This continuation of our study of the Formula of Concord overviews the distinction between the law and the gospel in light of debates among second generation Lutherans.
Just and Sinner Podcast
The Distinction Between Law and Gospel (FC V)
[music] Hello and welcome to the Justins Inter podcast. I am your host, Dr. Jordan Cooper, and thank you so much for joining me once again on the program today. I just want to give you all a quick reminder, like we always do, that Justins Inter as an organization is supported by donors, and we really do need your support to continue doing the things that we do here, and as I've announced not too long ago now, I guess this video is not going to be out for a little while once it actually shows up on the YouTube channel, but as I'm recording this, I had just made the announcement that I am going to be moving into doing this pretty much full time, and that does mean that I do need some support. We want to continue to provide materials at a very low cost, if not free. Obviously these videos are free, and we try to provide our books at an affordable cost for all of you. In order to be able to do that financially, I need to be able to make money somehow, and it's not like I'm bringing in tons of money from my YouTube ad revenue. You don't have millions of people interested in Lutheran theology as much as I would love for that to be the case. We do need your support. The best that you consider becoming a contributor, what we're asking right now is for people to consider giving a donation of $40 a month. If we can get 100 people to give $4 a month, we're not already giving, then that will cover costs to both pay my salary as well as to pay for a number of copy editors and translators. We have some translation projects we really want to do, but we just need some finances to be able to do that. With all of that being said here, we're going to jump into the topic of the program today. We are looking at the formula of Concord, and as we study the formula of Concord, we have gone through the first four articles, and now we get into Article 5. In Article 5 covers the topic of law and gospel, law and gospel being a topic that is... There have been no shortage of debates on this issue among Lutherans, and that has always been the case from the Reformation itself. Let's dive into the distinction between law and gospel, what that means, and then what some of the controversies are surrounding this distinction between the law and the gospel. Well, in the 16th century, Luther emphasizes the law gospel distinction heavily. This is a key part of his theology. There's a difference between God's word of law and God's word of gospel, and generally the law is regarded as the commandments of God, the gospel is the promises of God. That's just putting it as briefly as we can, and we'll see some of the things that are going on here within this article to find things more particularly there. But in light of that distinction between law and gospel, already in Luther's time, there are some who have argued that we can get rid of the law in preaching. We talked about this a bit before, and we'll talk about this more, but there are some within the group that is known as the antinomians. The antinomians argued that the law was useful basically just in the civic sphere. The law is useful for the civic courts, it's something that should be taught in schools, it should be taught in governments. We're talking about things like civic righteousness or virtue. However, the church is not really a place where the law should be taught. The law is taught in all these other places. What the church is here to proclaim is the gospel, and so there were these individuals who believed that it is only the law that should be, sorry, only the gospel that should be proclaimed in churches. That then leads to what becomes the first great antinomian controversy, and that great antinomian controversy involves Martin Luther, and Martin Luther coins the term antinomian. He has treatises called the antinomian disputations, and in those treatises he condemns this idea that only the gospel should be proclaimed in churches and that the law is only in the civic sphere. Instead, he says that Christians, because they still have, we still struggle with the sinful flesh, we are not yet perfect, we need the curb and guidance of the law to curb and suppress that sinful flesh, and that is an essential part of preaching. You just see this within Luther's own preaching, we read his large catechism, but if you read through his sermons, and I say read through his sermons, what I don't mean is read through one volume of sermons that has been put together by a modern editor. What you will tend to see in a lot of current volumes that compile Luther's sermons is that the sermons that are chosen are those that are not going to be particularly harsh on the law. I think that there is a bias in a lot of modern interpreters in grabbing onto Luther's works that don't emphasize what we call the third use or third function of the law. So I recommend getting some of the older public domain volumes. What is it? The Baker volumes, complete sermons of Martin Luther, which is seven, I'm looking at them on my shelf here, seven very beautiful volumes of Luther's sermons, and those are some of the first works I ever read of Luther, and really kind of shaped how I viewed Luther. They're fantastic, and it's kind of indiscriminate, a compilation of