"No Fences: Pharisees, Philosophers, Legalists, and Jesus" Chapter 1

Chapter 1: We’re Safe; Now What?

"Never give in to that sin and temptation that's lurking in the shadows, but keep constantly striving toward that burning beacon on the distant horizon."

Momma Dooright

"Flock, I just want to say a few words about them discotheques...people's in there drankin', people's in there smokin', people's in there dancin'...they get out there in the middle of the floor in a big pile, and just gyrate around like a bunch of wild heathens. I tell you what, them discotheques ain't nothin' but a regular Sodom and Gomorrah. Virgil, where are you going?"

Thurman Dooright

"I'm going to one of them discotheques!”

Virgil Dooright

There are people who judge the quality of a sermon by how guilty it makes them feel. They are motivated to do things for Christ with fear of underperforming and doing badly at the Last Judgment. They can quote venerable Christian authors better than they can quote parts of the Bible.

“A religion that costs nothing is worth nothing. A cheap Christianity, without a cross, will prove in the end a useless Christianity, without a crown.”

J.C. Ryle

Ouch. Getting crucified hurts. Wouldn't you like to skip ahead past all the unpleasant stuff and enjoy life as a citizen of Heaven? Let's investigate what the Bible actually says:

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. (Galatians 2:20)   

That's right, Christian. Many people know Christ died for you, but it's easy to forget that YOU already died, that you have been cleansed, and that you are an eternal being already (See also Colossians 2:12 and Ephesians 2:5). That thought alone will make you more patient in traffic. People struggle with keeping Christ first in their lives, but Christ is your life (Colossians 3:4). You are not living for Him as much as you are living from Him. Anyone telling you to “die to self” has forgotten that the Bible says we died with Him. You “denied yourself” by disavowing your own self-righteousness, you took up your cross, and you followed Him to the place of execution. If someone objects by referencing the half of the old Luke 9:23 manuscripts that say to take up the cross “daily”, then think of the condemned people carrying crosses who were mocked and shamed all the way to their deaths. As a Christian, you are hated by much of humanity, and you endure attacks from the Enemy/Accuser/Satan that are not a problem for the lost. Are you publicly acknowledging Him, come what may? Then, you are carrying your cross.   

That's not just one idea out of context. The Old Testament required two witnesses for a conviction, so please forgive me for sometimes providing multiple verses to support points if I seem redundant. Romans 6 has more about our co-crucifixion with Him:

What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? (Romans 6:1-2)  

Notice that Paul didn't say that the reason to avoid sin was loss of salvation or making Father mad. He already forgave us because of Jesus' finished work on the Cross. Please read Hebrews 10:14 frequently: "For by one sacrifice He has made perfect forever those who are being made holy²." Read that one more time for good measure. Yes, He said we are now perfect. Yes, He said forever. If we could mess this up or lose it, we wouldn’t be perfect forever. Colossians 1:22 also says: "But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation". He will never accuse you. 

Going back to Romans 6:

Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we will certainly also be united with Him in a resurrection like His. For we know that our old self was crucified with Him so that the body ruled by Sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to Sin — because anyone who has died has been set free from Sin³. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with Him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, He cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over Him. The death He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life He lives, He lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to Sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let Sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer any part of yourself to Sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer every part of yourself to Him as an instrument of righteousness. For Sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace. (Romans 6:3-14)

Again, the evil desires don't belong to Christians, they belong to Sin (Watchman Nee's The Normal Christian Life is the classic text arguing exactly this). Your enemy can feed you any bad idea any time, try to convince you that you thought of it, and then proceed to accuse you of being a bad Christian for having thought it. We walk by faith and not by sight. Remember, "perfect, forever, reconciled, holy, without blemish, free from accusation, etc." If what “you” seem to be thinking is out of character for a saint, then dismiss it. It’s not from you⁴.

Rather, think of our new reality (Colossians 3:2). Christ is alive! No matter what else you have going on in your life, that is happy news. Remember singing "Joy to the World'' as a child around Christmas time? "He rules the world with truth and grace"? You are united with Him. WE rule the world (although the devil is still claiming squatter’s rights per 2 Corinthians 4:4 and 1 John 5:19).  

