Great NYT Article: In 2012, No Religious Center Is Holding

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

Divided by God
By ROSS DOUTHAT


IN American religious history, Nov. 8, 1960, is generally regarded as the date when the presidency ceased to be the exclusive property of Protestants. But for decades afterward, the election of the Catholic John F. Kennedy looked more like a temporary aberration.

Post-J.F.K., many of America’s established churches went into an unexpected decline, struggling to make their message resonate in a more diverse, affluent and sexually permissive America. The country as a whole became more religiously fluid, with more church-switching, more start-up sects, more do-it-yourself forms of faith. Yet a nation that was increasingly nondenominational and postdenominational kept electing Protestants from established denominations to the White House.

The six presidents elected before Kennedy’s famous breakthrough included two Baptists, an Episcopalian, a Congregationalist, a Presbyterian and a Quaker. The six presidents elected prior to Barack Obama’s 2008 victory included two Baptists, two Episcopalians, a Methodist and a Presbyterian. Jimmy Carter’s and George W. Bush’s self-identification as “born again” added a touch of theological diversity to the mix, as did losing candidates like the Greek Orthodox Michael S. Dukakis. But over all, presidential religious affiliation has been a throwback to the Eisenhower era — or even the McKinley era.

That is, until now. In 2012, we finally have a presidential field whose diversity mirrors the diversity of American Christianity as a whole.

Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum all identify as Christians, but their theological traditions and personal experiences of faith diverge more starkly than any group of presidential contenders in recent memory. These divergences reflect America as it actually is: We’re neither traditionally Christian nor straightforwardly secular. Instead, we’re a nation of heretics in which most people still associate themselves with Christianity but revise its doctrines as they see fit, and nobody can agree on even the most basic definitions of what Christian faith should mean.

This diversity is not necessarily a strength. The old Christian establishment — which by the 1950s encompassed Kennedy’s Roman Catholic Church as well as the major Protestant denominations — could be exclusivist, snobbish and intolerant. But the existence of a Christian center also helped bind a vast and teeming nation together. It was the hierarchy, discipline and institutional continuity of mainline Protestantism and later Catholicism that built hospitals and schools, orphanages and universities, and assimilated generations of immigrants. At the same time, the kind of “mere Christianity” (in C. S. Lewis’s phrase) that the major denominations shared frequently provided a kind of invisible mortar for our culture and a framework for our great debates.

Today, that religious common ground has all but disappeared.

And the inescapability of religious polarization — whether it pits evangelicals against Mormons, the White House against the Catholic Church, or Rick Santorum against the secular press — during an election year that was expected to be all about the economy is a sign of what happens to a deeply religious country when its theological center cannot hold.

Our president embodies this uncentered spiritual landscape in three ways. First, like a growing share of Americans (44 percent), President Obama changed his religion as an adult, joining Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ in his 20s after a conversion experience brought him out of agnosticism into faith. Second, he was converted by a pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose highly politicized theology was self-consciously at odds with much of historic Christian practice and belief. Finally, since breaking with that pastor, Obama has become a believer without a denomination or a church, which makes him part of one of the country’s fastest-growing religious groups — what the Barna Group calls the “unchurched Christian” bloc, consisting of Americans who accept some tenets of Christian faith without participating in any specific religious community.

Obama’s likely general election rival, Mitt Romney, has had a less eventful religious journey, remaining a loyal practitioner of his childhood faith. But that faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is the ultimate outsider church, persecuted at its inception and regarded with suspicion even now. Christian theologians wrangle over whether Mormon beliefs should be described as Christianity; Mormons, for their part, implicitly return the favor, since they believe that true Christian faith was restored to earth by Joseph Smith after nearly two millenniums of apostasy. Indeed, between its belief in a special 19th-century revelation and other doctrinal embellishments, Mormonism is arguably as far as Jeremiah Wright’s black liberation from what used to be the American religious center.

THIS leaves Romney’s last significant Republican opponent, the Catholic Rick Santorum, to represent what the America of 50 years ago would have recognized as a (relatively) mainstream religious body. Except, of course, that there’s nothing particularly mainstream about Santorum’s theological convictions. His traditionalist zeal has made him a bigger target even than Romney or Obama for fascination, suspicion and hysteria. In a nation as religiously diverse as ours, a staunchly orthodox Christianity can seem like the weirdest heresy of all.

