Third Use of the Law

History

Causes

The Reformation had to answer a question its own doctrine created. If a sinner is justified by faith apart from works of the law, what is the law still for? The reformers’ first two answers were agreed: the law restrains evil in society, and it convicts the conscience and drives the sinner to Christ. Whether it has anything further to say to a Christian already justified was the open question, and it was settled differently in different places.

The dispute became concrete in Wittenberg in the late 1530s. Johannes Agricola argued that while non-Christians were still under the Mosaic law, Christians were free of it and under the gospel alone — a position Martin Luther attacked, coining the label “antinomian” for it (overview, secondary). Luther’s reply was that the law must still be preached, even in the church, because Christians remain sinners.

A threefold scheme of the law’s uses took shape in Wittenberg and Geneva in the same decade. John Calvin gave it the form the Reformed tradition has used ever since, and he was explicit about which use mattered most: “The third use of the Law (being also the principal use, and more closely connected with its proper end) has respect to believers in whose hearts the Spirit of God already flourishes and reigns” (Institutes 2.7.12). Even those who delight in God’s will, he argued, need the law to learn what that will actually is, and to be spurred on when the flesh drags.

Influence

The Reformed churches built catechesis around it. The Westminster Confession (19.6) states that believers are “not under the law as a covenant of works” yet find it “of great use to them… as a rule of life, informing them of the will of God and their duty,” and the Heidelberg Catechism treats the Ten Commandments under thankfulness, after its sections on sin and deliverance.

Lutherans settled the question at the end of their own long quarrel. The Formula of Concord (1577) devoted its sixth article to the third use, reporting one side that held the regenerate “do not learn the new obedience… from the Law” because the Spirit moves them freely, “just as the sun of itself, without any impulse, completes its ordinary course,” and another that held the Spirit uses the written law to instruct believers. It decided for the second: believers “should daily exercise themselves in the Law of the Lord,” because “the Law is a mirror in which the will of God, and what pleases Him, are exactly portrayed.”

Methodist and later holiness traditions inherited the position through Anglican and Puritan channels and gave it a particular stress on the law as a rule for growth in holiness. The scheme is now standard in confessional Protestant teaching, so much so that the disputes about it are mostly disputes about emphasis.

Key ideas and contributors

Three uses, one law. The usual list is civil (restraining evil in society), pedagogical (convicting of sin and driving to Christ), and didactic or normative (guiding the believer). Calvin runs through all three in Institutes 2.7, which is why the chapter is the standard reference (2.7).

The law is not a covenant of works for the believer. The point of the qualifier in the Westminster Confession is to keep the third use from reopening justification. The law directs the Christian; it does not accuse him before God, because Christ has borne that accusation (Romans 8:1). The same move appears in the Formula of Concord: the law “cannot burden with its curse those who have been reconciled to God through Christ.”

The law shows what love looks like. Without a standard, obedience becomes whatever the believer imagines God wants. The Formula puts it exactly there: the Spirit uses the written law so that believers “learn to serve God, not according to their own thoughts, but according to His written Law and Word, which is a sure rule and standard of a godly life.”

Only the moral law carries over. Reformed theology sorts the Mosaic law into moral, ceremonial and judicial, abrogates the last two and keeps the first (Westminster Confession 19). The third use applies to the moral law alone, summarised in the Decalogue and in the two commandments of love.

Gratitude, not merit. The Heidelberg Catechism makes the point structurally. Its second question sets out three things to know: “how great my sins and misery are… how I am delivered… how I am to be thankful to God for such deliverance.” The commandments are taught in the third part, as the shape of thankfulness for a salvation already given.

Other contributors: the Westminster divines, who gave the position its confessional form in English; the authors of the Formula of Concord, who settled it for the Lutheran churches; and Johannes Agricola, whose denial forced the question into the open.

Key controversies

Does the New Testament teach it? Critics argue that the apostles motivate obedience by the gospel and the indwelling Spirit, not by returning believers to the law (Galatians 5:18; Romans 6:14). Defenders answer that the apostles quote the commandments to churches constantly (Ephesians 6:2; Romans 13:8–10), which is exactly the third use in practice.

Whether Luther held it. Lutherans still argue about this. One side reads Luther’s law–gospel distinction as leaving no room for a third use, and treats the Formula of Concord’s article as Melanchthon’s scheme imposed on him. The other side points to Luther’s catechisms, which expound the commandments to Christians at length, and to his writings against the antinomians.

Radical law–gospel theology. Twentieth-century Lutheran writers in the line of Gerhard Forde argued that preaching the law to believers as a guide blunts the gospel, since the law always accuses and the Christian life grows from the announcement of forgiveness alone. Their critics answer that this leaves congregations with no concrete instruction and a vague ethic.

Legalism. The standing pastoral objection is that the third use slides into a religion of rule-keeping, measuring assurance by performance. Defenders reply that the cure for legalism is the first article of justification, not the removal of the standard, and that a church without a rule of life does not become freer, only vaguer.

Which law, in detail. Agreement that the moral law continues leaves open how much of Moses is moral. Theonomists push the judicial law further into modern civil life than the Westminster Confession’s “general equity” allows; dispensationalists pull the other way, holding that the believer’s rule is the law of Christ rather than Sinai.

What remains unresolved

Everyone in the argument wants obedience without merit. The question is whether the law can be given to a justified believer as direction without also being heard as accusation, since the same words do both jobs. Reformed theology answers that the believer’s standing makes the difference; the sharper Lutheran voices answer that the law does not change its nature according to who is listening.