of equity.”“Summa lex, summa injuria,”is sometimes true.
Applying now to the divine law this illustration drawn from human law, we remark:
(a) The law of God is ageneralexpression of God's will, applicable to all moral beings. It therefore does not include the possibility of special injunctions to individuals, and special acts of wisdom and power in creation and providence. The very specialty of these latter expressions of will prevents us from classing them under the category of law.
Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith:“The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace.”
Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith:“The soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in nature, that is, in the laws of heaven and earth, but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace.”
(b) The law of God, accordingly, is apartial, not an exhaustive, expression of God's nature. It constitutes, indeed, a manifestation of that attribute of holiness which is fundamental in God, and which man must possess in order to be in harmony with God. But it does not fully express God's nature in its aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy.
The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of[pg 548]the divine essence, is equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can be nothing above and beyond it.”This is a denial of the transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb:“As the cartwheel follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.”Denovan:“Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified [without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole penalty of the law.”
The chief error of all pantheistic theology is the assumption that law is an exhaustive expression of God: Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:31—“If nature, as the self-realization of[pg 548]the divine essence, is equal to this divine essence, then it is infinite, and there can be nothing above and beyond it.”This is a denial of the transcendence of God (see notes on Pantheism, pages 100-105). Mere law is illustrated by the Buddhist proverb:“As the cartwheel follows the tread of the ox, so punishment follows sin.”Denovan:“Apart from Christ, even if we have never yet broken the law, it is only by steady and perfect obedience for the entire future that we can remain justified. If we have sinned, we can be justified [without Christ] only by suffering and exhausting the whole penalty of the law.”
(c) Mere law, therefore, leaves God's nature in these aspects of personality, sovereignty, helpfulness, mercy, to be expressed toward sinners in another way, namely, through the atoning, regenerating, pardoning, sanctifying work of the gospel of Christ. As creation does not exclude miracles, so law does not exclude grace (Rom. 8:3—“what the law could not do ... God”did).
Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires, not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.”Campbell, Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of God.”C. H. M.:“Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the‘ten words.’Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God”(John 1:17—“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”). So there is more in man's heart toward God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or glad-tidings.
Murphy, Scientific Bases, 303-327, esp. 315—“To impersonal law, it is indifferent whether its subjects obey or not. But God desires, not the punishment, but the destruction, of sin.”Campbell, Atonement, Introd., 28—“There are two regions of the divine self-manifestation, one the reign of law, the other the kingdom of God.”C. H. M.:“Law is the transcript of the mind of God as to what man ought to be. But God is not merely law, but love. There is more in his heart than could be wrapped up in the‘ten words.’Not the law, but only Christ, is the perfect image of God”(John 1:17—“For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ”). So there is more in man's heart toward God than exact fulfilment of requirement. The mother who sacrifices herself for her sick child does it, not because she must, but because she loves. To say that we are saved by grace, is to say that we are saved both without merit on our own part, and without necessity on the part of God. Grace is made known in proclamation, offer, command; but in all these it is gospel, or glad-tidings.
(d) Grace is to be regarded, however, not as abrogating law, but as republishing and enforcing it (Rom. 3:31—“we establish the law”). By removing obstacles to pardon in the mind of God, and by enabling man to obey, grace secures the perfect fulfilment of law (Rom. 8:4—“that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us”). Even grace has its law (Rom. 8:2—“the law of the Spirit of life”); another higher law of grace, the operation of individualizing mercy, overbears the“law of sin and of death,”—this last, as in the case of the miracle, not being suspended, annulled, or violated, but being merged in, while it is transcended by, the exertion of personal divine will.
Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the law of nature.”The truth is midway between the Pelagian view, that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God, there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of an effect.”Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them irrevocably.”So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes' Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but grace is above and beyond nature.Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible utterance:“Nature always checkmates, without haste and without remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest allowance for ignorance.”Bradford then remarks:“This is Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace,[pg 549]but grace brings salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.”God revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; seeDeut. 1:6, 7—“Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain”—the mountain of the law;“turn you and take your journey”—i. e., see how God's law is to be applied to life.
