LAW AND GOSPEL, CHURCH AND CANON

Robert W. Wall

This essay envisages two tasks. First, in a macroscopic way, we will attempt to understand the New Testament tension between law and gospel. 1 Second, we will relate the NT teaching to today's church by using the perspectives of canonical criticism, a recent field of Biblical scholarship and one which holds great promise for academy and church alike. 2

In completing these two tasks, we will discuss four issues: we will first identify problems and define decisive terms. Indeed, the title of this paper, "Law and Gospel, Church and Canon," stakes out a plethora of thorny and complex issues. The second part of the essay will draw attention to a decisive clue for interpreting the Biblical discussion of law and gospel which emerges during the Jerusalem Council. In the next two parts of the essay, we will try to articulate two "canonical conversations": one within the multiple Gospel and another within the multiple Letter of the NT. Each of these two canonical conversations will bring into interplay differing although normative and useful construals of law and gospel, which will lead to a final section which relates these interplays to the Wesleyan church in prophetic and hopefully in redemptive ways.

There are two problems facing the hermeneut who wishes to articulate singular and unqualified definitions of law and gospel, and of the relationship between them as forwarded by the NT. First, there is the problem of the diverse ways the NT itself understands God's law and the Church's gospel. For example, the recent work of James Dunn has sought to distinguish between the different, indeed differing gospels which made up the earliest church and which are now reflected in our canon and among those who read it as authoritative. 3

The problem is often made more difficult by the church's tendency to understand the relationship between law and gospel in particularistic ways, usually in accord with traditional teaching. The ongoing relationship between law and gospel differs from communion to communion. Yet, across the church universal, believers are inclined to stake out one Biblical version of law and gospel as their own and exclude other Biblical notions from their accounts. The point must be made that the NT enshrines an inspired diversity; competing kerygmata and differing accounts of the usefulness or validity of law found within the Bible are all normative for the community of faith. 4

The second side of this two-sided problematic is the effort of Christian theologians to systematize and make uniform what is in fact a multivalent whole. Nowhere does the NT make a systematic distinction between law and gospel, between ethics and theology. For example, while Matthew's Sermon on the Mount includes Jesus' teaching about the law, it is but one part of His larger proclamation that the kingdom of heaven has come near with the inauguration of His messianic mission. Paul' s concern with the status of the law for the Gentile mission is never discussed apart from the gospel for the Gentile mission; in fact, the good news is that God in Christ has ordained a new age in the history of his salvation during which time Israel has become a new creation with a new, pneumatic law to obey.

Further, the literature of the NT is occasional. Whether the preaching of Jesus or that of the apostles, the gospel of God and its demand are always adapted to the life of a particular people: Biblical proclamation always intends to make the norms and values of God's reign relevant for a specific Sitz im Leben. Thus, the canonical kerygmata and their variegated descriptions of divine law, while always centered on the stable features of God's eternal attributes and the effects of His righteous action within history, take on the character of life itself: dynamic, living, unfolding. 5 Perhaps the recent trend toward narrative theology and ethic underscores this point: any articulation of law or gospel must finally attend to the life of a particular people, Israel, and of a particular individual, Jesus from Nazareth. 6

It goes without saying that the Bible, if not also the Spirit, resists any reductionistic effort to bifurcate divine law from divine gospel, and to "freeze" each into abstract and arcane summaries of Biblical teaching. Whatever our understanding of law and gospel, we must seek to retain in it the same sort of dynamic always found in ongoing conversations between a stable text and a changing context, between sacred canon and believing community, which is suggested by the non-systematic and multivalent character of the Biblical Word itself.

In stressing the Bible's diversity, we are not saying that the Bible's own theologies or ethical programs contradict each other in any fundamental way. The Bible's diversity is understood in terms of the writer's own theological conceptions or emphases. Such emphases, parts or contours of the larger canonical whole, form an inner "theo-logic" or moral logic which is decisive in understanding the ways in which a particular writer relates, for example, the law to the gospel. It is true that a particular church' s theological or ethical tendencies are shaped by the "theo-logic" or moral logic of those writers or books which have generally guided its tradition. For example, the tradition of the Protestant church by and large has been forged from its reading of Paul (and m particular Romans and Galatians). Paul's ethical emphases shape a particular ethos, 7 which moves the church, if left unchecked, toward antinominianism. However, within the whole canon we do find those checks appropriate to balance the antinomian Tendenz of the Pauline-oriented church. 8 We will return to this point later in the essay.

It should be clear that our "hermeneutical principle" which makes our discussion of law and gospel useful for the church is a canonical rather than a purely historical, thematic, or rhetorical one. Canonical critics wish to elevate the idea as well as the ongoing function of a Biblical canon as decisive for Biblical hermeneutics. What is of primary importance for the proper interpretation of the Bible is its "norming" role within the community of faith.

For the purposes of this essay, let us quickly sketch four elements of a canonical hermeneutic which will then control our subsequent treatment of the relationship between the law and gospel in particular, and, the canon and church in general. First, by emphasizing the canonical function of the Christian Scriptures for the Christian community, we wish to draw attention to the authority of the Bible for construing a Christian life and faith. That is, the Bible's authorized function within the life of God's people is to provide the true church with a standard against which theological or ethical claims and their justifications can be evaluated-either to approve them as orthodox (i.e., apostolic) or to correct them as heterodox.

In this regard, we should again underscore the pluralism which characterizes even the apostolic witness to Christ. It is a pluralism which James Sanders has rightly understood as self-correcting. 9 That is, a canonical epistemology recognizes that a single Biblical theology, while incomplete since no one theological conception encompasses the whole, nevertheless marks a valid account of God's Gospel. On that basis, it is possible to accept the truthfulness of all the Bible's theologies as multiple perspectives which mutually inform and correct each other. Thus, we should not be alarmed to find different conceptions of law and gospel in the NT; we should learn to celebrate such differences as divinely inspired "checks-and-balances" which continue to guide the whole church.

Further, the historic formation and the final literary form of the Bible, the inspired process and the inspiring product, envisage many clues which in turn should inform our "hermeneutical principle." That is, the final form of the NT represents a discrete and legitimate interpretation of God's Gospel Further, the entire formation of the NT occurred under the aegis of God's Spirit, who at each point guided the church to a right understanding and appropriation of God's Word: from the Jesus-event; to the first witnesses of Him; to their original proclamation and writing; to the later editorial reshaping of the record for new Sitze im Leben; to the selecting and collecting activities of the second and third century church; to the final formation of these various collections into the Christian book we continue to use in translated versions. How the church interprets its sacred texts at each moment of its life provides important clues for the "next generation" of tradents as they stand before their Bible as a normative medium of God's Word.

Second, the diversity within the church is not only an inevitable but necessary reflection of its canon's pluralism. Diversity between denominations is firmly rooted in the NT itself. But more important in our view is that this ecclesial diversity, which reflects the Bible's self-correcting apparatus, also provides a normative context for identifying the Church's communions and for guiding self-correcting ecumenical conversations between them. Even as the parts of the NT make an inspired whole greater than the sum of its parts, so also the church catholic must learn to listen to its own distinctive parts in order to understand more fully what it means to be the church and to do as the church ought.

Third, Biblical interpretation always involves an ongoing conversation between the canon in all its diversity and the church in all its diversity. Hermeneutical theory seeks to find some logical structure by which to make sense of this diversity. Given the function of the Bible as the church's canon, once its own diversity is established, the posing of such "conversations" must find their way back into the church's life. Any structure which tries to make sense of the Bible's own diversity must focus ultimately on the church's use of the Bible. The fundamentalistic "hermeneutics of harmonization" or the critical "hermeneutics of reductionism" are attempts to locate logical coherence between Biblical texts rather than in the conversation between church and canon. 10 In such cases, the Bible's authority for believers depends upon the character of Biblical propositions rather than on the Bible's ongoing usefulness as the conduit through which a living God continues to address His people in matters of their faith and practice. A truly Biblical (i.e., canonical) hermeneutics must find a way to conjoin text and context, canon and community in meaningful ways.

Rather than looking outside the Bible for such a logic, a canonical hermeneutic looks to the Bible's own unrecorded hermeneutics: how Biblical writers and their communities used and continue to use their Bibles, and how the church has continued to relate its Bible to faith and life. The crucial point to be made here is that both Biblical writers and Christian communities have always followed midrashic method when relating their bibles to Christian faith and life. By "midrash," we mean something more than its strict definition, a commentary on a Biblical text. It rather is a commentary on how a particular text interprets a particular context of faith. Assumed m midrash is the dynamic adaptation of sacred and stable text to living and changing context. God's Word is finally made clear within life, when the text or texts are re-interpreted and re-signified in ways meaningful for or analogous to a particular people living in a particular context, confronted with particular crises of faith and contingencies of life. The constraints operating in midrash are theological. Whatever new meaning is derived from a Biblical text for a new context, the new interpretation of law or gospel must "tell the Tell"-it must be consistent with the Biblical story of a covenanting God who in Christ calls a faithful people into a saving relationship with Him.

In this sense, the Bible teaches that God's Word is something "caught, not taught." The hermeneutical principle is concerned more with the meaning of the sacred text for the living context (midrash) than with the meaning of the sacred text qua text. Midrash then stands opposed to the sort of ethical or theological abstraction which removes God's Word and will from the sorts of things we actually deal with in our lives. Midrash also opposes a casuistry which imposes rules in an arbitrary manner upon a particular people without being sensitive to their living conditions, their religious tradition, their cultural myths and the Like. To be sure, our understanding of a text's significance today is controlled by past meanings and intentions; canonical hermeneutics does not call for an end to historical and literary critical work with the sacred texts. However, to assume that the past meaning either has no meaning for the present, or the past can somehow move into the present in some static way is to deny the inspiring action of a living God. The Bible must always be understood as the conduit of God's Word for the present age. We are not interested, then, in what the New Testament writers thought about the law and gospel in isolation from today's community of faith; nor are we interested in reconstructing the tradition the writer received or passed on. Rather, we are interested in how the traditioning process, and the understanding of God's law and gospel it enshrines, can be adapted in useful ways for the present age. Indeed, Biblical scholarship which is not intended for nor shaped by the worshiping community fails to interpret the Bible as the church's canon. When this occurs, in my view, God's Word for His people is silenced.

Finally, the canonical function of the Bible envisages a distinctively prophetic impulse. 11 Unlike its "scriptural" function, which is more pastoral in effect, the Bible's "canonical" function evaluates, judges, corrects, and measures those who read it as normative in matters of life and faith.

Approaching the whole Bible as canon, the church comes with a renewed sense of honesty and humility; it is reminded of what has been excluded from its own "Bible within the Bible"; from its own notions of orthodoxy and orthopraxis; and how such exclusions have distorted the Gospel in its real life. We will illustrate and apply this important point to the Wesleyan church later in the essay.

