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" (as a guide for Christian life; the first two "uses" are to restrain the excesses even of psychopaths with the fear of ultimate accountability and to drive us to Christ by crushing all aspirations to a holiness achieved by our own efforts) nevertheless began his explanation to each and every one of the Ten Commandments in the Small Catechism with the words, "We should fear and love God that we may (or may not)..."
Antinomianism, like a great many other features of liberal Lutheranism (the universalism of most ELCA pastors comes to mind), is so obviously a departure from authentic, biblical Christianity that one wonders how anyone who actually reads their Bibles can fall into it. But somehow, people manage. To paraphrase P.T. Barnum, nobody ever went broke betting on the ability of Christians to rationalize their acceptance of pretty much any demonic lie that happens to fit their fancy.
I am told that one of my former seminary professors continues to talk at every opportunity about a supposed quotation from Martin Luther in which the Reformer allegedly embraces universalism, in contradiction to literally everything else he ever wrote. The thing is, this gentleman has been challenged over and over to cite a primary source, to tell us where we can find that particular statement in anything Luther is actually known to have written or said. He has been unable to do so.
In fact, Luther never wrote or said any such thing. Perhaps somebody misunderstood something Luther did write, and thus attributed to him a position diametrically opposed the one he actually held, resulting in a misleading secondary source. But one doesn't get to claim that somebody held a position unless one can produce actual, primary evidence of that person having expressed it. Alas, the capacity of us sinful human beings for putting our own agendas ahead of the requirements intellectual honesty has never been hard to document!
I was compelled to leave the Missouri Synod of my youth and eventually take refuge in The ALC in no small measure because the Third Use of the Law- as a guide for the Christian life- was emphasized to me so strongly that I experienced my faith as a crushing burden. There came a point where I simply could bear it no longer. To be fair to my pastors, who were fine, orthodox men who sought to proclaim the Gospel in all its sweetness but sometimes in their human weakness inadvertently let other things obscure it, I am temperamentally inclined to scrupulosity and more sensitive to such things than most people. But the Law is dangerous stuff. It's spiritual nitroglycerine. It's absurdly easy to mishandle, with disastrous results. Our fallen natures are predisposed to misuse it and treat it as an achievable goal for self-transformation and thus self-glorification. In any event, I know from experience that Dr. Rod Rosenbladt is right when he says that when done badly, the preaching of the Third Use of the Law can turn into as demoralizing and de-Christianizing a misuse of the Word of God as the most outrageous legalism of the most Law-oriented Fundamentalist. The way some formally orthodox preachers preach it, the "third use" can be hard even for those not predisposed to scrupulosity to distinguish from the "application" section of the average "evangelical" sermon, in which great stress is laid on how believing Christians are to live with perhaps less emphasis than ought to be put on the One by Whose obedience we live. It was not for nothing that the great C.F.W. Walther, the first president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and the author of the classic The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel felt it necessary to caution that Law and Gospel are not properly distinguished in a sermon unless, taken as a whole, the Gospel predominates!
I returned to Missouri because it was the church of Walther and of my theology professors at what is now Concordia University Chicago who had helped me to understand the Gospel for what was really the first time. I returned to the Missouri Synod because it was the church which, at its best, reads Luther and the Confessions and the Scriptures honestly rather than using them as tools for advancing alien agendas of its own.
I returned to Missouri because, having had my fill of the false gospels of antinomianism and universalism, it was the place where one could find the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and Lutheranism as Luther and the confessors understood it. The Missouri Synod holds its hands an inexpressible treasure in the proper distinction between Law and Gospel. But sometimes even Missouri lets it slip between its fingers.
The Law can be a destructive thing if not wielded carefully. A former colleague of mine in the ministerium of the ELCA's Southeast Iowa Synod who shared my allegiance to the Confessions and the Faith Once Delivered was sometimes asked why he didn't join the Missouri Synod (he subsequently has, by the way, just as I have rejoined it). His customary reply was, "Because I'm not mean enough." There has always been a dark side to Missouri, an eagerness to censure and condemn and abuse and anathematize first and concern itself with winning the brother or sister to the truth only later, if at all. There has always been, despite the ineffable treasure of Law and Gospel properly distinguished, a temperamental preference in some sectors of Missouri for the Law.
