Quotes from “Calvin and the Law-Gospel Hermeneutic”

By Michael Horton (2002)

• “The Law” can be used in two different senses: the eschatological . . . (emphasizing the unity of revelation), and synonymous with “Old Testament,” and the theological (emphasizing the antithesis between word of judgment and word of promise). . . . Thus, the Law is filled with Gospel promises if by “Law” one means the Old Testament, but in its special office as a theological-hermeneutical category, there is no Gospel in the Law, nor Law in the Gospel.#
  ReligionChristianity
• The Reformers rejected either the tendency to collapse the New Testament into the Old or the Anabaptist tendency to radically separate the two testaments. In fact, Luther and Calvin both concentrated not so much on the nature of Scripture as its content.#
  ChristianityHermeneutics
• The Law is merely a written rule for the believer’s conformity to Christ’s image, although it can never produce the slightest effect toward that end.#
  ReligionChristianitySoteriology
• [M]any Reformed Protestants, especially in America, have allowed these trends rather than confessional distinctives to determine the reading and preaching of Scripture. . . . It is often moralized, exegeted in verse-by-verse isolation, psychologized, politicized, and always with the demand for “more application”—which really means “more Law.”#
  HermeneuticsReligionChristianity