Pastor Chad Richard Bresson at the 2011 Bunyan Conference
At last week’s Earth Stove Society think tank, Chad Richard Bresson presented a paper entitled, “The Incarnation of the Abstract: New Covenant Theology and the Enfleshment of the Law.”
Chad asks the question, “What does the Priority of Jesus have to do with New Covenant ethics?” He lists five implications:
1. That the Law is a Person means the Law of the New Covenant is not encoded in external imperatives or principles.
2. The Law Incarnate has placed a Person, the Holy Spirit, within the believer as the law written on the heart. That’s the upshot of 2 Corinthians 3’s understanding of Jeremiah 31. The law written on the heart should not be identified in its typical form, but its Antitypical… a Person, living and breathing life into and through the New Covenant member. The entire law “category”, as it moves from Old Testament to New, lands on a person. The trajectory of the fulfillment of the law does not land on a new set of rules or principles, or even a summarized list of the law of Christ. The Law as a type has its end in Christ. The law as a type fades away into oblivion because all types do… it has become a person
3. Abrogation of the law and a denial of third use is a given. The law, like any other type of the Old Testament, has fulfilled its prophetic and revelatory role and is gone and done now that the AntiType has filled up its intended meaning to the fullest.
4. Imperatives have a role to play in the New Covenant, but they cannot eclipse the Indicative, a Person, from whence they come. It’s not a matter of balance, as some have suggested. The New Testament doesn’t not speak of, explicitly or implicitly, a so-called balance between the Indicative and imperative. In fact, seeing the New Testament as having a heavy emphasis on the imperatives says more about the presuppositions of the interpreter than it does about proper hermeneutics.
5. An Incarnate Law does not mean that commands in the New Covenant are not important. It does not mean that obedience is not important. It simply means the grounds for the discussion have changed. Obedience to commands is the manifestation of the inward obedience-causing law written on the heart.
Chad has more at his blog, The Vossed World, including a link to his paper on Scribd.
