How Do Followers of Jesus Relate to the Law?

Matthew 5:17–20 in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship

“Do not think that I came to destroy the Law…”

Jesus was warning his disciples against a specific error when he said this. It was one of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “the twin errors.”

In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer devotes a chapter to this passage. It’s the eighth chapter, and it’s entitled “The Righteousness of Christ.”

The picture above is a word cloud of the chapter that I made using wordle.net.

As you can see, Bonhoeffer is focusing here on Jesus’ teaching about the law.

Before we look at what he says about it, let me clarify what Bonhoeffer is not talking about when he talks about the law.

He’s not talking about circumcision and dietary laws. He’s not asking if things like these apply to the Gentiles. That question is settled.

He’s not talking about animal sacrifices.

He’s talking about the moral law, the unchanging standard of right and wrong, good and evil.

How do followers of Jesus relate to that law? How do they live up to that standard? Or don’t they live up to it? Do they live constantly under it, constantly striving and falling short? Or do they not even try because it’s impossible? How do we, as disciples of Jesus, relate to the moral demands of the God’s law?

This article addresses that question in five sections:

The Idolatry of Grace — Jesus warned his disciples not to think that he had come to abolish the law. They weren’t in danger of becoming legalists like the Pharisees, but they were in danger of becoming what we might call “grace-Pharisees.”

Bonhoeffer himself didn’t use that phrase. Neither did he use the word “antinomianism,” but that’s what he’s talking about.

According to Bonhoeffer, only Jesus can deliver us from the twin errors of legalism and antinominanism.

The Law Was Not Fulfilled for Us So That We Could Ignore It — Bonheoffer talked about “cheap grace” in the beginning of The Cost of Discipleship. Christ alone can deliver from cheap grace on the one hand, and the crushing burden of an unfulfilled law on the other hand.

He does this by fulfilling the law. When we understand how he does this, we see that Christ doesn’t abolish the law for us. On the contrary, as Bonheoffer said, Christ makes the law “properly valid for the first time.”

Was the Law Fulfilled or Circumvented in Christ’s Substitutionary Death? — The law is not primarily about perfect performance. It’s about perfect love. Perfect love will produce perfect performance, but never the other way around.

Christ death was an act of perfect love. It fulfilled the law.

Faith Working through Love Knows No Limits — All this should change how we think about the law and its fulfillment. This should then change how we relate to the law as followers of Jesus.

Christ, the Disciples, and the Law — My purpose in this article it simply to understand what Dietrich Bonhoeffer was saying in one chapter of The Cost of Disicpleship. To that end, I briefly paraphrase that chapter here.

So that’s a summary of the following article. One more thing before we go any further: You might want to refresh your memory on Matthew 5:17–20.

Here it is:

“Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven.”

The Idolatry of Grace

“The Righteousness of Christ” is the title of chapter eight of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. It’s the chapter in which he addresses Matthew 5:17–20.

The idolatry of grace is my term. Bonhoeffer doesn’t use it, but I think it describes what he’s talking about.

Bonhoeffer doesn’t use the word “idolatry” at all in chapter eight of The Cost of Discipleship. He talks about the “error of Israel” and the “temptation of the disciples.” These are the “twin errors.” I think it’s fair to say they’re forms of idolatry.

The Error of Israel

The error of Israel was legalism. The Israelites (some of them, anyway) had made an idol out of the law.

Bonhoeffer says it this way:

“It was the error of Israel to put the law in God’s place, to make the law their God and their God a law.”

Anything put in the place of God is a form of idolatry. I’ve tried to illustrate the error of Israel below:

By making an idol of the law, they had cut themselves off from God and his grace.

Notice in the illustration that the law is not the same thing as God himself. Bonhoeffer was careful to point this out, saying this about Jesus:

“He fulfils the law down to the last iota. But that means that he must die, he alone understands the true nature of the law as God’s law: the law is not itself God, nor is God the law.”

That sounds pretty basic: God’s law is not God, and God isn’t the law. Was Jesus really the only one who understood this?

According to Bonhoeffer, yes. This was part of Jesus’ unique perspective as God’s Son. He could distinguish between the law of God and God himself. The law was a way of relating to God, and had its source in God, but the law itself was not God.

Only Christ properly maintained this distinction, so only Christ was totally free from this form of idolatry in his heart.

The Temptation of the Disciples

When Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law,” he was warning his disciples against making a similar mistake as Israel had made. Similar, but not the same.

The disciples had begun to experience the grace of God in a profound way through the ministry of Jesus. The temptation was to imagine that the law was now abolished for them. If they had done this, they would have made an idol out of the grace of God.