Any discussion of law and gospel in the NT must begin with the Gentile mission. In earliest Christianity, believers retained Judaism's Torah as normative for faith and life. In fact, for them Torah was interpreted and observed by God's messiah, Jesus from Nazareth. This made sense to these first Christians, who as converts from Judaism had always followed the essentially ethical form of religion which predominated Second Temple Judaism. Thus early Jewish Christian believers continued to prove their devotion to God by being zealous to the demands of Israel's Torah as it was interpreted by Messiah.

It is against this backdrop that Luke narrates in Acts the most decisive event (and problem) in the history of the early church-the conversion of Gentiles by the preaching of a law-free gospel. According to Luke, the watershed event of apostolic Christianity was the Jerusalem synod (Acts 15), which convened to tackle the relationship of the law to the law-free gospel as first preached by Peter to Cornelius (Acts 10) and now by Paul and Barnabas to the goyim of Asia (Acts 14). The ensuing apostolic decree (Acts 15:19-21) is of great importance not only in understanding how the first church related Israel's law to the church's gospel; it also became the apostolic (and thus continuing) paradigm according to which the canonizing church shaped its Bible for future generations of Christians.

The relationship between the Cornelius conversion and the subsequent Jerusalem Council, and then its purpose within the overall narrative and theology of Luke-Acts is a storm-center of Lucan scholarship. 12 Briefly summarized, Peter is pictured in Acts 10 as a pious, law-observant Jew: he is offended according to Acts 10:14-15, when in a vision he is told to eat food that God had previously forbidden through Torah. Of course, the vision functions in the narrative context as a divine decree that in the new age even as non-kosher food is now fit to eat, non-kosher people, the Gentiles, are now fit to receive the gift of salvation on terms equal with Jews. More profound than a reversal of previous revelation, the demand strikes at the very heart of Torah since it is by following the demand of Torah that an elect people was distinguished both religiously and socio-politically. The issue is one of identity: who is Israel? When other Jewish believers in Jerusalem-among them Pharisaic Christians-hear Peter's story, they object because for them the law is the gospel; that is, law-observance and circumcision are necessary requisites for entering into eschatological Israel. l3

For the readers of Acts 15, the conversion of Cornelius is preparation for Luke's report of the debate following the inauguration of Paul's Gentile mission and the preaching of his law-free gospel. Evidently the debate which followed the conversion of the Gentile, Cornelius, apparently settled in Acts 11:1-18, has resurfaced among Judean believers who have heard that Paul is not demanding of Gentile converts what Judaism demands of Gentile proselytes. Surprisingly, it is James, and not Peter (who merely rehearses the Cornelius episode; 15:7-11) nor Paul (who remains a minor player, perhaps even allowing Barnabas to recount the "signs and wonders" of the new age they have witnessed together; 15:12), who offers the resolution.

In keeping with Luke's use of his Bible (LXX) throughout Acts, James' speech centers on a prophetic text (15:16-17 - cf Amos 9:11-12) as the Biblical (i.e., normative) justification of his decree (15:19-21): for Luke, the Gentile mission is the fulfillment of God's promise of an eschatological Israel which is comprised of both Jews and non-Jews. What is critical to note about the decree, (which is the Lucan James' "drosh" on the Amos text), is that the Gentile gospel is law free (15:19) while the Jewish gospel is law observant (15:21).14 Fellowship between the two groups, their apostolates and missions, was guaranteed by maintaining certain "social" sensibilities: that is that Gentile believers respect certain food habits and sexual constraints (15:20), suggested by the apostles, in order to insure social solidarity within the church.

While the decree's intent is clear enough, the four requirements (15:20) which make it up are obscure. They are not found together in any Jewish source, nor do they reflect current Jewish halakah. Further, James points to himself (15:19; and by implication to the Jewish apostolate) as their source; it is quite simply an apostolic decree. Further, as Wilson persuasively argues, the unity James wishes to maintain is not theological nor ethical in a normative sense, but socio-political. 15 Luke's James is concerned about maintaining fraternal unity in light of the diversity of missions and gospels within the church which so easily angered and threatened to divide it. It goes without saying that such social stability would have been deemed requisite for the young church's progress.

This agrees with Paul's apologia of the same event in Galatians 2:1-10. According to Paul what fellowship is achieved at Jerusalem is a socio-political understanding between the two apostolates. Recall that according to Paul, he had gone to Jerusalem because of a revealed directive (2:2), and there, as in Antioch (2:11-14), he defended his call, his mission, and his gospel before the Jewish apostolate. Their political agreement was rooted in their mutual awareness that God had ordained two discrete missions and kerygmata (2:7-9), with two different understandings of the relationship of Israel's law to the church's gospel. In the case of Titus, his identification with the crucified Christ (2:15-21) has been secured by faith and not by observing the Jewish laws as proselyte (6:11-16). At the same time, Luke's Paul is pictured as a law-observant Jew when fellowshipping with other Jews (Ac. 18:8; 21:23-27; 23:1-9; 24:10-21; cf. 1 Cor. 9:20)! 16

The point we are making is that from the very beginning the church has struggled with the relationship between law and gospel, God's demand and God's grace. It is always a struggle over God's desire to have communion with all persons-especially the outcast. The Gentile mission was in fact a theological problem-a point which Paul intensifies by locating his law-free gospel explicitly in divine revelation (i.e., in the Damascus Road christophany; Gal. 1:11-12, 15). God's solution, given through revelation to Peter and James, Paul and Barnabas, is that law and gospel are conjoined in different ways according to different audiences: indeed, God's gospel and His demand find His people in many different ways. Yet, what is the singular purpose of all such arrangements is that God has reconstituted a new and true Israel for the new age of His salvation.

The canonizing community always looked back to the first church for guidance in forming the Bible for future generations of believers. This same diversity found at Jerusalem is also envisaged by the NT canon. Thus, in the two corpora of letters, Pauline and non-Pauline, which make up the whole NT Letter, we find law and gospel conjoined in differing ways according to Jerusalem's different apostolates. 17 Again, in the four-fold Gospel, we find Matthew's view of law different from that of Luke or John. Yet, each and all together the purpose remains the same: to provide the ongoing community of faith with an inspired medium through which God continues to make His Word known. To this prospect we now turn.

III

In this section of the essay, we will develop the idea of law within the gospels of the evangelists Matthew and Luke. It is axiomatic to Biblical exegesis, but an axiom which bears repeating, that it is one thing to speak of the evangelists' view of the relationship between law and gospel and still another to inquire after the historical Jesus' view of Israel's law and the gospel of God He proclaimed. Since our focus is with the final form of the canonical gospels, we are primarily interested in how the evangelists understand Jesus' teaching of the law and how that relates to their understanding of the gospel. Our reason for this is rooted in both practical as well as theological soils: the final form of the fourfold Gospel is what the church reads and uses to articulate its perception of what Jesus taught and did. Further, it is this fourfold narrative of God's Son and messiah which the church continues to recognize as inspired by God and therefore normative, indeed, trustworthy, for Christian discipleship. 18

We will follow the consensus and assume that Matthew's gospel was shaped within Jewish Christianity and Luke's within Gentile Christianity. 19 The diversity we will find, then, within the NT's multiple Gospel canon regarding the relationship between law and gospel in Jesus' messianic ministry reflects the diversity of the early church's mission.

Matthew's Gospel and the Law. 20 The question of the law and its relationship to both Jesus and His followers are matters of fundamental importance for the evangelist. Clearly, for Matthew the entire law remains authoritative and thus the community's concern with what is lawful and what is an authorized interpretation and application of the law continues to be important (5:17-48; 12:1-14; 15:1-20; 22:34-40). The legal content of Torah and the scribal tradition to which the evangelist likely belongs are critical guides in the community's life (12:1-14; 14:4; 19:3; 22:17; 27:6). Houlden is therefore correct in arguing that "the Law is accepted in principle and largely in content" by Matthew and his Jewish church. 21

Further, since Jesus' messianic work is always viewed from within the framework of the law and His righteousness stems from His obedience to it, His followers find God's grace within and not outside of Israel's Torah. Christian discipleship is lived out in continuity with Torah's authority and is guided by the scribal tradition to which rabbi Jesus also belonged. Ironically, perfect (both in outward action and inward motive) obedience to the law, to which all will be held accountable at the end of time, is an "easy yoke" (11:28-30) because of the disciples' relationship to God's Son who is Immanuel, the presence of God's compassion and forgiveness with them always (1:23; 18:20; 28:20).

Matthew's nomism is consistent with that of later Judaism which understood law within the framework of God's covenantal relationship with Israel. In this sense the evangelist's demand for obedience to the law as interpreted by Messiah assumes that God's heavenly reign has graciously come near in the life and ministry of Jesus who is the new offer of God's covenantal salvation. Salvation is a divine initiative. Yet, to enter into salvation at Christ's parousia requires that the disciples obey the law (5:19-20; 7:21-24; 19:16-17; 25:30-46).

Matthew's understanding of the function of law in the Christian's life is introduced in the difficult although definitive passage, 5:17-20, followed by the so-called "antitheses" in 5:21-48, which envisage Jesus' "binding" interpretation of the law. There are several thorny issues to stake out in 5:17-20. The most critical is the meaning of Jesus' statement that ouk elthon katalusai alla plerosai (i.e., katalusai ton nomon e tous prophetas) (5:17b; I did not come to abolish [the law and the prophets] but to fulfill [them]). It is a critical text because plerosai remains contested as to its meaning in this particular passage: in what way does Jesus "fulfill" the law and the prophets? It is generally agreed among scholars that we cannot use plerosai to advance an antinomistic or Paulinistic (cf. Rom.10:4) meaning; Jesus did not come to complete the law in either an ethical or heilsgeschichtlich sense. Both Matthew's understanding of the law and the immediate context preclude this. In fact, it would seem that the entire law remains valid in at least three senses. First,5:18-19 must be understood as an affirmation of the entire law and its continuing authority until Christ's parousia (5:18; heos anpanta genetai). Moreover, the commandments Jesus refers to in 5:19-commandments which must not be abolished-can only refer to those commandments which comprise the Scriptures. Second, the following antitheses (5:21-48) seem to qualify Jesus' statement about the "greater righteousness" in 5:20. Here Jesus is pictured as not abolishing the law but actually demanding a more radical, perfect obedience to it, involving action and motive, body and heart. Thus, we should say that it is not Israel's Torah-the law of the pharisees and scribes 22 - which has continuing validity; rather, it is the Torah as interpreted by God's Son, for it is He alone who discloses God's will for the present age. Finally, Jesus' Torah is valid in an eschatological sense. Within the context of Matthew's futurism, those who fail to attend to those commands which comprise the "greater" righteousness-which is God's will for the new age-will fail to enter the future Eschaton.