In a sense, the fact that the 2012 presidential race has come down to a Mormon, a traditionalist Catholic and an incumbent with ties to liberation theology is a testament to the country’s impressive progress toward religious tolerance. It’s a striking thing that one of the nation’s two political parties is poised to nominate a politician whose ancestors in faith were murdered, persecuted and driven into exile.

It’s almost as remarkable that Rick Santorum’s strongest supporters are evangelical Christians in the American South, a population that once would have regarded a devout Catholic with the deepest possible suspicion. And if you took a time machine back to the tumult of the civil rights era and told people that Americans would not only someday elect a black president, but one whose pastor and spiritual mentor was steeped in the radical theologies of the late 1960s — well, that would have seemed like science fiction.

But there are costs to being a nation in which we’re all heretics to one another, and no religious orthodoxy commands wide support. Our diversity has made us more tolerant in some respects, but far more polarized in others. The myth that President Obama is a Muslim, for instance, has its origins in Obama’s exotic-sounding name and Kenyan-Indonesian background. But it’s become so rooted in the right-wing consciousness in part because Obama’s prior institutional affiliation is with a church that seems far more alien to many white Christians than did the African-American Christianity of Martin Luther King Jr., or even Jesse Jackson.

Likewise, while Santorum no longer has to worry (as John F. Kennedy did) about assuaging evangelical fears about Vatican plots and Catholic domination, his candidacy has summoned up an equally perfervid paranoia from secular liberals, who hear intimations of theocracy in his every speech and utterance. (And not only from secularists: The liberal Catholic writer Garry Wills recently resurrected the old slur “papist” — once beloved of anti-Catholic Protestants — to dismiss Santorum as a slavish servant of the Vatican.)

Nor has Mitt Romney’s slow progress to the Republican nomination altered the fact that his fast-growing church is viewed by many with deep distrust. The same polls showing that many religious conservatives don’t want to vote for a Mormon also show that many independents and Democrats feel the same way, and explicit anti-Mormon sentiment percolates among evangelical preachers and liberal columnists alike.

These various fears and paranoias are nourished by the fact that America’s churches are increasingly too institutionally weak, too fragmented and internally divided to bring people from different political persuasions together. About 75 percent of Mitt Romney’s co-religionists identify as Republicans, and it’s safe to assume that President Obama didn’t meet many conservatives in the pews at Jeremiah Wright’s church. American Catholicism still pitches a wide enough tent to include members of both parties, but the church has long been divided into liberal and conservative factions that can seem as distant from one another as Rush Limbaugh and Bill Maher.

In this atmosphere, religious differences are more likely to inspire baroque conspiracy theories, whether it’s the far-right panic over an Islamified United States or the left-wing paranoia about a looming evangelical-led theocracy. And faith itself is more likely to serve partisan purposes — whether it’s putting the messianic sheen on Obama’s “hope and change” campaign or supplying the storm clouds in Glenn Beck’s apocalyptic monologues.

Americans have never separated religion from politics, but it makes a difference how the two are intertwined. When religious commitments are more comprehensive and religious institutions more resilient, faith is more likely to call people out of private loyalties to public purposes, more likely to inspire voters to put ideals above self-interest, more likely to inspire politicians to defy partisan categories altogether. But as orthodoxies weaken, churches split and their former adherents mix and match elements of various traditions to fit their preferences, religion is more likely to become indistinguishable from personal and ideological self-interest.

Here it’s worth contrasting the civil rights era to our own. Precisely because America’s religious center was stronger and its leading churches more influential, the preachers and ministers who led the civil rights movement were able to assemble the broadest possible religious coalition — from the ministers who marched with protesters to the Catholic bishops who desegregated parochial schools and excommunicated white supremacists. Precisely because they shared so much theological common ground with white Christians, the leaders of the black churches were able to use moral and theological arguments to effectively shame many Southerners into accepting desegregation. (The latter story is told, masterfully, in David L. Chappell’s “A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow.”)

The result was an issue where pastors led and politicians of both parties followed, where the institutional churches proved their worth as both sources of moral authority and hubs of activism, and where religious witness helped forge a genuine national consensus on an issue where even presidents feared to tread.

