God's Two Words

Law and Gospel in Lutheran and Reformed Traditions

Jonathan A. Linebaugh

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781467450232
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The distinction between God’s law and God’s gospel lies at the core of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions—and has long been a point of controversy between them.  God’s Two Words  offers new contributions from ten key Lutheran and Reformed scholars on the theological significance of the law-gospel distinction.

Following introductory chapters that define the concepts of law and gospel from each tradition, contributors explore how the distinction between law and gospel plays out in theology, preaching, the reading of Scripture, and pastoral care. As it traces both the common ground and the areas of disagreement between the two traditions, this book amplifies and clarifies an important conversation that has been ongoing since the sixteenth century.

CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Allen
Charles Arand
Erik H. Herrmann
Kelly Kapic
Peter Malysz
Mark C. Mattes
Steven Paulson
Katherine Sonderegger
Scott Swain
Kevin J. Vanhoozer

PART I

The Law Is Not the Gospel

Chapter 1

The Law in the Lutheran Tradition

PIOTR J. MAŁYSZ

The distinction between the law and the gospel was a hallmark of Luther’s theology, its formal principle. Its purpose was to keep in view theology’s proper subject, that is, “man guilty of sin and condemned, and God the Justifier and Savior of man the sinner.”¹ As early as the Heidelberg Disputation (1518), Martin Luther insisted, “The law says, ‘do this,’ and it is never done. Grace [or divine promise, or precisely the gospel] says, ‘believe in this,’ and everything is already done.”² The law-gospel distinction has ever since been a watchword of the Lutheran theological repertoire and one of Lutheran theology’s treasures.

Our objective is to investigate the first element of the distinction—the understanding of the law in Lutheran theology. The task is deceptively simple. To be sure, it can only be undertaken in light of the distinction itself. It will be necessary, therefore, to attend to questions of both theological anthropology (the human person under the law) and the doctrine of God (the one thanks to whom everything is already done). But beyond that, things are less obvious. Even on an issue so fundamental, the tradition has certainly not spoken with a single voice, let alone in a monotone manner. In the following, we shall grant a privileged voice to Luther himself as a doctor ecclesiae, officially recognized as such in the last of the Lutheran confessional writings, the Formula of Concord (1577).³ We shall also give some attention to Luther’s medieval context and the Formula of Concord itself, which claims Luther’s mantle. Yet there are many other voices, including that of Luther’s friend and colleague on the Wittenberg faculty, Philip Melanchthon, and a long line of their often-warring disciples. The tradition’s polyphonic voice not infrequently turns into the dissonance of controversy, stretching well into the present, and we cannot avoid stepping into that world. We cannot avoid taking sides, if only implicitly, as the law-gospel distinction refracts into a multitude of thorny and hotly contested issues. The law and the gospel are to be distinguished, but what is their underlying connection that enables their distinction in the first place? How old is the law; is it eternal? What kinds of law are there? How many uses of the law are there? Does the law have a place in the church and in the Christian life? There are challenges from outsiders, too, including Karl Barth’s charge, first, that the distinction rests on shaky biblical and dogmatic foundations that attribute to God “not one intrinsically true and clear Word of God, but . . . two Words in which he speaks alternately and in different ways to man,” and his further charge that the law in the distinction seems to contradict “the self-understanding of the Old Testament,” and finally his incomprehension in regard to how the law can lead to the gospel.⁴ We shall touch on some of these in-house and external issues in the course of our exposition.

Our approach is expository rather than polemical. The line of argument pursued here will amount to the claim that the law cannot be properly understood outside of a robust relational anthropology, and this means, in particular, outside of God’s communicative being as both Creator and Redeemer. It was as a result of an impoverishment of this anthropological framework that the distinction of law and gospel lost its broader clarity.

Edenic Anthropology and the Law

To understand the law and its work, we must begin by considering humanity as God’s creation, created in God’s image. For Luther, the law was present already in the garden of Eden. The question of what it was and is, therefore, is inseparable from broader anthropological considerations. This will allow us to inquire into humanity after the Fall and investigate Luther’s theology of the law against the broader picture of what the reformer understands as the human predicament.

In his Lectures on Genesis, delivered in the last decade or so of his life, Luther challenges the received tradition that views the imago Dei in terms of natural human endowments, such as memory, will, and mind.⁵ Though Luther does not discount those, the image of God, for him, is constituted rather in the use of those faculties as that use is enabled by and oriented to God’s actual, public work. It is thus not so much an internally ordered human being, keeping fleshly inclinations under control by means of a grace-fortified will and so able to attend to higher things, that expresses the image and similitude of God. It is humans’ openness to God at work, which in turn enables them to live “just as God lives.”⁶ What Luther emphasizes as an essential part of the image is the intimate knowledge of God by the first humans and, as its corollary, their openness to each other and an intimate knowledge of other creatures. All this enters into Luther’s definition of original righteousness.⁷ Adam and Eve find themselves “completely engulfed by the goodness and justice of God.” And just as God is toward them, they, being in God’s image, are able to be toward each other in “a singular union of hearts and wills.”⁸ God has, as it were, preached himself—spoken his own character—into Adam and Eve’s being.

The first couple’s knowledge of God has the more specific character of faith: “in man there was the most admirable confidence [fiducia] in God, and man could not have been afraid even if he had seen the heavens collapse.”⁹ Adam “knew God and believed [credidit] that He was good.”¹⁰ It is this overwhelming sense of divine goodness—Adam’s being “content with God’s favor”—that enables Adam not only to trust another human being but also to exercise dominion over creation without fear, that is, to make “use of the creatures only for the admiration of God and for a holy joy which is unknown to us in this corrupt state of nature.”¹¹ In this manner, Adam’s life was “wholly godly; that is, he was without the fear of death or of any other danger.” In faith, Adam and Eve received their very selves from God and were able to risk themselves not only for each other but also for creation itself. For this they had been created.