sermons. You're not going to get just kind of a few cherry picked sermons, so I'd recommend doing something like that if you want to dive into his preaching, instead of something that is very, very obviously going to be certain sermons that happen to coincide with the biases of the one that's that's editing the volume. Okay. So you've got this debate over the law in the gospel that occurs at the end of Martin Luther's life. After Martin Luther's death, these debates over the law in the gospel continue. They have not gone away. And one of these debates surrounds the definition of the gospel, particularly with the question of is repentance part of the gospel, or is repentance the law? And Melanchthon, at least in one later edition of his Loki, includes repentance under the definition of the gospel in some sense. Now, as we're going to see here in this article, we have to clarify what we mean when we're saying law and when we're saying gospel. So the terms law and gospel can be used in a number of different ways, and that means that when we are using those terms, and we're talking about the law gospel distinction, we have to be clear about what it is that we're actually referring to, because there are a number of different ways to use these terms. And so we may be speaking past each other. If you're defining the law in a certain way, you may be using what we call a broad sense of definition of the law or gospel in a certain way, we may be using a broad sense of the term gospel. So we have to be specific, and when we're talking about the law gospel distinction, we are talking about these things in their narrowest and most particular senses. So you'll get criticisms of the law gospel distinction from somebody like John Frame in the Reformed tradition, and I think Rich Lusk as well does this, where they'll grab on to certain texts, where it's very obvious that the word gospel or the word law also includes the things that generally Lutherans would put under the other category. In other words, there are texts where the word gospel is used in a broader sense. So we talk about the gospels, right? That's the reason we use that term to refer to the life of Jesus. Well, the gospels are not just Jesus giving promises. The gospels are not just stories of Jesus saying, "I forgive you, I absolve you." He does that, and he proclaims the gospel and delivers forgiveness and delivers his gifts to sinners, but there's also a lot of very harsh condemnation. There is also the Go and Sin no more that follows the absolution. That's what we call a third use of the law application there. So Jesus does not simply proclaim the gospel. He does all sorts of things. So we're using that term gospels in the broad sense of that, just those books, the story of Jesus, there's a lot of law in the story of Jesus. There's a lot of law in the preaching of Jesus. So you see guys like John Frame and others, as I said, kind of grabbing on to texts that clearly include other things in the definition of gospel, and we'll say, "Well, look, the Lutherans are obviously wrong. I've done a number of programs on this. This is a number of years ago now on the law gospel distinction and John Frame's critique. So if you go to the podcast archive, now the podcast archive, if you look on your podcast app, you can only see the last 100 episodes. I don't know why it does that, but you can't go back further than that. I've been doing this for 14 years, almost, or not 14 years, 12 years is what I meant. 12 years, almost, and so there's a lot of stuff out there. So what you have to do is go to the Justincenter.org website and then go to the podcast archive there, and then you can access, you can search through topics, but I've done a number of things on John Frame and I've done things responding to other people who've critiqued the law gospel distinction from their forms tradition as well. I haven't done as much of that in recent years, the only reason is because the material is already out there, so I try not to just go back and repeat a lot of things that I've done in the past, which is why my themes of what I talk about in podcasts often change, because the hope is that I have this giant archive of, by the time I die, podcasts or lectures that are on all sorts of different topics so that you'll be able to access all sorts of things. So you can go back and listen to some of those if you want to hear a very young sounding me talking about those issues. Anyway, so the same thing is true of the law. And I talked about this before as well, that the law, the term law, is used to refer to all sorts of things in Scripture, whether we're speaking about Torah and the Old Testament or Namas in the New Testament, those terms are used very broadly. So if you're saying, oh, Torah is law, well, look at the first five books of Moses that are Torah. There are a lot of promises there, there's a lot of gospel there. We have the Abrahamic promise, we have the Proto-Evangel, that's all part of the Torah, so we have gospel in the law, so we're talking in broader sense. And then we have law used, Namas used by Paul, meaning kind of a principle, he talks about the principle of works versus the principle of faith using that term Namas. So I know I'm spending a lot of time overviewing that, but that's really key. It's really important to figure out what we're talking about. When you read a lot of the early Christians, they're speaking about the law gospel distinction, what they