Today’s America does not lack for causes where a similar spirit could be brought to bear for religious activists with the desire to imitate the achievements of the past. But with the disappearance of a Christian center and the decline of institutional religion more generally, we lack the capacity to translate those desires into something other than what we’ve seen in this, the most theologically diverse of recent presidential elections — division, demonization and polarization without end.

Ross Douthat is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. This article is adapted and excerpted from his new book, “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/opini ... wanted=all

[Marcus]

“As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”

― Wendell Berry

[Nonc Hilaire]

Religion and politics mix like ice cream and manure.

Mixing the two didn't change politics significantly, but it really stunk up religion.

[Marcus]

Politics is religion* applied to economics.

• *read "right & wrong"

[Nonc Hilaire]

“As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”

― Wendell Berry

Berry is wrong. Jesus was well organized. 12 disciples, each of them trained six and they went out and taught with explicit instructions.
What was inconsistent was the political nature of the disciples themselves. Matthew, a tax collector and Simon, a zealot, are about as opposite politically as possible. Add in a few fishermen, probably employer and his employees) together with the women and you have pretty broad political reach.

No wonder Jesus was so big on "love your enemies".

[Marcus]

“As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”

― Wendell Berry

Berry is wrong. Jesus was well organized. 12 disciples, each of them trained six and they went out and taught with explicit instructions.
What was inconsistent was the political nature of the disciples themselves. Matthew, a tax collector and Simon, a zealot, are about as opposite politically as possible. Add in a few fishermen, probably employer and his employees) together with the women and you have pretty broad political reach.

No wonder Jesus was so big on "love your enemies".

Totally lost, Nonc . . .

[Enki]

Jesus did not come to found a religion at all. He came to reveal the truth. For thousands of years, those who didn't understand his message one bit have been using it as a method of organizing the state above and beyond the tribe.

[Demon of Undoing]

Jesus did not come to found a religion at all. He came to reveal the truth. For thousands of years, those who didn't understand his message one bit have been using it as a method of organizing the state above and beyond the tribe.

The Unitarians are right.

If Christ doesn't transcend the church, he's not the Christ.

[Enki]

Jesus did not come to found a religion at all. He came to reveal the truth. For thousands of years, those who didn't understand his message one bit have been using it as a method of organizing the state above and beyond the tribe.

The Unitarians are right.

If Christ doesn't transcend the church, he's not the Christ.

Absolutely. People think that he will come back as some kind of holy warrior and slaughter everyone they don't like. It's evidence that they are still pagans at heart. Even Spenglerian Jews are still pagans.

The return of Christ will be the end of civilization, because civilization is an evil and wicked thing. Civilization is the system of usury whereby we separate ourselves from one another.

The return of Christ will be quite simple. When people are willing to just give what someone needs to someone when someone needs it, that will be the return of Christ and the end of debt.

We pave paradise to put up a parking lot. It is within our scientific understanding to turn the entire world into a garden full of edible foods, to where no one would ever be hungry. We could maintain them with intention and teach every single person how to properly cultivate such a garden. We have such knowledge now. But we continue to pave it over for the dictates of industry.

When this changes, then we will see a return. Not through the lens of some hokey revenge fantasy, but through a return of the Christ consciousness where everyone truly loves their fellow as they love themselves.

[Nonc Hilaire]

“As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”

― Wendell Berry

Berry is wrong. Jesus was well organized. 12 disciples, each of them trained six and they went out and taught with explicit instructions.
What was inconsistent was the political nature of the disciples themselves. Matthew, a tax collector and Simon, a zealot, are about as opposite politically as possible. Add in a few fishermen, probably employer and his employees) together with the women and you have pretty broad political reach.

No wonder Jesus was so big on "love your enemies".

Totally lost, Nonc . . .

Re-read Matthew. Jesus carefully picked out a select group of disciples, trained them, then taught them to train others and sent them out in pairs with specific directions on how to act.
He avoided being understood by the public - the parables were intended to confuse the public and were only explained to the disciples privately. Very unlike traditional Jewish parables and more like Sufi teaching stories. Then there is the Lord's supper and the command to continue to perform this ceremony in His memory.

