On the Uses of the Law
Q. What is the purpose of the Ten Commandments?
A. The Ten Commandments were given to define our relationship with God and our neighbors.
Q. Since we do not fully obey them, are they useful at all?
A. Since we do not fully obey them, we see more clearly our sin and our need for redemption.
Having offered an explanation of the content of the Law, as expressed in, and drawn together by, the Ten Commandments, the Catechism turns to the question of the purposes of the Law. This provides an occasion for placing our Catechism within the context of the ongoing conversations between the different Protestant bodies about the so-called uses of the law.
Central to Protestantism is the idea that the law does not save us—whatever salvation is, we do not receive it as a reward for following the law. However, with the first question here, one can think of the Catechism as offering the perspective that while the Law should not be thought of as the means to salvation, as though salvation exists as something added on to our experience after we have followed the commands of the law. Instead, salvation itself consists in following the law. The Ten Commandments offer us the blueprint for human life as God intended it in creation, and thus human life that is flourishing. This is a life of joy and happiness because humans are living fully into what they were created to be. They are, to use a musical analogy, fully in tune and in tempo with each other, playing perfectly the music that leads to a harmonious and pleasant song.
However, that we must have the law spelled out for us shows that something has intervened such that we are not living into that perfect purpose. The second question discussed today addresses this point: There is a sense in which our problem is ignorance of God’s law, the fact that in having fallen into a state of broken relationships we do not know God’s purpose for humanity intuitively means that it needs to be taught to us. But our fundamental problem goes beyond mere ignorance—the tradition affirms that we are incapable, on our own, of repairing our broken relationships and following the law as it was intended, rather than self-servingly out of a desire to avoid God’s wrath. Thus, under the conditions of Sin in the world, the Law serves not only to show us what life will look like once we are fully restored through God’s grace, and how to strive for that life, but also our utter and complete reliance on that grace to forgive and restore us.
This understanding of the purpose of the Law places us firmly within both the Lutheran and Reformed traditions in relationship to the purposes, or as they are often called in such discussions, “uses” of the law. There are two important distinctions in our expression from both the Lutheran and Reformed positions. First, we reverse the order. In these other two traditions, such expositions begin with the uses of the law that convict us of our inability to keep the law before moving on to the “third use” of the law whereby we are offered a template for righteousness. Second, our Catechism omits one use of the law, the notion that the law serves as a preserver of general order for both Christian and non-Christian alike by reigning in sinful excesses through fear of punishment.
Importantly, while we as Anglicans follow the early Protestant understanding that salvation is opened to us through God’s unmerited grace, we, like them, do not understand this to mean that there is no place for law. Rejected is any notion that because we cannot restore ourselves by following the Law that the Law is meaningless and that we can behave however we want. Living lawlessly continues to mean living in opposition to God’s purpose which is also the purpose for which we have been created and that in which our true flourishing consists. We are not saved from the Law so much as we are saved for the Law.
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