Shortly after my return to the LCMS I became involved in an online discussion concerning John's baptism. I questioned- feeling my way, really, rather than staking out a position- the sense in which it was a means of grace. I could find no specific promise from God attached to John's baptism itself, as opposed to the repentance it seemed to me to symbolize in a manner rather similar to the Baptist and "Evangelical" misunderstanding of Christian baptism. The Spirit had not yet been given and the promises made in connection to Christian baptism had not yet been made. Clearly, John's baptism was not the same as Christian baptism. Strictly speaking, was it even a means of grace?
I was immediately set upon like a pack of wolves by the pastors and laity alike in the group. Instead of showing me how I was wrong, the brothers and sisters in Christ called me names, implicitly questioned my honesty- and, incredibly, in one case accused me of having a personal grudge against John the Baptist!
I have actually never met the man, and have only heard good things about him.
A prominent Missouri Lutheran who utterly failed to comprehend what I was saying attacked me for writing a blog entry raising some of the same questions I'm raising in this one. He didn't seem to realize that the position he was attacking wasn't the position I had expressed, and from what he had to say it was clear that he had completely missed several points I had made. It took the intervention of a third party to get him to cease firing. I don't really think that what I wrote was unclear, but he still hasn't apologized for the beating the Eighth Commandment took at his hands that day.
Sadly, he is not alone- and in the hands of such people, the Law can do a great deal of damage. This is not an indictment of the Missouri Synod as such, or of its ministerium in general. On another occasion, a retired Missouri Synod pastor happened to come across the blog on which I kept my sermons from my years as pastor of St. Mary Lutheran Church, an independent confessional congregation here in Des Moines. In one of them, I committed an inadvertent doctrinal error concerning one of the finer points of Christology. Had I gone to seminary in St. Louis (I applied there as well as to Wartburg, and was accepted), I no doubt would have received better instruction on that particular point and would have known better; though my training in historical theology at Wartburg was excellent, St. Louis has been known as an institution to be just a little more concerned about orthodoxy than WTS, at least in recent years. As it happened, this brother in the ministry kindly explained my mistake to me, as well as the historical background of the issue and exactly why I was wrong. I was and am very grateful for the lesson and for the fact that this faithful servant of the Word was gracious enough to teach it and to do so in such a gentle and loving manner.
But the Missouri Synod does contain a disproportionally large contingent of people who are never quite as happy as they are when attacking somebody. To be blunt, there are an awful lot of Missourians who, given their choice between showing a sinner the error of his ways and tearing him a new one are temperamentally drawn like a magnet to the second option.
I have heard that ferocious wars have broken out in certain LCMS Facebook groups over the question of whether Mary remained a virgin all her life. Luther believed in the semper virgo theory, and so did all the great luminaries of Lutheran and Missouri Synod history. Yet it is not taught by Scripture, there are legitimate reasons to question it, and if there's one thing orthodox Lutherans have always agreed about it's that it's an adiaphoron- a matter which, precisely because Scripture doesn't settle it either one way or the other, by its very nature cannot be church-dividing. The same is true, by the way, with regard to birth control, an issue concerning which I have gotten into dust-ups with fellow Missourians online. One must and should follow one's own conscience and one's own honest reading of Scripture, but one does not bind consciences without a clear Scriptural warrant.
It seems incredible to me that so many Missourians, of all people, are ready to almost literally go to war over an adiaphoron, and for all their supposed allegiance to the sola scriptura give every indication of regarding Holy Tradition as to all intents and purposes an authority equal to Scripture! It seems that not a few of us are not only unbecomingly fond of condemning others but none too clear on the point that we're not supposed to condemn people for things for which God doesn't condemn them. Paul goes to great trouble to make that very point.
The unwillingness of the folks in the ELCA to take biblical ethics seriously lies at the root of many of the problems faced by that hapless church body. We have an obligation to call people to account when they go astray. The ordination oath I took in the chapel at Wartburg Seminary included a promise I remember quite well to "give no occasion for false hope or illusory comfort."
God help an ELCA pastor who tries too hard to keep that promise! At the same time, warning people in spiritual danger and reproving their behavior isn't supposed to be fun. A former prof of mine at Wartburg Seminary who is emphatically not an antinomian once responded when I told him how much I hated rebuking people, there would be something very wrong with anybody who didn't hate it. But he reminded me that it was still my duty.
It is a duty many of my former colleagues in the ELCA avoid. But for too many in the LCMS, it's a pleasure as well as a duty. One suspects that Walther would be more impressed with a pastor who was willing to proclaim the Law as his duty required but was a pastor because he was filled with a burning passion for healing troubled consciences and setting the captives free through the proclamation of the Gospel than with a man who was willing to proclaim the Gospel but mainly liked to yell at people!