Jesus was not a disorganized, itinerant preacher. Matthew is the best for seeing Jesus' organizational pattern, with a HQ in Capernaum. I don't see a bit of disorganization in Jesus' actions, much less forming a disorganized church.

[Marcus]

. . read Matthew. Jesus carefully picked out a select group of disciples, trained them, then taught them to train others and sent them out in pairs with specific directions on how to act.
He avoided being understood by the public - the parables were intended to confuse the public and were only explained to the disciples privately. Very unlike traditional Jewish parables and more like Sufi teaching stories. Then there is the Lord's supper and the command to continue to perform this ceremony in His memory.
Jesus was not a disorganized, itinerant preacher. Matthew is the best for seeing Jesus' organizational pattern, with a HQ in Capernaum. I don't see a bit of disorganization in Jesus' actions, much less forming a disorganized church.

Berry did not say that Jesus himself was disorganized . . only that Berry suspects Jesus may have not intended to found an organized religion. And of course whatever Jesus picked, trained, and sent out was all accomplished within the larger context of the organized Judaism of the time. But beyond that, I don't understand your point . . if there is one . .

Nor am I sure I get the "ceremony" thing? A common meal? What more than that?

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

“As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.”

― Wendell Berry

Berry is wrong. Jesus was well organized. 12 disciples, each of them trained six and they went out and taught with explicit instructions.
What was inconsistent was the political nature of the disciples themselves. Matthew, a tax collector and Simon, a zealot, are about as opposite politically as possible. Add in a few fishermen, probably employer and his employees) together with the women and you have pretty broad political reach.

No wonder Jesus was so big on "love your enemies".

Totally lost, Nonc . . .

Re-read Matthew. Jesus carefully picked out a select group of disciples, trained them, then taught them to train others and sent them out in pairs with specific directions on how to act.
He avoided being understood by the public - the parables were intended to confuse the public and were only explained to the disciples privately. Very unlike traditional Jewish parables and more like Sufi teaching stories. Then there is the Lord's supper and the command to continue to perform this ceremony in His memory.

Jesus was not a disorganized, itinerant preacher. Matthew is the best for seeing Jesus' organizational pattern, with a HQ in Capernaum. I don't see a bit of disorganization in Jesus' actions, much less forming a disorganized church.

New Age folks are always trying to appropriate Jesus while papering over the harsher, less flexible parts of his message and mission.

[Ibrahim]

The nature of Jesus' teachings are interesting fodder for discussion, but politically speaking this is only about group identification. America used to be overwhelmingly Protestant, now it clearly is not. Thus candidates will reflect that diversity.





If you look at Jesus as a prophet, he is mostly concerned with egalitarianism and personal charity and piety. He wasn't a political reformer or a lawgiver. The Jewish and Roman laws are left largely unchallenged and even uncommented on.

New Age folks are always trying to appropriate Jesus while papering over the harsher, less flexible parts of his message and mission.

Not saying you are wrong, but give some examples.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Grace does not replace nature. It is by God hand that nature allows for certain peoples in their imagined communities. It is for the Christian to be a leaven for his or her nation. The real division and politics is meant for beyond the grave- when Jesus, as lawgiver, judge and king reigns over whom He has mercy upon and casts away those he hasn't. There is no such thing as a "religious center" in any of this.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

He wasn't a political reformer or a lawgiver.

He most certainly was a lawgiver and he commissioned his followers with the Two Greatest Commandments.

His status of Judge/Lawgiver superseded the title of "King", when it was even acknowledged, in Christianity for most of its history. It was men like Hobbes who emphasized Christ as King in an effort to shut the gates of Heaven to human actions. Christ was "King" in heaven, but had no say on what goes on here where Man is King.

Any Christian half-serious about his or her faith could see how silly it is to agree that Jesus is no lawgiver of man here on Earth. It totally undermines the whole Christian Ethic to say or think otherwise.

[Demon of Undoing]

I think whatever metaphysical role he has is open to interpretation based off your opinion on the resurrection. However, distilling the Law into the Two is emblematic in the entire arc of moral progression. As far as earth goes, it stands more significant than the crucifixion.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

I think whatever metaphysical role he has is open to interpretation based off your opinion on the resurrection. However, distilling the Law into the Two is emblematic in the entire arc of moral progression. As far as earth goes, it stands more significant than the crucifixion.

