Being Christian in the World: The Tertius Usus Legis as the Starting Point of a Reformed Ethic

In Protestant theology, the law of the Old Testament still has two functions for Christians: as God’s containment of the chaos in the form of political order and as confronting self-righteous humans in their inability to comply and pointing them to the necessity of grace. For Reformed Protestants ho...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Au, Christina aus der 1966- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Sage 2015
In: Studies in Christian ethics
Year: 2015, Volume: 28, Issue: 2, Pages: 132-141
IxTheo Classification:KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history
KDD Protestant Church
NCA Ethics
Further subjects:B Law
B Covenant
B Gospel
B Bonhoeffer
B Barth
B Christian Responsibility
B Spirit
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Parallel Edition:Electronic
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Summary:In Protestant theology, the law of the Old Testament still has two functions for Christians: as God’s containment of the chaos in the form of political order and as confronting self-righteous humans in their inability to comply and pointing them to the necessity of grace. For Reformed Protestants however, there is a third use of the law, directed to the renatus, the ‘born again’ Christian, to the iustus and not to the peccator in order for him to keep growing in insight and the practice of God’s will. Different from the Lutheran usus politicus, it is not limited to being God’s containment of evil through the orders of creation, but the realisation of and the public responsibility for those possibilities of life that were disclosed for men/women as partners in God’s covenant by God’s law. Those possibilities are perceived and realised by living in the spirit of God.
ISSN:0953-9468
Contains:Enthalten in: Studies in Christian ethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1177/0953946815570587