Law and Gospel
yndale knew that putting the Bible into
English was not enough. A plowboy could hold the New Testament in his hands and still misread it from
cover to cover, mistaking the commands of God for the way of salvation and the promises of God for
license. So before the reader ever reached Matthew, Tyndale gave him a key.
That key was the distinction between law and gospel. It was not Tyndale’s invention. Luther had pressed it at Wittenberg, and Paul had laid it down long before either of them: “by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law” (Romans 3:20–21). The Reformers did not discover a new doctrine. They recovered a way of reading Scripture that the medieval church had allowed to blur, and in recovering it they recovered the gospel itself.
A Key to the Whole Scripture
The prologue to Tyndale’s Cologne New Testament of 1525, later reissued as a separate treatise under the title A Pathway into the Holy Scripture, opens by naming the terms every reader must understand: the Old Testament and the New, the law and the gospel, Moses and Christ, nature and grace, working and believing, deeds and faith. The danger, he warns, is confusing them:
Lest we ascribe to the one that which belongeth to the other, and make of Christ Moses; of the gospel, the law; despise grace, and rob faith; and fall from meek learning into idle disputations; brawling and scolding about words.1 William Tyndale
He closes the treatise with the promise that justifies its existence. To know these things, he says, is to have all the scripture unlocked and opened before thee, so that if thou wilt go in and read, thou canst not but understand. To be ignorant of them is to have the scripture locked up, so that the more a man reads, the blinder he becomes.2
What the Law Does
The law is God’s holy, righteous, and good command (Romans 7:12). It tells us what God requires: perfect love to Him and to our neighbor, from the heart, in all we do and all we suffer. Because it is good and we are not, it condemns us. Tyndale put it plainly: the law, whose minister is Moses, was given to bring us unto the knowledge of ourselves, that we might feel and perceive what we are by nature. It is, in Paul’s phrase, the ministry of death (2 Corinthians 3:7), for it requires of us that which is impossible for our nature to do.3
Luther had made the same point five years earlier in The Freedom of a Christian:
The whole Scripture of God is divided into two parts: precepts and promises. The precepts certainly teach us what is good, but what they teach is not forthwith done. For they show us what we ought to do, but do not give us the power to do it.4 Martin Luther
The law is not the enemy. It is the physician’s diagnosis. But no diagnosis ever healed anyone, and the medieval church had made the fatal mistake of handing sinners a diagnosis and calling it a cure.
What the Gospel Does
The gospel is not a better law, or an easier one. It is news. Tyndale reached for the Greek word itself:
Evangelion (that we call the gospel) is a Greek word; and signifieth good, merry, glad and joyful tidings, that maketh a man’s heart glad, and maketh him sing, dance, and leap for joy.5 William Tyndale
He compared it to the news that came to Israel when David killed Goliath: the enemy is slain, and the people are delivered without lifting a sword. So Christ, the true David, has fought with sin, death, and the devil and overcome them, and all who believe are, without their own merits or deservings, loosed, justified, restored to life, and reconciled to God.
Elsewhere in the Pathway he offers an image every Englishman of his day would have felt. The law condemns the thief or murderer and brings him to the scaffold, so that he sees nothing before him but present death; and then comes good tidings, a charter from the king, and delivers him.6 The law does not soften to make room for the pardon. The pardon comes from outside the law, from the king himself.
Luther again: the promises of God give that which the precepts exact, and fulfill what the law commands, so that all is of God alone, both the precepts and their fulfillment.7 What the law demands, Christ has supplied.
Two Salves
For preachers above all, the distinction is practical. Tyndale described law and gospel as the two remedies the Great Physician uses on the same patient:
These two salves (I mean the law and the gospel) useth God and his preacher, to heal and cure sinners withal.8 William Tyndale
The law is a sharp salve, a burning corrosive that draws the disease to the surface, strips a man of trust in his own works, and brings him to the end of himself. Then comes the gospel, a more gentle plaster, which soothes the wounds of the conscience and brings health. “The law goeth before,” Tyndale wrote, “and the evangelion followeth. When a preacher preacheth the law, he bindeth all consciences; and when he preacheth the gospel, he looseth them again.”