mean is Old Testament and New Testament. Why do they use the terms in that way? It's not because they're just, theologically, they don't know what they're doing. No, it's because they're dealing with a particular debate, which is the one that we find with the Martianites. And Martian makes the argument that there is this total discontinuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament, some rise with those terms, the law and the gospel. And that there is this kind of different God that was the God of the Old Testament versus this loving, graceful God of the New Testament, we still hear that kind of rhetoric a lot, I think today, and critics of Christianity. So in light of that, the primary concern for a lot of the Church Fathers was to defend the continuity of the Testament. So they're defending that the Old Testament and the New Testament are aligned in their teaching. There's a saying of St. Augustine to summarize this where he says the New Testament isn't the old concealed and the Old Testament isn't the new revealed. It's a great saying. It's summarized as well, I think, where the Church Fathers were trying to go on these particular issues. So all of that outlining what are we talking about here? Well, let me look now into the text to see what the text actually says. How does the book of Concord define the law and the gospel here? First, the law and the gospel is a particularly glorious light. It serves to divide God's word properly and to explain correctly and make understandable the writings of the Holy Prophets and Apostles. Therefore, we must diligently preserve this distinction so as not to mix these two teachings together and make the gospel into a law, for this obscures the merit of Christ and Rob's troubled consciences of comfort that they otherwise have in the Holy gospel when it is preached clearly and purely. With the help of this distinction, these consciences can sustain themselves in their greatest spiritual struggles against the terrors of the law. So this is to say here, it's a particularly glorious light and understanding the distinction between the law and the gospel helps us to understand what the text of Scripture is saying in any particular given circumstance. So we have this reference to this text where St. Paul speaks about properly dividing the word of truth. We properly divide the word of God with this distinction between the law and the gospel, properly dividing, understanding what's law and what's gospel. Now, the immediate critique here is always going to be, I hear this a lot, is always going to be, well, what you're doing then is saying you're taking this kind of foreign hermeneutical principle and you are then applying it to the text. So you're forcing the text into these categories of law and gospel and that's not how we do biblical hermeneutics. And if the distinction between the law and the gospel was not in the text of the New Testament or the Old Testament, then that would be a totally valid critique. We can't just kind of make up hermeneutical principles. You don't just get to make up, well, I like this distinction. So we're going to place these verses here and these verses here. That's not how this works. So we have to ask the question, well, what does the New Testament do? How does the New Testament understand the law and how then does it understand the gospel? How do these two things relate to one another? And when you look at the way that St. Paul especially, but not exclusively, but St. Paul especially speaks about the mosaic works and the promise that is in the New Covenant, we see that the way that he reads the Old Testament text does divide law and gospel. And this is not an extensive exegetical treatment. Again, you can go to those older programs if you really want to. If you want to have that, because I do have exegetical treatments of various texts. But just to quickly overview some distinctions here, St. Paul mentions that what the law says is that the one who does this book of Galatians here, the one who does these things and does the works of the law shall live by them, but on the contrary, as opposed to that, in the gospel, one who believes shall live. The righteousness of faith is granted to the one that has faith. So if we look at this contrast that we see in St. Paul, so read Galatians 3 and 4 there. In Paul's writings, he distinguishes pretty clearly, I think, between that principle of believing and that principle of doing. In the principle of doing is applied to Mosaic Law and the principle of promise or the principle of believing is applied then to the Abrahamic promise or the Abrahamic Covenant, which is this law and gospel distinction. So for example, when Paul's writing to the Corinthians, he speaks about a ministry of death referring to the Mosaic administration. So why is it a ministry of death? Well, he's speaking about the laws that are written on tablets of stone. So the law, as given in the Mosaic Covenant, becomes a ministry of death. It brings death that serves as a great contrast to how St. Paul speaks about the Abrahamic promise throughout his writings, that we become children of Abraham. We're brought into the promise, but the law brings death. And so those are just a couple of places where St. Paul uses this law gospel distinction in his reading of specific Old Testament texts and placing them into his overall system. And again, this isn't meant to be an extensive exegetical treatment here. If you want