Devotional 103: Liberty and the Law: Not a License to Sin

The Confession Read

God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are, in any thing, contrary to his Word; or beside it, if matters of faith, or worship. So that, to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands, out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience: and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 20, Section 2

Introduction

There is within every human being a chamber into which no other creature can enter. It is the conscience: that faculty of the soul which sits as judge over our actions, accusing or excusing, binding or loosing, and filling the heart with peace or with dreadful expectation. And the question that has divided churches, launched reformations, and sent martyrs to the stake is this: who sits on the throne of that chamber? To whom does the conscience answer? In whose name may it be bound, and by whose word may it be set free? The Westminster Divines answered that question in a single, uncompromising declaration: God alone. No pope, no council, no parliament, no presbytery, no husband, no parent, no teacher, no human authority whatsoever, possesses rightful lordship over the conscience of another. The conscience is God's territory, and every intrusion upon it by merely human power is, in the Divines' language, a betrayal of true liberty and a destruction of reason itself. This was not, and is not, a theoretical abstraction. The men who drafted these words had seen what happens when human authority usurps the throne of conscience. They had watched as the Roman Church bound men and women to doctrines nowhere found in Scripture, to ceremonies that Christ never instituted, to fasts and feasts and pilgrimages that had no warrant beyond ecclesiastical tradition, and then enforced compliance by social pressure and by the threat of eternal damnation. They had read the accounts of the Marian martyrs — Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer — who went to the flames rather than submit their consciences to a merely human authority in matters of faith. And they had seen, on the other side, the chaos that ensued when every man became a law unto himself, claiming the Spirit's private leading as warrant for doctrines and practices that shattered the peace of the church. Between these two errors, the tyranny of imposed belief and the anarchy of private revelation, the Divines planted Section 2. It is brief, barely eighty words in the original, but every phrase is a fortress. It establishes the throne, defines the territory, marks the boundaries, and names the invaders. To understand it rightly is to understand why the Reformation was necessary, why the martyrs died, and why every believer must learn to distinguish the voice of God from the voice of men.