Yet, what is so striking about this emphasis is that the "greater" righteousness required of the true disciples, while perfectionistic (5:48), is not legalistic. The character of a righteous disciple is formed by obedience to the whole law; and the righteous life, which is patterned after the righteous life of Jesus and His teachings of righteousness, maintains a right relationship with a righteous God. The true disciple is not preoccupied with doing righteous acts nor with making deliberate choices. The true disciple has a righteous character and so the capacity for righteous deeds. Thus, in the vision of the sheep and the goats, the righteous who enter into eternal life are actually surprised by the king's favorable judgment (25:37-40). The true disciple is compelled, even unconsciously, by what s/he understands of the transcendent kingdom to act in righteous ways, and so is allowed to enter God's kingdom (25:46).23

One final point must be made. Matthew's conception of the law is further radicalized by his conception of spirituality. The true disciple, whose moral vision is "heavenly," whose character is righteousness, and who can act in right ways, is shaped within a personal relationship with God (Mt.6). In Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, the evangelist has located Jesus' teaching of the law (5:17-48) within His teaching of the disciple's relationship to the future reign of God (the Beatitudes; 5:3-12) and to a God whose rewards are personal and spiritual (acts of piety; 6:1-34). Moral formation is conjoined with spiritual formation; obedience to Jesus' Torah is the yield of a life which is profoundly theocentric.

Luke's Gospel and the Law. 24 Because Luke works with traditions of the historical Jesus, similar to those of Matthew, we should expect to find some similarities in how each depicts the law in relationship to Jesus and to those who follow after Him. Like Matthew, Luke includes several traditions which tell of Jesus affirming the commands of the law (10:25-28 par Mt.22:34-40; 16:16-17 par Mt.5:18,29-31; 18:18-20 par Mt. 19:16-20; et al)25 or rebuking those who disobey the law (11:37-12:3 par Mt.23:15:2-3; 16:14-15; 18:9-14; 19:39, 45-46; 20:1-26 par Mt. 21; et al). His unqualified affirmation of the law's validity in 16:17 is seen by some as even stronger than Mt.5:18 26 (however, see above). Luke's version of Jesus' birth story (Lk. 1-2) emphasizes the adequacy and even necessity of the ethical and ceremonial functions of the law in a way that Matthew does not. In this light, Jervell's comment about Torah seems appropriate that "Luke has the most conservative outlook within the NT because of his concern for the law as Israel's law, the sign of God's people." 27

Yet, in comparing the idea of law in Matthew and Luke, it is clear to us that the opposite is true in this essential sense: Luke's concern is with a practical piety and not with preserving the law's status within the community of faith. When Luke's Jesus discusses the law, He is more inclined to talk of positive and negative responses to the law rather than involve Himself in more theological discussions of right or wrong interpretation (which is the emphasis of Matthew's Jesus). In general, Luke is less interested in law as a requirement which must be met to enter into God's future reign and more in law as a description of the right response to a God whose mercy has already been disclosed in the life of Jesus.

More to the crucial difference, while Matthew's Jesus employs the scribal hermeneutic in order to teach His disciples the "way of righteousness," Luke's Jesus employs the hermeneutic of Israel's prophets in two different senses. First, in the sense of prophecy that Israel's law enshrines the promise of God's salvation which is now fulfilled in the life of Jesus, God's messiah (24:27, 44). Luke's use of plerosai in 24:44 is radically different from its use in Mt. 5:17. Here Luke affirms the predictive character of the law. In fact, more than a prophecy of Jesus' life and work, it is part of the Biblical authority by which the gospel, along with its central claim that Jesus is the salvation of God, is justified. According to Luke, the continuing validity of the law is understood by the drama of Jesus' messianic mission which repeats the old, old story and fulfills its promise. In this prophetic sense, Torah is the gospel; the two are different only in form-Torah is promise and gospel is fulfillment.

Second, the prophetic Jesus interprets the law as a call for "official" Judaism to repent. His prophetic critique of current Judaism is quite easily seen in His ongoing indictment of the pharisees and scribes for not living up to Torah's demands. Jesus' rebuke of the scribal tradition does not have to do with its interpretation (as in Matthew) but with the lifestyle of those who control it: their piety is not a practiced piety. Thus, Jesus' prophetic interpretation of the law intends to bring about Israel's repentance so it can receive the promised salvation of God.

With respect to this second point, we also mention the attractive thesis first advanced by C. F. Evans and further refined by James Sanders and others. According to Evans, the entire Central Section of Luke's gospel (9:51-18:14) is a "Christian Deuteronomy." By this he means that the evangelist shapes this section of the gospel, composed largely of Luke's own gospel traditions, to resemble in content and scope the deuteronomic treatment of Mosaic teaching (Dt. 1-26).

Using common catchphrases and sequence of topics, Luke fashions an interplay between Jesus' discipleship of His followers and those used by the deuteronomic Moses to prepare Israel for its entrance into the Promised Land. According to Evans, Luke's theological intent for using such a complicated literary scheme is to portray Jesus as the long awaited prophet-like-Moses promised in Dt. 18:18: Jesus is the one sent by God to guide the new Israel into its Promised Land (i.e., God's kingdom).

It is James Sanders who re-presents the Evans thesis in terms of Luke's ethics. 28 According to Sanders, Luke's Jesus re-presents the deuteronomic law in such a way as to disclose God's true will: "Be merciful even as your Father is merciful" (6:36; cf. Mt. 5:48). Thus, when placed against its deuteronomic background, the teachings of Jesus in the Central Section actually fashion a law of mercy, 29 which reverses the pharisaic understanding of law in later Judaism-a law of election which excluded Israel's least and lame. The law of mercy includes all, even the outcast and lost of Israel. 30

This prophetic use of the deuteronomic law is not prescriptive; rather the law is both promise and paradigm which bids faithful Israel to respond in merciful ways toward others. Deuteronomy, as it is followed and taught by this prophet-like-Moses, is transformed into a Christian Deuteronomy which teaches about God's mercy and shows how His true Israel should respond in love both to God and neighbor. In this regard, notice Luke's version of the love command pericope in contrast with Matthew (10:25-28 par Mt. 22:34-40). While each synoptic evangelist tells of Jesus' positive commendation of the Shema and the levitical love command, it is only Luke who relates it to active service and then uses the Good Samaritan parable and Martha-Mary episode to illustrate. 31 Matthew, on the other hand, relates it to the law as its summary and fulfillment. Moreover, whenever Luke's Jesus calls the law into question on His way to Jerusalem (11:41; 13:10-17; 14:1-6; 16:18), or adds to it (18:18-19), the deuteronomic texts which provide the hermeneutical key for the Central Section intend to clarify the merciful response for the true follower of Christ's "way."

Luke affirms the law, then, in both a prophetic and in a practical way; it is finally the active response of a disciple that measures his/her commitment to God and to God's Christ, and not where s/he stands with respect to a proper understanding or interpretation of the law. This relative disinterest in a "Jewish" understanding of law, and in the debates over law within Judaism, and his pronounced interest in a more practical "doing" of the law might be further underscored by the relative disinterest in the Jewish debates shown by Luke's Jesus. For example, while Luke confirms the validity of the law in 16:17, in the verse before and after he seems to call the current relevance of that very law into question. Further, Luke's emphasis on prayer might suggest that Jesus depended upon unmediated conversations with God as well as upon the law for divine guidance-perhaps a reflection of Luke's pentecostal emphasis.

In summary, then, like Matthew, Luke's conception of the law is dominated by his christology and eschatology. Both understand Jesus as God's messiah, and that through His life of service to God, He ushers a new age of God's salvation into history. Both understand that Jesus' proclamation of God's Gospel makes clear this new reality and that an eschatological Israel is formed by following after Him. The evangelists' understanding of law must be located, then, within their respective christologies and their view of salvation's history. Thus, even as Luke understands Jesus' ministry as inaugurating a period of Heilsgeschichte during which God's promises are fulfilled, it is Torah which is the community's depository of the promises and so predicator of Jesus' messiahship. Even as Luke's Jesus is God's prophetic messiah, it is Torah which provides Him with ample justification for His criticism of official Judaism and the basis of a better "way." We will return to these points below.

Law and the NT's Gospel. Before we compare how Matthew and Luke view the law differently, let us make the fundamental point again of how they view the law similarly: both evangelists agree that Israel's Torah has continuing validity in the new age of God's salvation.32 The church's identity must continue to be formed by its obedience to God's law. Yet, while agreeing about the law's status in the present age, they re-signify the law's function and its relationship to Jesus in differing ways. At the risk of unqualified generalizing, we want to underscore in a positive way what those differences are, potential dangers with each, and how when brought together these differences actually form two self-correcting, mutually-informing interplays which yield a normative and fuller understanding of the law for the present age. In constructing these interplays, we want to point out how the Bible's own inspired diversity establishes a complementary (rather than adversarial) relationship between Biblical writers and their theologies.

Matthew locates Jesus within the scribal tradition of Judaism: he is the messianic teacher of righteousness whose oral Torah establishes God's will for the present (and future) age. Jesus' relationship to the law, then, is as its teacher and interpreter. The true (i.e., righteous) disciple is the one who follows Jesus' interpretation over and against the scribes and pharisees of "official" Judaism. Matthew's Jesus also sets down a code of rules to guide the conduct of a "greater" righteousness which the disciple must obey in order to enter into the future consummation of God's kingdom

The emphasis of Matthew's Jesus is toward debating the law with others who employ a scribal hermeneutic to Israel's Torah. Its movement is toward a new casuistry which clarifies the conditions of obedience and service to God; its purpose is to establish a way of life which is "other worldly" (i.e., heavenly). In this way, the evangelist directs his readers toward the future consummation of this age when God's heavenly reign will break into human history in a final and cosmic way. Those who obey will enter God's future salvation, and those who do not follow the messiah's instruction will be like the fool who built his spiritual house upon a weak foundation, and was destroyed on the day of judgment. In brief, Matthew's conception of law is "Jewish."

The Jesus of Luke's gospel is God's eschatological prophet. By the obedience of His own life and through His prophetic interpretation of the Torah, Jesus bids Israel to repent and enter into the mercies of God, which were first promised in Israel's Torah, and now are being fulfilled in the life and work of Jesus and His followers. The true disciple is actively engaged in works of mercy such as are envisaged by the God of Torah.

Luke's Jesus is not interested in battles for right interpretation between scribes and rabbis; nor is he interested in establishing a Christian casuistry. Rather, Jesus is more interested in an active response of merciful deeds and pious prayer-to a law of mercy which responds to God and to outcast alike out of an awareness of God's mercy already bestowed in the life of His Son and Spirit. In this sense, the salvation of God is not something to strive for, but to respond to.

This summary makes clear not only the tension within the fourfold Gospel between Matthew's view of law and that of Luke; it also suggests conflicts inherent to each gospel tradition. Within Matthew's Jewish church, the twin emphases on the theoretical discussion of the law and then on rules to ensure righteous conduct locate the value of law both in the abstract sphere of scribal debate and in the concrete sphere of the disciples' life. Further, the evangelist's emphasis on the spiritual side of discipleship and on the future of God's salvation tends all the more to emphasize the transcendent or abstract nature of the law's role within the community of faith.