Let's look at Ephesians 2:  

And God raised us up with Christ, and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages He might show the incomparable riches of His grace, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:6-10) 

The good works are part of the "life and life abundantly" (John 10:10) that He came to bring us. The Old Covenant is set aside (Hebrews 8:13), so the New Testament contains new instructions. The two big commands Jesus gave us for life on this side of the Cross are Believe (John 6:28-29) and Love (John 13:34-35) Jesus is Lord; believe it and say it (Romans 10:9-13). He loves us, and we love Him, so we love those that He loves. These new “laws” written on our hearts (not to be confused with the Law of Moses) are spelled out in the Gospels (like in John 6:29 and John 13:34) and in the Epistles (John says 1 John 3:23; 1 John 4:12; 1 John 4:15; 1 John 5:1; etc.; Paul agrees in Colossians 1:4; 1 Thessalonians 1:3; 1 Timothy 1:4-5; 1 Timothy 1:14; 2 Timothy 1:13; Philemon 5, etc.; Peter agrees in 1 Peter 1:21-22.)   

In John 13, Jesus used foot-washing (a menial task fit for servants) to demonstrate to the apostles how they were to love each other as He had loved them. At that point in His ministry, He hadn’t died for us yet. He didn’t wash every foot every day. This means that we basically just help each other out. This could mean consolidating the trash cans so the janitor's job is easier. It could mean supporting a ministry serving those in the greatest need (like persecuted fellow Christians or the sick, the suffering, the starving, and especially those still lacking the Bread of Life) financially. You don't have to live on gruel and pick up double shifts to do this. Remember that even a cup of water is rewarded, we give "not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Corinthians 9:7), and that a boy’s lunch was a fine donation when Jesus fed multitudes (John 6:9). He still multiplies our gifts (Hebrews 13:8). Mark’s summary of the concept “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 19:19) is “don’t cheat people” (Mark 10:19) “Love” in Hebrew is less about fuzzy feelings than about loyal actions (hesed) like helping each other, not swindling each other, not speaking ill of each other⁵, etc.

You may have had a favorite stuffed toy as a child. It may have always smiled and been relentlessly cheerful despite how it was treated or what was going on in the world. Was it radically accepting of the harsh realities of life, grinning madly at the world through a perspective espoused by Nietzsche or the cannibalistic Aghori (that live among tombs like the Gerasene demoniac)? Had it been driven crazy already by this world, pulled toward the insanity around us like gravity? No, the plushie was cheerful and unconditionally supportive for the purpose of comforting you. Was it lying? No, the deeper truth is that it was just being the way it was made. Their smiles are genuine because they could be no other way than how their maker intended. This is true of us as well. We “new creations'' in Christ are naturally loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, benevolent, loyal, good, and stable; we can be very comforting to others when we learn to stop thinking that God is keeping score with us, get over ourselves, and listen. Some children play that the plushies are their babies. It is a much bigger leap for the God of the universe to call me His son than for one of His creatures to adopt their stuffed friend. You are the light of the world, reflecting Him, and maybe the teddy bear of the world too.  

So why do we worry about what to do at all? The New Testament tells us that Christ is the end of the Law for believers and that being under Law encourages sinning, yet it then gives us many behavioral instructions⁶. Yes, that seems contradictory. However, Israel as a priestly kingdom (Exodus 19:6) was given the Law of Moses for a specific purpose (Romans 3:19): to demonstrate everyone’s need for grace (Romans 3:20). There are still behaviors that God considers sinful among groups of people that were not under the Law of Moses, and we can see violations of those universal principles for humanity being punished before the Law of Moses was given. Additionally, the situation then is like the situation now. You can tell someone they have a new heart that wants what God wants (and doesn't want what He doesn't want), they have a new human spirit, and they have the Holy Spirit living within them guiding them to everything they need to know. You can tell them that Romans 14:4, Hebrews 13:20-21, Philippians 1:6, Philippians 2:13, and Jude 24 reiterate that Jesus was telling the truth in John 15 that much fruit for God will be grown from those united with Him (which He prayed for you to be in John 17, and His prayers definitely got answered). It's an oversimplification to think of yourself as a happy little sock puppet once you've trusted Christ to live through you; it's Him and you in union forever (John 17:23). You, as your new self, are not an obstacle to God. Paul in Galatians 5:22-23 tells us that the Gardener is growing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in us right now. A branch on the Vine doesn't sit there all day stressing out about making more and bigger fruit. You can tell believers that sinning will never satisfy them (Galatians 5:17), that they are allergic to sinning and addicted to righteousness (Romans 6:18), and that the behavioral instructions are a description of the only lifestyle that will make sense as a new creation in Christ, or as 2 Timothy 2:19 states:  

Nevertheless, God’s solid foundation stands firm, sealed with this inscription: “The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Everyone who confesses the name of the Lord must turn away from wickedness.”  