But it is not distilling the law into two. Christ did not commission the apostles to "distill the law into two." He told them to be steadfast in upholding the Two Greatest Commandments for which everything hangs. The Judeo-Christian synthesis of some Protestant groups is just that: a Protestant project which has nothing to do with what Christ commanded. The whole law is the business of the Jews and God, it has nothing to do with Christ as Lawgiver.

[Marcus]

. . The Judeo-Christian synthesis of some Protestant groups is just that: a Protestant project which has nothing to do with what Christ commanded. . .

Nap, please elaborate here or by PM. I'm totally lost about what you're referring to.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

As far as earth goes, it stands more significant than the crucifixion.

No. Miracles and morals didn't convert half the planet to Christianity. Martyrs, following the example of the man on the cross, did.

[Parodite]

The return of Christ will be quite simple. When people are willing to just give what someone needs to someone when someone needs it, that will be the return of Christ and the end of debt.
[..]
When this changes, then we will see a return. Not through the lens of some hokey revenge fantasy, but through a return of the Christ consciousness where everyone truly loves their fellow as they love themselves.

That's how I always understood the core of Jesus' teachings. The question is how to help bring about that change, the return that you mention.

[Juggernaut Nihilism]

Jesus was not a New Age guru running a chain of health spas and writing bland bestsellers. He was a Jewish zealot and heretic who thought - with many in that feverish, apocalyptic time - that the world was about to end.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Jesus was not a New Age guru running a chain of health spas and writing bland bestsellers. He was a Jewish zealot and heretic who thought - with many in that feverish, apocalyptic time - that the world was about to end.

I think the Jewish zealot and heretic line of thinking is a bit outdated and too convenient in its explanation.

The "apocalyptic" Jews seemed to be of the old prophetic tradition suppressed by the Maccabees/Romans who allowed for prophesy if it were couched in "End TIme" language. That's why we see an explosion of 'end of the world' concerns from the period of 200 BC to 200 AD. And the Zealots/politically fomenting Jews wouldn't have been apocalyptic in that regard because they were obsessed with the continuation and harmony of what they perceived was the Old Order.

[Enki]

Jesus was not a New Age guru running a chain of health spas and writing bland bestsellers. He was a Jewish zealot and heretic who thought - with many in that feverish, apocalyptic time - that the world was about to end.

The world is always ending for someone at every moment. I think he understood that.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

. . The Judeo-Christian synthesis of some Protestant groups is just that: a Protestant project which has nothing to do with what Christ commanded. . .

Nap, please elaborate here or by PM. I'm totally lost about what you're referring to.

I think we'd both agree that Christ commissioned the Two Great Commandments for his followers, right? Everything beyond that is an important bit of commentary, including the concern of how Jewish and Christian covenants co-exist. This has traditionally been more concerning for certain Protestant groups, which I think is historically self-evident. It isn't for nothing that groups like the Puritans were considered Judaizers, right? Certain concerns you wouldn't find in, say, the Syrian Orthodox Church are going to pop up in the Dutch Reformed Church, with this being one of them. So this notion that Christians in general have to sit around justifying how, or if, the Two Great Commandments synthesize the whole of the Law is from a specific tradition that gives us catch-phrases like Judeo-Christian values distracts from the original commission by the Lawgiver.

[Marcus]

I think we'd both agree that Christ commissioned the Two Great Commandments for his followers, right? Everything beyond that is an important bit of commentary, including the concern of how Jewish and Christian covenants co-exist. This has traditionally been more concerning for certain Protestant groups, which I think is historically self-evident. It isn't for nothing that groups like the Puritans were considered Judaizers, right? Certain concerns you wouldn't find in, say, the Syrian Orthodox Church are going to pop up in the Dutch Reformed Church, with this being one of them. So this notion that Christians in general have to sit around justifying how, or if, the Two Great Commandments synthesize the whole of the Law is from a specific tradition that gives us catch-phrases like Judeo-Christian values distracts from the original commission by the Lawgiver.

Yes, I'd agree that all the law is summed up in those two commandments, but beyond that we diverge.