This error would have resembled the idolatry of Israel. I’ve tried to illustrate this below:

In describing this temptation, Bonhoeffer says that “the disciples were trying to exploit God by their possession of salvation.”

This is what I have called the idolatry of grace. Any attempt to exploit God is a form of idolatry.

“In Both Cases, the Gift Was Confounded With the Giver”

By the way, in looking at these twin errors, we are not concerned with unbelievers. Of course unbelievers commit idolatry, but both of these errors are temptations common to all believers.

Here is a longer quote from Bonhoeffer, describing the twin errors and what they had in common:

“It was the error of Israel to put the law in God’s place, to make the law their God and their God a law. The disciples were confronted with the opposite danger of denying the law its divinity altogether and divorcing God from his law. Both errors lead to the same result. By confounding God and the law, the Jews were trying to use the law to exploit the Law-giver: He was swallowed up in the law, and therefore no longer its Lord. By imagining that God and the law could be divorced from one another, the disciples were trying to exploit God by their possession of salvation. In both cases, the gift was confounded with the Giver: God was denied equally, whether it was with the help of the law, or with the promise of salvation.”

Legalism and Her Sister

So the temptation of the disciples was to try to “exploit God by their possession of salvation.”

What does this exploitation look like? Well, if these are really twin errors, it will look like its twin.

The legalists, who made the error of idolizing the law, trusted in their own ability to keep the law.

The idolatry of grace would look similar. It would be to trust in your own ability to understand, define, and defend the doctrine of grace. It would be to trust in your own grasp on the grace of God, both intellectually and emotionally.

The idolatry of grace means trying to use the grace of God to do for yourself what only the grace of God itself can do. It means trying to use grace to justify yourself, not unlike the Pharisees attempted to use the law to justify themselves.

This kind of do-it-yourself grace doesn’t work.

If you keep it up for too long, you will have to convince yourself that it is working, much like the Pharisees convinced themselves that they were righteous. You will have to deny the continuing presence of sin — and sinful attitudes — by shutting out the voice of the law. This is why the idolatry of grace has historically been called antinomianism (which means anti-law-ism).

This is a kind of idolatry, even if you call your idol “Jesus.”

Jesus First

Dietrich Bonhoeffer doesn’t use the terms “legalism” and “antinomianism” in chapter eight of The Cost of Discipleship, but that’s what he is talking about. As I said, these temptations afflict all believers. Jesus himself is the solution to both of them.

Law and grace hold together in Jesus because both are fulfilled in him.

I’ve tried to illustrate this with another picutre. The point of this on is that Jesus himself comes between the disciples and the law.

Bonhoeffer emphasized this. For him it was a key to understanding how the disciple relates to the law differently than before:

“It is Jesus himself who comes between the disciples and the law, not the law which comes between Jesus and the disciples. They find their way to the law through the cross of Christ. Thus by pointing his disciples to the law which he alone fulfils, he forges a further bond between himself and them.”

Jesus himself keeps us from both the idolatry of the law (legalism) and the idolatry of grace (antinomianism). In doing so, he connects us to his Father.

“Only In Personal Communion With God Is the Law Fulfilled”

Let me summarize with one more quote from Bonhoeffer:

“Confronted with these twin errors, Jesus vindicates the divine authority of the law. God is its giver and its Lord, and only in personal communion with God is the law fulfilled. There is no fulfilment of the law apart from communion with God, and no communion with God apart from the fulfilment of the law. To forget the first condition was the mistake of the Jews, and to forget the second the temptation of the disciples.”

Disciples of Jesus are not under the Old Covenant, but the law of the Old Covenant remains, and cannot be ignored.

So how does the law relate to the disciples now that it is fulfilled in Christ?

As Bonhoeffer said in the previous quote, “They find their way to the law through the cross of Christ.”

So what comes first, the law or the cross?

We may think it’s the law. In the quote above, however, we can see that for Bonhoeffer the answer was the cross.

The Law Was Not Fulfilled for Us So That We Could Ignore It

Know Jesus, Know the Law

Jesus comes between the disciples and the law, so that they know the law through him. They know the law as an already-fulfilled law. Yet that does not mean that they are free to ignore its moral demands.

This quote from Bonhoeffer makes the point:

“But if Jesus comes between the disciples and the law, he does so not to release them from the duties it imposes, but to validate his demand that they should fulfil it. Just because they are bound to him, they must obey the law as he does. The fact that Jesus has fulfilled the law down to the very last letter does not release them from the same obedience. The law is fulfilled, that is all. But it is precisely this which makes it properly valid for the first time.”