That “must” is a promise, not a threat. Believers are saints, and eventually all of their conduct will match their new identities. Even knowing this, inevitably, a brother in Christ will raise his hand and (worriedly or impishly) ask, "How much wickedness?" That notion comes from a lack of understanding of whether sinning is fun (it's not), but also a lack of understanding of what things are actually sinful. Words are buckets we put meaning into, and their meanings drift over time. Much of our New Testament consists of English translations of letters in Greek that were to former pagans, whose wild lifestyles most of us no longer understand, written by a reformed Pharisee, whose Hebrew Scriptures were also written in a context that most of us no longer understand. The Pharisees tried very hard to be holy; their name means “set apart”. Rather than leaving the world to form a separate community like the Essenes, the later celibate “desert fathers”, or monks (celibacy kept inheritance issues about Church property simple), the Pharisees set themselves apart within Hellenized Jewish society with their scrupulousness. The Pharisees cared so much about pleasing God that they invented extra rules to "put a fence" around the actual rules to make sure they didn't get too close to messing up. There seems to be something admirable in that. Then again, 2 of the 613 parts of the Law of Moses say “don’t add to or subtract from the Law” (Deuteronomy 4:2, Deuteronomy 12:32), so when some of them got very judgmental about fellow worshipers of God that didn't fit their mold, Jesus didn't like that very much at all, to make a huge understatement⁷. 

A fun game to play with popular Bible commentaries is "What New Testament Verse Says the Opposite of What This Says". For example, let’s look at Psalm 80:3,7,19: "Turn us again to yourself, O God, Make your face shine down upon us. Only then will we be saved." One of the writers of the bestselling NLT Study Bible notes looks at this appeal to God for the help that only He can give us and focuses the reader right back onto their own works again instead, saying: "Before God can turn us to himself, we must turn away from sin. Repentance involves humbling ourselves and turning to God to receive his forgiveness. As we turn to God, he helps us see ourselves, including our sin, more clearly. Then, as we see our sin, we must repeat the process of repentance. Only then can we constantly be restored to fellowship with God." That line of thinking condemns everyone to Hell. We all stumble in many ways (James 3:2), no one’s memory or legal pad is good enough to catch all their sins, and obedience to God is an all-or-nothing proposition (James 2:10). God doesn’t forgive based on apologies; He accepts blood (Hebrews 9:22). We already had turn-or-burn behavior improvement under the Old Covenant (Ezekiel 18 is a fine explanation) all the way up to John the Baptist; Jesus is better. John 12:32 says Jesus draws all men to himself; that other commentator tries to limit Him. The New Covenant is based on Jesus’ obedience (2 Corinthians 5:21), the once-for-all forgiveness earned by His sacrifice (Hebrews 10:1-18), and His indestructible life (Hebrews 7:25), not our efforts and hopes that God grades on a curve. If you’ve given up any notion of entitlement based on your own righteousness and asked Him to save you, He has, and you shouldn’t worry about “falling out of fellowship” with the Savior you share a Spirit with (1 Corinthians 6:17), that lives in you, and is united with you (John 17:23). Colossians 2:13-15 says you’re already forgiven, and the records where your sins would be recorded are destroyed. It is living in the reality of your perfect cleansing (Hebrews 10:14) that makes sinning undesirable anymore (2 Peter 1:9). Turning from sin is a natural consequence of turning to Him and realizing that He has made you new.  

People call and write ministries with questions that are variations of "Please, just tell me what to do!" This book is not a complete guide to that (Romans 12 is a great start), but this is an attempt at alleviating the anxieties of the questioners. Trusting Christ to produce His life within you (as a “walk” not a “work”—behaving because it makes sense given how you’re wired now, not to “earn” salvation) while reckoning yourself dead to Sin and alive to God are great, but knowing what thoughts come from Sin and what thoughts are your own require knowledge of what is sinful, and thought-screening becomes a work in itself. Paul in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 would have us consult Scripture, so let us do exactly that since our consciences can be programmed by anything, godly or not. Since I intend to stick to the Bible in as original a context as we can achieve in this century, I expect downvotes from the same legalists that accused Paul of preaching a license to sin and from the "anything goes" crowd that uses Paul as a license to sin. To avoid a cult of personality and to speak freely of matters shared in confidence, I intend to release this book anonymously. The hucksters that Paul warned us about, the ones in it for the money, the ones that sell behavior books, the ones with "donate" tabs on their sites, etc., probably won't like this book. I intend to make it available for free.  

