Considering the Naked Gospel Part 2

The second section in Andrew Farley’s The Naked Gospel is called Religion is a Headache. I couldn’t agree more.   The idea that our relationship with God is dependent upon us, and our works, is not only burdensome but untrue.

The nature of justification is that it is an act of God’s free grace in which He imputes the righteousness of Christ to all who receive Christ as He is presented to us in gospel.  It is not increased nor decreased by our works, good or bad.

The trouble is, Farley never defines justification.  Farley never defines sanctification, and never distinguishes between the two.  This is at the root of the problem.  Like Roman Catholicism, he does not distinguish between the two.  Unlike Roman Catholicism which then declares that faith AND works are necessary for justification, he says that the law has NO role in our sanctification.

He continually makes two appeals.  The first is that “legalism” as he defines it, makes Christianity look unattractive to non-Christians.  Our lack of joy and satisfaction resulting from our misunderstanding of Christianity drive people away.  The second is to say that if we are to follow the Law we must follow ALL of it, and how absurd it would be for us to follow the 600+ laws given in the Pentateuch.

In the first case, I guess any level of dissatisfaction with marriage should mean that no one should get married.  No, our relationship with God is, at times, dissatisfying and frustrating because we have not yet been made perfect.  We are still adjusting to life with Christ, just as two spouses continually adjust to life together.  Just as no marriage is an entirely blissful relationship, our relationship with God is not all pure bliss and joy this side of heaven.  You get no indication that this is so from Acts or any of the Epistles.  Life was hard and God’s people struggled with sin even though they were on this side of the cross and indwelt by the Holy Spirit.   That last point is one of the ways in which we have a better covenant, but Farley seems to take too much of the “not yet” and deposit it into the “already” aspects of salvation.  He sets people up for false expectations, like the children’s song about being happy all the time since I asked Jesus into my heart.

Secondly, he ignores that the ceremonial aspects of the Law have been declared to have been fulfilled.  Jesus declared all foods clean- I don’t have to follow the dietary laws.  Jesus fulfilled all the sacrifices and other stipulations of the laws of worship, so we do not keep them anymore (Hebrews).  To do so would be to turn back the redemptive clock.  The moral law is more than just a list of dos and don’ts.  It also reveals the character of God, the very likeness we are being conformed into.

This connects with his failure to distinguish between justification and sanctification.  When Paul is addressing the law in terms of justification in Galatians (and Romans), Farley also applies this to sanctification.  He does not keep the context of those passages in mind and therefore misinterprets and misapplies them.

“The New (covenant) involves God’s desires being written inside of us, so that we have the guarantee of being his people no matter what.”

So what are God’s desires?  Wouldn’t that be contained in the 10 Commandments?  Farley refers to Hebrews 8:10, in which he claims “the author of Hebrews actually misquotes the Old Testament.”  Huh?  The Holy Spirit inspiring someone to misquote the Old Testament?  No, not quite.  He claims that the author of Hebrews is clarifying things.  I can agree with that, but not misquoting.  But his clarification is that God is not writing the Law of Moses on our hearts (though  in Ezekiel 27, a parallel promise of the new covenant,  He puts His Spirit in us to move us to follow & keep his laws and decrees, not his desires, which explains Jeremiah 31).  He draws a distinction between the Law (the whole system) and laws (nothing in the Law).    Farley makes a strange, unprovable, distinction between the Law of Moses and God’s laws.  Moses received those laws from God.  It is to the moral law that James refers to which gives us freedom (note how he uses it in the mirror illustration).  But Farley retreats again to the absurdity of saying that if it is the Mosaic covenant it must refer to everything including diet, wardrobe etc.

In his discussion of Hebrews in chapters 4 & 5 he never addresses the context of Hebrews.  Hebrew Christians, under the pressure of persecution, where considering returning to Jewish forms of worship.  To go back would be to reject that which is greater, for Jesus is the greatest prophet, priest and king the One to whom the law pointed and in whom the law is fulfilled.

