The Upper Register

Republication, Part 5: Freed from the Law as a Covenant

There are a number of passages in Galatians and Romans where Paul teaches that believers are freed from the law:

Gal 2:19: Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God

Gal 3:23-25: We are no longer under a guardian

Gal 4:4: Born under the law to redeem those who were under the law

Gal 5:18: If you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law

Rom 6:14-15: We are not under law but under grace

Rom 7:1-6: We have died to the law through the body of Christ

Antinomians take these texts to mean that believers are freed from the moral law as rule of life. A better explanation is to utilize the concept of Republication and to suggest that what Paul is affirming is that we are freed from the law as a covenant of works. On this view, Paul is not denying the third use of the law (which he affirms, e.g., in Rom 6:15-22; 8:4).

This is the standard Reformed position, as seen in the Westminster Confession: “Although true believers be not under the law, as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified, or condemned; yet is it of great use to them, as well as to others; in that, as a rule of life informing them of the will of God, and their duty, it directs and binds them to walk accordingly” (WCF 19.6; cp. WLC #97).

Republication enables us to answer the antinomian interpretation of the Pauline “not under law” texts. Some have tried to get around this by suggesting that when Paul says we are “not under law” he means we are “not under legalism” or we have been “freed from a legalistic misinterpretation and abuse of the law.” But that theory breaks down when one realizes that Paul affirms that we died to the law through union with Christ in his death and resurrection. He does not say that God delivered us from a cognitive misunderstanding and misuse of the law. He says God delivered us from the law itself “through the body of Christ” (Rom 7:4). The Mosaic law pronounces a curse on all who do not keep it perfectly (Gal 3:10; Deut 27:26), but Christ “became a curse for us” (Gal 3:13). Christ was “born under the law to redeem those who were under the law” (Gal 4:4). Thus, “the law” in these passages cannot be a “legalistic misuse of the law” but “the Mosaic law as a covenant of works.”

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Republication, Part 4: The Breakable Covenant - Jeremiah 31

One of Kline’s most powerful arguments for Republication is the fact that the Old Covenant was breakable: “Behold, the days are coming, declares YHWH, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares YHWH” (Jer 31:31-32). Though YHWH was their husband, Israel was unfaithful, the covenant itself was broken, and YHWH divorced Israel (Jer 3:1, 8; cp. Hosea 1:9; 2:2). But if the Old Covenant was breakable, as Jeremiah plainly says that it was, how can it be the covenant of grace pure and simple?

Kline writes:

Paul was resuming Jeremiah’s classic analysis of the covenants when he contrasted the new covenant to the old (the old viewed in the restricted but distinctive terms of its typological dimension). In contrast to the new covenant which could not be broken, founded as it was on God’s sovereign, forgiving grace in Christ, the old covenant, according to Jeremiah, was breakable (Jer 31:32). Individual members of the new covenant community might prove false and be broken off as branches from a tree while the covenant tree remained intact, pruned and flourishing. But the old covenant’s typological kingdom order as such could be and was terminated. The axe of God’s judgment was ultimately laid unto the roots of the tree and the tree itself was felled. Jeremiah’s identification of the old covenant as breakable was the equivalent of an assertion that it lacked the guarantee afforded by the grace principle and was instead based on the principle of works (Kingdom Prologue, 322).

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