If I get hit by a bus before I write all of this, or if you do before you finish reading it, know up front that if you are a believer in Christ, your behavior is not your primary concern. As in Jesus' day, the Accuser wants us focused on our behavior and not on our Savior. If Satan cannot prevent your salvation, he will settle for keeping you in full-time ministry to yourself to keep you from helping anyone else. In general, the crowd that reads Christian books could worry a lot less and radiate more joy. Who knows? Someone else might notice it and give you a chance to share the Good News of Jesus. Whether we know it or not, most of Western culture’s values and mores were derived from Judaism and Christianity; the worst thing about many people nowadays within driving distance of me is that they don't believe in Jesus (John 16:9), and that's an easy fix. Billy Graham's “big tent” “easy believe-ism” is great; we can work on the rest later. If people wait until they are “ready” to be saved, they will never come at all. I speak of “cheap grace” you say? No, it cost Jesus everything, and for us it is free; it is cheap for no one⁸. He will never leave us, He will never forsake us, no created thing can snatch us from His hand, and we as created things cannot crawl out of it, either. We did nothing to merit our salvation, and we can do nothing to mess it up. When Paul frets over the possibility of being “disqualified” in 1 Corinthians 9:27, he means in ministry. He avoided messing up his witness. 1 Corinthians 10:33 clarifies this. Paul was not trying to negate any of Jesus’ promises of eternal security in John 6. Jesus drew large crowds and was a popular dinner guest. Creepy and angry guys are not popular with children as a rule (Matthew 19:13-15). Would He have gotten so many party invitations if He acted like King Nahash the Eye-Poker of Ammon (1 Sam 11)? He didn’t take out eyes and chop off hands; He healed people wherever He went. The eye and hand rhetoric in the Sermon on the Mount is about the impossibly high standard of the Law, and it is a part of the same cultural hyperbole that He employed when He spoke of walking around with a wooden beam in your eye. He forgave His own killers, namely us (Isaiah 53:5, Luke 23:34). He protected his own disciples when they were caught violating the Sabbath, and He protected a woman caught in the act of adultery. Jesus lives forever to intercede for us (Hebrews 7:25); we are protected by the power of His indestructible life. God accepts Christ’s blood (2 Corinthians 5:17-21, Hebrews 9:22), and Christ is not dying over and over again (Hebrews 9:25-28). He finished the job completely. You’re not being forgiven little by little or sin by sin; Christians are totally forgiven people.

Let us begin in prayer:  

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, oh Lord, my strength, and my redeemer. Gracious heavenly Father, because You are our light, and our salvation, we have no need to be afraid. We thank You for not giving us a spirit of fear, but a spirit of power and of love. Father, we thank You for holding us in the palm of Your hand securely, never to be snatched away or to wander off again. Thank You for filling us with the power of Your love, and for casting out all fear. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

