The Law Of Love?

There is a very large part of Christendom which teaches that the moral Law of God, as given in the Decalogue, has been replaced by the "Law of Christ" and is not to be found in any "codified" (arrange according to a plan or system) sense but rather comes from the believer's new desire, by the leading of the Spirit, to love our neighbor.

To this Dr. Robert Reymond explains their view a bit more and demonstrates why it should be rejected:

Bruce’s proposal and proposals resembling it—heard so often today that the position has acquired among Christian ethicists its own special designation, namely, ‘Christian Intuitionism’—is that the renewed consciousness of the Christian has an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong. A popular version of this ethical theory is expressed by the words, ‘As a Christian I don’t need a written code of regulations. The law of love, infused within me by the Holy Spirit, will lead me to do the right thing.’ This proposal urges that since the heart of the believer is renewed after the image of God in knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and love, the renewed person will spontaneously respond in the only way that bespeaks the divine exemplar after which the heart has been renewed. Of course, since the same renewal occurs over time in the hearts of a great number of individuals, which renewal dictates similar responses to similar situations, these ‘common responses’ produce a ‘moral convention’ which can become codified and systematized. If there are any objective norms of acceptable behavior, this is the explanation for their appearance. That is to say, any objective norms are human conventions which flow out of the renewed spirit, not objective norms revealed by God that exist objectively prior to the palingenesis to which the renewed spirit must give heed. In sum, the renewed heart does not require objective laws in order to know what to do or not to do.

...Against the second condition—the Christian intuitionist’s insistence that the outflow of love toward God and one’s neighbor which springs naturally from every renewed heart does away with the Christian’s need for objective norms for approved behavior and his insistence that the intuited ‘readings’ of love’s dictates are the only ‘norms’ that one needs to develop a biblical ethic—I would advance the following four arguments:

First, with John Murray I would urge that ‘the thought of the passages [where the law is said to be written on the heart of the renewed person, Jer 31:33; Heb 8:10; 10:16] 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 sinful heart a new affinity with and a love to the law, to the end that there may be cheerful, spontaneous, loving fulfilment of it.’ Surely Adam in the state of original integrity had the law of God inscribed upon his heart, but ‘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’. Murray explains:

  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 … 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 where 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!

Second, I would say that while it is true that love is the fulfillment of the law (Matt 22:37–40; Rom 13:10), it must never be forgotten that love to God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind and love to our neighbor as ourselves are themselves commandments. We are commanded to love God and our neighbor. The antithesis which is oftentimes set up between love [as the only proper norm for action] and commandments [depicted as a sub-Christian norm for biblical ethics] overlooks this elementary fact. Love itself is exercised in obedience to a commandment: ‘Thou shalt love.’

Love then is not ultimate but is dictated by a divine command that is its logical prius. Love then is itself obedience to a commandment which comes from a source (namely, God) other than itself, and not to love is sin because it is the transgression of this commandment of God. We do not, by taking refuge in love as the only proper ‘norm’ of biblical ethics, totally escape thereby the norm of law.

Third, while again it is true that Jesus declares that on the two commandments of love hang all the law and the prophets (Matt 22:37–40) and Paul affirms that love is the fulfillment of the law (Gal 5:14), these very statements draw an obvious distinction between love and the law that hangs on it, and between love and the law that it fulfils.… 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 fulfils. 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.

Fourth, the consistent witness of Scripture is to the effect that love is never allowed to discover or dictate its own standards of conduct. The renewed heart is simply never allowed spontaneously to define the ethic of the saints of God. To the contrary, the Bible confronts us with objectively revealed precepts—all either explicit commandments or implicates of the Ten Commandments—to be regarded as the norms for human behavior. Neither Adam in Paradise was permitted nor even the most committed saint since the Fall has been permitted to chart for himself the path he would take. Nor has the love which is the fulfillment of the law ever existed in a situation that is absent from the revelation of God respecting his will for mankind. To think so amounts to an abstraction that has never been true of the human experience. Rather, from the beginning—even from the state of innocence—into the New Testament era itself which extends to the present, the norms of human behavior have come in the form of divinely revealed objective commandments and precepts. After setting forth the doctrinal bases for the Christian life, the writers of the New Testament letters follow them with ethical imperatives addressed to the Christian mind and heart. They clearly understand that it is not enough to explicate the glories of our ‘so great salvation’ and to conclude their letters with such explication. They do not assume that the Holy Spirit will simply lead believers to see what they must do in light of their ‘so great salvation’—the error of the Anabaptists in the sixteenth century who separated the Spirit of God from the written Word of God. To the contrary, they provide their readers detailed, at times highly detailed, moral instructions—this moral instruction, as we have seen, being nothing more than the Decalogue and/or its implicates (see the extended treatments of ethical behavior in Romans 12–16 and Ephesians 4–6).

To conclude, according to Murray, ‘the notion … 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 entire witness of biblical teaching.’ In sum, I would urge that the uniform biblical witness in this regard is that the Decalogue is the covenant norm and way of life for all human behavior, Christian no less than non-Christian.*

*Reymond, R. L. (2000). Paul, Missionary Theologian (482,489-491). Scotland: Christian Focus Publications.