Scripture Foundation

The lordship of God over the conscience is not an inference drawn from a few scattered texts; it is a theme woven through the entire fabric of Scripture, from the garden to the apostolic letters. But one passage stands as a kind of capstone, gathering the argument into a single, decisive declaration. James, the brother of our Lord, writes: "There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy: who art thou that judgest another?" James 4:12. The Greek word translated "lawgiver" is nomothetēs, a compound of nomos (law) and tithēmi (to set or place). It denotes one who has the authority to establish binding moral obligation — to set down a law that the creature must obey on pain of judgment. And James insists, with the force of an axiom, that this authority belongs to one and only one. "There is one lawgiver" — not two, not many, not a distributed network of human authorities each with a piece of the legislative power. One. And this one possesses both the right to command and the power to enforce: he "is able to save and to destroy." The God who gives the law is the God who holds the ultimate sanctions, eternal life and eternal death, in his hand. No human authority can claim either of these. The pope cannot save; the magistrate cannot destroy the soul in hell. Therefore neither the pope nor the magistrate can bind the conscience, for the binding of conscience always carries an implicit appeal to final judgment. When a merely human authority commands as though disobedience were damnable, it usurps a prerogative that belongs to God alone. But James is not merely asserting a metaphysical truth; he is drawing a pastoral conclusion. "Who art thou that judgest another?" The logic is inescapable: if God alone is Lawgiver and Judge, then every human judgment that presumes to bind another man's conscience — to declare him guilty or innocent before God on the basis of human rules — is an act of intolerable presumption. The one who judges his brother in matters where God has not spoken has forgotten his place in the universe. He is a creature addressing another creature as though he were the Creator. The Confession's language about "the doctrines and commandments of men" finds its sharpest biblical expression here: human commandments, when elevated to the level of divine law, are not merely unwise; they are a challenge to the unique sovereignty of the one Lawgiver. The apostle Paul advances the same argument from a different angle — not from God's legislative authority, but from Christ's exclusive ownership of his people. In Romans 14:4, he asks: "Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand." The word translated "servant" is oiketēs, a term for a household slave, one who belongs entirely to his master and owes allegiance to no other. Paul's logic is both simple and devastating: the Christian belongs to Christ. He has been bought with a price. He is not his own, and he is certainly not yours. Therefore no third party — no fellow believer, no church officer, no ecclesiastical court — has the right to stand between the servant and his Master and issue binding commands in the Master's name where the Master himself has not spoken. The servant's standing is determined by his relationship to his own Lord, not by his conformity to your preferences or traditions. And Paul adds, with characteristic tenderness, the promise that undergirds this liberty: "Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand." The believer who rests his conscience on God's Word alone, refusing the impositions of men, will not be left to fall. The same God who claims exclusive lordship over the conscience also supplies the grace that sustains the conscience in its liberty. This same apostle, writing to the Corinthians, extends the argument from ownership to the very price of redemption. In 1 Corinthians 7:23, he declares: "Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men." The Greek verb ēgorasthēte (you were bought) is the same marketplace language that Paul used in Galatians to describe Christ's redemptive work. The price was the blood of the Son of God, and the purchase was total. A slave purchased by a new master owes no further obedience to his former owner, and a believer purchased by Christ owes no ultimate allegiance to any merely human authority in matters of conscience. The negative command, "be not ye the servants of men," is not a prohibition against lawful submission to civil government or church order, for Paul himself teaches both. It is a prohibition against transferring to any human authority the kind of inward, conscience-binding allegiance that belongs to Christ alone. When a church demands that its members believe doctrines not taught in Scripture, when a pastor binds the consciences of his flock with rules that Christ never gave, when a council claims the right to command what God has not commanded: in all these cases, the believer must remember the price that was paid for him and refuse to become, in the inner tribunal of the soul, the servant of men. The Lord Jesus himself provided the foundational principle from which all these apostolic applications flow. In Matthew 15:9, quoting Isaiah, he pronounced a devastating judgment on the religious leaders of his day: "But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." The word translated "in vain" is matēn, meaning empty, fruitless, to no purpose. The most elaborate liturgy, the most rigorous asceticism, the most scrupulous observance of human traditions — all of it is void of value in the sight of God when it rests on commandments that originate in the mind of man rather than the mouth of God. Christ does not say that such worship is imperfect, or that it needs supplementing, or that it is well-intentioned but misguided. He says it is vain. Empty. Worthless. The reason is not that human traditions are always evil in themselves; it is that worship belongs to God, and God alone has the right to prescribe how he shall be approached. When men substitute their own inventions for divine prescription, they are not worshiping the God who reveals himself; they are worshiping a god of their own devising, and the lips that move in prayer are addressing an idol. This text alone would be sufficient to ground the Confession's insistence that the conscience is free from human doctrines "beside" God's Word in matters of faith and worship. If Christ condemns as vain the worship that rests on human commandments, then no church may require such worship, and no believer may offer it with a clean conscience.