Walther and Francis Pieper felt strongly about the role the Gospel plays in motivating the Christian obedience the Third Use of the Law informs. Pieper wrote quite plainly that if a pastor notices that his congregation isn't growing in sanctification like it should, shame on him- for not preaching enough Gospel!
The Law, as Paul points out, is written on human hearts. But the Gospel is not. We have to be told the Gospel week after week, year after year. All sorts of problems arise from not hearing enough Law. But it ought not to be necessary to point out that, as Dr. Rosenbladt has pointed out so eloquently, that even worse problems arrive from not hearing enough Gospel or hearing it in terms so tentatively expressed and so qualified that it is effectively negated. If a person doesn't hear the Gospel, that person is lost. If a person hears only a thin trickle of Gospel in a torrent of Law, trying to live a Christian life will be like trying to drive a car without gasoline. The Third Use of the Law might be compared to a roadmap for living a God-pleasing life. But the best map in the world won't get you to your destination without gas in your tank!
It's the failure of "Evangelical" Protestantism to understand that long-time Christians need to be told about Jesus, too, and be remind them that He forgives our failures, and not merely given instructions for Christian living that has created the crisis I am convinced that God is calling confessional Lutheranism in America to help heal. And He has uniquely blessed us with the cure. But the fondness some of us show for yelling at and condemning others, even inappropriately, gets in the way.
And then, there's Seminex.
The crisis at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis in the late 1970s, fostered by the embrace of both the historical-critical method and of the and the "Valparaiso Theology" by its faculty, guaranteed that antinomianism would forever after be a hot-button issue in the LCMS- as well it should be. We live in an antinomian culture, and even in conservative churches "cheap grace" and an unseemly willingness to sell out culturally unpopular Christian positions for the sake of worldly acceptance is rife. Antinomianism isn't only a danger in the ELCA and the Presbyterian Church (USA) and the Disciples of Christ and the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church. That particular brand of unfaithfulness has also spread its malignant tentacles deeply into churches more firmly rooted in the Bible, too. Missouri has a sore spot where the neglect of the Law is concerned. Good.
If only it had a sensitivity as strong to the unclear or inadequate preaching of the Gospel as Walther and Pieper did! But in all fairness, I believe that in the hearts of most Missouri pastors, it does. It's just that their alarm bells sometimes don't go off nearly as loudly when someone inadvertently lapses into legalism as they quite rightly do when one strays into antinomianism.
It is my unshakeable conviction that as big a problem as antinomianism is in our culture, an even bigger problem is that American Christianity is experiencing a veritable famine of the Gospel, a draught of the water of life. Thank God that so many Missourians these days agree with me that while both of these crises need to be addressed, the second of these two utterly unacceptable problems, the second is if anything the more urgent of the two.
In certain circles, it has become fashionable to decry "salad sermons," i.e., those ending with "Let us." The observation has been made that while theologians may distinguish between the First, Second, and Third Uses of the Law, it's the same Law- and that it's the Holy Spirit, not the preacher, Who uses it. If the Law is preached in all its sternness, by that very fact whatever psychopaths may be in the congregation are put on notice that they will be held to account someday; the presumptuous fallen natures of the congregation confronted both with their unworthiness and with their inability to become worthy by their own effort, and thus driven to Christ; and the New Selves of the hearers instructed as to how they can behave in order to please the Lord they love and want to serve.
I agree with them. I do not for that reason advocate neglecting to take aim at particular issues and problems. But in the last analysis, we always proclaim the Law for the sake of proclaiming the Gospel, and something is wrong when the Gospel ends up as little more than an afterthought.
I became a pastor because I am in love with the Gospel. Like the pastor in Bo Giertz's The Hammer of God, I saw myself when I was in the parish as a warden going from cell to cell with a letter of pardon in his pocket for each of the prisoners I met, I didn't become one because I wanted to scold or coerce people, as ready as I knew I had to be to proclaim and insist upon the Law in all its sternness when the occasion arose.
And yes, I found out the hard way that many of the people I preached to weren't ready to hear the Gospel. And agree that in our contemporary society, that, too, is a major crisis.
