The Highest Christian Law is Love
‘The highest Christian law is love’
Assess this view
Christianity is both legalistic and antinomian, which sounds quite paradoxical as legalistic means that there are rules for every situation, and antinomian means that there are no rules. I don’t mean this directly but it contains parts of both. Christianity is legalistic, this is quite obvious as the Bible is full of commandments and stories stating what you shall or shall not do. For example ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ (Mark 12:31). However Jesus seemed to bend the laws and common moral principles of that age in order to help and heal those that were seen as unclean (sinners, sick…) and his reason for doing so was love. I’m not saying he completely disregarded them but definitely went around them if they prevented him from helping others and his main reason was love for his fellow man. What I understand from this is that love comes before any law that prevents love from being shown and applied, this kind of represents an antinomian approach to decisions. Even the Commandments or most of them involve the word love, but a lot of the laws stated in the Bible seem to go against Gods love. However nowadays recognize that love comes before a lot of the laws as they’re interpreted differently in this day and age.
However you could argue that the Bible also seems to give priority to law over love or that Christian love comes down to obeying Gods laws. For example ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me’ so of course Christians are going to love God as they aren’t allowed to love any other. Neither can they take his name in vein, what I’m trying to get to is that the only Christians that truly love their neighbor as their self and love their enemies are those that completely obey God’s commandments and claim to do it through love, but could it really be because they don’t want to be judged by God at the end of their life, that they want to secure their place in paradise. Therefore if the other laws weren’t
Assess this view
Christianity is both legalistic and antinomian, which sounds quite paradoxical as legalistic means that there are rules for every situation, and antinomian means that there are no rules. I don’t mean this directly but it contains parts of both. Christianity is legalistic, this is quite obvious as the Bible is full of commandments and stories stating what you shall or shall not do. For example ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ (Mark 12:31). However Jesus seemed to bend the laws and common moral principles of that age in order to help and heal those that were seen as unclean (sinners, sick…) and his reason for doing so was love. I’m not saying he completely disregarded them but definitely went around them if they prevented him from helping others and his main reason was love for his fellow man. What I understand from this is that love comes before any law that prevents love from being shown and applied, this kind of represents an antinomian approach to decisions. Even the Commandments or most of them involve the word love, but a lot of the laws stated in the Bible seem to go against Gods love. However nowadays recognize that love comes before a lot of the laws as they’re interpreted differently in this day and age.
However you could argue that the Bible also seems to give priority to law over love or that Christian love comes down to obeying Gods laws. For example ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me’ so of course Christians are going to love God as they aren’t allowed to love any other. Neither can they take his name in vein, what I’m trying to get to is that the only Christians that truly love their neighbor as their self and love their enemies are those that completely obey God’s commandments and claim to do it through love, but could it really be because they don’t want to be judged by God at the end of their life, that they want to secure their place in paradise. Therefore if the other laws weren’t