Preaching Law and/or Gospel? Avoiding Extremes
In a section dealing with legitimate use of the traditional distinction between law and gospel, John Frame offers the following corrective in relationship to preaching:
We all know a type of preaching that merely expounds moral obligations (as we usually think of them: don't kill, don't steal, etc.) and does not provide the knowledge of Christ that sinners need for salvation. That kind of preaching (especially when it is not balanced by other preaching emphases) we often describe as preaching mere law, legalism, or moralism. There is no good news in it.
We should be reminded, of course, that there is also an opposite extreme: preaching "gospel" in such a way as to suggest that Christ makes no demands on one's life. We call that "cheap grace" or "easy believism." We might also call it preaching "gospel without law." Taken to an extreme, it is antinomianism, the rejection of God's law. The traditional law/gospel distinction is not itself antinomian, but those who hold it tend to be more sensitive to the dangers of legalism than to the dangers of antinomianism.
Such considerations may lead us to distinguish in a rough-and-ready way between preaching law and preaching gospel. Of course, even in making that distinction, our intention ought to be to bring them together. None of these considerations requires us to posit a sharp distinction. And certainly, this rough-and-ready distinction should never be used to cast doubt on the integration of command and promise that pervades the Scriptures themselves.
It should be evident that "legalistic" preaching, as described above, is not true preaching of the law, any more than it is true preaching of the gospel. For as I indicated earlier, law itself in Scripture comes to us wrapped in grace.
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