This can result in a dangerous Tendenz toward a moral realism which intellectualizes and so obscures the heavenly source of the law while elevating at the same time the importance of current realities. The code of rules becomes a casuistry, emptied of good news, divorced from our devotion to the heavenly Father and His commitment to others. Rules become requirements to meet, tests to pass, a standard of external holiness necessary to enter God's future salvation. Christianity becomes a moralistic religion, without a vision of transcendent power to challenge and change life within and without.

Understood in this light, Luke's understanding of law is Matthew's "check and balance." His emphasis is on a law which promotes an active mercy-one which attends to the needs of the least, the last and the lost of Israel, not out of a frenzy to gain or maintain God's salvation, but out of a profound sense of gratitude that God's mercy has already found us. Luke presses not only the reality of God's salvation in the present age, but its historical fabric: the community of disciples is empowered by God's mercy to act, concretely and historically, in ways which can transform society for the good. His salvation is jubilary even as it is prophetic. For Luke, divine law is for this world, not for the "other world."

Yet, the danger of Luke's view of law, perhaps exemplified by his Jesus' apparent ambivalence to it, is that it tends toward irrelevance. Indeed, this sort of antinomistic Tendenz is at the heart of the Jewish concern with the Gentile mission. For Luke as for Paul, there is a sense that the law is a promise which Jesus has already fulfilled; the law is a useful paradigm of God's mercy and of our merciful response toward Him. The law might even promote our devotion to God and His redemptive interests; but it is not critical for maintaining our right relationship with Him. Torah is less a demand than a revelation. The mark of authentic discipleship is a life of merciful actions, in obedient response to a merciful God who is disclosed in Torah.

Such a concern for the "act" (praxis) of discipleship can also truncate a concern for the character of the one who acts: an ethics of doing often demotes an ethics of being. Too often, a theological vision of morality, a way of "seeing," is replaced by the juridical concern for the rightness (=mercy quotient) or the wrongness (=apathy quotient) of human responses to situations of need. Morality, then, is measured by how many Good Samaritan acts one can produce during a lifetime. Matthew's view of law envisages a different morality, for in the law, Jesus finds a certain kind of life-one which flows from the righteousness of the heavenly kingdom and its heavenly King. Matthew's casuistry is not merely a code of rules but the contours of God's righteous demand that informs and forms a righteous character (="heart"), which can naturally see what is the will of a just and justifying God and which empowers a life which transcends the present evil.

Further, Matthew's desire to rid his own church of an emergent antinomistic spirit by a Christian casuistry works well within the canon's Gospel to enhance Luke's ambivalence toward a rule oriented view of law. It is possible that Luke's emphasis on praxis at the expense of rules, ends instead of means, might result in moral confusion at best or cynicism at worst-a clear danger for immature audiences.

Together, in dynamic interplay, the fourfold Gospel argues for a law which shapes both the disciple's righteous character and his/her merciful responses to human need. It argues for a law which guides disciples to a salvation not yet realized and for one which bids them to respond to a salvation already real. Matthew's emphasis on theory is balanced by Luke's emphasis on praxis; Matthew's construal of law as the requirement for a coming kingdom is checked by Luke's stress on law as conveying the promise of salvation already fulfilled. We will come back to these canonical interplays later in this essay for their importance for Wesleyan Christianity.

Our second conversation arises from within the NT's multiple Letter collection. On the one hand, we will try to recover the core teaching of Paul with respect to the relationship between the law and the gospel; on the other, we will summarize our findings from the non-Pauline corpus of letters, finally emphasizing the canonical interplay between Paul and James, historically the location of the fiercest battle over the Letter's understanding of law, and its relationship to the gospel. As is true for the Gospel, what diversity we find in the Letter reflects the multiformed character of the gospels proclaimed by the first apostles of the church, whose collective witness has been canonized and preserved for Christian faith. While differing in specifics we would argue as a general principle that the Jewish-Gentile pluralism has been maintained at a canonical level, with Matthew's view of law (and Jesus' understanding of it) continued in the non-Pauline letters and Luke's view of law (and Jesus' understanding of it) contained in the Pauline letter. Also as a general principle, we would accept the assessment of the canonizing community which elevated the importance of the Paul and the Gentile mission and positioned his writings first among the apostolic witnesses. However, we do this so as not to exclude the non-Pauline witnesses from their critical role of checking and balancing the Pauline tradition.

Paul's view of law and gospel. It is the consensus of Pauline scholars that the Pauline corpus forwards an inconsistent view of the Torah and the relationship of law to Paul's gospel. For that reason, James Sanders says that "Paul's attitude toward the Law has been one of the most puzzling and seemingly insoluble in Biblical study." 33 Essentially, the conflict is this: on the one hand, Paul speaks of Christ as ending the law; to try to follow Torah as a means of entering into or even of maintaining right fellowship with God is bankrupt, a curse, for the crucified and risen Christ has abolished it (Rom. 10:4; Gal. 2:19; 3:13; 2 Cor. 3:4-17; Eph. 2:14-16; et al). On the other hand, Paul also speaks as a Jew who sees Israel's law as holy, as the instrument of divine revelation, and as moral advice to follow (Rom. 3:31; 7:8-13, 22; 1 Cor. 7:19; 9:8, 21; 14:34; cf. 1 Tim. 1:8).

Most explain Paul's apparent inconsistency historically, either in terms of Paul's own theological development 34 or in terms of the different Sitze im Leben Paul encountered in the early churches to which he wrote. 35 It is conceivable that Paul's view included both a negation and affirmation of law depending on how the community of faith used it. 36 Whatever the historical reality, (which resists a consensus of scholarly speculation and is impossible to reconstruct in any case,) the canonical level of Paul's gospel contains different accounts of the law, and our exegetical task is to make some sense of this canonical inconsistency for the church. 37

We begin our discussion by claiming that Paul's letters were all occasional; that is, they were written in response to particular audiences who were facing real crises, most often theological. In general, his references to law were part of larger controversies between believers. Thus, we must first try to reconstruct the controversy as best as the textual evidence allows in order to understand the "theo-logic" which lies behind the adaptation of his view of law to a particular space-time. Moreover, his view of law, whether negative or positive, always functions as part of his defense for his Gentile gospel and his apostolic mission. His opponents are both insiders (typically, nascent gnostics) or outsiders (typically, Judaizers). This is a battle waged over the law's legitimate function within the Gentile mission.

In Paul's Judaism (and in some quarters of the Jewish church), Torah observance had become the essential identifying mark of a true Israel. Sanders argues that the halachic (or ethical) aspect of Israel's Torah was stressed "almost to the exclusion of its haggadic (or the story of God's saving grace in Israel's history) aspect." 38 In other words, Judaism's perception of its relationship to God was informed by a legalistic and cultic reading of Torah to the exclusion of the narrative of God's salvation. Once divorced from its theological mooring, the codes of rules had no "theo-logic." The result was a religiousness identified by its ethos (i.e., what it means to behave as Israel) rather than by a mythos (i.e., what it means to be Israel). Obedience to rules was elevated over authentic piety as the mark of devotion to God and membership in the true Israel. In a word, such a community understands its relationship to God nomistically.

Against this religious milieu, Paul's demotion of law's heilsgeschichtlich importance envisages his concern to shift the emphasis back to one which retained Torah's inherent balance between ethos and mythos-indeed, a balance which Paul achieved only by an overemphasis in the other (i.e., theological) direction. His concern is not to remove God's demand from the gospel; he is not antinomistic. Rather, it intends to check the dangerous legalistic and moralistic tendencies of a version of God's gospel which somehow elevates demand at the expense of grace or which separates demand from grace as if obedience is ever possible without first becoming a new creature by the transforming grace of God. For Paul, obedience to God is impossible outside of a relationship with Him; thus, one cannot logically speak about ethos without first (and foremost) speaking about mythos.

It is also no doubt the case that the Jewish Tendenz militated against the gospel he received through the Damascus Road christophany. Further, it is no doubt true that Paul felt an overemphasis on ethos had earlier led him to persecute the church (Gal. 1:11 16). Therefore, there may very well be a sense that Paul's emphasis on mythos, on the story of God's saving grace disclosed through the dying and rising of Christ, reflects both divine revelation as well as his own psychological pain.

According to Paul's law-free gospel Torah no longer functions as a way of approaching God. Even as a legal code, believers are no longer obliged to obey Torah's rules; only the God Torah narrates, and the Christ it foretells. Indeed, trying to obey the law during the new age is only doomed to frustration (Rom. 7:14-8:2). Even though Paul fought against an emergent antinomism within his own church (e.g., 1 Cor.), such a Tendenz is the natural result of a gospel which emphasizes mythos over ethos.

Paul also articulates a more positive view of law. In doing so, he retains the Jewish idea that Torah enshrines God's revelation in a way not unlike Luke's prophetic use of the law (see above). Even as God is good, so must Torah be intrinsically good. Thus, in the law Paul finds evidence that Jesus is Messiah, the fulfillment of God's promised salvation (Gal. 3:16-6:1); and in the law Paul finds that faith is the way of entering into right relationship with Yahweh (Rom. 3:27-4:25). Faith in Christ, then, is faith in Torah, since to trust that God has revealed His salvation in Torah will naturally lead one to trust Christ in whom God's salvation has finally and fully come.

We can understand Pauline paraenesis in this way as well. The apostle does not hesitate adding lists of rules to several of his letters; however, these rules do not vary much from the paraenetic tradition Paul received within Judaism-rules based upon if not echoed in Torah's Code of Holiness and Judaism's catechesis. 39 What has been changed is not the content of God's demand, but the "heart" of God's Israel. That is, as a new creation, the true Israel, the church, can now obey by faith what God has promised in Torah (i.e. salvation by faith in Christ) and there revealed to be His will (i.e. a life of holiness).

Thus, such rules are not commands given by Paul to obey; they do not comprise an heteronomy, a list of precepts from God (or apostle) to obey in order to maintain a right relationship with God (or apostle). Rather, they comprise a description of the new life which God's Spirit now effects within the believing community. In this sense, Pauline paraenesis is regulation rather than prescription. God's righteousness, revealed "faith unto faith" (i.e. from Christ's faith in God to the community's faith in God's work through Christ), now becomes a lived righteousness under the aegis of the Spirit of holiness (Rom. 8). The church's righteousness now discloses God's righteousness. The church's new way of life testifies to the eschaton which is "becoming" in its midst and to this evil age which is "passing away" as a result of the church's witness to God's powerful reign. 40 Paul's paraenesis is, as has often been said, an imperative hidden within the gracious indicative of God's salvation during the new age. Thus, we would argue that in Paul's view of law the community's ethos has finally given way to the gospel's mythos. 41 Paul's discussion of law, whether positively or negatively construed, is really a defense of his gospel: God's righteousness is now revealed in the righteous (=law / paraenesis observant) life of those who depend upon the dependable work of Jesus through whom God's forgiveness and human transformation are possible. We should insist, then, on a moral calculus which views faithfulness as the natural yield of faith, righteousness as the logical manifestation of God's right-wising action through Christ and in the Spirit. It is on this ground that we would also insist that Paul's essential understanding of the law is in continuity with that of Luke's Jesus.