2  The main verb, "has made perfect" (teteleiōken), is a perfect-tense verb: a past action with continuing present effect. The participle describing the recipients, "those who are being made holy" (tous hagiazomenous), is a present passive participle. This need not describe a gradual approach toward a holiness not yet possessed; Hebrews 10:10 and 1 Corinthians 6:11 both state sanctification as an already-completed fact ("we have been made holy," "you were sanctified"), so the present participle in Hebrews 10:14 is better read as describing the ongoing unfolding, in lived experience and in the community across time, of a positional holiness already whole from the start culminating with receiving our new bodies. From an acorn to a tree, the sapling is an oak all along. Commentators across a range of theological traditions agree that the author of Hebrews is deliberately holding a completed standing (perfected, once for all, in respect of access to God and cleansing from sin's guilt) together with this unfolding in a single sentence (see, e.g., the discussion of Hebrews' "already perfected / being sanctified" tension in Attridge 1989, 280–83). The warning passages in Hebrews 6 and Hebrews 10 are the subject of a genuine, longstanding, and still unresolved four-way scholarly division, most thoroughly mapped by Thomas Schreiner and Ardel Caneday's The Race Set Before Us. (1) The genuine-loss-of-salvation view, defended at length by Scot McKnight's widely cited formal analysis of the warning texts, reads the passages as addressed to real believers with real, if disputed, eschatological stakes attached to willful apostasy (McKnight 1992). (2) The classical Reformed "never truly regenerate" view, associated historically with Augustine, Calvin, and Owen, reads the warned-of persons as professing members of the visible covenant community who shared in its blessings without ever being inwardly regenerate, such that their falling away simply discloses what was already true rather than describing a loss. (3) A hypothetical-warning view, associated with Chrysostom among the church fathers and some later Reformed scholastics, reads the conditional "if they fall away" as a rhetorically real but never actually realized warning, functioning solely to spur perseverance. (4) Schreiner and Caneday's own "means of perseverance" proposal holds the warnings to be a genuine, effective instrument God uses to keep his true people persevering, such that the warning is neither hypothetical nor ever actually fulfilled in the life of a true believer, without collapsing into the "never regenerate" view's account of who is being addressed (Schreiner and Caneday 2001, 137–61). None of the four readings requires believers to re-secure, through ongoing obedience, a standing Hebrews 10:14 has already declared to be complete. Even the genuine-loss view (1) locates the danger in a decisive, willful renunciation of Christ altogether. Instead of any of those, I maintain that the Book of Hebrews' original audience faced the temptation to cling to the comfortable tradition of Temple sacrificial worship with its accompanying social and economic benefits instead of accepting Christ, and that the warnings target that concrete, imminent choice rather than describing ordinary Christian struggle with sin. This sits closest to option (2), and is not an idiosyncratic invention: the connection between the warnings, and especially Hebrews 10:26–31's language of "deliberately continuing to sin" after receiving "knowledge of the truth," and a live temptation to return to Jerusalem worship before the Temple's destruction in 70 C.E. is a recognized element of the letter's reconstructed historical occasion in the standard commentaries (Cockerill 2012, 21–31, on the letter's setting and audience). It is the sin of unbelief that is in focus throughout Hebrews. The audience had “tasted” the Holy Spirit (as in Hebrews 6:5) throughout their history, and had especially seen the Spirit’s power in the events of Acts 2.

3  “Were baptized," "were buried," and "our old self was crucified" (Romans 6:6) are all aorist-tense verbs describing a completed past event, not a process. Douglas Moo's commentary on Romans, representative of the mainstream exegetical consensus, treats this as decisive against readings that turn Romans 6 into a program of gradual self-crucifixion: Paul is describing something that happened to the believer at conversion-baptism, understood as incorporation into Christ, not a discipline to be undertaken repeatedly (Moo 2018, 369–86). Believers do not achieve union with Christ's death through effort; they are described as having already received it. However, Romans 6:4 does not say "we were buried with him, therefore we are finished"; it says we were united with him in his death "in order that . . . we too may live a new life." Our identity is settled: the walking-out of that identity is still described as future and expected, which is why the chapter ends not in celebration alone but in the exhortations "do not let sin reign in your mortal body" (Romans 6:12) and "offer yourselves to God" (Romans 6:13).

4  The 1984 New International Version rendered Paul's word sarx ("flesh") in several key passages (e.g., Romans 7:18, 8:3–9) as "sinful nature," a paraphrase intended to clarify the sense for English readers. The Committee on Bible Translation's 2011 revision of the NIV deliberately reverted to the more literal "flesh" across these passages, judging that "sinful nature" imported more theological precision than the Greek term carries on its own and obscured Paul's broader, more flexible use of sarx to denote the whole embodied, fallen human orientation toward self-reliance (see the CBT's published translation notes accompanying the 2011 NIV; cf. discussion in Schreiner 2018, 373–75 on the semantic range of sarx in Romans 7–8). Genesis 4:7 personifies Sin explicitly and early, as an agent crouching at the door with a desire of its own ("Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you"), addressed to Cain before he acts — and Romans 6:12's "do not let Sin reign in your mortal body" echoes this personification closely enough that a reader of the Greek Old Testament would likely hear the allusion. Both texts use that personification in the same breath as an imperative addressed to the human will: Genesis 4:7 continues, "but you must rule over it," and Romans 6:12–13 continues with a series of commands ("do not let... do not offer... offer yourselves"). It is defensible to say that Scripture does not teach believers to identify their truest, Spirit-given self with the impulse to sin (Romans 6:6, "our old self was crucified"; 2 Corinthians 5:17, "the new creation has come"). The exegetical debate over whether Paul speaks in Romans 7:14-25 about his own persona as a believer, or rhetorically as pre-Christian under Torah, remains genuinely unsettled; see the summary of positions in Moo 2018, 468–76.