But I went to seminary because I wanted to teach people who were burdened by the guilt I'd grown up with to look up from their struggles and their guilt, as Schartau's Transfiguration Day sermon quoted in The Hammer of God exhorts them to do, and see Jesus only. When I hear the term "soft antinomians" used as a description of those whose only fault is that they share that desire with me, as a veteran of the ELCA my impulse is to paraphrase Lloyd Bensen, and say that I know antinomians, that antinomians have been friends of mine- and that these people are no antinomians!
Now, please note what the issue in contention is not. It is not that there is anything inherently wrong with a preacher describing the Christian life in a sermon, and thus intentionally proclaiming the Law specifically in its Third Use. In fact, there is something desperately wrong if the message doesn't get through to the congregation that the Christian is to use the Law as a model for his or her life.
The problem is more subtle than that. To begin with, there is a huge difference in describing the ideal Christian life and exhorting the hearer to seek to live it on one hand, and even inadvertently allowing the hearer to come away with the expectation that he is going to succeed. The Law cannot be watered down. It cannot be compromised. When that happens, people resolve to try harder- and all is lost.
Full-strength Law crushes the hearer. It sends the hearer fleeing to the Cross both for pardon and for strength. Its proclamation is rendered pointless if allowance is made for human weakness in describing what the Christian life is supposed to look like. But it's rendered just as pointless if it fosters the expectation that it's a standard which the hearer should actually expect to meet. The tension between being satisfied with nothing short of perfection while understanding that there will never be a time in this life when we will not be dependent on Christ for forgiveness even for our good works may be a hard one to maintain, but it's crucial. I love the verse in one of our hymns that begins,
To You our wants are known,The fact is that our obedience is always imperfect. The Old Self will have its victories. Even what the New Self accomplishes out of uncoerced love is acceptable to God only for Christ's sake. And that is a huge practical problem in preaching the Third Use specifically as Third Use: how does one faithfully present what God demands of our lives as Christians without creating the impression that we can measure up if only we roll up our sleeves and try harder? Our fallen natures, after all, are eager to believe that they can!
From you are all our powers.
Accept what is Your own,
And pardon what is ours!
But wait a minute! The moment it stops being a help, a roadmap, a guide, and begins to reprove and reprimand and condemn, it isn't even the Third Use of the Law anymore! And therein lies the problem with hortatory preaching: it's very, very difficult to do without the Third Use turning into the Second. It's difficult to say, "This is what living a Christian life looks like" without quite logically leading the hearer to the conclusion that since at its best this is not what his life looks like, it is not a Christian life, and he himself may not even be a Christian. When one directs the attention of his hearers to themselves, the only way to avoid utter disaster is to always promptly bring that attention back to Christ! To leave the hearer condemned by the knowledge that he hasn't, he can't, and he won't without making very sure that he can take refuge in the fact that Christ has and does and will is to court disaster.
And yes, I know that Christians have fallen natures, too, and that they cannot be shown the slightest mercy. But the pummeling must lead the convicted sinner to Christ. If the Gospel isn't clear enough, the hearer is led either to despair or to hypocrisy.
Yes, I know that no Lutheran pastor worthy of the name intentionally does that. Ever. But managing to preach a hortatory sermon which leaves the hearer looking to Christ's obedience rather than to his own for his assurance of salvation is a very difficult task and one which requires even more stress on Christ's saving righteousness as on our damning lack of it. And if it isn't given for fear that someone may think that they're antinomians, faithful and orthodox shepherds who themselves want nothing more than to lead their sheep to the water of life and be able to give an account for them at the Last Day end up leaving them burdened by the Law, and not empowered to use it as a guide for their lives. That's something nobody can do unless the Gospel predominates in preaching and is allowed to be the driving force in a believer's relationship with God. That is something no sermon can accomplish unless it teaches Christians to focus their spiritual lives not upon themselves and how they're doing, but on Christ and what He has done.
One cannot both convince people of their inability to fulfill the Law by their own efforts and foster an expectation on their part that they will or even can. It's one or the other, but it can't be both.
Rod Rosenbladt's presentation "The Gospel for Those Broken by the Church" should be required reading/ viewing for anybody who wants to debate this issue. As Dr. Rosenbladt points out, if done badly (note the italics), the preaching of the Third Use of the Law can result in a bondage to legalism every bit as iron and unyielding and literally soul-killing as that experienced by a member of some Reformed "Evangelical" congregation who never hears about Jesus, but only about living the Christian life. Walther's dictum should be engraved on every pulpit: "The Word of God is not rightly divided when the person teaching it does not allow the Gospel to have a general predominance in his teaching."