Law according to the non-Pauline corpus. Of the non-Pauline letters, only two (Hebrews and James) refer to the law and its relationship to the believing community in a specific way. Yet, 1 Peter is largely paraenetic, and the Johannine letters, like the fourth gospel, transform the law (i.e., God's "commandments") into Jesus' "new commandment" which is "love one another." 42 2 Peter, probably written much later, envisages law as consisting of certain ethical logia from the Jesus/gospel tradition (2 Pt. 3:2; cf 2:21). The point is that all the Jewish apostles emphasize the "rule" of the Christian's life. We would also argue that according to the non-Paulinists, Israel's-law remains more than a valid form of God's will for the church; it maintains a saving relationship with God especially in times of suffering. 43 Law, then, is both ethical and redemptive.

While each writer offers an interesting if not compelling version of this general construal of Christian conduct, we want to focus our attention on James whose ethical programme is clearly the most conservative version of law within the apostolic witness to the gospel and the one most in contrast to Paul's. James teaches that Israel's law has not been superseded by Christ; rather, it continues as a norm for the believing community. Indeed, Christ is not mentioned except in passing (1:1; 2:1); and even those who claim that the book's paraenesis is rooted in Jesus' moral tradition do so only on the shakiest ground. 44 We would argue that James' idea of law is not christologized; but that Israel's Torah remains the church's law as well. 45 We would also propose that James' interpretation of the levitical Holiness Code is quite pastoral if not also traditional, filtered as it through Jewish Wisdom. It is not through Christ that God liberates the true Israel, but through the heavenly word (1:17-18) of wisdom (1:19-20). Such Wisdom brings the community more squarely within the traditional instruments of Israel's covenant-"quick to hear and obey the law for liberty" 46 (1:22-2:26); slow to speak earthly wisdom but rather with the virtues of "pure speaking" (3:13-18); and slow to anger over mammon but rather to submit in worship to God (4:1-12).

Further, the paraenesis of James is thoroughly eschatological; it is an "apocalyptic paraenesis." Thus, James posits liberation at the end of time, at the parousia of the Lord (5:7-9), when God will judge Israel according to their obedience to the law, either to bless them (1:25; cf. 1:12) or to judge them (2:13; 47 cf.4:11-12; 5:1-6). Eschatological liberation is granted to those who act mercifully (2:13), in obedience to the law's center, the levitical law of love, which will gain God's approval at the end of time (2:8; 1:27; cf.2:19a, 1:26).

For James, religious faith is works-oriented (1:26-7); the law is gospel (1:25; 2:12); God recognizes those who serve and obey Him by what they do. For Paul, faith yields works; God recognizes those who serve and obey Him by whom they believe. 48 For James, God's saving righteousness is given to those who obey God's law-such as Abraham and Rahab (2:21-26). Faith alone, even though pious (2:14-17) and orthodox (2:18-20), is not recognized by God, rather, God recognizes the faithful (or faithless) by what they do (or do not do). For Paul, God's saving righteousness is given to those who by faith participate in Jesus' dying and rising and thus in God's triumph over evil and death. James does speak of faith in the Christ of glory (2:1); by doing so, he locates the coming triumph of God and those who follow His law at the parousia of Christ. It is not so much a belief "in" Christ as with Paul; but an apocalyptical belief "that" through messiah God will triumph over evil.

We admit these are cursory discussions of complex issues. In so doing we have attempted to introduce a crucial point in comparing the Pauline idea of law to the non-Pauline one. The content Paul gives to Israel's law, whether viewed negatively or positively, is ethical; it is the will of God and demands obedience. In reacting to this, Paul positions law and its ethical demand under God's saving work through Christ and in the Spirit; ethos becomes mythos m the new age. The non-Paulinists, as exemplified by James, view Israel's law as an essential part of God's salvation. With Paul, James assumes that Israel's law reveals God's mercy; however, unlike Paul, James assumes that divine mercy is revealed in rule rather than in Christ. Thus, law has the capacity to mediate God's mercy and so to maintain a right relationship with God until the end of time.

The law and Hebrews. We conclude our discussion of the epistolary view of law with Hebrews. To do so only underscores the importance of Hebrews in terms of both its canonical function and its content with the NT Letter. Hebrews functions within the NT Letter as a "linking book." On the one side stands the Pauline corpus of letters, while on the other stand the letters of the Jewish "pillars," James, Cephas and John (cf. Gal. 2:91). There is a sense in which the vocabulary of Hebrews sides with Paul. Indeed, early in the canonizing process, Hebrews circulated within the Pauline corpus, even though as an anonymous letter. Yet, by titling the book, "Letter to the Hebrews," the canonizing community ultimately positioned the book among the letters of the Jewish mission. 49 The contested history of Hebrews' canonization suggests this same ambivalence: it is at once neither and either fish or fowl. For us the position of Hebrews within the canon of NT letters suggests in a symbolic way that the presence of Hebrews betwixt and between the corpora of letters reminds the hermeneut that the whole in which diversity is found must be taken as seriously as the diversity itself. A part of the whole cannot be truncated or elevated without distortion to the whole's truth. 50

This is true of Hebrews' attitude toward Israel's Torah. Hebrews shares Paul's christologizing of law: law has been superseded by Christ and is now abrogated in these last days of Israel's history. Yet, at the same time, Hebrews' view of law is non-Pauline in that it locates the center of law in soteriology rather than in ethics. That is, by subordinating his/her discussion of the law to the priestly work of Christ, the writer transforms the content of law from ethical to theological in that it regulates the cultus through which God reigns over Israel and redeems it.

Thus, according to the priestly christology found in Hebrews, the Torah's cultic legislation only points to the good news disclosed through the priestly work of Jesus Christ on the cross and in heaven; "the law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming-not the realities themselves" (10:1). It should be noted that the writer's discussion of law falls within that section of the argument which develops the idea of the new covenant, the idea of atonement it embodies, and the idea of priesthood all of which the law regulates (cf. nomos in Heb. 7-10). The maintenance of the covenant between God and Israel, mediated by the priests, demands obedience to cultic rules especially those which guide Israel's Yom Kippur (Lev. 16; cf. Heb. 9-10)- for its atonement.

This emphasis differs from that of Paul. In Hebrews, Torah is viewed as the instrument which establishes the earthly cultus, and through the cultus, the old covenant, and through the covenant, God's forgiveness. Law mediated God's atonement of old Israel. For Paul, on the other hand, Torah demanded obedience to a righteous God; it was the very act of obedience which according to Paul established a covenantal relationship with God. While Paul can retain some of the law's ethical teaching (e.g. sexual code), the writer of Hebrews, for whom the law's center is cultic, makes it clear that the law in its entirety has been superseded by Christ and the Christian gospel. In this sense, Raymond Brown is correct in calling Hebrews the New Testament's most "liberal" document with respect to Israel's law, more liberal even than Paul. 51

When comparing the writer of Hebrews' negation of the law with Paul's negation of the law, then, we find a common emphasis but a different understanding of it. While agreeing that the Christ event should radically transform how the church should view the law, the interest of Hebrews clearly is the law's usefulness in forging a cultus through which sins were atoned. and access to God provided. For Paul, on the other hand, the center of law is largely (although not exclusively) ethical rather than soteriological. In short, Hebrews views the law in Pauline and in non-Pauline ways, and thereby symbolizes the interrelationship between the Pauline and non-Pauline corpora within the NT canon.

Law and the NT Letter. We have taken up the canonical conversation between Paul and James in other articles. 52 In this essay, let it suffice to bring them together once again in a dialogue over law and gospel similar to the one already envisaged by Matthew and Luke. Matthew and James both deposits of Jewish Christian preaching, have a more positive view of the law's ongoing function within the church. By this we mean that God's demand and obedience to it is elevated in salvific importance, so that the church's righteousness (and so eschatological fitness) is not something "given" apart from law observance, but something which accrues from human obedience to a code of rules (whether Jesus' interpretation of rules or James' apocalyptic paraenisis). Quite simply, law is something to obey; it has moral authority but also covenantal authority in that by obeying it the righteous life is formed and eternal life is therefore granted.

While neither James nor Matthew are legalists in the strictest sense of that word, both are nomists. 53 The church still stands under the law. There are rules to follow for they formulate the manner of life to live in the new age; indeed, the blessings of the new age are found within and not outside Israel's Torah. We should also say by way of qualification that Matthew's view of Torah is more "liberal" than that of James in that Matthew does recognize that Jesus' radical reinterpretation (and not the "official" scribal tradition) of Torah has final moral and redemptive authority over the church. James, as far as we can tell, resists any kind of subordination of Torah to Christ. For him, Jesus is messiah whose parousia marks God's final judgment of those who neglect the "doing" of Torah.

The tendency of nomistic faith is an ethos characterized by casuistry and when distorted, by legalism. Observance of codes of rules which govern various aspects of the community's life is elevated in importance and even reified as the mark of authentic faith and spirituality. This is not to say that a rule-oriented construal of human conduct militates against devotion to God; rather, it is to say that devotion to God is manifested by obedience to the community's codes of right conduct.

We would also suggest that a nomistic orientation has distinct advantages, along with well-known disadvantages. God's demand is not left to guesswork; a deontology such as found in James' view of law or in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, posits morality in the rules themselves. Nor is the community's understanding of God's merciful actions toward it unclear, since the moral logic is that such codes of rules enshrine the conduct of a righteous God toward His people and creation. Thus, obedience to the rules insures a life which not only guides a people in the right direction, but which also guides them to bear witness to God's salvation. 54

Even as a nomistic faith corrects and balances an antinomistic faith, so also an emphasis on what God has done in Christ corrects and balances the nomistic tendency toward legalism and its tacit denial of God's gracious acceptance of us. It is too often the case that even a well-intended casuistry forms an ethos which demotes the current authority of the Spirit and neglects the dynamic nature (if not ambiguity) of trying to discern under the Spirit's aegis God's will for an ever-changing context. What tends to be abrogated in any legalism is not merely the moral authority which transcends space-time, but also the believer's own responsibility for working through a particular moral dilemma. The believer's morality is determined by whether or not s/he follows the law.

In this sense, Paul's emphasis on mythos (i.e., on the community's theological vision) is a helpful focus. His traditional paraenesis does not stand alone but rather is situated within a conceptual world which makes law observance the yield of and impossible without commitment to the sacred Story. His gospel forces its readers to understand what ought to be done in any given situation not in terms of the community's rules but in terms of God's grace and forgiveness. In this sense, Paul posits moral authority outside of the human community and in God whose holiness has been revealed first in Torah, then definitively through Christ and now in the Spirit's life within the community. Because it is the metaethical concern which controls Paul's discussion of the law, the decision of what then is normative falls upon the believer who as a new creature and as part of a Spirit led community is called on to discern the will of God in the new situation of grace (Rom. 12:1-2).