What the Divines Meant

The Divines did not invent the doctrine of liberty of conscience. They inherited it from the Reformation, whose earliest battles were fought precisely on this ground. But they gave it a precision that the confessional tradition had not previously achieved, and they did so because the pastoral situation demanded it. The errors they faced were not speculative; they were souls in the balance. The first and most obvious target was Rome. The Council of Trent, convened in response to the Reformation, had not retreated from the medieval claims of papal and conciliar authority; it had entrenched them. The Roman Church taught, and still teaches, that the church possesses an infallible teaching office, that unwritten traditions carry authority equal to Scripture, and that the faithful are bound in conscience to receive both what Scripture teaches and what the church declares, even where the church's declaration goes beyond the express statements of the Word. The Confession's language about "doctrines and commandments of men, which are, in anything, contrary to his Word; or beside it, if matters of faith, or worship" was a direct repudiation of this claim. The Divines drew a line: human authority may command what Scripture commands, or it may command what Scripture neither commands nor forbids in matters indifferent, but it may never command what Scripture forbids, nor may it command as necessary to faith or worship what Scripture does not require. The latter point — the "beside it" clause — was the more controversial of the two, for Rome did not generally claim to command what Scripture explicitly contradicted; it claimed rather that the church, by virtue of its teaching office, could supplement Scripture with binding traditions. The Divines answered that in matters of faith and worship, the silence of Scripture is itself a prohibition: what God has not commanded may not be imposed as though he had. But Rome was not the only error the Divines addressed. The antinomians and enthusiasts of the seventeenth century had taken the Reformation's recovery of Christian liberty and twisted it into a license for private revelation. If the conscience is free, they reasoned, then the Spirit may lead the individual believer to doctrines and practices that the rest of the church does not recognize, and no ecclesiastical authority may question what the Spirit has allegedly revealed. The Divines' answer was to tether liberty firmly to Scripture. The conscience is free from human commandments, but it is not free from God's Word; it is bound to Scripture as its only infallible rule. The enthusiast who claims that the Spirit has revealed a new doctrine or a new form of worship is not exercising Christian liberty; he is confusing his own imagination with the voice of God. The Spirit who inspired the Scriptures does not contradict the Scriptures he inspired. Liberty of conscience is not liberty from God; it is liberty from men in matters where God has not spoken, precisely so that the conscience may be wholly subject to God where God has spoken. There was also a third and more subtle error: the tendency of Reformed churches themselves, once established, to multiply requirements beyond Scripture. The history of the Scottish church after the Reformation shows how quickly the impulse to bind consciences with human rules could reassert itself, even among those who had repudiated Rome. The Divines, including the Scottish commissioners, were acutely aware of this danger. They had witnessed the controversies over kneeling at communion, over the use of set prayers, over the observance of holy days — disputes in which well-meaning churchmen had sought to impose uniformity in matters where Scripture had left Christians free. The Confession's careful distinction between things "contrary to his Word" and things "beside it, if matters of faith, or worship" was designed to protect the liberty of believers against Rome's gross usurpations and against the more subtle encroachments of Reformed church authorities who, in their zeal for order and uniformity, might be tempted to bind where God had loosed. The closing sentence of the section introduces a phrase that deserves particular attention: "the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also." The term "implicit faith" — fides implicita — was a technical expression in medieval theology. It denoted a faith that accepted whatever the church taught without requiring understanding or personal conviction. The layman was not expected to know what Scripture taught or even what the church's doctrines were; he was simply to believe what the church believed, to trust that the church would not lead him astray. The Reformers saw in this doctrine the destruction of Christian liberty and of human reason itself, for it reduced the image of God in man — an image that includes the capacity for rational understanding and moral judgment — to a blank surface on which the church could write whatever it pleased. When the Confession says that implicit faith destroys "reason also," it is not claiming that unaided human reason can discover the truths of the gospel; it is claiming that the gospel addresses rational creatures who are capable of understanding what they believe, and that a system that demands belief without understanding degrades the human being into something less than what God created him to be.