So What Has Changed?

As we have seen, the Pharisees had made an idol out of the law.

Not all of the Israelites had made this mistake, however. Not even all of the Pharisees had done this. There were some good ones.

Consider the best examples of believers in the Old Testament. There were some real role models for us, heroes of faith. How did they respond to the moral demands of God’s law?

Maybe it looked something like this: they strove for the moral perfection that the law demands because this is the revealed will of God and he is worthy of no less. At the same time, however, they knew that they would inevitably fail. They would have shortcomings and they would always need to seek his grace and forgiveness.

Now, if that was the Old Testament view of the law, at least to some believers, what is the New Testament believer’s relationship to the same law, and how is it different from what I just described?

There is, of course, the convenience of not having to kill animals when we seek forgiveness. But we’re not talking about those aspects of the Old Testament law. We’re looking at the unchanging moral standards of God. And we can agree with those Old Testament believers that God deserves no less from us than perfection.

So when it comes to our relationship to that perfect standard, what difference does the New Testament really make?

Same Law, Better Righteousness

Bonhoeffer said the key difference is that the law has been fulfilled. Actually, he went so far as to say that this alone makes the law valid for the first time, as if it had not been valid in the Old Testament.

Let’s look again at that last sentence from the quote I shared above:

“The law is fulfilled, that is all. But it is precisely this which makes it properly valid for the first time.”

So, if the law is made properly valid for the first time because Jesus fulfilled it, then what was it before?

The answer is that the moral law is the same law as it was before Jesus fulfilled it.

“It is not the law which distinguishes the disciples from the Jews,” according to Bonhoeffer, “but the ‘better righteousness’.”

What is different for Jesus’ disciples? The righteousness that Jesus has made available to them. This is what has changed. Same law, better righteousness.

A Mental Model (That Doesn’t Work)

How do we relate to a law that’s already fulfilled? Later, I’m going to share a model that might point us in the right direction.

Before I do that, however, let me share the following model. It represents another possible approach. It’s a model created by transferring the Old Testament approach to God into the New Testament:

This kind of model encourages us to think that grace kicks in where our efforts end. We try our best and Jesus makes up for the difference.

If that model is correct, then this one would work just as well:

And so would this one:

Perhaps you can see where this leads:

This last illustration does have a lot of beauty to it. It reminds of us of the all-important truth that Jesus did it all for us.

The problem we are looking at, however, is the way in which “Jesus did it all for me” becomes “Jesus expects nothing from me.”

Or, to state the problem in the terms of Matthew 5:17, “Jesus fulfilled the law for me” becomes “Jesus abolished the law for me.”

Or, to use the terms Bonhoeffer uses in another part of The Cost of Discipleship, “costly grace” becomes “cheap grace.”

So how do we avoid this slide into cheap grace without losing sight of the beauty and power of the free gift of God?

How did Jesus fulfill the law?

Did he do it by living such a good life, by doing perfectly what we could only do imperfectly?

Perhaps this is what comes to our minds when we think of Christ’s righteousness. The problem is that the cross is not central to this definition.

As we have seen, Bonhoeffer insisted that disciples of Jesus know the law through the cross. They don’t interpret the cross in the light of the law; it’s the other way around.

According to Bonhoeffer, the cross is key to our relating to the law because it was key to Christ fulfilling the law. So we have to be clear that, in his crucifixion, Christ really did fulfill the law. He didn’t just find a way around it.

Was the Law Fulfilled or Circumvented in Christ’s Substitutionary Death?

The moral law remains for Jesus’ disciples. It has not been abolished.

But because this law has been fulfilled by Jesus, his own righteousness is available to the disciples. This makes a big difference.

Same law. Better righteousness.

As the Sermon on the Mount makes clear, this righteousness is to be seen in the behavior of the disciples. They are called to the highest moral standards.

I’ve already shared a model that illustrate the problem of motivation in pursuing those standards.

That model of relating to the law can be summed up as follows:

“Strive for perfection even though Christ already fulfilled the law.”

This kind of motivation doesn’t really work.

Bonhoeffer’s model was different. He changed the even though into a because.

He didn’t say, “Strive for perfection even though Christ already fulfilled the law.”

He said, “Strive for perfection because Christ already fulfilled the law.”

This changes the logic of motivation. It also works better, if we can see the logic for ourselves.

Bonhoeffer saw this logic in the structure of Matthew 5:17–20. According to his understanding of these verses, Jesus “prefaces his teaching on the ‘better righteousness’ with reference to his own fulfilment of the law.”

Here is Matthew 5:17–18, where Jesus refers to his fulfillment of the law:

“Think not that I came to destroy the law or the prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished.”

