Michael Horton

Quotes From

“Calvin and the Law-Gospel Hermeneutic” (2002)

• [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.”#
• 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.#
• 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.#
• “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.#

Introducing Covenant Theology (2006)

• Law and gospel are not in opposition unless we seek to find satisfaction before God. But they are always distinguished at every point.#
• To say that certain things have to happen before we are justified is not to say that any of these things are instruments in our justification. Conditions are not instruments.#
• We cannot say that the new covenant replaces obligations of law with those of love, since the law had always been regarded as the specification of love’s duties.#
• God will save his elect, overcoming every obstacle in his way, including us.#
• Jesus did not make the law easier, but more difficult. When Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount, corresponding to Moses’ giving of the law at Sinai, all notions of a “kinder, gentler” Moses in the person of Jesus are put to flight.#
• What the Scriptures labor to demonstrate is not that there are no normative laws for Christians, but that there is no way that we, being who we are, can become heirs of God’s kingdom by keeping them.#
• While the basis of the covenant of grace is God’s unconditional, electing, and redeeming grace (no confusion of law and gospel), there are clearly, in its administration, both commands and promises.#
• Wherever there is a discussion of unity in the New Testament, the sacraments are close at hand.#
• Recalling the fig tree that withered at Jesus’ curse, symbolizing the pronouncement of woes and the parables of the kingdom, the picture is of an Israel that, despite its national judgement as a covenant-breaker, is nevertheless kept alive by extensive pruning and grafting at the level of individual salvation through Christ.#
• God is transcendent. Therefore, any relationship that one might have with this God would have to be something other than a natural relationship.#
• Those who confuse civil righteousness with righteousness before God will be likely to confuse moral reform in society with the kingdom of God.#
• If Calvinists are not expected to endure tyranny, they are also not given liberty to take justice into their own hands or to exercise the judgement reserved for the King of Kings on the last day. Nor are they to seek to impose their distinctively Christian convictions on society through the kingdom of power, as both Rome and the radical Anabaptists tried to do. Rather, they are to pursue their dual citizenship according to the distinct policies proper to each kingdom. The Bible functions as the constitution for the covenant people, not for the secular state.#
• The kingdom of God advances through the proclamation of the gospel, not through force.#
• By identifying the kingdom of God with the advance of Christianity in the world here and now, it was easy to take the further step of identifying the fortunes of Christianity with those of the empire. Christendom is the result of this unholy alliance.#
• The Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants are related as the everlasting Sabbath rest is related to the typological rest in the land and on every seventh day.#
• No one in the Old Testament obtained the inheritance by works, but only by promise. Yet Israel’s national status in God’s land depended on fulfillment of the treaty’s terms.#
• No one will be justified by “works of the law,” according to Paul, not because there has never been an arrangement in which that was possible (i.e. creation), but because since the fall (which the history of Israel recapitulates), all of humanity (including Israel) is now “in Adam.” The direct problem is not being under the law, but being found “in Adam,” a transgressor of the law.#
• God’s predestination is hidden to us, but Christ is not.#
• “Law” and “promise” do not represent the Old and New testaments respectively, but characterize two different kinds of covenants that obtain within the same history.#
• Commands issue from Sinai with smoke and peals of thunder, but there is nothing distinctive in the Mosaic economy that actually provides for its fulfillment.#
• Only through Sinai could Israel be established in the land – by the personal loyalty of the people themselves to the covenant. But only through the covenant of promise could anyone – Israelite or Gentile – become children of Abraham in the sense identified in the New Testament.#
• Whenever God shows leniency by not executing the curses of the covenant upon Israel’s transgression, the basis of such leniency is never the Sinaitic covenant itself, but the Abrahamic (or Davidic) (cf. 2 Kings 13:23).#