Theological Depth

Calvin devoted the entirety of Book Three, Chapter Nineteen of his Institutes to the subject of Christian liberty, and the second section of WCF 20 is essentially a distillation of his argument. Calvin recognized that the doctrine of liberty of conscience was not a secondary matter but an essential appendage of justification by faith. The man who has been justified freely by the grace of God has been freed from every tribunal except God's own. His conscience no longer trembles before the judgments of men because it has been acquitted by the judgment of God. Calvin writes: "When the consciences of believers, seeking an assurance of their justification before God, raise and advance themselves above the law, and forget all the righteousness of the law, they should altogether renounce the righteousness of works, and wholly rest on the righteousness of Christ." But he immediately extends this principle from justification to the whole of the Christian life: the conscience that has been freed from the law's condemnation must also be freed from every merely human authority that would bind it where God has left it free. For Calvin, the two are inseparable. The same Christ who purchased our liberation from the curse of the law purchased also our liberation from the doctrines and commandments of men. To submit the conscience to a merely human authority in matters of faith is, in effect, to deny that Christ's lordship over the conscience is sufficient. But Calvin went further than many of his successors dared to go. He insisted that the conscience's freedom includes freedom in what the tradition calls adiaphora — things indifferent, matters neither commanded nor forbidden in Scripture. The apostle Paul's discussion of meat offered to idols in 1 Corinthians 8-10 was not, for Calvin, a minor pastoral footnote; it was a paradigm of how Christian liberty operates in the daily life of the church. The believer whose conscience has been instructed by Scripture knows that the idol is nothing and that the meat is clean. He is free to eat. But he is also free to abstain, and his abstention, when motivated by love for a weaker brother, is an exercise of the very liberty it appears to renounce. What he may not do is allow the weaker brother to bind his conscience where Scripture has left it free. The moment a brother says, "You must abstain, for eating is sin," the line has been crossed from charity into tyranny, and the liberty for which Christ died has been compromised. Calvin's pastoral wisdom here is rarely matched: the strong must bear with the weak, but the weak must not be permitted to legislate for the strong. Both the impatient contempt of the strong for the weak and the imperious demands of the weak upon the strong are violations of the liberty Christ purchased. William Perkins, the father of English Puritanism and perhaps the finest casuist the Reformed tradition has produced, devoted an entire treatise to the subject of conscience, and his work shaped the Confession's language at every point. Perkins defined conscience as "a part of the understanding in all reasonable creatures, determining of their particular actions, either with them or against them." It is, in his careful analysis, a faculty that sits between God and the soul, applying general principles to particular cases, and it functions properly only when it is bound by the Word of God alone. Perkins distinguished between the "binding" power of conscience — its capacity to oblige the will — and the "testifying" power — its capacity to bear witness to what has been done. The binding power belongs only to God, for only God can impose an obligation that reaches to the inner man and carries eternal consequences. When a human authority attempts to bind the conscience, it is not merely overstepping its jurisdiction; it is attempting to exercise a power that human nature cannot possess, any more than a man can create a world or raise the dead. The conscience, Perkins wrote, is "a little god sitting in the middle of men," and the attempt of any creature to usurp that throne is not merely error but idolatry, the creature demanding the allegiance that belongs to the Creator alone. Robert Shaw, writing his exposition of the Confession two centuries later, sharpened the application of Perkins's principle to the ecclesiastical controversies of his own day. Shaw observed that the requirement of implicit faith is destructive of liberty and of piety itself, for a faith that believes without understanding cannot love the God in whom it believes. Faith, in the biblical sense, always involves the whole person: the mind apprehending truth, the will embracing it, and the affections delighting in it. A system that demands belief without understanding severs the mind from the will and affections, producing a hollow conformity that has the form of godliness without its power. Shaw pressed this point against both Rome and the latitudinarian tendency within Protestantism: the former destroyed reason by demanding belief in what could not be understood, and the latter destroyed faith by reducing it to what could be understood without revelation. The Confession's balanced affirmation — that liberty of conscience and reason are both destroyed by implicit faith — preserves both the rationality of Christian belief and the transcendence of its object. Boston brings to this discussion the experiential warmth of the Scottish communion season. In his notes on the Marrow of Modern Divinity, he addresses the believer who has been freed from the condemning power of the law but still lives under the tyranny of human expectations, the expectations of fellow church members, of family, of a religious culture that measures spirituality by conformity to unwritten codes. Boston's counsel is pastoral and direct: the conscience that has been quieted by the blood of Christ must not be troubled by the judgments of men. The believer, he taught, has but one Lord in the court of conscience, and it is treason against that Lord to receive the sentence of any other. This was not a license for antinomian carelessness: Boston was as rigorous a preacher of holiness as any in the Scottish tradition, yet he insisted that the motivation for holiness must arise from the gospel itself, not from the pressure of human opinion. The man whose obedience is motivated by fear of what others will think is still a slave, however impeccable his outward conduct. The man whose obedience flows from gratitude for redemption received is truly free, even if his conduct occasions the disapproval of every human tribunal. Turretin, the great Genevan scholastic whose Institutes were the standard textbook of Reformed theology for a century, provides a rigorous definition of what is at stake when the conscience is bound or loosed. He distinguishes between the "obligation" of conscience — the binding force that attaches to a moral precept — and the "judgment" of conscience — the application of that precept to a particular case. Only God can create moral obligation, because only God can impose a sanction that reaches beyond this life. A human law may carry civil penalties; it may carry ecclesiastical censures; it may carry social ostracism. But it cannot carry the divine approval or disapproval that makes an action truly right or wrong in the sight of God. When a human authority commands what God forbids, the conscience must disobey the human authority and obey God. When a human authority commands what God neither commands nor forbids — in matters indifferent — the conscience is free to obey or disobey as Christian prudence and love dictate, but it may not treat the human command as though it were divine law. To do so would be to grant to a creature what belongs only to the Creator, and in the very act of what appears to be submission, to commit the most fundamental act of rebellion: the transfer of ultimate allegiance from God to man.

