Love vs. The Law (by John Murray)
A Supplemental Introduction to a future series on Christian Ethics
We here at Reformed Every Day have probably been a bit loosy-goosy with copyright stuff sometimes when quoting the works of faithful Reformed authors… but this is probably the worst example yet. So I will probably delete post in the near future, but I push my luck because:
I believe that argument made here by the late Dr. John Murray is so perfectly stated and relevant for our moment here in the CRCNA that I need everyone to read it!
The following is an extended passage from the first chapter “Introductory Questions”
in John Murray’s book “Principles of Conduct: Aspects of Biblical Ethics”.
((Murray Puts Forth A Rhetorical Question:))
It is the great truth, embedded in the Old Testament as well as in the New, that love is the fulfilling of the law, and that on two commandments, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God' and 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself', hang all the law and the prophets (cf. Romans 13: 10; Matthew 22: 37-40). Among students of Christian ethics no datum is more universally admitted or regarded as more incontrovertibly established than this, that love is the fulfilling of the law.
It must be recognized, of course, that the love spoken of in this connection is love in the human heart, the outflow of love to God and our fellowmen. It is true, of course, that this love to God and men is constrained in the human breast because the love of God to us is shed abroad in our hearts. We love him because he first loved us. But when love is said to be the fulfilment of the law, it is the love to God that is in view. Hence, incontestably, the fulfilment of the law springs from love to God and our fellowmen. And this must mean that the practice of the biblical ethos, the bringing to expression and fruition of the behaviour required and approved by the biblical revelation, springs from this love. It must follow that, to the extent to which this love governs us, to that extent we fulfil the demands of the biblical ethic. Where there is the perfection of love there will be the perfection of both ethical character and behaviour. Love never fails, and perfect love casts out fear.
Is not the inference inevitable, therefore, that the norms and canons which define or exemplify the biblical ethic are simply the readings of love's dictates, the crystallizations and formulations of the necessary outflow of love to God and our fellowmen? Or, to put it in terms of the earlier analysis, is not the biblical ethic the sum-total of the ways in which the renewed consciousness of man reacts to the demands of the diversified concrete situations in which he is placed? The common principles which characterize this ethic proceed from the fact that the renewed consciousness will react in principially similar ways to situations that are essentially similar in nature and circumstance. This construction of the scriptural ethic, it could be said, makes full allowance for what is standard and normal, on the one hand, and yet allows for the variety or diversity that is necessitated by personal individuality and the particularity or singularity of each situation.
((Murray Answers the Rhetorical Question:))
In the analysis and resolution of this question we are concerned with the cardinal issues of the biblical ethic, and at this point, therefore, we shall have to enter upon a rather extended discussion.
1. Love is without question the fulfilling of the law. It might be more accurate to say that love is the fulfilment of the law. It will surely not be challenged if we say that love is both emotive and motive; love is feeling and it impels to action. If it does not impel to the fulfilment of the law, it is not the love of which the Scripture here speaks. In a word, the action to which love impels is the action which is characterized as the fulfilment of the law. Again, since love is in the category of feeling which creates affinity with the object and constrains the outflow of affection for the object, the fulfilment which love constrains is not the fulfilment of coerced and unwilling formal compliance, but the fulfilment of cheerful and willing obedience. Without such constraining and impelling love there is really no fulfilment of the law. Law prescribes the action, but love it is that constrains or impels to the action involved. This appears to be the essence of Paul's thought in Romans 13: 8-10. The emphasis is upon the necessity of love for our neighbour as that which constrains to the absence of ill-doing and the practice of well-doing. It is impossible for the prescriptions of law to have scope in our relationships to our fellowmen unless love reigns supreme, love as both expulsive and impulsive affection, expulsive of evil and impulsive to good.
Perhaps we have not yet expressed the kernel of Paul's thought when he says that 'love is the fulfilment of the law'. The thought appears to be that it is love that carries into effect the law of God; love constitutes the fulfilment of the law. It is the motive and active principle of fulfilment. Love renders to the requirements enunciated in the law the full measure of the obedience demanded. If we may use the metaphor, love fills to the brim the cup which the law puts into our hands. Love is the first drop; it is the last drop; and it is all the drops in between. From start to Finish it is love that fulfills the law. When love is all-pervasive and inclusive, then the fulfilment of the law is completed. It is obvious how embracive this concept of love is; it is not otiose emotion but love as both emotive and motive, intensely preoccupied with him who is its supreme object, and therefore intensely active in the doing of his will. Any analysis of the biblical ethic that fails to assess the import and function of love in these characteristic features misses the witness of the Old Testament as well as of the New.
2. In the attempt to discover the origin of the norms and canons of the biblical ethic, we must not forget that love to God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind and love to our neighbour as ourselves are themselves commandments. We are commanded to love God and our neighbour. The antithesis which is oftentimes up between love and commandment overlooks this elementary fact. Love itself is exercised in obedience to a commandment - 'Thou shalt love'. We cannot get away from the fact that love in this case is not ultimate or original. Love Lo is dictated by a consideration that is prior to itself. Love is obedience to a commandment which comes from a source other than itself; it does not autonomously excogitate or create itself. We must resist that perverse conception of the nature of love that we cannot be commanded to love, that love must be spontaneous and cannot be evoked by demand. It is true that the command or demand will not itself create the love. Commandment of itself has no power to generate love or elicit obedience. But it by no means follows that love is not commanded. Love is commanded, and love is exercised in response to the commandment even though it is not the commandment that creates or generates that response. In this respect the commandment to love is like every other commandment. The commandment to feed the hungry, for example, does not itself create the disposition or will to do so; but feeding the hungry is action elicited in response to the commandment.
