The Internet Monk Archives

Random Thoughts on a Chilly Monday

It is graduation season. Our youngest son got his degree from North Park University in Chicago on Saturday and we enjoyed the ceremony. Our immediate celebration was postponed because we had a limited number of tickets to the ceremony and had to deal with car problems, but the family is gathering next weekend to raise our glasses, catch up with each other, laugh, feast, and mark a milestone.

Congratulations to all of you who are rejoicing together over similar achievements this spring.

I’ve been reading some of the most thoughtful, inspiring theology from the pen of Peter Rollins. As usual, I am a bit late to the party when it comes to Rollins’s work, but I am finding his 2006 book, How (Not) to Speak of God, jaw-droppingly good. Before I finish it and attempt a review, here is a passage for you to chew on.

Hence revelation ought not to be thought of either as that which makes God known or as that which leaves God unknown, but rather as the overpowering light that renders God known as unknown. This is not dissimilar to a baby being held by her mother — the baby does not understand the mother but rather experiences being known by the mother. In contrast, revelation is often treated as if it can be deciphered into a dogmatic system rather than embraced as the site where the impenetrable secret of God transforms us. In the former, revelation is rendered into an eloquent doctrine, while in the latter, revelation is that which transforms. We are like an infant in the arms of God, unable to grasp but being transformed by the grasp. Revelation can thus be described as bringing to light the secret of God in such a way that it remains secret. God is thus the secret who remains concealed in the sharing. We can thus not speak of a hidden side of God and a manifest side, for we must acknowledge that the manifest side of God is also hidden.

After writing about God’s providential care for us yesterday, another aspect of the situation became clear to me last night. If we had not been trapped in traffic, crawling along for an hour on I-65 in central Indiana, it’s possible that the air conditioner part that failed might not have burned out until we had made it to Chicago. Then we would have been stuck in the city rather than in the place where we were cared for so well by a friend.

The threads of Providence that bring to pass the events in the world are wondrously woven together.

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Ein Wenig Gott Geschichte (A Little God Story)

One staple of evangelical church life is the “testimony.” I recall many, many gatherings when I as a pastor or worship leader would stand before a group and ask, “Who has something they’d like to share tonight? What has God been doing in your life lately?”

We’d encourage people to share insights they had gained in their Bible reading, answers to prayer that they had perceived in recent days, lessons they had learned which helped them grow and make changes in their lives, or occurrences that they attributed to God’s active presence or providence for which they wanted to give thanks.

“Let the redeemed of the Lord say so!” we would exclaim, quoting Psalm 107.

Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good,
For His lovingkindness is everlasting.
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so,
Whom He has redeemed from the hand of the adversary
And gathered from the lands,
From the east and from the west,
From the north and from the south.

– Psalm 107:1-3, NASB

In my view, giving testimony is one of the delightful traditions of evangelicalism. At the same time, it can also be one of its troublesome practices.

Those of us who believe in a living God, a reigning Christ, and an outpoured Spirit have no problem acknowledging that there is divine activity in our world. When we read the New Testament, especially the narrative of the church in the Book of Acts and the more personal sections of the epistles, we meet people who talk about dealing with a God who acts in the midst of his people and in the affairs of life. The Kingdom continues to break into this world, and there are “thin places” where earth and heaven intersect.

Churches in the revivalist tradition make most use of the practice of giving testimony. Evangelicals, especially those who lean toward the pentecostal/charismatic/”third wave” end of the spectrum, are taught from the beginning to try and identify “what God is doing in your life,” and to talk with others about that as a means of “witnessing” to the reality of God’s presence, salvation, and love.

Problems arise, in my opinion, with three aspects of this:

Interpretation
Expectation
Inclusion

We all know that there are various ways to look at any particular incident or experience in life, but those in an evangelical atmosphere tend to grant God the benefit of the doubt when giving credit for anything they consider unusually helpful to their lives. The results vary, and at times, interpretations of divine activity can be, frankly, silly.

The traditional example is the person who has a deadline to meet and prays that God will provide a parking place right in front of the building where he needs to be. And, what do you know? One opens up at just the right place and just the right time! Well, OK. But I wouldn’t tell the part about the eighty year old lady in the car behind you who was hoping that spot might open up for her too.