Puritan Application

First, learn to distinguish between the voice of God and the voice of men, and teach your conscience to answer only to the former. This is the foundational discipline of Christian liberty, and it is far more difficult than it first appears, because the voice of men rarely announces itself as such. It comes dressed in the language of piety, of tradition, of concern for the peace of the church, of respect for those in authority. It speaks through parents who genuinely desire their children's good, through pastors who sincerely believe they are guarding the flock, through fellow believers who cannot understand why you do not share their scruples. The apostle Paul had to withstand the pressure of those who insisted that Gentile converts must be circumcised, a demand that came not from pagans but from fellow believers who could quote Scripture in its support. The Galatian churches were being led astray not by obvious heretics but by men who claimed to be building on the apostolic foundation. The believer must therefore develop the habit of asking, of every command or expectation that presents itself as binding on the conscience: "Where has God said this?" If the answer is "Nowhere, but the church has always taught it," or "Nowhere, but every serious Christian believes it," or "Nowhere, but the consequences of not conforming will be severe" — then the conscience must remain free, however costly that freedom proves to be. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, but the price of bondage is higher still. Second, guard against the subtle temptation to bind other consciences where God has left them free. It is a peculiar irony of the fallen heart that those who have been delivered from tyranny often become tyrants in their turn. The believer who has learned to resist the imposition of human rules in matters of faith may then proceed to impose his own convictions on others with exactly the same imperiousness from which he himself was delivered. The apostle Paul saw this danger clearly and addressed it with pastoral wisdom in his treatment of matters indifferent. The strong brother who knows that an idol is nothing and that all foods are clean is tempted to despise the weak brother who still shrinks from meat offered to idols. The weak brother, in turn, is tempted to judge the strong brother as spiritually careless. Paul condemns both: "Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth." The liberty of the strong must be exercised in love, and the scruples of the weak must be borne with patience. What neither may do is attempt to bind the other's conscience. The strong may not compel the weak to eat, and the weak may not compel the strong to abstain. In the household of God, the servants answer to one Master, and fellow servants must not presume to sit in the Master's judgment seat. Third, resist the demand for implicit faith wherever it appears, including in settings that call themselves Reformed. The requirement of implicit faith did not die with the Council of Trent. It reappears whenever a church, a movement, or a Christian leader demands allegiance that goes beyond what Scripture teaches. It may take the form of a theological system that claims to answer every question definitively, leaving no room for legitimate differences of interpretation on secondary matters. It may take the form of a pastor who expects his congregation to adopt his doctrines, his applications, his cultural judgments, and his political opinions, treating disagreement as disloyalty. It may take the form of a Christian subculture that enforces conformity through social pressure: the raised eyebrow, the unspoken question, the gradual exclusion from the inner circle. The Reformers died to establish the principle that the conscience may not be bound by merely human authority, and that principle is violated just as surely by the soft tyranny of group expectation as by the hard tyranny of official decree. The believer who finds himself in a church that demands implicit faith — faith that goes beyond personal conviction grounded in Scripture — must, with all charity and humility, gently but firmly decline. To do otherwise is to surrender what Christ purchased with his blood. Fourth, do not mistake liberty of conscience for liberty from conscience. The freedom the Confession proclaims is freedom from the doctrines and commandments of men, not freedom from the binding authority of God's Word. The conscience has been set free from human lords precisely so that it may be wholly subject to the divine Lord. A conscience that refuses to be bound by Scripture is not free; it is shipwrecked, adrift without anchor or compass, at the mercy of every wind of doctrine and every surge of personal desire. The believer whose conscience does not tremble at the threatenings of God's law, who does not rest in the promises of the gospel, who does not submit to the commandments of Christ: that believer has not understood the first thing about Christian liberty. True liberty is the glad and willing subjection of the whole soul to the God who made it, redeemed it, and will one day glorify it. The chains from which Christ frees us are not the chains of his own commandments, for his commandments are not grievous, but the chains of human opinion, human tradition, and human expectation that would enslave us to the fear of man rather than the fear of God. Fifth, cultivate a tender conscience without cultivating a scrupulous one. The distinction is easily lost but pastorally crucial. A tender conscience is one that is sensitive to the Word of God, quick to detect sin, prompt to repent, and earnest in pursuing holiness. A scrupulous conscience is one that is bound by rules that God has not given, perpetually anxious about matters indifferent, forever asking, "Is this permitted?" rather than "What would please my Father?" The former is the fruit of the Spirit's sanctifying work; the latter is the fruit of legalism masquerading as piety. The Divines were not encouraging believers to become indifferent to sin or careless in their walk. They were warning against the multiplication of obligations beyond Scripture — obligations that burden the soul with a weight Christ never intended it to bear. The believer who wakes each morning wondering whether wearing a certain garment, eating a certain food, observing a certain day, or adopting a certain practice will offend God (though God has said nothing about any of these things) is not walking in liberty. He is carrying a yoke that Christ never laid upon him. The remedy is not to despise the things themselves — for often they are harmless — but to retrain the conscience to answer to one voice alone. When the conscience learns that its only Lord speaks in Scripture, and that where Scripture is silent the believer is free, the scrupulous anxiety that poisons so much of Christian experience begins to dissolve, and in its place grows the calm confidence of a child who knows his Father's voice and trusts his Father's heart.