That is utterly and absolutely imperative. Walther goes on to say,
On examining your sermon for both its Law and its Gospel contents, you may find that you have given the Gospel very little space. Now remember, if you come out of your pulpit without having preached enough Gospel to save some poor sinner who may have come to church for the first and the last time, his blood will be required of you.The Gospel must predominate. People's salvation depends on hearing the Gospel, and hearing it clearly, over the interference of a culture ironically in its own way every bit as legalistic as it is antinomian and a fallen nature to which the Gospel is an alien and frankly unwelcome concept. It's not that the preaching of the Law can be neglected; people can be lost as a result of misunderstanding forgiveness as permission, too. A gospel without the Law is a false gospel and saves nobody. But where the Law is taught clearly and the Gospel is neglected there is no possibility of anyone being saved by believing what that sermon says. That is not an excuse for neglecting the preaching of the Law. But it is a reminder as to why Walther is right, and the Gospel must predominate!
I have even heard it said- and I am inclined to believe it- that if a pastor has never been accused by somebody of being an antinomian, he ought to seriously consider whether it's actually the Gospel that he's preaching!
A faithful pastor is walking a tightrope when he gets into the pulpit. I would argue- and I think I have Paul and Luther and Walther all on my side in saying this- that if one is going to err in one's human fallibility on one side or the other, it is more important that the Gospel be clearly and unambiguously proclaimed than that a specific portion of the sermon be given over to an explicitly hortatory proclamation of the Law. That, and not the question of whether such preaching has a place, is the real issue in the "soft antinomianism" debate.
If you're going to be intentional in preaching the Law specifically in its Third Use, fine. Mazel tov. But for the love of Christ and for the love of your hearers do so in such a way that your proclamation of the Law doesn't obscure the Gospel!
I say this as someone who was baptized a Missouri Synod Lutheran (though at the age of ten), who was confirmed a Missouri Synod Lutheran, who graduated from a Missouri Synod parochial school and a Missouri Synod high school, and who nevertheless didn't "get" the Gospel until one day in a doctrine class at Concordia, River Forest, when twenty or thirty others with a similar spiritual and educational background also came to understand it for the very first time.
I say this as somebody who went to seminary because my heart burned to share what I learned that day in Dr. Hein's class with the people out there- yes, even the people in the pews- who still didn't understand it. Many in our congregations, who are in the pews Sunday after Sunday, still don't.
I say this as somebody who saw the destructive effects of antinomianism first hand in the ELCA, and who learned the hard way just how closely on the heels of antinomianism legalism comes. After all, if the Law is no longer in the picture in any sense, what need is there for the Gospel? And if the Gospel is simply that God is really nice and lets everybody into heaven whether they believe or not, what is there left to preach but ethics- and not necessarily biblical ethics?
I say this as someone who prays that we don't have another generation of Missouri Synod youngsters who have to wait until college to understand what they need to be taught clearly and unambiguously every week from the pulpit, but which too often somehow gets drowned out by other things to the point where they never really hear it.
I say this as someone who knows all too well how right Dr. Rosenbladt is when he says that, poorly handled, the Third Use of the Law can be a death sentence for souls, an unbearable burden that drives people right out of the Church.
I say this as someone who is convinced that the greatest obstacle to the sanctification of contemporary Missouri Synod Lutherans is not a lack of hortatory preaching, but the fact that so many people in our pews have lived their lives hearing faithful Missouri Synod pastors preach to them, and yet still don't understand the Gospel.
I say this as someone who, having heard it said that if you have never been accused of being an antinomian you're probably not preaching the Gospel- is convinced by his own experience with falling off the log on the other side that no truer and more urgently- needed words were never spoken.
well said and extremely important to understand. I need to hear the law to get that I'm wholly inadequate to obey it and to then realize that my only hope is the Gospel. The relief and gratitude that I feel when hearing the gospel is what motivates me towards good works. The law works for me in that the judgments of others pale in comparison to what God demands. If Jesus forgives me for not doing what God demands of me, what you demand of me is, as the Dude states in "The Big Lebowski" is like, just your opinion, man. Rod Rosenblats "Gospel for those broken by the church is one of the most important things I have ever read. Thank God for Paul, Luther, Rosenblat, and yourself or I would be toast.
ReplyDeleteFellow Scruper, Steve H