We come now to the most critical section of the essay. Because these conversations between Biblical writers over the law and the gospel are found within the church's canon, they all must be accepted as normative and appreciated as useful for the formation of Christian faith and life. The hermeneut's essential task is to conjoin text with context in ways which both identify and evaluate current faith and life (2 Tim. 3:16), and which then can form in God's people the "wisdom" of His salvation (2 Tim. 3:15) and the "good works" which bear witness to it (2 Tim. 3:17). In proposing this, we are especially concerned with how the canonical conversations discussed above relate to the formation of Wesleyan Christianity.

Let us begin with a rather bold statement: the Wesleyan church is identified by the Jewish church envisaged within the NT-by its nomistic understanding of the law, and its elevated relationship to the gospel. By this we do not mean that the Wesleyan church looks only to the gospel of Matthew and the non-Pauline letters for its moral advice. Rather, we mean to suggest that the moral logic by which the Wesleyan church organizes all the Bible's moral advice is analogous to the nomism found in the early Jewish church. Thus, whenever the Wesleyan church appropriates the Bible's moral teaching, even from Pauline paraenesis or the lips of Luke's Jesus, it tends to be interpreted nomistically - as demand rather than description, as ethical obligation rather than theological revelation.

It is no doubt the case that the Wesleyan tradition relates the law to the gospel in nomistic ways precisely because its gospel stresses sanctification, even as the non-Pauline corpus enshrines the Jewish Church's emphasis on Judaism's halachic reading of Torah. The community's discernment of the demand of God, which is guided by Biblical and traditional rules, is the recognition of a holy God whose purposes are pursued within history by obeying the law, the embodiment of God's holiness.

The Reformed side of Protestant Christianity posits the work and outworking of God's salvation exclusively with God. 55 Whether this is reflected by the "divine election" leitmotif of Calvinistic Christianity or by the "divine justification" of Lutheran Christianity, salvation is located where God is located-in heaven, outside of history. Salvation is finally God's responsibility, a responsibility met in Christ, and so we now "boast in Him. "As such, law observance is an unnecessary focus, since salvation is not a human endeavor. Our relationship with God is not entered into nor maintained through a life made righteous by obedience to some external standard. The moral logic of this theological orientation, informed largely by Paul, forms an antinomistic ethos. If not antinomistic, certainly law is construed more theologically with the result of a more diffuse, ambiguous role given to law as an ethical norm. 56

In contrast to this theological orientation, Wesley locates God's salvation within history, as a social as well as a spiritual process, with a specific telos (i.e. perfection) as the church's social and spiritual goal. 57 Salvation includes sanctification, even as sanctification includes believers in the redemptive process in partnership with God's Spirit and the church's sacraments. Because of this orientation toward an historical process, Wesleyan Christianity emphasizes work-the work of God and the work of the believing community in concert with Him. Sharply stated, God's sanctifying grace is discerned within history by the holy acts of God's people. In emphasizing this point, Wesleyan anthropology is quite optimistic: hardly paralyzed by a fallen nature, hardly made inadequate by imperfection, believers are transformed by God's inward work and are empowered to work for and with Him within history.

While it is true that the personal piety of the holiness branch of the Wesleyan tradition emphasizes the individual's sanctification and the spiritual, inward side of salvation's historical progress, the larger tradition is more holistic than that. While it is true that entire sanctification functions on a spiritual and individual level, the sanctified individual participates in the ongoing perfecting of all things, most especially the community of believers.

This keen emphasis on a working discipleship tends toward an emphasis on the "works of the law." Especially if the law embodies the revelation of a holy God, to follow the law, itself inherently holy, yields works of holiness necessary to participate in the sanctifying of all things. One should further suspect that this impulse toward praxis, toward the historic out-working of God's salvation, shapes a rule-oriented ethic. Rules themselves are historically conditioned; rules intend to guide human conduct within history. Rules also evaluate whether a person/community is actually participating with a holy God in the outworking of his salvation within history. A fundamental orientation toward history, therefore, will desire if not demand a casuistry of some kind. Nomism is more than a concrete disclosure of this transcendent, holy God; it has in view the possibility of actually living a holy life toward the end of participating with God in the sanctification of all things. The church's life articulates God's righteousness and promise in deed, not in faith alone.

This is not to say that Wesley nor the tradition which follows him has eliminated the Reformed emphasis on justification by faith alone. We have rather subordinated it to the perfecting process of sanctification by works alone which is the telos of justification. Thus, the true disciple expresses God's justifying righteousness in works of righteousness, not merely in words of faith; in orthopraxis, not merely in orthodoxy. In this way, the Wesleyan impulse toward working out God's salvation is legitimized by the canonical James and Matthew.

It should not surprise any of us, then, to find in our various Wesleyan communions the codification of law rather than of gospel. Fraternal debates tend to be over how to construe the sanctified life rather than over how to confess orthodox faith. It should not surprise us that generally Wesleyan communions stress ethos, so that their salvific calculus focuses attention on holy living as the authenticating mark of a vibrant faith. It should not surprise us to find the language of accountability and praxis. It should not surprise us to find an enlightened anthropology and pneumatology. It should not surprise us to find Wesleyans engaged in process or liberation theology of a profoundly Biblical sort. And within the church universal, it should not surprise us that the Wesleyan tradition is a critical check and balance to those Reformed communions and confessions which deemphasize a rule-oriented life as an important, concrete guide in the church's ongoing relationship with God and all things historical and spiritual. Those Christian traditions which promote a "positive" gospel sometimes at the expense of God's demand, forgiveness to the exclusion of repentance and responsibility, can fall easy prey to an antinomistic faith. 58 The fear of stressing "works-righteousness" even for ethical gain can lead to a moral immaturity, or a concern with general ethical principles but not with those rules which actually guide right conduct in specific, historical dilemma. Therefore, Wesleyan believers should be involved in a prophetic way in a variety of ecumenical discussions and endeavors, not with a self-righteous or triumphalistic manner, but in all humility to bring some balance to the whole people of God in this regard.

Indeed, it should not surprise us to find that Wesleyans struggle with their own distortions of the law's role in Biblical Christianity-with legalism, with judgmentalism and division, with shattered self-esteem, with workaholic frenzy, and with other dangerous tendencies of nomistic faith. The Tendenz of nomism always is to elevate the importance of law and ethical obligation so that the formation of the Community's ethos finally replaces the primary concern for faith formation. When this happens, the ordo salutis is perverted and justification becomes the telos of sanctification instead of its ground. Even as the Wesleyan tradition is identified by the Jewish church, so also these dangerous moral tendencies are checked and balanced by those ecclesial (i.e. Reformed) traditions which are more closely identified by Paul and Luke's theological orientation and its emphasis on gospel.

In listening to the remnant of Pauline Christianity in our midst, Wesleyan preaching should come to stress afresh those checks which balance nomistic faith and so prevent heretical distortions from eroding our church's life and faith. In concluding this essay, we will mention three themes from the Lucan / Pauline matrix which check certain dangerous tendencies of Wesleyan Christianity, and which will deepen and preserve our distinctive witness to the church universal.

(1) Our tendency in emphasizing sanctification is to locate God's acceptance of us at the telos of salvation's history-in the future, the "not-yet" of human experience. The result is often a failure to perceive that God has already accepted us and that God's forgiving grace is currently for us and ever present in human experience. To proclaim entire sanctification without God's forgiveness is a message which shapes a self-centered construal of life, doomed to self-destruction. Our preaching must recover the power of Paul's idea of justification by faith alone-this radical dependency upon God's forgiving grace disclosed in the Christ event-to balance and deepen the idea of sanctification by works alone. 59

(2) The reductionism of nomistic faith replaces the inward character of holiness with an orientation toward holy works. Both Paul and Luke emphasize a "responsive" version of law whereby the holy life is the natural yield of a righted relationship with God. An emphasis on human acts as somehow separate from divine empowerment detracts from God's grace. Devotion to God ultimately rests on what God has already accomplished through Christ and continues to accomplish through the Spirit's sanctifying work in us. Our preaching, then, must become more theocentric and less anthropocentric, more gospel and less law.

(3) Nomistic faith is juridical; it tends to speak about the Christian's obligated duty and about the overt acts of a sanctified believer. The codes of rules set forth the external standard of what is right and what is wrong. Such standards make clear how one should behave in historical conflicts, and what decisions to make during personal crises. Nomistic faith tends to prescribe specific remedies rather than to describe a theological framework within which believers can work through a responsible action. Frankly, a nomistic ethos, while helpful in directing moral traffic, is not conducive to moral development, learning how to think ethically and to be morally responsible is thwarted. Wesleyan preaching should therefore articulate a vision of the Christian life, which makes more coherent the moral logic of our tradition. Believers should be able to compose new rules for new situations; however, such freedom requires a transcending power that enables them to see the "old" and the "new" as God sees it.

A visional perception of law's relationship to gospel also underscores the fundamental importance of the formation of a character which can act in ways that sanctify all things. This shift of focus from "doing" to "being" enhances the prospects of dismantling both the legalism ("doing" the law) and the battered self-esteem (not being able to "do" the law's demands) which too often characterizes the Wesleyan tradition.

Of course, all these themes are found in Wesley's preaching; they are an often neglected part of the self-correcting apparatus found within the Wesleyan tradition. Prophetic preaching sometimes, perhaps always, is reactionary rather than revolutionary in that it reminds a people of what God's gospel proclaims and what God's law has always demanded. Prophetic preaching calls a people to repent and change back to what they once were in order to be restored once again into a right relationship with God.

Notes

1The phrase "law and gospel" summarizes the content of God's Word, since that Word, whether in Christ, in Scripture, or in Sacrament, takes the forms of demand (law) and gift (gospel). "Law and gospel" also summarizes the covenantal relationship between God and God's people since it is a relationship conditioned by God's response of saving grace (gospel) and His people's response of grateful obedience (law). This more theological construal of law and gospel does not deny that a more specific, historical form is sometimes in view, e.g., Judaism's Torah or a particular evangelist's gospel. Our tendency for this essay, however, is to speak of "law" as God's demand/will and "gospel" as the story of God's gift of salvation, unless we want to underscore a particular document, such as Torah, as a particular form of God's demand/gospel. Luther remarked that maintaining a proper dialectic between the two was the central theological task of the church. While there is much to commend Luther in this regard, he was inclined to set the two in adversarial relationship, as law versus gospel. The result with the Protestant tradition is to focus too much on the casuistry of "law" leading to legalism and a tacit denial of divine grace; or to focus too much on the gift of God's forgiveness and unconditional acceptance of us leading to a limitless freedom and to a moral individuation which is again a tacit denial of divine grace. We rather find in Scripture that law is always located with the gospel. Thus, God's demand is an aspect of good news, not bad news. God demands our redemption, which we can now enter into because of Christ's obedience and because of our obedience to Him. While the literature which tackles this issue is enormous, I like very much Lewis B. Smedes' sensitive introduction to it in his book, Mere Morality (Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 239-43. On "gospel," see my little article, "gospel," in Beacon Dictionary of Theology (Beacon Hill Press, 1983), p. 239; and my essay, "Introduction: New Testament Ethics," Horizons in Biblical Theology 5.2(1983) 49-94.