Another interpretive problem is that, as Martin Luther was wont to say, God is famous for hiding from us. And, even when he does reveal himself, it is often in “hidden” ways that offend human expectations, indeed, in ways which can shake us to the core. A common theme over the years here at Internet Monk is that people have found evangelicalism wanting because it doesn’t always allow room for God to act like this — and therefore, they find little resonance with their own lives and experiences. For many churches, testimony is not about the journey, but only about significant (mostly positive) turning points. We want to hear the “victory” stories and little else.

Mystery, nuance, ambiguity, paradox, and anything which remains stubbornly unresolved — these are not the components of the usual evangelical “word of witness.” Testimony, as often given, can in fact serve to suck the mystery out of life, even while claiming to provide a revelation into the workings of the Almighty.

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Saturday Ramblings 5.11.13

Horrific kidnappings in Cleveland. Arguing over the body of a bomber. A teen who hits and kills a soccer ref for giving the teen a yellow card. Someone named Jodi Arias being found guilty of killing her boyfriend in a horrendous manner. [Loud sigh … ] Does anyone else feel the need for some good news right about now? If not exactly good news, perhaps at least something that doesn’t include death and dismemberment. Something to make us grimace a little less. Maybe even a fun tune to get us humming. If that is you, you’ve come to the wrong place. I have stories about the Boston Marathon bombs, about the death of a great man, Christians doing and saying stupid things, Pope Francis tellings nuns to become mothers, and … well, you’ll just have to read for yourself, iMonks. (I will try to find a fun tune to hum … ) It’s time to ramble.

Evangelical Christians feel they (we?) are becoming a “hated minority” because of their stance on homosexuality. Let me ask this: Could it be that evangelicals are correct in what they are saying, but are very wrong in how they are saying it? Discuss.

Meanwhile, we continue to hear of bias against Christians in the military. Here is a case where Christians protesting against a wrong that doesn’t exist could cause harm. Would it be asking too much for those who are protesting to, perhaps in their spare time, bone up on the facts? Or did I miss something in the Great Commission? “Go and make disciples of all soldiers, whether they want to become disciples of Mine or not … ”

There are things you can and cannot do in Texas. You can come up with blueprints for a print-it-yourself gun that fires very real and very deadly bullets, post these blueprints on line, and see them downloaded more than 100,000 times before you are told you are most likely in violation of federal laws and are advised to remove the blueprints. What you cannot do is lift one finger into the air as a way of celebrating your victory in a relay race at a high school track meet. Someone has some ‘splainin’ to do …

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IM Book Review: A Year of Biblical Womanhood

A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master”
by Rachel Held Evans

Thomas Nelson, 2012

* * *

Mother’s Day is coming up on Sunday. What better time to offer a gift to all the women in our community, as we prepare to honor the most special women in our lives? I therefore present to you one of the most thoughtful, engaging, and invigorating books I’ve read in a while — Rachel Held Evans’s, A Year of Biblical Womanhood.

This book narrates a serious search for understanding wrapped in the delightful account of a creative personal experiment. Evans, who is from a southern U.S. evangelical culture with strong ideas about the appropriate roles of women in the home, church, and society, sets out to answer this question:

Could an ancient collection of sacred texts, spanning multiple genres and assembled over thousands of years in cultures very different from our own, really offer a single cohesive formula for how to be a woman?

By means of a year-long “performance art” project, Evans finds some answers to that question. In the end, she appeals to her readers to put nouns above adjectives, people above “principles,” and love above long-held cultural prejudices when we approach the subject of gender roles. In particular, she deconstructs the very idea that there is any such thing as a supra-cultural set of roles known as “biblical womanhood” to which women of faith are to conform.

At the heart of the matter is this tricky word “biblical,” about which she says,

Now, we evangelicals have a nasty habit of throwing the word biblical around like it’s Martin Luther’s middle name. We especially like to stick it in front of other loaded words, like economics, sexuality, politics, and marriage to create the impression that God has definitive opinions about such things, opinions that just so happen to correspond with our own. Despite insistent claims that we don’t “pick and choose” what parts of the Bible we take seriously, using the word biblical prescriptively like this almost always involves selectivity.

