‘Not Under Law’—Meaning…?
It’s a phrase you may well have heard in sermons, or even some worship songs, and it’s found in a few places in New Testament letters, notably Galatians 5:18 and Romans 6:14, the fuller version of which reads: “you are not under the law, but under grace.” When we want to know what a phrase like that means, we need to go back to basics and ask not what it appears to mean to me, in terms of how I read it (extracted, stand-alone), but what it originally meant in its context at the time. What did Paul and his audience think it was saying?
The biggest ‘big question’ for the early church was the basis on which the Gentiles should be included in the people of God. In particular, the extent to which—either entirely or partially—Gentile Jesus-followers should be expected to follow Torah (circumcision, dietary practices, Sabbath, and so on). It’s clear that there were different opinions on that question amongst the Jewish early church leaders, which Paul addresses in Galatians and to some extent Romans. We also see it feature prominently in Acts, culminating in the decision of the so-called Jerusalem Council in Acts 15.
Torah is the correct word to describe what most translations unfortunately render as ‘law’ or ‘the law’ (Torah was the ‘covenant charter’ of 613 commandments given to Israel through Moses for how they should live as a new nation of former slaves coming out of Egypt into the promised land). Rendering Torah as ‘law’ is very unfortunate because, although it’s technically correct (it’s describing a biblical genre), the ordinary Christian reader hears it as being about legalism, and hence a bad thing.
We frequently hear disdainful throwaway comments about ‘the law’ from pulpits up and down the land. This is notwithstanding that nowhere in the Old Testament do we ever see Torah being demeaned (for example, three times in Psalm 119, David said, “Oh, how I love your law!”); nowhere do we see it suggested that no-one could ever keep the law; and still less, that it was just waiting for someone to be the first to ‘fulfil it’ (so it could thereafter be decommissioned). What Paul had to say about it negatively was always in the context of that question: how Torah related in whole or in part to Gentile Jesus followers. Answer? It didn’t. Not because of anything intrinsically bad about it, but because the Holy Spirit had made it clear in those Gentile Jesus followers’ experiences of him that he was not requiring them to adopt Torah first; the Jewish early church leaders were therefore simply following the Spirit’s lead.
As modern evangelicals, we have the Reformers to thank for this legacy. They read their own experiences of corrupt, legalistic mediaeval Catholicism as pari passu with Paul’s experiences of (what they assumed to be) corrupt, legalistic first-century Judaism. The Reformers saw themselves as present-day Pauls, fighting essentially the same battle.
Evangelical preachers since then, following those assumptions, have habitually dissed ‘the law’ and the ‘works-righteousness’ that they perceived to be synonymous with it, both in Catholicism and Judaism. Reformed scholars have perpetuated those ideas, not least because the Reformed doctrinal package majorly depends on some version remaining the case. However, outside of that world, scholars now realise (belatedly) that Paul and his relationship to Judaism has been significantly misread.
Scriptures originally written with Gentile Jesus followers in mind, responding to the question of how Torah ‘fits’ with their faith, have been taken out of that context and universalized. The perceived message has become caricatured as, “Jesus came to save us from the law—we are no longer under the law but under grace instead.” But that’s a caricature because almost every evangelical Christian who’s saying or singing that was never ‘under the law’ in the first place! Torah was for Jewish believers—it was their covenant charter. Jesus didn’t come to save anyone from a ‘law’ (Torah) that God himself gave to Israel (it wasn’t ‘the law of Moses’ in any authorship sense, he was simply the postman).
As to the widespread idea that no one could ever keep the law, the law itself had explicit provisions for what to do when people did (inevitably) fail to fully keep it—for example, elements of the sacrificial system were there, as part of the law, for that very purpose—built into the law itself. Arguably, therefore, availing oneself of those provisions for failure was part of ‘keeping’ it.
My point here is not to get into a debate about Jewish salvation, save to say that Scripture is clear that Jesus’ salvific work is efficacious for the whole world, embracing the whole world in its scope, Jews and Gentiles alike (the only question is how that salvation is accessed, which is ultimately something to be determined by God). The New Testament tells us thst “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:19) and “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). The ongoing role of Torah as a Jewish covenant charter is an entirely separate question (and since practicing Torah was never about "how to get saved” we can put that to one side).
Paul offers two significant ideas to help Gentile followers of Jesus grasp the nature and basis of their relationship with God.
In Romans 11, he offers the analogy of an olive tree, with the Gentiles pictured as branches being grafted onto the Jewish tree/root stock. Evangelicals typically (unwittingly) reverse this reading, as if it were saying that Jews are now able to be grafted onto the Christian tree, if they become Christians like us.
The other picture he offers is to say to these Gentile Jesus followers that they should take their point of reference for their inclusion in the people of God (their ‘covenant charter’) from Abraham rather than Moses. Though revered as the father of Jewish faith, Abraham was strictly speaking a Gentile (insofar as there was no Jewish identity at that point in the biblical story). Torah, said Paul, was not a requisite part of Abraham’s relationship with God, and in the same way as with your forefather, God is not expecting it of you.
If it appears I am dissing the Reformers, that’s not the case. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Holy Spirit inspired their realisation that the Christian faith (as reflected and represented at the time by widespread corrupt mediaeval Catholic practices) required major reform. They saw a biblical basis for that in what Paul had to say about ‘the law’, but this was a case of the Holy Spirit using those Scriptures to convey something that they were not speaking about in the first instance. That wasn’t the meaning of those verses; it was the Spirit speaking meaningfully to the Reformers through those verses.
Are we, then, as Christians, ‘under the law’? Yes, and no. We are not under the law in the sense of Torah, to which most New Testament verses that feature the Greek word nomos are referring (the same word can be talking about ‘law’ in other senses, depending on the context). But that does not mean God has no Torah-like expectations of us. There are multiple commands of Jesus directed to his followers in the Gospels, not least in the Sermon on the Mount, and the Great Commandment (love God and love people)—which, we should remember, was said in the context of Torah. Jesus said that the whole of Torah ‘hangs on’ those two (other versions say, is ‘based on’ them, and ‘depends on’ them). James 2:8 calls love your neighbour, ‘the royal law’. And Paul himself in Romans 6:15 directly addresses the obvious question: If we’re not under law (v.14), “does that mean we can live any old way we want?” (MSG) and he answers that robustly: “Of course not!” (NLT) “Absolutely not!” (CSB) “God forbid!” (KJV).