That, according to Bonhoeffer, was the preface and logical foundation for Matthew 5:20:

“For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

So Jesus is not teaching his disciples that they must have exceeding righteousness even though he had come to fulfill the law for them, but because he had come to fulfill the law for them.

Doing Perfect Works

At this point Bonhoeffer goes so far as to say that the disciples of Jesus who keep the law — who hold themselves accountable to God’s perfect moral standard and strive to live up to it — actually do so perfectly.

This comes about not by some flawless performance on their part, but by virtue of their fellowship with Jesus:

“But the disciple has the advantage over the Pharisee in that his doing of the law is in fact perfect. How is such a thing possible? Because between the disciples and the law stands one who has perfectly fulfilled it, one with whom they live in communion. They are faced not with a law which has never yet been fulfilled, but with one whose demands have already been satisfied. The righteousness it demands is already there, the righteousness of Jesus which submits to the cross because that is what the law demands.”

It seems to me the key word there is communion. The disciples have fellowship with Jesus, who himself has come between them and the law. So the way they encounter the law — through Jesus — makes their doing of the law perfect.

We’re about to take a closer look at this perfect doing of the law on the part the disciples. But before we do that, we should consider how, according to Bonhoeffer, Jesus himself perfectly fulfilled the law.

Does the Law Demand the Death of Sinners or the Death of Jesus?

Let’s look again at the last line from the Bonhoeffer quote I shared above: “the righteousness of Jesus which submits to the cross because that is what the law demands.”

Here Bonhoeffer says that the law demanded that Jesus die on the cross, as if Jesus could not have fulfilled the law without doing so. Not even for himself.

Certainly he could not have fulfilled the law for us without the cross. That’s because we are sinners. We needed him to die in our place.

But as for Jesus himself, didn’t he fulfill the law before he died?

The law demands that sinners be punished for their sins. But it doesn’t demand that Jesus take their place, does it? Isn’t that something he did for us out of love, even though he didn’t have to? Doesn’t that make his self-giving an act of grace and not law? Isn’t a righteous man suffering for the sins of others contrary to the very spirit of the law?

Let me ask another question. If you believe, as I do, that the righteousness of Christ has been imputed to you, where did Christ get this righteousness?

By living a perfect life?

If you believe, as I do, that Christ fulfilled the righteous requirement of the law for your sake, how did he fulfill it?

By living a perfect life?

If that’s the whole answer, it’s easy to look at the cross as simply the means of transfer. It serves as the necessary device to get the righteousness of Christ imputed to us.

It is correct to say that Jesus lived a life of perfect righteousness under the law, and that by his death and resurrection, this righteousness is imputed to us.

That seems right to me (I try to always add “and resurrection”). We are forgiven. He bore our punishment. Our sins are not counted against us. What’s more, his righteousness is counted to us.

So far, so good. This is evangelical truth, to my understanding.

But is it complete? Because, according to that explanation, it’s still possible to understand Christ’s death strictly as a means of transfer, a way of getting his righteousness imputed to our account.

Bonhoeffer is saying something else here. He’s saying that the death of Christ was itself part of his perfect righteousness under the law. It was the culmination of his fulfillment of law. It was more than a means of transferring his law-fulfilling righteousness to us. It was his law-fulfilling righteousness.

The Law Fulfilled Not in Works but in a Person

If Bonhoeffer was correct, and if I understand him correctly, then Christ’s death was the ultimate expression of his perfect, law-fulfilling righteousness.

Not everyone agrees about this. Jesus’ death is sometimes understood as something that happened outside of the law, as a suspension of the law, or a clever way around it, a way to satisfy the law’s demand for punishment while also getting a victory for grace.

Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, understood it like this:

“The only way for him to fulfil the law is by dying a sinner’s death on the cross. There he embodies in his person the perfect fulfilment of the law.”

How can this be? Jesus lived a perfectly sinless life. Wasn’t that enough to fulfill the law?

Didn’t Jesus lay down his life for us out of love, voluntarily, as a free gift?

Well, as it turns out, that’s what the law of God is ultimately about: freely given love. Such love will manifest itself differently, according to the situation it finds itself in. For Jesus, that meant the cross.

Here is that quote again in more context. See how Bonhoeffer first acknowledges that Christ did fulfill the law during his life. Then he goes further and says that, given the situation he found himself in, and the nature of the opposition against him, staying true to the spirit of the law would cost him his life.