After all, technically speaking it is biblical for a woman to be sold by her father (Exodus 21:7), biblical for her to be forced to marry her rapist (Deuteronomy 22:28-29), biblical for her to remain silent in church (1 Corinthians 14:34-35), biblical for her to cover her head (1 Corinthians 11:6), and biblical for her to be one of multiple wives (Exodus 21:10).

What then, is “biblical womanhood?” Well, what Rachel Held Evans decided to do was to give it a try. She would attempt to follow as many of the Bible’s teachings regarding women in her daily life as possible, taking up practices from both Old and New Testaments in order to determine if there is such a construct as “biblical womanhood.”

Each month for a year she focused on engaging in practices that reinforced a different virtue the Bible commends for women, from domesticity to valor, from modesty to justice. She read Bible commentaries, seeking out various Christian perspectives on pertinent passages. She spoke with and sometimes developed ongoing relationships with women who were seeking to practice what they held to be “biblical” mandates in their lives — including an Orthodox Jew, Amish and Quaker women, a daughter from a “Quiverfull” family, a woman pastor, even members of a polygamist family. She studied the stories of women in Scripture, and one of the most valuable parts of her book, in my opinion, is a set of devotional summaries of what those women contributed to the Bible’s Story of salvation-history. She includes the voice of her husband Dan throughout the book, citing journal entries he kept that reflect on what they were learning together.

At times, this book is laugh-out-loud funny. There are priceless descriptions of the contortions it requires to keep an Alabama fan exhibiting a “gentle and quiet spirit” during football season. And she writes with lively and self-deprecating wit about the time she literally sat on the roof to symbolize penance for being a “contentious” woman, her valiant attempts, successes, and failures while learning the domestic arts, her adventures camping out in the yard during her monthly period to mark her ritual “impurity,” the effort it takes trying to find good kosher food and wine in her neck of the woods, the experiment of caring for a computerized baby to learn about the demands of motherhood, and her attempts to quiet the noise in her mind and cultivate silence in a Benedictine monastery.

In a later reflection on the process of writing this book, RHE said:

Biblical interpretation is a messy, imperfect, and at times frustrating process. I wrote this book with humor and with love because I think both are needed in the conversation, particularly as it pertains to something as complex and beautiful as womanhood.

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Dallas Willard Quotes

“Anyone who really wants to be a follower of Jesus,” said my pastor, “needs to read this book.” Those were heavy words from this pastor. I knew if he said I should read something, he most likely was right. And he was. “This book” was The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God by Dallas Willard. It was my introduction to a writer and teacher who had a profound influence on my life by his words.

Dallas Willard passed away yesterday at the age of 77.

I want to share some passages from Willard’s writings, not as a way for you to skip reading his books, but as a way to whet your appetite for all he wrote. Words—spoken or written—are only of value if we let them into our lives in a way that we are changed for good. Dallas Willard’s words changed me for good. I pray they will you as well.

“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.”
The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“The test of character posed by the gentleness of God’s approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel — or one desperate for another life — therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.” Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.” The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.” The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

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Dallas Willard — 1935-2013

From an IVP Press Release (click link for full text):

Dallas Willard, renowned teacher, acclaimed writer and one of our most brilliant Christian thinkers, died of cancer May 8, 2013. He was 77.

“This morning our wonderful teacher and friend awakened to the full goodness of the Kingdom of the Heavens he had described so beautifully,” said friend and colleague Gary Moon, director of the Dallas Willard Center for Spiritual Formation at Westmont College. “I believe Dallas Willard was one of the great reformers of Christian thought of the past century and that his most powerful lessons were in how he lived an unhurried life with God.”

Kent Carlson, a friend of Willard, said, “I heard Dallas say recently that some people will die and it will be a while before they realize they are dead. That is vintage Dallas. Eternity is real and it has already begun. He lived this. He once wrote, ‘You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.’ I cling to this truth today.”