This fact that to love is itself a commandment-should serve to expose at the outset the fallacy and perversity of that pattern of thought which is intolerant of the notion of keeping or observing commandments. If this notion is not biblical then we shall have to eliminate the commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets.
3. When Jesus said, 'On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets', or Paul wrote, 'Love is the fulfilment of the law', there is in both cases an obvious distinction between love and the law that hangs on it, and between love and the law that it fulfils. Jesus did not say, 'Love is the whole law', nor Paul, 'Love is the law'. In neither case do love and law have the same denotation. Hence there must be content to the law that is not defined by love itself. We may speak, if we will, of the law of love. But, if so, what we must have in view is the commandment to love or the law which love fulfills. We may not speak of the law of love if we mean that love is itself the law. Love cannot be equated with the law nor can law be defined in terms of love. A good deal of ethical theory has ignored the most elementary canon of interpretation when it seeks to develop the ethic of love in abstraction from the denotation and connotation of the law of which our Lord and the apostle spoke.
4. When we examine the witness of the Scripture itself as to the origin of the canons of behaviour which the Scripture approves, we do not find that love is allowed to discover or dictate its own standards or patterns of conduct. We do not find that the renewed heart is allowed spontaneously to excogitate the ethic of the saints of God. We do not find that love is conceived of as an autonomous, self-acting agency which of itself, apart from any extraneous prescription or regulation, defines its own norms of behaviour. We do find that, from the beginning, there are objectively revealed precepts, institutions, commandments which are the norms and channels of human behaviour. Even man in innocence was not permitted to carve for himself the path of life; it was charted for him from the outset.
5. It is easy to see the difficulties that would embarrass love if it were left to itself to devise the ways and means of its self-realization. We think very naïvely indeed if we suppose that love can spontaneously decide the mode of its expression. It is only because we have become habilitated to the biblical revelation of law and commandment, because our thinking has been informed to such an extent by the revelation of God's will as deposited in the Scripture, that we could ever have entertained the thought that love dictates the law of its activity or the modes of its behaviour. If we should envisage a situation in which love would be abstracted from all special revelation respecting God's will for thought and conduct, we could discern more readily the impossibility of the hypothesis that love prescribes its own law or that love is the law. This love which is the fulfilling of the law has always existed and been operative in the context of revelation from God respecting his will. And the hypothesis amounts to an abstraction that has never been true in human experience. Experiment in terms of the hypothesis is likewise an impossibility; we can never abstract our consciousness or its operations from the influence exerted upon it by that revelation with which it is informed. And neither could we abstract love from the indelible influence exerted upon it by the context of revelation within which it has come to exist.
6. In connection with the law written upon the heart of the renewed person, we must recognize that the law referred to in those contexts where this inscription is mentioned (Jeremiah 31: 33; Hebrews 8: 10; 10: 16) is the law which, as respects its content, has been revealed and deposited for us in the Scripture. The thought of the passages is not that we come to know what the law is by reading the inscription upon the heart. The thought is rather that there is generated in the heart an affinity with and a love to the law, to the end that there may be cheerful, spontaneous, loving fulfilment of it (cf. Psalm 40: 8, 9). The writing of the law upon the heart in the renewing operations of grace is parallel and similar to that which must have been true in Adam's state of integrity. Adam was created in the image of God in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. The analogy of Scripture teaching would indicate that this implied the inscription of the law of God upon his heart. But it is abundantly clear that this inscription did not obviate the necessity of giving to Adam positive directions respecting the activity which was to engage interest, occupation, and life in this world. We must not focus our attention upon the specific prohibition of Eden respecting the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to such an extent that we overlook the other commandments given to Adam, commandments germane to the most basic interests of life in this world (cf. Genesis 1: 27, 28; 2: 2, 3, 15, 24). All of these commandments bear closely upon our question; but some of them are more directly pertinent. The procreative mandate, for example, had respect to the exercise of one of his fundamental instincts. Adam as created must have been endowed with the sex impulse which would have sought satisfaction and outlet in the sex act. But he was not left to the dictates of the sex impulse and of the procreative instinct; these were not a sufficient index to God's will for him. The exercise of this instinct was expressly commanded and its exercise directed to the achievement of a well-defined purpose. Furthermore, there was the marital ordinance within which alone the sex act was legitimate.
These original mandates are germane to our present inquiry precisely because they are so closely related to the powers and instincts with which man is naturally endowed, and they show unmistakably that native endowment or instinct is not sufficient for man's direction even in the state of original integrity. The exercise of native instincts, the institutions within which they are to be exercised, and the ends to be promoted by their exercise are prescribed by specially revealed commandments. If all this is true in a state of sinless integrity, when there was no sin to blind vision or depravity to pervert desire, how much more must expressly prescribed directions be necessary in a state of sin in which intelligence is blinded, feeling depraved, conscience defiled, and will perverted!
The conclusion to which we are driven, therefore, is that the notion we are controverting, namely, that love is its own law and the renewed consciousness its own monitor, is a fantasy which has no warrant from Scripture and runs counter to the witness of the biblical teaching.