Prayer

O Lord God, who alone art Lord of the conscience and who alone hast the right to command the souls that Thou hast made, we bless Thee for the liberty that is ours in Christ: liberty from the doctrines and commandments of men, liberty from the yoke of human tradition, liberty from the demand of implicit faith and blind obedience. We confess that we have too often surrendered what Christ purchased, bowing our consciences to the expectations of men when we should have bowed them to Thy Word alone. We have feared the disapproval of our fellow creatures more than we have feared Thee, and we have conformed to patterns of this world that we mistook for patterns of godliness. Forgive us, we pray, and restore to us the freedom of sons who know their Father's voice. Grant us wisdom to distinguish between Thy commandments and the commandments of men, and courage to obey Thee when human authority demands what Thou dost forbid. Grant us charity toward those whose consciences are bound by scruples we do not share, that our liberty may never become a stumbling block to the weak. Grant us humility to receive correction when our own consciences err, for we know that conscience itself is not infallible and must be continually reformed by Thy Word. And grant us, above all, such a lively sense of Christ's lordship over every chamber of our souls that no merely human voice may ever again sit on the throne that belongs to Him alone. Keep us from the twin errors that would destroy the liberty for which Christ died: from the tyranny that would bind consciences where Thou hast loosed them, and from the license that would loose consciences from the bonds that Thou hast fastened. Let our liberty be ever exercised in love, our love ever guided by truth, and our truth ever drawn from the fountain of Thy holy Word. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who purchased this liberty with his precious blood, and who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.