Hooker, Eccl. Polity, 1:155, 185, 194—“Man, having utterly disabled his nature unto those [natural] means, hath had other revealed by God, and hath received from heaven a law to teach him how that which is desired naturally, must now be supernaturally attained. Finally, we see that, because those latter exclude not the former as unnecessary, therefore the law of grace teaches and includes natural duties also, such as are hard to ascertain by the law of nature.”The truth is midway between the Pelagian view, that there is no obstacle to the forgiveness of sins, and the modern rationalistic view, that since law fully expresses God, there can be no forgiveness of sins at all. Greg, Creed of Christendom, 2:217-228—“God is the only being who cannot forgive sins.... Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of an effect.”Robertson, Lect. on Genesis, 100—“Deeds are irrevocable,—their consequences are knit up with them irrevocably.”So Baden Powell, Law and Gospel, in Noyes' Theological Essays, 27. All this is true if God be regarded as merely the source of law. But there is such a thing as grace, and grace is more than law. There is no forgiveness in nature, but grace is above and beyond nature.
Bradford, Heredity, 233, quotes from Huxley the terrible utterance:“Nature always checkmates, without haste and without remorse, never overlooking a mistake, or making the slightest allowance for ignorance.”Bradford then remarks:“This is Calvinism with God left out. Christianity does not deny or minimize the law of retribution, but it discloses a Person who is able to deliver in spite of it. There is grace,[pg 549]but grace brings salvation to those who accept the terms of salvation—terms strictly in accord with the laws revealed by science.”God revealed himself, we add, not only in law but in life; seeDeut. 1:6, 7—“Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain”—the mountain of the law;“turn you and take your journey”—i. e., see how God's law is to be applied to life.
(e) Thus the revelation of grace, while it takes up and includes in itself the revelation of law, adds something different in kind, namely, the manifestation of the personal love of the Lawgiver. Without grace, law has only a demanding aspect. Only in connection with grace does it become“the perfect law, the law of liberty”(James 1:25). In fine, grace is that larger and completer manifestation of the divine nature, of which law constitutes the necessary but preparatory stage.
Law reveals God's love and mercy, but only in their mandatory aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul:“I spoke as I saw. I report as man may of God's work—All's Love, yet all's Law.”Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος), but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command (dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen). The Christian λόγος is λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and effective word, as that of creation.”Chaucer, The Persones Tale:“For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.”S. S. Times, Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.”Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.
Law reveals God's love and mercy, but only in their mandatory aspect; it requires in men conformity to the love and mercy of God; and as love and mercy in God are conditioned by holiness, so law requires that love and mercy should be conditioned by holiness in men. Law is therefore chiefly a revelation of holiness: it is in grace that we find the chief revelation of love; though even love does not save by ignoring holiness, but rather by vicariously satisfying its demands. Robert Browning, Saul:“I spoke as I saw. I report as man may of God's work—All's Love, yet all's Law.”
Dorner, Person of Christ, 1:64, 78—“The law was a word (λόγος), but it was not a λόγος τέλειος, a plastic word, like the words of God that brought forth the world, for it was only imperative, and there was no reality nor willing corresponding to the command (dem Sollen fehlte das Seyn, das Wollen). The Christian λόγος is λόγος ἀληθειας—νόμος τέλειος τῆς ἐλευθερίας—an operative and effective word, as that of creation.”Chaucer, The Persones Tale:“For sothly the lawe of God is the love of God.”S. S. Times, Sept. 14, 1901:595—“Until a man ceases to be an outsider to the kingdom and knows the liberty of the sons of God, he is apt to think of God as the great Exacter, the great Forbidder, who reaps where he has not sown and gathers where he has not strewn.”Burton, in Bap. Rev., July, 1879:261-273, art.: Law and Divine Intervention; Farrar, Science and Theology, 184; Salmon, Reign of Law; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 1:31.