The playwright Henrik Ibsen once wrote of a Norwegian Lutheran newsboy whose take on the Christian faith was refreshingly honest. A lot of us see the Faith the same way. "I like to commit sins," Ibsen quoted the young man as saying, "and God likes to forgive them. Really, the world is admirably arranged!" As transparently superficial and even hypocritical as that way of looking at things is, it nevertheless has a following. In my days as a seminarian and pastor in The ALC and ELCA, I found myself among theologians and seminarians and pastors who spoke about the Law with contempt, convinced that it had no role to play in the Christian life. That this was based on a superficial and distorted reading of Paul, who wrote of Christ as the end of the Law for righteousness but openly championed its ongoing significance in the life of the Christian, somehow escaped them. So did the fact that Luther, who admittedly never spelled out a "Third Use of the Law" (
Observations from a baptized sinner