The order matters. A sinner who has never felt the law will think the gospel trivial. A sinner who has felt only the law will despair. The faithful preacher wounds in order to heal, and never leaves the wound open.
The Law in the Christian Life
Does the law then fall silent once a sinner believes? The Reformers answered no. Calvin distinguished three uses of the moral law: as a mirror, showing us our sin and driving us to Christ; as a restraint, curbing the wicked by fear of punishment; and as a guide for believers, a lamp to their feet.9 The third, he insisted, was the chief:
The third use of the Law (being also the principal use, and more closely connected with its proper end) has respect to believers in whose hearts the Spirit of God already flourishes and reigns.10 John Calvin
Tyndale says much the same in his own idiom. Before conversion the natural man rages against the law; afterward, when the conscience has tasted how sweet a thing the bitter death of Christ is, believers begin to love again, to consent to the law of God that it is good, and to desire to fulfill it, as a sick man desires to be whole. The motive has changed entirely. “Bond-servants work for hire,” he wrote, “children for love.” And again: “By faith we receive of God, and by love we shed out again.”11
The Westminster Confession, and the Second London Baptist Confession after it, gathered this into a single sentence: although true believers are not under the law as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified or condemned, yet it is of great use to them, as a rule of life informing them of the will of God and their duty.12
Lutheran and Reformed Christians have long differed in emphasis here, and the difference is real. Lutherans have guarded the law’s accusing voice so that it never crowds out the gospel; the Reformed have stressed the law as the grateful believer’s rule. But the difference is narrower than is often supposed. The Lutheran Formula of Concord devotes an entire article to the third use of the law, and both traditions confess that the law can never justify and that the believer is not without it.13 (See Lutheran versus Reformed.)
What the Distinction Does Not Mean
A tool this powerful can be misused, and it has been. Four cautions are worth keeping.
Distinguished, never separated. Tyndale himself said that “the law and the gospel may never be separate.” The law without the gospel drives to despair; the gospel without the law becomes sentiment, comfort offered to people who do not know they are sick. He kept both before his own eyes daily: the law, that he might be meek and give God all the praise; the promises, that he might not despair.14
Not Old Testament against New. It is tempting to file the Old Testament under law and the New under gospel. Tyndale’s opening definitions can sound that way, but he corrected the impression a few paragraphs later: the Old Testament contains many promises which are nothing else but the gospel, and the New Testament often speaks of the law to condemn those who do not believe the promises. The gospel was promised in Eden (Genesis 3:15) and to Abraham (Genesis 22:18), and Paul says Scripture preached it beforehand (Galatians 3:8).
Two errors, not one. Tyndale warned that two kinds of people are badly deceived. The first justify themselves by outward conformity, comparing themselves favorably with open sinners and never seeing that the law requires love from the bottom of the heart. The second give themselves to sin and say, “God is merciful, and Christ died for us,” mistaking a careless opinion for faith.15 The first error is legalism; the second is antinomianism. The Reformation had to fight both. Luther contended in the late 1530s with his colleague John Agricola, who would have banished the preaching of the law from the church, and Calvin rebuked those who boldly discard the whole law of Moses, imagining it unchristian to adhere to a doctrine which contains the ministration of death.16
A key, not a substitute for reading. The distinction unlocks Scripture; it does not replace the patient work of reading it. Tyndale’s whole purpose in writing the Pathway was to send his readers into the text, not to save them the trouble of entering it.
Why It Still Matters
The Formula of Concord called the distinction between law and gospel a special brilliant light, which serves to the end that God’s Word may be rightly divided.17 Lose that light and the church slides one of two ways. Either the gospel hardens into a program of self-improvement with Jesus as its example, or grace softens into indulgence with Jesus as its excuse. Both empty the cross.
Every pulpit must still answer Tyndale’s question. Is Christ being made into Moses? Is the gospel being turned into law? Or is the law being preached until the sinner has no hope in himself, and then Christ being held out as the charter from the King, freely given, fully sufficient, received by faith alone?
For the troubled believer the distinction is not academic. When the law accuses, and it will, the believer does not answer by pointing to his progress. He answers with the promise. The law says, “You have not done it.” The gospel says, “It is finished.” And the second word is God’s last word to all who are in Christ Jesus, for whom there is now no condemnation (Romans 8:1).
