Militant Grace by Philip G. Ziegler

Author:Philip G. Ziegler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Theology;End of the world;Eschatology;Theology;REL067000;REL067110
ISBN: 9781493413164
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

Paul L. Lehmann: Putting Human Law in the Context of the Gospel

In a sense Paul Lehmann’s approach to the question of law begins precisely where Torrance’s account leaves off. Indeed, Torrance’s solution to the problem of law—the theological invocation of an idea of natural law—is the particular problem from which Lehmann sets off. Lehmann stands firmly within a trajectory of those twentieth-century Protestant theologians for whom the crisis of confidence in the coherence of law amid the trials of their time could only be adequately met by establishing law upon the revelation of God in Christ.36 In this they overleaped even the Reformers themselves, who on matters of state, social ethics, and the res publica left long-inherited patterns of argument from natural law largely undisturbed, something Lehmann considers a loss of theological nerve.37 As he describes it, “Almost immediately after the Reformers had made their attempt at a theology adequate for a gospel of forgiveness,” the focus of the problems of ethics and law was “returned to the point from which they had deflected it.”38 The effect was to keep questions in these fields, including the question of the basis of juridical law, firmly within the ambit of the doctrines of creation and providence, abstracted (or insulated) largely from the radical cardinal dogmas of emerging Protestant faith. In short, on such matters as these, Lehmann contends that “Protestant theology has never sufficiently regarded the world in the light of the victory of Christ.”39

Lehmann’s own theological ethics is ambitious to regard the world strictly in light of this divine victory won in Christ for the sake of wayward humanity. What Torrance was content to denote simply as the “Logos of God” must, in Lehmann’s view, be much more precisely specified as the very “presence and formative power of Jesus Christ in this world.”40 Torrance’s leading motifs, divine sovereignty and the intrinsic and intelligible ordering of things, must be inflected christologically. The crucial point of dogmatic orientation for Lehmann is not so much creation and the transcendence of the Creator as it is redemption and the lordship of the Savior. In ethics generally, and so too on the question of law, the approach must be thoroughly christological. Where it is not, Lehmann muses, Christian inquiry inevitably gets snagged in a dilemma between “a capricious doctrinal selectivity, on the one hand, and the abandonment of its theological character, on the other.”41

In this, Lehmann shows his close fidelity to impulses from the fragmentary ethic authored by his friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer.42 Lehmann sees himself as standing in the trajectory that carried Bonhoeffer’s own thinking from “the response to the Lordship of Christ in the church to the response to the Lordship of Christ in and over the world.” The upshot thereof was that in his late Ethics and Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer considered the world with increasing clarity “as the sphere of the regnum Christi [reign of Christ].”43 In his own Ethics in a Christian Context, Lehmann asserts that the significance of the

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