2The two pioneers in the field are Brevard S. Childs, whose seminal book, Biblical Theology in Crisis (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970) started the discipline, and James A. Sanders, whose recent book, Canon and Community (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), is perhaps the best introduction to it. While both seek to promote the hermeneutical importance of the idea of canon, Childs tends to emphasize its final, canonical product, while Sanders tends to emphasize its canonizing process and the ongoing interaction between the believing community and its Bible. My own introduction to canonical hermeneutics, "Ecumenicity and Ecclesiology," is forthcoming in Christian Scholars Review, 16 (1987).

3James D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster. 1977).

4See my "The Canon and Christian Preaching," The Christian Ministry 17/5 (1986) 13-17.

5Cf. Paul D. Hanson, The Diversity of Scripture (OBT, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982).

6While most narrative theology works off of a theological (i.e., eschatological) or historical perspective which views life as presently moving from somewhere to someplace, it seems to us that the Bible itself envisages the same sort of dynamic, beginning with Genesis, a book about the "beginnings" of creation and of Israel, of covenant and of promise, of evil and of redemption, and concluding with Revelation, a book about the apocalypse of God' s triumph over evil and the final fulfillment of God's promise of salvation. The eschatological/historical drama of human and salvation's history from its beginning to its conclusion is a canonical one. The normative way we view our own stories, then, is as the Biblical story casts life: not as if there is no end, as if the existential moment is of ultimate importance; rather, in light of a conclusion when issues we address are finally resolved by the righteousness of God. For a good introduction to narrative theology, see Michael Goldbert, Theology and Narrative (Nashville: Abingdon, 1981-2).

7At several points in this essay, we will use ethos instead of ethic(s). By ethos we mean to refer to the moral behavior or logic which a particular writer's moral advice, or ethic, tends to form. While an ethic is construed as specific rules or paraenesis which guide human conduct, an ethos is the moral Gestalt which takes shape in a people who use a particular ethic. We would argue, for example, that the terms, nomism and antinomism, do not refer to an ethic, but to an ethos which is formed by following a particular gospel and its version of law. Paul's gospel tends to shape an antinomistic ethos, then, not because Paul fails to provide an ethic, a paraenesis, for his readers; rather, because his paraenesis is so construed by the logic of his gospel as to subordinate law to gospel, even to abrogate it from the Christian's life. Likewise, we will use the complementary term, mythos, to refer to the theological conception of a particular writer or ecclesial tradition. Again, what we have in mind is the "theo-logic" of such a conception, or how the various pieces of the whole gospel are so fitted together as to make the relationship between mythos and ethos coherent.

8In this paragraph I have introduced two related terms of importance for adequately understanding my proposal: a Biblical "emphasis" and a church's "tendency" (or Tendenz). Particular ethical emphases, especially when placed within a theological framework, will form certain perceptions of Christian existence which in turn tend to motivate certain actions. This is not to say that the consequences of certain ethical emphases are themselves imagined or authorized by the Biblical writer who forwards them. While I would argue that Paul's understanding of the Christian life, given his theological commitments, forms a moral logic which tends people toward antinomianism, I would also argue that Paul himself was not an antinomian. Clearly from 1 Cor. 9-10, Paul is well aware of this potential danger in his churches, the result of distorting his moral programme: his emphasis on God's accepting love in Christ and his deemphasis of Law promotes the illusion of a lawless Christianity. Yet, the point still must be made in light of the church's continuing struggle with "works righteousness" that an appropriation of Paul s gospel to the exclusion of his own correctives or the emphases of other Biblical moralities will "tend" the church in dangerous directions.

9Sanders, Canon and Community, 46-60.

10We are using "logical coherence" in a philosophical sense as a criterion for conveying truth in rational (i.e., in non-contradictory) ways. Discussing the problematics of using this criterion as a measurement of Biblical truth will take us too far afield in this current essay. We would only comment that Biblical hermeneutics must be controlled by a set of criteria which emerges from the Bible itself and not from the Western philosophical tradition. While recognizing that the idea of coherence is multifaceted and that it allows for "apparent" contradictions, it is an altogether inadequate formula for construing the realities of the Biblical texts and the multivalent truth it forwards. Further, such a criterion promotes an inadequate view of divine inspiration-one which tends to demand of God and the Biblical texts a monolithic rather than a multivalent Word. In saying this, we do not want to deny the importance for recovering a coherent core of those Biblical commitments or themes which are non-negotiable (i.e. to hold to them as true is what it means to be Christian) and which lie close to the surface of all Biblical theologies. In the case of an "hermeneutics of harmonization" we mean to deny the validity of those programmes which are concerned, even preoccupied, with the demand that the Biblical text be coherent down to the tiniest detail; or that it be coherent, or inerrant, in scientific and historical ways. The rules of such programmes do not allow for the complexity language or for differences between the text's "horizon" and the hermeneut's.

11In making this point, I am using a point developed more carefully by Charles M. Wood, The Formation of Christian Understanding (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1981), pp. 82-105. Gaylord Norce reflects on the importance of Wood's monograph in "Stimulating Faith by Way of Contradiction," Christian Century 103 (August 13-20,1986) 703-04; Noyce draws similar conclusions to those presented in this essay.

12R. W. Wall, "Peter, the 'Son' of Jonah: The Conversion of Cornelius in the Context of Canon," JSNT 49 (1987), 79-90; in general, I follow J. Jervall over G. Lohfink in the current debate.

13There is considerable debate over this point between those who follow the lead of E. P. Sanders, who in a set of influential monographs argues that early Christianity in accord with Palestinian Judaism was shaped by covenantal nomism. That is, the function of the law was to maintain Israel's covenantal relationship with Yahweh; however, it was by trust that the true Israel actually entered into covenant. See especially Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), and Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983). James D. G. Dunn has recently argued in an important article, "The New Perspective on Paul," BJRL 65(1983) 95-122, that the Sanders thesis makes no sense of Paul's polemic against the Judaizing opponents in Galatians and in Romans. The issue is what is required for entrance into the covenant, and not what is necessary to maintain a relationship already secured. Further, Dunn rightly argues that the whole idea of law-observance transcended merely religious or spiritual concerns, Jews and Jewish Christians were fundamentally concerned with their political identity and social stability within the Greco-Roman world. To give up what Paul wanted to would have, they thought, serious socio-political consequences.

14See Stephen G. Wilson's highly illuminating and informed discussion of the Council and the history of its interpretation in his Luke and the Law (SNTSMS 50, Cambridge: University Press. 1983) 71-102

15Wilson, 101-02.

16There is considerable debate over this point. Robert Maddox, for example, says that "It is indeed remarkable . . . that Luke is at such pains to have Paul emphasize that he himself has always lived according to the Law including the oral, Rabbinic halakah. But it is also clear that Luke has no real understanding of what this law is;" The Purpose of Luke-Acts (T&T Clark, 1982) p. 38. J. Jervell makes the opposite point in Luke and the People of God (Augsburg, 1972) p. 169. With Jervell, we think the central point is Luke's desire to underscore at once the Jewishness of Paul and the inclusiveness of God who through Paul called a people out of the non-Jews to himself in a "new" way with a "new" gospel.

17R. W. Wall, "The Problem of the Multiple Letter Canon of the New Testament," HorBT 8.2 (1987), 1-31.

18Such a focus does admit to a difference between the gospels and their stories of the historical Jesus, and what Jesus actually said and did. We would argue, however, that there is fundamental historical and theological continuity between the life and teaching of the historical Jesus and the fourfold narrative of the canonical Christ.

19Here we follow Stephen Wilson's thesis that Luke wrote his gospel "mainly, if not solely, for Gentile Christians for whom those aspects of the law discussed in the Gospel were not a problem," Luke and the Law (SNTSMS 50, Cambridge: University Press, 1983) p. 57-8. J. Jervell's contention that Luke's view of law is rather quite Jewish and no doubt written to appease Jewish believers is more true for Acts which was probably written later when the Lucan church's Sitz im Leben was more catholic and faced with the controversy (among Jewish belivers) of Paul's law-free mission; see Jervell's Luke and the People of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1972).

20I have found Roger Mohrlang's monograph, Matthew and Paul A Comparison of Ethical Perspectives (SNTSMS 48, Cambridge: University Press 1984), pp. 7-47; 72-93, quite helpful both in guiding and in confirming my reading of Matthew's gospel as well as of the Pauline letters. This essay builds upon Mohrlang's study by suggesting ways to utilize the obvious differences in matters of law and grace as posed by Matthew (the Jewish mission) and Paul (the Gentile mission). Mohrlang also includes a good bibliography for further study in this area.

21J. L. Houlden, Ethics and the New Testament (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 49.

22The pharisees and scribes as leaders of "official Judaism" are Matthew's "foils." Their interpretations of Torah as well as their legalistic piety represent a righteousness which is opposed to God's reign. For Matthew, observance of God's law should be an "easy yoke" to bear, not harsh; it should produce a life characterized by the spirit of the Beatitudes (5:1-12) and the life of piety (6:1-34).

23There is a sense in which Matthew's ethic is deontological, while his ethos is visional. That is, the antitheses clearly set out a list of rules which if obeyed will yield a righteous life; because they are the messiah's interpretation of Torah, they constitute an inherently righteous rule. Such a deontology might even be "rigorist" since Jesus' casuistry is limited to a set of exceptionless rules. However, at the same time there is operating a vision for a righteous life which clearly transcends juridical considerations. The sheep, who enter the kingdom because of their righteous life, apparently have no "sense" of obeying certain rules as the measure of such moral fitness. An intriguing tension that we do not have time to work through; I am grateful to my colleague, C. Stephen Layman for pointing it out to me.

