“The motivation for God’s people to live by God’s law is ultimately to bless the nations. After all, what would the nations actually see? The nearness of God is by definition invisible. What, then, would be visible? Only the practical evidence of the kind of society that was built on God’s righteous laws. There is a vital link between the invisible religious claims of the people of God (that God is near them when they pray) and their very visible practical social ethic. The world will be interested in the first only when it sees the second. Or conversely the world will see no reason to pay any attention to our claims about our invisible God, however much we boast of His alleged nearness to us in prayer, if it sees no difference between the lives of those who make such claims and those who don’t.”
Christopher J. H. Wright
The Mission Of God — pg. 380
If we stipulate that the motivation for God’s people to live by God’s law is ultimately to glorify God and then penultimately to bless the nations we would heartily endorse Wright’s words here.
There are those who insist that God’s law is not abiding as it pertains to the ‘laws of nations’ believing instead that we should look to natural law for the establishment of law. Those who reason this way look to the Old Testament laws and insist that if we are to properly read the Scriptures in a redemptive-historical fashion we will see that the covenantal ethics that were established for the nation State of Israel fall under a rubric called ‘intrusion ethics’ and are no longer applicable today. This is a kind of Reformed dispensationalizing of the law texts in the Old Testament with the result that the greater but temporary fullness of the consummational Kingdom that was represented by the laws that governed National Israel in the Old Testament is withdrawn in the New covenant age only to await their re-implementation in the fullness of the Christ’s Kingdom that appears with the second advent. There is a GREAT deal wrong with this view but the most obvious seems to be this revisionist Reformed theology ends up making the Old Covenant a better covenant then the New Covenant. Also there is the problem that in relation to the ‘now, not yet’ of eschatology what this theology ends up doing is reversing what we would expect to find. What this theology does is that it front loads the ‘now’ in the Old Covenant choosing to emphasize the ‘not yet’ in the ‘age to come’ which Christ has brought in with His birth, death, resurrection, advent and session. In short, this theology under-realizes severely the reality that with Christ’s coming the Kingdom is present.
Obviously such people would strongly disagree with Dr. Christopher J. H. Wright’s quote above. While these radical two Kingdom types agree that the law applies to a personal ethic what they disagree with is the idea of a Biblical social ethic that is informed and governed by the Old Testament case law. Such Theologians can and have ended up suggesting that the Church should not speak out against matters like Homosexual marriage since that is an issue that belongs to the common grace realm. Ideas have consequences.
I will have more to say about the idea of the revisionist ‘intrusion ethic’ in my next post. Also I haven’t forgotten that I need to finish the Dr. J. P. Moreland paper on the problem of to many Christians taking the Bible to seriously.