So what purpose does the law fulfill?  Here is Farley’s answer:

“Today, the law speaks to only one group, namely, unbelievers.  … The law is irrelevant to life in Christ. … Its sole purpose is to convict the ungodly of their spiritually dead state.”

He recognizes that the law is good, holy and righteous.  He recognizes that the problem is with us, not the law.  So rather than Jesus changing us through regeneration and sanctification, Farley argues that God merely gets rid of the law.  The presence of the Holy Spirit in us is supposed to be enough.

Here is where Farley makes a number of errors based on his erroneous definition of legalism.  Though the moral law remains a guide, the power to obey it comes only from Jesus in the presence of the Spirit (granted, I have not yet gotten to the place where he defines the ‘desires’ of God the Spirit writes on us).  He again fails to distinguish between justification and sanctification.  He neglects the fact that when Paul explains love in Romans 13 (within the context of sanctification) he says this:

8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law.  9 The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  10 Love does no harm to its neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law. (NIV)

Love is the goal of the commandments.  Paul was not afraid of the Law, but saw it as useful for us to understand what love does.  So, the law is our guide to show us how to love God and our neighbor.  Paul does not share Farley’s perspective of the Law.  Paul and James use the Law to convict Christians of their sin.  Those letters are addressed to particular churches, they are not evangelistic.  They are not legalistic in that they do not teach that our acceptance with God is derived or maintained by law keeping.  But they do believe that as new creatures, regenerate persons, God is working in us to conform us to the likeness of His Son (Rom. 8:29) and the Law continues to reveal our sin (that we might confess it) and direct our love.  As Packer notes, it is the rails for love.  The law teaches us what direction love moves in particular situations.

Farley thinks that if we have the Law as our guide we are “under law” and therefore dominated by sin.  In his passages on sanctification, Paul does not say we put the law to death, but our sinful desires to death.  Those sinful desires are revealed by the Law.  We do this in the power of the Spirit- grace!  We remain under grace for we do all of this by faith and in the power of the Spirit, not the flesh.

Farley thinks the leading of the Spirit is enough.  But how does the Spirit lead?  Does He not lead through the Word?  The Spirit leads me into marital faithfulness, generosity rather than greed, guarding the reputation of others rather than gossip, etc.  He leads me to fulfill the Law which hangs upon love for God and neighbor.  We do not think the law changes us- the Spirit does that.  Yet Farley talks of victory over sin.  What is sin but lawlessness (1 John 3:4).  So, obedience is to live in keeping with the law, right?

“Understanding the law’s place in the world today keeps us from the error of antinomianism (“law hating”).”

Here, Farley defines antinomianism as hating the law in a way that denies its place in the world today (according to him) is to convict the world of sin.  So, antinomianism is supposedly hating the law which convicts me of my sin.

“Antinomianism so stresses Christian freedom from the condemnation of the law that it underemphasizes the need of the believer to confess sins daily and to pursue sanctification earnestly.  It may fail to teach that sanctification inevitably follows justification.”  The New Dictionary of Theology

By this more common and accepted definition of antinomianism, Andrew Farley is, in fact, an antinomian who is advocating antinomianism.  He is against the law for its proper use among those who have been redeemed (not even the context of the law in Exodus 20 & Deuteronomy 5-6.  it is given in the context of redemption not to earn justification).

“those who deny the place of the law in the life of the Christian are advocates of free vice in the guise of free grace.”  Thomas Shepherd

Farley gets the relationship between law and gospel correct in matters of justification.  But he fails to get the relationship correct in matters of sanctification.  As a result, Sinclair Ferguson would say in his lectures on the  Marrow Controversy, he distorts both law and gospel.  While we do need to declare the gospel of free grace freely in matters of justification, we also need to declare how grace works in our sanctification freely.  Paul did both, and so should we, if we are to be healthy, biblical churches.  To avoid one error by embracing another does no one any good.

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