Love, Law, and Wrath

Love, Law, and Wrath October 21, 2015

Robert Jenson grasps the attractions of antinomianism: “perhaps only on the edge of antinomianism does the true bite of the gospel appear” (Ezekiel, 62). 

Yet Christians must stop short of the edge, because “falling over that edge is . . . the disaster of faith.” This is not because we need to balance God’s gracious, loving choice with the demands of God’s law. Rather, love requires the imposition of statutes and ordinances. A lawless love is “a mere oxymoron” (62).

This is because of the inherent nature of love, which “contains an intention for the other.” Absent such intention, “the choice is not personal but rather arbitrary or mechanistically determined. And the intention of one person for another intrinsically displays some construal of their mutual good., unless again the chooser is a demon or automaton. If God chose Israel in love, then this included his intention that they together live one kind of life and not another, and the difference is delineated in Torah.” This is not lost in the New Testament, where Paul teaches that God chooses believers in love “to be persons bringing the fruits of the Spirit and not of ‘the flesh’” (62).

For similar reasons, wrath is inherent in God’s love. Moderns want God to be “a disinterested judge, on the model of one behind the bench of a British or American courtroom.” Disinterested is exactly what God is not: “his boundless personal investment in his creatures is his most determining characteristic. His law is not something he devises and administers, it is his active personal will, which thus defines also who and what he himself is.” Thus, when His law is flouted, He is “personally offended” (63). Because He is a lover, He is jealous. 

This is not a negotiable piece of ancient myth, but intrinsic to the gospel: “as the gospel construes our situation, our only hope is God’s personal stake in the good he wills for us” (63).


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