5  Where Matthew's version of Jesus's answer to the rich young man lists the Decalogue commands and then adds "love your neighbor as yourself" as the summarizing addition (Matt. 19:18–19), Mark's parallel list, in the same structural position, has "do not defraud" instead (Mark 10:19). The two Gospels are not reporting contradictory sayings; they are evidence that the tradition treated "love your neighbor" and "do not cheat people in your dealings with them" as functionally interchangeable ways of naming the same concrete requirement. This supports reading love, in its New Testament ethical use, as hesed-shaped faithful action — treating others fairly within the existing social and economic framework of the Bible, the way one would want to be treated inside that same framework — rather than as a mandate to dismantle the framework itself, which is consistent with, and helps explain, the New Testament's general pattern of regulating existing social structures (marriage, household governance, slavery, civil authority) rather than calling for their abolition.

6  This is not a novel observation. New Testament scholars have long noted that Paul's letters follow a recognizable shape: an extended statement of what God has done (the indicative), followed by an extended exhortation to live accordingly (the imperative). Rudolf Bultmann framed the relationship as "become what you are," and Victor Paul Furnish's landmark study Theology and Ethics in Paul traced how consistently Paul's imperatives are grounded in, rather than added to, the prior indicative of what has happened to believers in Christ (Furnish 1968). The answer offered by the Reformed biblical-theological tradition (associated with Geerhardus Vos and developed at length by Herman Ridderbos in Paul: An Outline of His Theology) is that Paul's theology is structured by an "already/not yet" eschatological tension: the decisive turn of the ages has already occurred in Christ's death and resurrection, and believers already participate in it, but the full unveiling of that reality, including the resurrection of the body, remains future (Ridderbos [1966] 1975, 44–90). Believers are, in Paul's indicative statements, dead to sin and alive to God (Romans 6:11), a settled, past-tense, judicial and participatory fact. They are also, in the same letter, warned not to let sin reign in their mortal bodies (Romans 6:12). That ongoing exhortation only makes sense because the body has not yet caught up with the verdict. New Testament scholarship on salvation in Paul has long recognized two distinct, complementary categories of description: a forensic (law-court) category, in which the believer is declared righteous (justification) and a participatory category, in which the believer is joined to Christ's death and resurrection so as to share in their effects. Sanders described Paul's soteriology as fundamentally "participationist" rather than juridical (Sanders 1977, 502–8), a claim that provoked considerable and ongoing debate among scholars working in more traditional Reformation categories, who insist the forensic language of Romans 3–5 cannot be reduced to a metaphor for something more basic underneath it (see, e.g., the exchanges collected in Campbell 2012, 33–66). The more defensible position, and the one this book adopts, is not that one category replaces the other but that Paul holds both simultaneously and moves fluidly between them: Romans 3–5 argues the case in forensic terms (righteousness reckoned, not achieved); Romans 6 shifts to participatory terms (union with Christ in his death and resurrection) precisely in order to answer an objection that forensic language alone invites — if righteousness is a legal verdict rather than an achievement, why not sin more to display more grace (Romans 6:1)? Paul's answer is not primarily a warning about consequences; it is a claim about what has already happened to the person asking the question. Constantine Campbell's exegetical survey of every occurrence of "in Christ" and cognate language in the Pauline corpus concludes that union with Christ functions in Paul as an organizing center that draws together justification, “sanctification” (behavior improvement), and future glorification (receiving our new bodies) as different facets of one reality: we participate in Christ's own history (Campbell 2012, 401–13). On this reading, Romans 6:1–14 is not a digression into ethics after the doctrinal argument of Romans 3–5 is finished; it is the outworking of the same participatory logic that made justification possible in the first place. Frank Thielman's survey Paul and the Law says that Paul does not replace Torah with lawlessness, but with what Paul himself calls "the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2) and "the law of the Spirit of life" (Romans 8:2) — a moral pattern continuous with much of the Mosaic law's content (especially its love-command core, Romans 13:8–10) but grounded in a different covenant, mediated by a different Lawgiver, and enabled by a different power, the indwelling Spirit rather than an external code (Thielman 1994, 235–46). The positive content of "the law of Christ" is not left for the interpreter to construct from scratch out of general love-of-neighbor sentiment. The Gospel of John and the Johannine epistles state it as a pair of named, repeated commands. Jesus identifies "the work of God" as believing in the one God has sent (John 6:28–29), and gives his disciples "a new command" to love one another as he has loved them, naming this as the mark by which "all men will know that you are my disciples" (John 13:34–35). First John draws the two together explicitly: "this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us" (1 John 3:23). Paul's letters, working independently of John's vocabulary, arrive at a structurally identical pair: righteousness comes through faith (Romans 10:9–13) and the whole law is summed up in the single command to love one's neighbor (Romans 13:8–10; Galatians 5:14). This is not merely this book's own synthesis; it reflects a broader recognition in New Testament ethics scholarship that love-of-neighbor functions as the organizing center from which specific behavioral instruction is derived, rather than existing as one item on a list of comparable commands. Victor Paul Furnish's dedicated monograph The Love Command in the New Testament traces this pattern across the Synoptics, John, Paul, and the general epistles, arguing that the love command functions less as a discrete rule than as a hermeneutical key that generates and governs the more specific instructions surrounding it (Furnish 1972, 195–222). Richard Hays's widely used synthesis The Moral Vision of the New Testament likewise treats love, understood concretely as cruciform, self-giving action rather than sentiment, as one of the primary lenses through which the New Testament's diverse ethical material coheres (Hays 1996, 200–203, 356–72). In addition to Believe, Love, and the apostolic decrees from Acts 15 is the New Testament's recurring concern that Christian conduct not needlessly damage the church's public reputation or its evangelistic access to a watching, and in the first century often suspicious, Greco-Roman society "so that the word of God may not be discredited" (Titus 2:5), "so that you may win the respect of outsiders" (1 Thessalonians 4:12), "make the teaching about God our Savior attractive" (Titus 2:10). David Balch's study of the household codes in 1 Peter, the standard scholarly treatment of this material, argues that the codes governing marriage, parenting, and master-slave relations in Ephesians 5–6, Colossians 3–4, Titus 2, and 1 Peter 2–3 function at least partly as a considered apologetic response to specific Roman anxiety that foreign religious associations subverted household order (Balch 1981, 81–116). This is best understood as one outworking of loving one's neighbor, including the neighbor not yet reached by the gospel, under a specific set of first-century social conditions.