24Of the many works which deal with Luke's view of the law, I have found Wilson's work, Luke and the Law the most helpful. In the same series, Robert Banks, Jesus and the Law in the Synoptic Tradition (SNTSMS 28, Cambridge: University Press,1975) is helpful in comparing Luke with Matthew, and Hans Huebner's Das Gesetz in der synoptischen Tradition (Witten: Luther Verlag, 1973) is especially helpful in setting the synoptic law against Qumran and within Second Temple Judaism. While Jacob Jervell is Wilson's conversation partner, Jervell's work is more interested in Acts than in the gospel and tends to assume uncritically that Luke's view of law in Acts is consistent with the gospel; see his Luke and the People of God

25However, we must also note that Luke omits several passages about the function of law within the community of disciples found in Matthew's gospel. For example, Luke omits Mt.15:1-20 (par Mk.7:1-21) and Mt.19:3-12 (par Mk. 10:2-12) both of which address rabbinic controversies within later Judaism; passages which narrate Jesus' interaction with scribes over what is exon (i.e. over what is oral Torah), "lawful," within Judaism (Mt. 12:2, 4, 10, 12; 14:4; 19:3; 20:15; 22:17; 27:6; cf. 7:29; 15:1-20; 16:11-12; 23:4-12). Jesus' admonition to His disciples that they observe the scribal tradition (23:2-3,23) underscores for Matthew the scribal premise that Torah is always in need of interpretation. Interestingly, it is only Matthew who calls attention to converted scribes within the community of Jesus' disciples (13:52; 23:34). Further, when playing Jesus against that tradition at decisive points in the narrative, Matthew argues that it is the Son's interpretation of the Father's will and not the scribal tradition of official Judaism that is normative for the church. Of course, this polemic might in fact suggest that Matthew wrote for a church for whom Jesus' relationship to Israel's law was a problem; or perhaps for a church in conflict with the synagogue and thus for whom a precise understanding of the law's validity in the messianic age was crucial.

26Esp. Huebner, Gesetz, pp. 16-19.

27Jervell, p. 141.

28James A. Sanders, "The Ethic of Election in Luke's Great Banquet Parable," in Essays in Old Testament Ethics (ed. J. Crenshaw and J. T. Willis, New York: KTAV, 1974), 247-271.

29In our own work with the Evans/Sanders thesis, we suggest the law of mercy has three rules: single-minded in serving the interests of God; attentive to the gift of the eschatological Spirit; and a rejection of the materialistic desires of those who oppose God's reign. Obedience to these rules is the condition of Lucan discipleship.

30Mercy is always historically specific and results in a jubilary community in which all is shared, one with another.

3lAgainst the deuteronomic backdrop, the good Samaritan parable is interpreted by Dt. 7 and its command not to show mercy to the outcast-a demand which is reversed in the new age where the outcast becomes the object of mercy. The Martha-Mary episode is interpreted by Dt. 8:1-3 and its recounting of the Manna story; with Mary, the true disciple is not nourished by bread alone but loves God by listening to the Word which proceeds from the Lord's mouth.

32There is a marked difference it seems to us between the synoptic claim that Israel's law has continuing validity and the fourth gospel which replaces Torah with Jesus. In a more radical sense than the synoptic evangelists, John claims that in Christ God's will has been infleshed. The result is that Christ displaces Torah as divine law for the eternal age, so Israel's Torah has ceased to function as a part of Heilsgeschichte; cf. Eldon Jay Epp, "Wisdom, Torah, Word: The Johannine Prologue and the Purpose of the Fourth Gospel," in Current Issues in Biblical and Patristic Interpretation (Tenney FS, ed. by G. F. Hawthorne, Eerdmans, 1975) pp. 135-141. We would also call attention to John's intriguing way of speaking of Israel's Torah as "their law" (8:17; 10:34; 15:25; 18:31; cf. 19:7) in tacit contrast to Jesus' ministry as "our law."

33James A. Sanders, "Torah and Paul," in God's Christ and His People (Dahl FS, eds J. Jervell and W. A. Meeks, Oslo: Universitetsforlatet, 1977), 132. Sanders provides us with a helpful discussion of the various attempts to understand the dilemma; 132-137.

34Perhaps the best known in this regard are Hans Huebner, Law in Paul's Thought, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark. 1984) and John W. Drane, Paul: Libertine or Legalist? (London: SPCK, 1975). This view depends on a particular chronology of Pauline writings which is highly speculative and a dubious reconstruction in my view. Rhetorical critics have also pointed out how Paul's apologetical language in Galatians tends toward an uncritical and no doubt inaccurate description of his opponents' positions. Yet, we consider it highly likely that Paul's various controversies did force him to constantly rethink his positions and as a result lead him to new positions, especially regarding issues contested between Jewish and Gentile believers.

35This particular position would no doubt argue for a coherent idea of law which then is adapted to the ever-changing contingencies of his churches. Apparently discrepant accounts of the law in the believer's life, then, can be understood as a dialectic between "coherence and contingency," to use Christian Beker's term, in Paul the Apostle (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980) 11-19; also "Contingency and Coherence in the Letters of Paul," USQR 33 (1978) 141-51.

36Typically, such harmonies divide the law into various codes: there is a cultic code, a legal code, an ethical code and the like. Paul's view of the law changed depending on which code was on the table for evaluation. This is a highly dubious solution to the problem of Paul's inconsistency, however, since it is not at all apparent from Paul's letters nor from Paul's Judaism, (and certainly not from Torah itself that such distinctions were ever intended by the apostle.

37Cf. James D. G. Dunn, "The Levels of Canonical Authority," HorBT 4 (1982) 13-60.

38Sanders, "Torah and Paul," 136.

39We acknowledge the fact that Paul rarely mentions Torah in conjunction with moral precepts, and when he does, usually only as support rather than as a primary justification for following a particular rule. In point of fact, Paul seems always to drive the reader back to the story which obligates the rules. When, for example, in 1 Cor. 8-10, or in Rom. 14-15, he argues against Jewish food injunctions, or even in 1 Cor. 5-7 when he argues for Jewish sexual injunctions, his intent always is to support his preaching of the gospel. With Mohrlang we would say that "Paul wants to arouse a deeper, more internalized moral response and sense of ethical obligation than that based on mere submission to the demands of law;" 42.

40For this, see Thomas W. Olgetree's brilliant discussion, in The Use of the Bible in Christian Ethics (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) 140-46.

41For an extensive discussion of this point, see my The Nature of Obedience in the Ethics of Paul (ThD diss., Dallas Theological Seminary, 1979).

42That is, into a sectarian demand which encourages love between disciples.

43For the non-Pauline ethos as Leidenethik, see my "Introduction," 79-81.

44The gospel tradition closest to James is Matthew's, cf. Massey H. Shepherd, "The Epistle of James and the Gospel of Matthew," JBL 75 (1956) 40-51. Yet, there is much in the teaching of Matthew's Jesus which seems more radical than that of James. For example, James understands the levitical demand to love neighbor in traditional (i.e. sectarian) ways. There is even the tacit injunction to "hate" (or expel) the enemy in 2:1-7. This contrasts with Jesus' radical interpretation of neighbor as enemy in Matt. 5:43-44.

45L. T. Johnson, "The Use of Leviticus 19 in the Letter of James," JBL 101 (1982) 391-401; algo, his superb study, "Friendship with the World/ Friendship with God: A Study of Discipleship in James," in Discipleship in the New Testament (ed F. F. Segovia, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985) 166-83.

46We understand the genitive tes eleutherias (1:25; 2:12) as a genitive of purpose, and thus as specifying the purpose for which the law exists.

47We cannot take time to comment on the contested passage, James 2:14-26, except to say that within the sermon, it functions as a "footnote" to 2:13, which is the virtual center of this section of James' argument. God's endtime mercy (2:13) is given to those who are recognized by their merciful deeds (2:14-26). Those who claim their eschatological fitness by their pious words (2:14-17), by their Jewish orthodoxy (2:18-20), or by their "paulinized" (Christian?) faith (2:21-263), and do so without observing Israel's law, are simply not recognized by God at the end of time. We cannot help but notice how fundamentally different James' use of the Abraham tradition is from that of Paul in Rom. 4. In each case, midrash has been employed to justify a particular point of view. Because I view James as earlier than Romans, it would seem to me that Paul has transformed the Judaizer's use of Abraham (following Pastor James) to serve his own gospel-something he is inclined to do in Romans since his opponents are Judaizers (16:17-20).

48I do not place much stock in the distinction between Paul's "work of the law" and James' "works." Certainly in the context of James, "works" refer to obeying the law. While, "work of the law" refers to the results of law observance rather than to obeying the law per se, I think the distinction is moot in fact. Law observance, perceived soteriologically, is not an option for Paul; it denies the "work of Christ" and is therefore bankrupt.

49Book titles are "canonical properties" rather than authorial superscriptions. This is a theological rather than a purely historical claim in that the titles reflect the community's own commitments toward a book's apostolicity and its inspired content. Whether 2 Peter was written by Peter or the Pastorals by Paul is not a canonical issue; rather, the community in recognizing their inspiration did so within the theological "world" of the apostles, Peter and Paul, of Jewish and Gentile Christianity respectively.

50We would go on to argue that the Pauline corpus, which comes first, is the "greater of two equals," with the non-Pauline corpus functioning to check and balance the church's normative (i.e. Pauline) understanding of the Gospel.

51Raymond Brown, "Introduction," in Antioch & Rome (New York: Paulist, 1982) 1-9, esp. 6-8.

52Let me note three: "The Liberated Legalist," Christian Century 100 (1983) 848-89; "Introduction, " 81 83; "Biblical Foundation for Social Justice and Human Liberation, " in The Church in Response to Human Need (Monrovia, Ca: MARC, 1983) 343-72.

53However, we note Gerhard Barth's important essay, "Matthew's Understanding of the Law," in Tradition and Interpretation in Matthew (Phil: Westminster Press, 1963), pp. 58-164; and especially draw attention to the distinction Barth makes between the nomism of Matthew and that of James, as well as between their antinomian opponents (159-64). On the whole, however, Barth's work supports and deepens our own thesis: that the Jewish Christian matrix, represented in the New Testament by Matthew and James, corrects an antinomian Tendenz within the earliest Church.

54Without speculating too much in this regard, moral development theory (e.g., Kohlberg) which places such a rule-oriented ethic, with its rewards and punishments, at a more immature stage might help us adapt this paradigm to discipleship. An emphasis on law might serve a people who are new to faith, who need the sort of clarity which a casuistry brings to the moral life.

55James M. Gustafson has given us an excellent summary of Christianity's perspective toward law in his Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics (Chicago: University Press, 1978) 1-29. In his discussion, Gustafson notes the fundamental difference between the juridical approach toward law within Roman Catholicism and the more theological or spiritual focus of Protestant Christianity. In fact, he argues that neither law nor its precise interpretation has ever been important to the Protestant tradition. Yet, his analysis fails to consider the non-Reformed Protestant trajectories such as Wesleyanism. Interestingly, he locates exceptions to his general observations of the Reformed (i.e. Lutheran and Calvinistic) view of law in both the Anglican/Puritan and Anabaptist traditions, which along with the Wesleyan tradition stress sanctification and consequently have a more ethical view of law. It would be an interesting study to contrast the Reformed and non-Reformed orientations found within the Protestant church, also, to compare the juridical, halachic approach toward law found within Wesleyanism with that found within Roman Catholicism. Because Roman Catholicism locates God