Last week, when I asked the question, “What is a Christian view of Law?”, I said the “answer depends on a person’s metaphysics, because that informs our understanding of what law is and what it is for.”
Today, I will explain that in the context of the verse I ended with last week, Romans 7:14: “For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.” I will focus on the first part of the verse: “the law is spiritual” (KJV).
Law Has a Nature or Essence
For a Christian to know what law is and what it is for—a way of describing a metaphysical inquiry—we need to first appreciate the word “is.” The verb “is” is a form of the irregular verb “to be” which speaks to being or existence. So the word “is,” both in Romans 7:14 and in our question, addresses an issue of metaphysics, meaning the verb “is” is doing more than communicating a fact. It is addressing the nature or essence of law. What it is.
In other words, law is more than words inscribed on “tablets of stone” (Deuteronomy 4:13) or “written with ink” (Corinthians 3:3) in code books. Law has a nature; it has an essence. And I never thought of law that way until more recent years.
But to say the law is spiritual is to say it points to something beyond the physical, beyond “bare” nature—it is metaphysical. Moreover, to say the law “is” means it has an existence that is not dependent on anything we do.
Evidence That Metaphysics Has Disappeared from Law
That law has a metaphysic—is “spiritual”— is why I speak so often of common law. For centuries and into the days of our founding generation, common law was a conception or understanding of law that says law “is.” Therefore, law is "discovered,” as William Blackstone famously put it in the 1700s, and is not “created” by human beings.
However, few Christian legislators, public policy advocates, and legal advocates today want to know about common law, let alone bring its concepts into their work. I understand why.
First, I can’t recall a Christian metaphysic being explained to me in any evangelical church I ever attended. Last week I explained why that is so. This leads to my second reason.
Without a Christian metaphysic, Christians are easily taken captive by what they are taught in law school, namely, that law is made by legislative bodies composed of human beings or made by judges who are human beings. All law comes from us and is written with ink on pieces of paper.
What I have seen in my profession and what I now realize I was taught in law school is, evidence that Nietzsche’s cosmological nihilism has won the day.
Nihilism means that we must give law its nature and meaning, and we do so by the words we use and define to create law.
The “Law” Referred to in Romans 7:14
Having established that Romans 7:14 is making a metaphysical statement about the nature or essence of law, the next question is what the word “law” means.
To cut to the chase, in the context in which we find the verse, particularly that of chapters 5 and 6, we can say it refers to the moral law or the law reduced to writing in the ten statements known as the Ten Commandments.
And the metaphysic of the Ten Commandments is that they are spiritual—since law is spiritual— and they point to something or, we should say, to someone, Christ. Romans 10:4: “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.”
The Way in which Law is Spiritual
The word translated “end” is the Greek word “telos,” meaning ultimate end or the fulfillment of what a thing is and what it is for, again, a metaphysical statement. So, we are effectively being told in Romans 10:4 that the law embodied in the Ten Commandments is spiritual, meaning it is pointing to what righteousness is, another metaphysical statement.
For Christians, that means we come to know what righteousness is— its nature or essence—by what is revealed in and mediated to us by the person of Christ. Put another way, Christ, whose nature or essence is both divine, as the one true God, and human, reveals to us the righteousness of God’s being. But Jesus, also being human, “translates” that righteousness into what human beings can, by faith, understand, namely, the kind of righteousness God intended for beings called human.
That helps us understand what Paul wrote in Romans 9:31, “But Israel, which followed after the law of righteousness,” which is the moral law that was pointing us to Christ, “hath not attained to the law of righteousness.” Law is spiritual as is righteousness. So Paul is addressing what is here called “the law of righteousness,” which is that law referred to in Romans 7:14. Verse 31 also helps us understand what is recored in verse 32.
How the Metaphysical Nature of Law is Made Visible
There the Apostle explains why the people comprising the ethnic nation of Israel could not attain the measure of righteousness the law entailed, even though it was transcribed for them on tablets of stone. And the reason: “Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were by the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumbling stone” who, of course, is Christ.
And, of course, faith in the Bible is also a metaphysical proposition; it points beyond what mere reason could attain to, because “in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God” (1 Corinthians 1:21).
Putting this now in the context of Hebrews 11:1, we read, “Faith is the evidence of things not seen.” In other words, the law is spiritual, it points to a righteousness that is spiritual, and, when we live by faith, we give to the world tangible evidence that this righteousness is real, though unseen.
This is anti-Nietzschean to the core. The whole of what I’ve written pertains to a metaphysics that repudiates Nietzsche’s metaphysical nihilism.
Jesus Christ: The Metaphysical Foundation for Law
In sum, and for our purposes today, we might say Christ is the Christian’s metaphysic in relation to law (and everything else). In his person as God and man, Christ is the foundation of law. And from our understanding of who Christ is— a being word—flows all other expressions of law, all of which point to a righteousness the world can’t see unless we give evidence of it by faith.
It also explains and gives depth of meaning to why Scripture treats magistrates as a type of minister (diakonos) of God (Romans 13:4). To think politics and public office is worldly comes from a horrible, God-denying, Nietzsche-embracing metaphysic calling for repentance.
But, more specifically, the truth for us as human beings is “in Jesus,” (Ephesians 4:21), and in our “acknowledgement of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ . . . are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:2-3 KJV).
As Paul wrote to the Corinthians in his first letter, chapter 3, verse 11, “For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” And that includes law.
Next week our daughter’s family will be with us from out of state, and the “demands” of being a grandparent could mean further discussion of this topic may be delayed more than a week.
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