Their ecstatic being determined Adam and Eve’s attitude to God’s command. Luther is of the opinion that there was law in Eden. For one thing, God as part of his blessing had issued a command to be fruitful, etc. (Gen. 1:28). Even more obviously, he forbade the eating of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and to this particular command attached the threat of death (Gen. 3:16–17).¹² But this was not law as we come to experience it in our being. In the context of Adam’s faith, obedience to the command became Adam’s “outward physical way of indicating his worship of God and of demonstrating his obedience by an outward work.”¹³ With the tree, “God gave Adam Word, worship, and religion,” so that humans might obey and praise him, so much so that the tree itself actually was “Adam’s church, altar, and pulpit. Here he was to yield to God the obedience he owed, give recognition to the Word and will of God, give thanks to God, and call upon God for aid against temptation.”¹⁴ The command, it seems, was a vehicle of Adam’s recognition of his creaturely limitation, and the tree the place where the wise God, whom Adam knew so intimately, could be taken at his word, not just in Adam’s whole ecstatic existence as its innermost determinant, but also in a willed external act by the creature itself. Luther, therefore, denies that the command was anything weaker than that, that is, exhortation rather than law, albeit prelapsarian law.¹⁵ The command with its explicit threat enabled Adam’s self-expression as a creature basking in the overwhelming goodness of God. It was, according to Luther, “Gospel and Law.”¹⁶ In that order!

It should come as little surprise that the serpent’s temptation in Genesis 3 is not really into disobedience to the command as such. The violation of the command—just as obedience to it—could only come as a symptom of something far deeper: the subversion of one’s whole being in the loss of faith. The focal point of the chapter is, therefore, God. Luther depicts Satan, speaking through the serpent, as one who apes God. Satan is in effect a preacher of another word, or to put it more precisely: “Satan attacks the Word and works of God” in such a way that “a new god is invented by Satan for men without their even being aware of it.”¹⁷ As a result, behind the good will of God there now looms another will, not good but uncertain and untrustworthy. “The serpent directs its attack at God’s good will,”¹⁸ with the result that one no longer feels “safe in God’s goodness,” as Adam and Eve used to.¹⁹ For Luther, “the chief temptation is to listen to [this] other word and to depart from the one which God had previously spoken.”²⁰ When one succumbs, the first thing that has—already!—happened is the loss of the knowledge of God, and with it a complete collapse of the person’s being.²¹

Luther speaks of a “prodigious fear which followed sin.”²² He explains: “By nature we have become so thoroughly frightened that we fear even the things that are safe.” This postlapsarian fear is crystallized chiefly in humans’ fear of God, which now takes the place of humans’ natural faith: “Adam and Eve lose their confidence [fiducia] in God and are so filled with fear and terror that . . . they immediately think God is approaching to punish them.” God now appears to Adam and Eve as an oppressive taskmaster whose command—now an arbitrary command because the giver is not to be trusted—they have transgressed, a powerful deceiver whose sole goal is to keep the man and the woman ignorant and submissive. Therefore, God’s question “Where are you?” is heard by them as nothing but words of the law.²³ God’s whole being—in its inscrutability and unreliability—is now a threat. Unmoored, uncontained, and sheer law. It is, of course, “our will [that] makes a devil out of God and shudders at the mention of His name, especially when it is troubled by God’s judgment.”²⁴ But Adam and Eve do not know that—for “sin itself is the real withdrawal from God,” and, in light of the false image that stands at its center, it can only be followed by flight.²⁵

Luther identifies unbelief “in the inmost heart” as “the root and source of all sin”; in fact, “unbelief alone commits sin,” and actually is “the only sin.”²⁶ Acts done in unbelief produce further acts of unbelief, in that the sinner does not believe—because he or she does not know—that unfaithfulness can be brought before God. “This is the nature of sin—that the farther man withdraws from God, the farther he still desires to withdraw.”²⁷ The postlapsarian “fear is really an avoidance and hatred of God,”²⁸ as “man not only does not love God any longer but flees from Him, hates Him, and desires to be and live without Him.”²⁹

The Law of Unbelief

That Adam and Eve hear God’s question “Where are you?” as law, rather than loving concern, for example, is one aspect of the collapse of their being. But the ripple effects of the loss of the knowledge of God are far more pervasive. Luther implies that something like God’s question, a bare and unmitigated threat, now continues to echo in the sinner’s conscience and wreaks havoc there. “Where am I? Who am I?” For the loss of the knowledge of divine goodness brings with it a loss of the knowledge of self, which was founded upon the former. The man and the woman “do not know their Creator, [and so also] their origin, and their end; they do not know out of what and why they were created.”³⁰ Furthermore, when one no longer knows what one is, not to mention what one was, the transgression itself, one’s very guilt, also becomes unknowable. The knowledge of sin is thus lost as well.³¹ Coming back to one’s true self becomes impossible. The sinner neither has the means nor knows the path. Reality itself must take the form of a cipher and a trap. If God exists, he appears unjust, and even satanic; or perhaps there is no God, and everything is at the mercy of fate’s own iron law.³² This sweeping uncertainty takes its toll on the conscience: “our conscience is no longer quiet but, when it thinks of God’s judgment,” or perhaps what it only takes for God’s judgment, it “despairs and adopts illicit defenses and remedies.”³³

Chief among such defenses and remedies is for the unbeliever to attempt...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction (Jonathan A. Linebaugh)
• Part I: The Law Is Not the Gospel
• Part II: The Gospel Is Not the Law
• Part III: Law and Gospel in Theology and Ministry
• Part IV: Lutheran and Reformed Responses
• Contributors
• Index