Willard is known for changing the way thousands of Christians experience their faith. “Again and again I have been profoundly struck by Dallas Willard’s ability to speak fully to both mind and heart,” said Richard J. Foster. “His intellectual stature and his deep devotion to Christ are distinguishing marks of his life. And, above all else, the humility and gracious character of his life is simply stunning.”

“He is the kind of figure and person that only is given by God once in many generations,” said Keith Meyer, friend of Willard.

Midweek Monkery 5/8/13

I Can’t Believe I Didn’t DVR This

How did this happen? I apparently missed the media event of the winter. Where were my iMonks? I needed you!

According to the New York Times, NRK, the state broadcaster of Norway, ran their TV show, “National Firewood Night,” back in February. Somehow, they found a way to edit it down to twelve hours — four hours of produced television followed by eight hours of a live fireplace burning and being tended. You read that right — eight hours.

About the first part: “We’ll be sawing, we’ll be splitting, we’ll be stacking and we’ll be burning,” said the host, Rebecca Nedregotten Strand, promising to “try to get to the core of Norwegian firewood culture — because firewood is the foundation of our lives.”

Following the exploration of this culture, the real excitement started. The “action” moved to a farmhouse where an NRK photographer tended a live fireplace. Her face never appeared and there was rarely any sound but that of the flickering flames. However, occasionally her hand could be seen adding wood to the fire or cooking marshmallows or sausages. Viewers could participate via Facebook and make suggestions as to where to place the logs.

One viewer said, ““I couldn’t go to bed because I was so excited. When will they add new logs? Just before I managed to tear myself away, they must have opened the flue a little, because just then the flames shot a little higher.”

And I missed it.

* * *

Now I Am Really Confused

Culture warriors have a new issue to confront in the battle for sexual morals: septesexuality.

National Geographic introduces us to Tetrahymena thermophila, a tiny, single-celled organism that has seven sexes. Now I’ll be the first to say, I don’t even know what that means, much less how to explain it. But you can go to NG and read it for yourself.

The rest of us can simply imagine the sitcom possibilities.

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Len Wilson: The Unnecessary Tragedy of Artists and the Church

Note from CM: A regular reader emailed me about an article that impressed him, encouraging me to consider it for IM. So I went to Len Wilson’s blog and was likewise stimulated by his words and insights. I have added Len’s site to our Blogroll, and recommend that you check it out. He introduces today’s piece by saying, “This post is a tribute to my friend Dr. Paul Bonneau and a call for the church universal to understand the soul of the artist. I wrote it in response to the news that he’d passed away.”

Thanks, Len, for this fine contribution, and the permission to use it.

* * *

The Unnecessary Tragedy of Artists and the Church
by Len Wilson

It’s these little things, they can pull you under.
Live your life filled with joy and wonder.
I always knew this altogether thunder
was lost in our little lives.
– REM

My desire to create a space in the church for artists took on a new meaning today. A friend and colleague from my former church has unexpectedly passed away.

Paul was a pan-seared spirit, a conductor and musician perhaps born out of time. He was a dapper dresser, quick with a compliment or a snarky comment at my choice of shirt or shoes. Once he picked a piece of lint off my shoulder and told me I was too nice looking a person to walk around with fuzz. Every week in our worship meeting, Paul sat in his corner chair with coffee, mostly quiet but quick to bellow at someone’s gallows humor. When pressed he would engage in conversations that poked below the surface of church life, such as the relationship of faith and doubt.

Like any artist, Paul believed in honesty. It scared some pastors and churchy folks, but fellow artists among our staff and volunteer cadre of worship planners valued his low filter for lies and stupidity. Though I don’t know this for sure, I think that Paul struggled with depression. If so, it was perhaps related to the fact that artists abhor truth dissonance, and often have a hard time living in the suspended chord that is the body of Christ.

Of course, our cynical age covers truth in a vacuous veneer of detached irony. Paul was brilliantly maddening for his insistence on naming the mockery of much of our attempts at playing church. He had perhaps the purest junk filter of any artist I’ve ever known. And this was his tragedy, because while many of us are artists who can’t afford unfiltered honesty, Paul could accept no alternative.