First, in the Reformed tradition, the Jewish and Christian covenants do not "coexist." The whole of God's dealing with man consists of one Covenant of Grace:

IV. This covenant of grace is frequently set forth in scripture by the name of a testament, in reference to the death of Jesus Christ the Testator, and to the everlasting inheritance, with all things belonging to it, therein bequeathed.

V. This covenant was differently administered in the time of the law, and in the time of the Gospel: under the law it was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews, all foresignifying Christ to come; which were, for that time, sufficient and efficacious, through the operation of the Spirit, to instruct and build up the elect in faith in the promised Messiah, by whom they had full remission of sins, and eternal salvation; and is called the Old Testament.

VI. Under the Gospel, when Christ, the substance, was exhibited, the ordinances in which this covenant is dispensed are the preaching of the Word, and the administration of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper: which, though fewer in number, and administered with more simplicity, and less outward glory, yet, in them, it is held forth in more fullness, evidence, and spiritual efficacy, to all nations, both Jews and Gentiles; and is called the New Testament. There are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same, under various dispensations.

—Westminster Conf. Faith

Western Christianity after the Reformation was greatly concerned with how the Christian and the Church interact with the state and social order in general, necessarily so as Protestantism eclipsed Roman Catholic political hegemony in many places, most notably England . . hence the fantasy* that such groups were Judaizers. They were not, they were merely interested in retaining Old Testament Law** to the extent that it codified the moral law and not civil or ceremonial as practiced in the Jewish social order before Christ. The Reformer's preoccupation with issues such as the Sabbath were not efforts at Judaizing . . such a notion would have been repugnant to them. The Reformers were intent on retaining the moral law, nothing more.

Why the Orthodox Churches exhibit their own peculiar attitude toward the state is another matter altogether.

• *That the Jewish and Christian covenants exist together is refuted by Calvin and others. Dispensationalists/Arminians perhaps disagree. That the Reformers were Judaizers is a fantasy of Spengler/Goldman, etc.
  
  **

  Of the Law of God
  
  I. God gave to Adam a law, as a covenant of works, by which He bound him and all his posterity, to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience, promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it, and endued him with power and ability to keep it.
  
  II. This law, after his fall, continued to be a perfect rule of righteousness; and, as such, was delivered by God upon Mount Sinai, in ten commandments, and written in two tables: the first four commandments containing our duty towards God; and the other six, our duty to man.
  
  III. Besides this law, commonly called moral, God was pleased to give to the people of Israel, as a church under age, ceremonial laws, containing several typical ordinances, partly of worship, prefiguring Christ, His graces, actions, sufferings, and benefits; and partly, holding forth divers instructions of moral duties. All which ceremonial laws are now abrogated, under the New Testament.
  
  IV. To them also, as a body politic, He gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the State of that people; not obliging under any now, further than the general equity thereof may require.
  
  V. The moral law does forever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof; and that, not only in regard of the matter contained in it, but also in respect of the authority of God the Creator, who gave it. Neither does Christ, in the Gospel, any way dissolve, but much strengthen this obligation.[
  
  VI. Although true believers be not under the law, as a covenant of works, to be thereby justified, or condemned; yet is it of great use to them, as well as to others; in that, as a rule of life informing them of the will of God, and their duty, it directs and binds them to walk accordingly; discovering also the sinful pollutions of their nature, hearts and lives; so as, examining themselves thereby, they may come to further conviction of, humiliation for, and hatred against sin, together with a clearer sight of the need they have of Christ, and the perfection of His obedience. It is likewise of use to the regenerate, to restrain their corruptions, in that it forbids sin: and the threatenings of it serve to show what even their sins deserve; and what afflictions, in this life, they may expect for them, although freed from the curse thereof threatened in the law. The promises of it, in like manner, show them God's approbation of obedience,and what blessings they may expect upon the performance thereof: although not as due to them by the law as a covenant of works. So as, a man's doing good, and refraining from evil, because the law encourages to the one and deters from the other, is no evidence of his being under the law: and not under grace.
  
  VII. Neither are the forementioned uses of the law contrary to the grace of the Gospel, but do sweetly comply with it; the Spirit of Christ subduing and enabling the will of man to do that freely, and cheerfully, which the will of God, revealed in the law, requires to be done.
  
  —ibid