NCT is a form of antinomianism. NCT adherents hold that Our Lord, in some sense, brought a new, better, and higher law, virtually denying Him as the lawgiver on Sinai in the first place, and implying an imperfection in God, since the Psalmist and the very nature of God teaches us that the Law of the Lord is perfect (complete, sufficient, not needing correction, etc.). The reality is that Our Lord came and in the Sermon on The Mount corrected the Pharisaical perversions of the moral law, not abolishing the Decalogue, but reclaiming the right understanding of it. It is a most grievous and consequentially wicked error.
Within NCT folk, there is such an animus toward law. The NCT folks take certain antithetical-sounding statements by Paul, which then constitute their formal principle of theology. In practical terms, NCT adherents will usually be found in conformity (after a fashion) with most of the moral law—the 4th commandment excepted. I think NCT really do want to follow the Lord, but they also want to think of discipleship in terms that leave obedience almost out of sight.
Consider the way NCT person will read Jer.31:34. The Christian doesn't need to "hear" the law, because it is already pre-formed and perfected on the heart. "Obedience" is more a matter of re-accustomization to the re-calibrated internal compass. The disjunct between the way faith and obedience operated in the OT and the way it happens in the NT age is total. In NCT, Christianity is fundamentally a NEW religion. Sigh.
I think NCT is basically dispensationalism that has been significantly purged of some distinctive elements, and reformulated through influences that include historic covenant-theology. NCT has gone further than "progressive" dispensationalism, but I think they are both on a continuum of modification.
The NCT hostility to anything that feels like a legal principle leads to semantic games with regard to the commands of Our Lord or Apostolic imperatives. If you don't like law, then these can't be "laws." Within NCT, they are but guidance to the Spirit within the Christian, or some such. They sound like directions, but really they are more like descriptions of "what Christians do when led by the Spirit." Only the flesh, in reaction to the law, still engages in disobedience--but it's not the new you.
If we covenantalists ask the question, "what does love to God and neighbor look like?" in truth we should end up with a picture of the moral law. Yet NCT resists that definition with all its might. The New Covenant Theology proponent will say, "if you just love Jesus, if you just learn to admire who he is and what he did, then you will naturally be like him in practice without minding any directions. Whatever you do—if it doesn't appear to be opposed to God—must be spiritual." No rules; rules just encourage the flesh. :AMR:
AMR