Dishonesty is a subset of ugliness, and ugliness is an affliction to the artist. Because sin is ugliness, an artist who follows Jesus lives a wounded life, yearning for connection to the wholeness and truth of a Holy God, yet disconnected by the darkness within. We are all saints and we are all sinners.

This potent mixture, this “outrageous humanity,” as Pat Conroy calls it, vexes the church. Consider the film release Don Miller’s biopic about searching for faith, Blue Like Jazz, which while in production received some complaints from church leaders. It seems that some find the ambiguity of a search for faith troubling.

To use Plato’s virtues as oversimplified categories, people who want to respond to art with argument are Truth types. They seek the resolution of a right answer. They’re convergent. Artists, or to use another platonic virtue, Beauty types, are comfortable with mystery. They are divergent. Paul did not need a final answer to know the truth of something.

The church tries to treat the artist’s affliction, and the need for honesty is indeed an affliction, with analysis and apologetics, which is like taking a laxative for a flesh wound. They’re different parts to the body.

Some Truth types fear that to acknowledge sin is to condone sin, never recognizing their fear perpetuates sin by creating a fortress around Jesus. Beauty types want to explore our humanity, and through it to find a deeper truth than a surface set of facts.

There are also Goodness types, who live between these two poles, more concerned with what is loving than what is correct. When Paul and I worked together at Trietsch, our worship team had a healthy mix of all three. One of the great moments that arose from our mix, and there were many, was the Sunday in worship we hosted Ron Hall and Denver Moore of the number one New York Times bestseller, Same Kind of Different As Me. The book recounts the true story of a wealthy art patron who befriended a homeless man, and the changed life each man discovered. That formerly homeless man, Denver Moore, gave a classic call to Goodness in our worship service when he said, “Churches in America are full of people studyin’. What we need is less studyin’ and more doin’.”

The church needs all three. We as people are built for all three.

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Random Thoughts on a Rainy Monday

Another week like last week, and I won’t need a vacation, I’ll need an extended stay at a sanitarium.

Speaking of sanitariums, I officiated a funeral service in Martinsville, Indiana Saturday. The funeral home was built on the site of the former Home Lawn Mineral Springs health resort. Throughout the mortuary, they had wonderful display cases showing photographs, china, and other memorabilia from the days when people longing for rest and healing came to this little town in central Indiana. In 1885 artesian mineral springs were discovered in Martinsville, and from 1888 to 1968 it was well known as home to many health spas with mineral water baths. These facilities were like a combination of hotel, restaurant, country club, and hospital, all in one setting. Dignitaries and others traveled by road and rail to enjoy these spas for their perceived therapeutic and health restoring qualities.

One person I met said he had worked as an elevator operator in the facility when he was young. Elevator operator. Just think of all the jobs like that that are gone now in our do-it-yourself society.

That’s one reason I laugh whenever I hear a big business talk about putting their customers first. Leaders in those businesses may think they are doing things for the advantage of their customers, but they rarely ask the customers themselves what putting them first would actually look like. If they did, they would have real people answering the phones. In my business of health care, doctors would actually sit and spend time with patients, and hospitals would provide consistent staffing for their patients. Customer first means giving actual, direct attention to the customer, not just providing better bells and whistles that make the customer say wow. Come to think of it, it would be nice to have an elevator operator to talk to once in awhile.

I finally joined the blu-ray generation the other day. Phenomenal. First up: “Lincoln.“

Speaking of movies, we saw “42” the other night. I thoroughly enjoyed Harrison Ford’s performance as Branch Rickey and thought it was the best part of the film. The Baseball Hall of Fame website offers this brief bio of the Dodgers’ executive:

After a mediocre career as a player and manager, Branch Rickey spent half a century in the front office as baseball’s greatest visionary executive. With the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1920s and ’30s, Rickey invented the modern farm system, promoting a new way of training and developing players. Later with the Brooklyn Dodgers, he pioneered the utilization of baseball statistics. In 1945, he became the first executive to break baseball’s color line when he signed Jackie Robinson, who became the major leagues’ first African-American player in the 20th century.

It also notes that Rickey was instrumental in introducing the batting helmet as protective gear, and that he had such a keen eye for talent that one sportswriter opined, “He could recognize a great player from the window of a moving train.” In the movie, Ford plays him as one of those wise and witty leaders who listen well and say just enough to make their point and make you think at the same time. Just the kind of mentor we could all use in our lives.