7  Pirkei Avot 1:1 records the rabbinic instruction to "make a fence around the Torah" (asu syag laTorah), the Pharisees' extra rules, meant to guard against ever approaching a real transgression. Jesus's complaint in Matthew 23:4 is not necessarily against fences as such but against human-invented rules that become "heavy loads" placed on others' shoulders without lifting a finger to help carry them. Feel free to exercise common sense in your own life without burdening others.

8  Any argument that leads with unconditional acceptance invites a specific objection, most famously associated with Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship: that grace detached from obedience becomes "cheap grace," a covering for sin without any cost to the sinner (Bonhoeffer [1937] 1959). Bonhoeffer and other participationists: Bonhoeffer maintained that "a faith without obedience is no faith at all" a la James’ “faith without works is dead.” Bonhoeffer's target, however, was grace preached as a general amnesty detached from the cross and from any transformation of life — grace as a doctrine to be believed rather than a person, Christ, to be encountered and obeyed. That is a different claim from the one this book makes. The argument here is not that obedience is optional because grace is free; it is that, on Paul's own account, a definite change of allegiance and identity ("united with him in a death like his," Romans 6:5) precedes and produces the change in behavior, rather than behavior producing or maintaining the standing with God. God will do what He says He will do in the lives of believers.Bonhoeffer pointed to examples like Judas Iscariot to show that a person can be a participant in ministry and still ultimately fall away through betrayal and disobedience. However, Judas was an unbeliever (John 6:64-71) who died before Pentecost and was therefore unregenerate. The works James 2 points to are one-time responses to God, like a hooker opening a door (like we do to Christ). We can’t mess this up (2 Timothy 2:13, Hebrews 7:25); if we could, we would not be “perfect forever” (Hebrews 10:14). Jesus is way better at being our savior than we are at being sinners.

Previous Post

Next Post