Reformed Reading Guide · 15 books
The Best Books on Law and Gospel
In Reformed theology, the law and gospel distinction describes how Scripture both commands (the law) and promises redemption in Christ (the gospel), and how the two relate without being confused or separated. The moral law, summarized in the Ten Commandments, functions to expose sin, restrain evil, and guide the believer in grateful obedience, this last role being known as the third use of the law. Rightly understanding this relationship guards the church against both legalism and antinomianism.
Few doctrines shape the Christian life more quietly than the relationship between law and gospel. Get it wrong in one direction and you drift toward legalism, wrong in the other and you slide into antinomianism. The books below trace a confessional Reformed path through the uses of the law, the third use, and the place of the moral law today. They are grouped from accessible introductions to demanding academic studies so you can start where you are.
Basic
5 books
The Whole Christ
Sinclair B. Ferguson · 2016
Ferguson revisits the Marrow Controversy to show that both legalism and antinomianism spring from the same root and that Christ himself is the cure.
The Ten Commandments: What They Mean, Why They Matter, and Why We Should Obey Them
Kevin DeYoung · 2018
A clear, contemporary walk through each commandment that makes the case for why the moral law still matters for Christians today.
Written in Stone: The Ten Commandments and Today's Moral Crisis
Philip Graham Ryken · 2010
Ryken expounds the commandments one by one while connecting each to Christ and to the moral crises of modern life.
Keeping the Ten Commandments
J. I. Packer · 2007
Packer offers brief, readable chapters that recover the commandments as God's gracious blueprint rather than a burden.
The Law of Perfect Freedom: Relating to God and Others through the Ten Commandments
Michael Horton · 2004
Horton frames the commandments as the shape of love for God and neighbor, showing how law and gospel work together in the believer's freedom.
Intermediate
5 books
Delighting in the Law of the Lord: God's Alternative to Legalism and Moralism
Jerram Barrs · 2013
Barrs presents God's law as a delight and a gift, charting a middle path between the ditches of legalism and moralism.
The Law and the Gospel
Ernest C. Reisinger · 2019
Reisinger gives a pastoral, Reformed Baptist account of the law's proper uses and its indispensable place in gospel preaching.
Five Views on Law and Gospel
Stanley N. Gundry (ed.) · 1996
Five scholars argue their positions and respond to one another, giving readers a map of the major evangelical views on how law and gospel relate.
The Marrow of Modern Divinity
Edward Fisher, with notes by Thomas Boston · 2009
This seventeenth-century dialogue with Boston's annotations is the classic text behind modern debates over grace, law, and assurance.
The Ten Commandments
Thomas Watson · 1965
Watson's Puritan exposition of the Decalogue remains one of the richest practical treatments of the moral law ever written.
Advanced
5 books
The Doctrine of the Christian Life
John M. Frame · 2008
Frame's massive triperspectival ethics grounds the Christian life in the Ten Commandments and treats the uses of the law in depth.
From the Finger of God: The Biblical and Theological Basis for the Threefold Division of the Law
Philip S. Ross · 2010
Ross mounts a rigorous biblical and theological defense of the classic threefold division of the law into moral, civil, and ceremonial.
The Grace of Law: A Study in Puritan Theology
Ernest F. Kevan · 2011
Kevan mines seventeenth-century Puritan sources to show how they held together the grace of the gospel and the abiding authority of the law.
The Law Is Not of Faith: Essays on Works and Grace in the Mosaic Covenant
Bryan D. Estelle, J. V. Fesko, and David VanDrunen (eds.) · 2009
These essays argue that the Mosaic covenant in some sense republished the covenant of works, a pivotal debate in Reformed law and gospel theology.
The Law and Its Fulfillment: A Pauline Theology of Law
Thomas R. Schreiner · 1998
Schreiner works through Paul's complex statements about the law to build a careful biblical theology of its purpose and fulfillment in Christ.
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