Jesus, the Son of God, who alone lives in perfect communion with him, vindicates the law of the old covenant by coming to fulfil it. He was the only Man who ever fulfilled the law, and therefore he alone can teach the law and its fulfilment aright. The disciples would naturally grasp that as soon as he told them, for they knew who he was. But the Jews could not grasp it as long as they refused to believe in him. It was thus only to be expected that they would reject his teaching on the law: to them it was blasphemy against God, because it was blasphemy against his law. Jesus, the champion of the true law, must suffer at the hands of the champions of the false law. He dies on the cross as a blasphemer, a transgressor of the law, because he has vindicated the true against the false. The only way for him to fulfil the law is by dying a sinner’s death on the cross. There he embodies in his person the perfect fulfilment of the law.

If Jesus loved God with all his heart and loved his neighbor as himself — in other words, if he fulfilled the law — then the cross would be part of that fulfillment. He laid down his life out of perfect love for God and for his neighbor. He fulfilled the law all the way to the end, all the way to the cross.

Wasn’t it also a gift of grace? It certainly was for us. Perhaps that’s how grace and law meet together, not in conflict, but in agreement.

I already shared an illustration of this meeting-together of law and grace. It looked like this:

Now I want to share one more illustration. As I promised, this one might point us in the right direction.

Faith Working through Love Knows No Limits

We have already looked at the following model of how we might relate to the law as followers of Jesus:

We considered the problem of motivation that comes with this model. Why try at all if Jesus is always going to make up the difference for us?

I would like to suggest two more problems with it and then propose a different model.

This Model Encourages Us to Think of the Law as Something Far Away From Us

This is exactly what Moses told the people not to do. In Deuteronomy 30:11–14 he said this:

“For this commandment which I command you today is not too mysterious for you, nor is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend into heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it.”

If that’s what Moses warned them about under the Old Covenant, how much more should we who have a New Covenant avoid this kind of thinking?

This Model Keeps Us in Pursuit of “Enough”

It implies that there is a standard called “enough.” That we can love God enough, we can do enough, with enough energy, and that our intentions will be pure enough.

I could go on.

Not only does this ideal called “enough” remain far away from us, as we have seen above, but it also suggests that our keeping of the law is only temporary.

What would we do, for instance, if we finally did enough? When we finally loved God enough, would we stop growing in love for him? When we finally bore enough fruit in this life, would we stop bearing fruit?

The truth is that there is no outer limit to how much we can love God or how much fruit we can bear.

Maybe the following model would work better than the one we considered above:

This model reflects that the law is fulfilled at the outset of our efforts. Its fulfillment by Christ motivates us.

There is no stopping point. Faith working through love knows no limits.

Christ, the Disciples, and the Law

A Summary of chapter eight of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship:

The disciples were so undeserving, yet Jesus imparted such grace to them. It was something totally new. It seemed that for him, anything was possible and that the old rules didn’t apply. “Maybe Jesus would do away with the law altogether,” they must have thought.

“Don’t even think it,” he told them.

They did need to rethink the issue of authority, however. Jesus honored the law, but he also told his disciples to listen to him and follow him. He asserted his own authority, and it was greater than any authority they had ever seen. And although he really did honor the law, the way he did it looked different than the way the scribes and Pharisees had done it.

So the law remained in the lives of the disciples, and it called for their perfect obedience, just as Jesus had. That call was never as compelling as the call of Jesus, but it was clear in its demands. So how could they follow two masters, even if those two masters agreed?

They had to re-learn the law so that they could re-hear it. They needed to hear it from Jesus. He obviously understood it and was doing it right.

What the disciples didn’t know was that for Jesus, doing it right was going to cost him his life.

The law is done right when it is done not just for God but with him. The secret to fulfilling the law was to live in communion with the law-giver. Jesus did this.

The chief priests and scribes had abused the law. When they saw Jesus fulfilling it, it looked to them like blasphemy and transgression. It looked to them like he deserved to die.

In keeping the law, Jesus kept it to the end, even unto death on a cross. This is what perfect communion with God costs a person in this world of sin.

Jesus paid this price so that he could share that divine communion with his disciples, right here in the very world of sin that crucified him.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’re still in the Sermon on the Mount, well before the cross. Jesus hasn’t told his disciples about the cross yet. He is simply warning them that he is not going to abolish the law for them, but fulfill it. He is not yet telling him everything that fulfilling the law would require of him.

From now on, the disciples of Jesus would know the law as his law. And because he was fulfilling it for them, his righteousness would also be theirs.

The disciples would not operate as if there was an unfulfilled law towering over them. They would live from a fulfilled law within them — the righteousness of Christ.

They were the poor in spirit, and his righteousness was their blessing. They were the city on a hill, and his righteousness was their light.