This post is the third in a series of 4.
Calvin and Kline
At its best, I don’t believe the Reformed tradition applies this tripartite division uncritically. It’s worth taking a look at two Reformed theologians, John Calvin and Meredith G. Kline.
Calvin
The work of John Calvin is significant, because he is the quintessential Reformed thinker. Often criticism of Reformed theology is made simply with reference to his work. There are two challenges to his thinking today which have influence on Evangelical circles. The New Perspective on Paul, and Modified Lutheranism (also called New Covenant Theology).
At the conservative end of Evangelicalism, the latter has had considerable influence through the work of Don Carson and Douglas Moo (who are both great men in the kingdom, it’s just that I disagree with them on the shape of Biblical Theology). Modified Lutheranism often sees the Reformers as using the tripartite division to explain how the Law was only partially abrogated, and therefore parts of it are still in force. In contrast Modified Lutherans look particularly to Galatians to make clear that the law has been abrogated in its entirety. The salvation-historical era of the law is now over, and the era of Christ has begun (Gal 3:24-26). In fact the law belongs to the realm of this world – within the same sphere as the idolatry the Gentile Galatians had originally repented from (Gal 4:1-3, 8-10).
The New Perspective, or at least N. T. Wright’s brand of New Perspective, claims that the Reformers failed to understand that what Paul is arguing against in books like Galatians and Romans is not law as a route to personal justification through works righteousness, but law as the boundary marker identifying who God’s people (the one’s who experience the blessing promised to Abraham) really are. The Reformers were blinded by their obsession with personal righteousness, and therefore didn’t read Paul carefully enough, nor understand the world of the 1st century.
In contrast to both those positions, I want to demonstrate something about the way Calvin actually read Galatians. Calvin did not use the tripartite division to explain away the text – instead he asserted over against the papists that the law must be treated as a whole entity when exegeting Galatians. Furthermore, the very position he was refuting was remarkably similar to the New Perspective position. The papists claimed that the law in Galatians refers only to the ceremonial law. They claimed this for slightly different reasons to the NP, in order to draw different conclusions, but there is significant overlap. Calvin not only considered the possibility that Paul was writing against the idea of righteousness through Jewish observance, but he spent much of his Galatians commentary refuting it.
Here’s some example of where Calvin does this. Emphases are all mine.
From his commentary on Galatians 2:21:
The Papists explain this in reference to the ceremonial law; but who does not see that it applies to the whole law?
From his commentary on Galatians 3:6:
The notion of the sophists, that it is contrasted with ceremonies alone, will presently be disproved, with little difficulty, from the context.
From his commentary on Galatians 3:14:
The spirit is here contrasted with all outward things, not with ceremonies merely, but with lineal descent, so as to leave no room for diversity of rank. From the nature of the promise, he proves that Jews differ nothing from Gentiles; because, if it is spiritual, it is received by faith alone.
From his commentary on Galatians 3:18:
Who will dare to explain this as applying to ceremonies alone, while Paul comprehends under it whatever interferes with a free promise?
Calvin is often unfairly criticised for utilising an invalid method of hermeneutic which in actual fact he was attempting to refute.
Kline
The work of Meredith G. Kline is, in my view, outstanding. Just about everything he wrote seemed to come from a totally fresh angle, and yet the results of his work were not novel, but classic and confessionally Reformed. In his case, he was confessionally bound to the Westminster Confession, which affirms the tripartite division of the law in chapter 19.
Kline understands the entire Old Testament canon to be a “canon” precisely because they are the “covenant documents” of the Mosaic covenant. The New Testament is made up of the “covenant documents” of the New Covenant. Each covenant contained laws that had to be adapted within that covenant era. Kline describes these adaptations as “intracanonical polity phases”. For example, he writes in The Structure of Biblical Authority (2nd ed), pp103-4:
The laws of the Mosaic covenants were programmed from the outset for this succession of modifications in Israel’s polity. So, for example, Moses not only prescribed arrangements for the administration of justice during his own leadership of Israel, but appointed a modified judicial system to meet the new conditions that would presently obtain upon the entry into Canaan (Deut. 16:18ff.); and for the more distant future, he incorporated into the Deuteronomic treaty the law of the king (Deut. 17:14ff.). Precepts dealing with the future, near or remote, were potentially effective, becoming normative when Yahweh had brought to pass the situation which those precepts legislatively anticipated. When a later phase with its modified norms arrived, the prescriptions peculiarly designed for an earlier phase naturally ceased to be normative.
Kline is rightly sketching a way in which the Mosaic law was not monolithic, but contained within itself variation. In this case necessary variation for the different phases of Israel’s political existence. But this variation is not arbitrary, but contains within itself an inherent unity. Kline goes on to say in pp105-6:
However, though not all the polity prescriptions for Israel were currently normative at all times even within the Old Testament era, they do all possess an inner coherence as belonging to a single general type, a peculiar institutional integration of culture and cult. the successive Old Testament stages of the kingdom were designed to arrive at a fully matured form of this general type, all the institutional modifications remaining within the limits of this type. Hence, even though canonicity is a matter of community life-norms, or polities, the contents of the Old Testament are not to be subdivided into several canons according to their relation to the several stages in Israel’s polity.
In other words, the biblical theological thing people do of tracing “kingship” through the Bible to include Adam, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, the Judges, etc. as sort of “semi-kings” is, well, biblical. No-one would argue with that practice, in fact it’s quite a chic thing to do in current evangelical circles.
But then we must affirm with Kline, that the Mosaic law is here self-consciously legislating in a manner that is adaptable, according to a higher principle. These abrogated laws still played a role, therefore, in informing the life of Israel, such as Jehoshaphat’s incorporation of Levites and priests into the judicial system when reforming Israel. His actions (2 Chron 19v8ff) seem to be clearly informed by the then abrogated laws of Deut 17v8-13.
Bad biblical theology can sometimes do what Kline warns against – and treat the New Covenant church as having the same typological shape and nature as that of Israel. Kline rightly, and consistent with Reformed hermeneutic, excludes that. However, an essential distinction has been drawn within the law, a distinction that the Westminster Confession labels as “judicial” laws, and the 39 Articles label as “civil”. This distinction, as Kline has demonstrated, can be observed to be derivable from the Mosaic law itself. He goes on to carefully define its implications for moving from old-new covenant obligations, p109:
Only in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments does the church possess infallible norms of faith and conduct. But though all the faith-norms of Scripture are, of course, permanent, not all the norms of conduct, or life-norms, found in Scripture are currently normative. When it comes to distinguishing among the life-norms those which have been abrogated from those which are still normative, the core of the problem centers in the relation of the life-norms of the Old Testament to the life of the church.
Analysis of the data may be clarified by approaching the matter with an historically and legally more precise concept of canon. If the covenantal concept of canon is utilized, in which the nuclear or definitive aspect of canonicity is discovered in the area of community polity, the basic relevant distinction that emerges is the distinction between individual life-norms and covenant community life-norms. It is the community life-norms, or polities, that are subject to abrogation as the covenant order undergoes major change.
In my final post in this series I will try to synthesize some of this stuff, and offer a conceptual illustration of how Kline’s work can help explain the relationship between the testaments.
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