In the realm of compelling television, have you seen “Call the Midwife” — Sunday evenings on PBS? Deeply engaging and moving.

Our youngest son graduates from college at the end of this week, yet another milestone reached in our family. It will be our final trip to North Park University, where we have enjoyed our visits over the past four years. I’m sure we will keep finding other reasons to go to Chicago, one of my favorite places in the world. I guess this means, however, that we are turning another one of those corners and merging onto a different road taking us into new territory in life. It certainly means that for our son, whom we congratulate and welcome into the world of adulthood.

This Sunday I will finish my spring church assignment for my ordination process. If we were in position to do so, this would be a congregation I’d love to join, but for now we’re moving on.

Next up: filling in at my home church during the pastor’s sabbatical over the summer. Leading worship and preaching each Sunday, doing a bit of pastoral care — back in the parish ministry saddle, you might say, at least on a part-time basis. I’ll be taking a few more days off from hospice work than usual in order to accommodate the additional responsibilities.

Who knows? By the end of the summer I may need that sanitarium more than ever.

Third Use of the Law? No, Something Better

The Debate

One of the great debates in theology regarding Law and Gospel is whether or not there is a third use of God’s laws. The first two uses of the Law are accepted by all:

The Civil Use of the Law: God’s laws serve all humanity by restraining sin, setting moral and ethical boundaries for humans in society. This use of the law allows humans to enjoy a limited measure of order and justice in this life.

The Pedagogical Use of the Law. God’s laws show the perfection of God’s character and thus reveal people’s sinfulness in contrast to his righteousness. By so doing, it enables us to realize our need for mercy and grace from outside ourselves. It gives the lie to all efforts at self-justification.

Some theologians posit a third use of God’s laws.

The Normative Use of the Law. Though God’s laws cannot justify us, grant us forgiveness of sins, or bring us new life, for the Christian God’s laws serve as a guide to show us how to live. The Law sets before us a norm of conduct and instructs those who have been saved by grace through faith regarding the good works that should follow salvation. The Christian, therefore, is called to love God’s laws and obey them.

Others have objected to this idea, noting the clear N.T. teaching that Christians are “free from the law,” and “not under the law” anymore. Specific objections include the following:

The third use is unnecessary and actually ends up covering the same ground as the first two uses. The civil use (first use) already covers the purpose of instruction, and is designed to order our behavior by positive guidance and negative warnings. And when Christians embrace God’s commands and attempt to live them out, they discover that they continually fall short, which leads them back to Christ (the second use).

The third use is incomplete. Most look to the Ten Commandments as the epitome of God’s laws, along with specific summary passages such as “Love the Lord your God…” (Shema) and “Love your neighbor…” which Jesus himself commended as the greatest commandments. It is up to the New Testament to more specifically enumerate and explicate distinctively Christian behavior through the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. This goes beyond natural and Mosaic law to include such things as “love your enemies,” and “take up your cross and follow me.” Jesus himself speaks of giving and exemplifying a “new commandment” and he is presented in the Gospels (especially in Matthew) as a “new Moses” who inaugurates the Kingdom of heaven among humans. As we will see below, the new covenant now in effect goes beyond the idea of “law” as its guiding principle.

The third use is easily misused. Speaking of the third use of the law can lead to a legalistic conception of the Christian’s life, as though the new life in Christ is concerned primarily with obeying commandments, following instructions, avoiding that which is prohibited, and staying within boundaries. Paul wonders why the Colossians are so concerned to live by rules that say, “Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!” (Col. 2:21), and notes that believers have died to such “elementary principles” and are now part of a life that is about so much more.

I am in agreement that it is unhelpful to think of a third use of God’s laws. In the Christian life, except for the ongoing experience of the law’s first two uses, we should not imagine that our lives are to be motivated by laws at all. Our motivation is the Gospel, not God’s laws. Therefore, as some of my teachers have suggested, it is wiser to speak of the second use of the Gospel rather than the third use of the Law.

What do we mean by this?

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