that, go other places in things that I've done before. Just broad overview here to say this distinction is coming from the text of Scripture. So Lutheran Reformers are not just imposing a foreign interpretive grid. Instead, they're saying, how is it that the New Testament deals with this? Because we do have a lot of kind of confusing stuff going back to the Old Testament in terms of how the promise given to Abraham relates to the conditionality of the law that is given to Moses. This tension is apparent within the text itself of the Old Testament. So we have, for example, God putting Abraham to sleep in Genesis 15 when he enacts that covenantal promise to Abraham. And God takes the obligations upon himself. And God gives this unilateral promise saying, I will bless you. There's no conditionality there. Well, how then, and this is going to be a promise to the land, well, how then does that relate to what happens with Moses? Because you read the covenant with Moses, you have these conditions of Israel is only going to stay in the land. If they obey, and if they disobey, you're going to be cursed. And you see this like Deuteronomy 28, you have these horrific curses that are given to the people for breaking the covenant. The people take obligations on themselves with the law. They say, you know, this we shall do. There's the do this and you will live principle as if God's promises are dependent upon the fulfillment in some way of the law by the people of Israel. There's a clear contrast that's within the text itself, a tension within those narratives of well, we've got this free unconditional promise, but then all of a sudden we've got this strong conditionality in order for the promise to be fulfilled. You can see that enacted narratively when we have the instance of Moses receiving the commandments on the tablets of stone, walking down to see the people of Israel worshiping the golden calf breaks the tablets, symbolically saying the people of Israel have broken the covenant already, right? They haven't even heard it yet, and they've already broken it. And then he goes back up the mountain and converses with God and God is basically telling him, I'll just start over Moses with you, we'll just wipe everybody out. And then Moses pleads with God and what does he do? He reminds him of the promise that he gave to Abraham and God relents. So we see the tension in that narrative right there of law says, do this and you will live and God says you broke it, you're done. But then Moses says, but Abraham and but the promise, which is unconditional. And God is not literally changing his mind. He's not like, oh, wow, I forgot about that. This is God interacting anthropomorphically with creatures to teach Moses something to teach us something. And that is that the unconditionality of the gospel promise stands underneath and behind all of the conditionality of the law. And so we see that contrast Romans three and four and the way that Paul speaks of the law Romans three, 20 as, you know, through the law comes knowledge of sin, every mouth is stopped through the law. And then we see that contrasted with the gospel that's given to Abraham in Romans chapter 4, the beginning of Romans chapter 4, that is not of works. All right, it's a textual argument here. What we're saying is the law gospel distinction comes from those texts. And so we are using that distinction that comes from those texts that specifically comes from those texts and is used hermeneutically as a way to understand the Old Testament, including using allegorical interpretation, interestingly in Galatians with this Hagar and Sarah thing, but won't get into that. So okay, this distinction is very helpful when we are looking at texts and asking what, what are they speaking to? What's the context and what is the pastoral concern here? I see people often asking questions about the, the epistles where they say, what, what's going on with this, these, these constant warnings, because you get these warnings of, you know, you better remain in the faith or else, you got Hebrews, but Paul does this a number of times as well. And people say, well, that doesn't seem to make sense with these other texts that are all about assurance and clearly portray this hope that we have and should we be constantly afraid in our Christian life that we're going to lose our salvation? Or should we be, should we just be joyful and hopeful in the gospel? Like how do these two things fit together and they can seem to be attention? Well understanding the law gospel distinction really helps to put those in their proper context, which is to say that the law is given in a particular context and the gospel is given in another context and that that is that the law is given to those who are secure in their sins and the gospel is given to those who are, who are broken. And that means that who's Paul giving the warning passages to, not to those, those Christians who are faithfully trusting in Christ and who are trying to live out their faith, what he's giving those warning passages to those who have, who have been neglectful, those who are like in Hebrews, considering a departing from Christ altogether or those who are engaging in sin unrepentantly, what we have in 1 Corinthians, for example. So they need the warnings, but those warnings aren't to be given to everybody, right? The person that comes to, you know, a pastor and says, like, I feel so guilty, I've committed so much sin, I feel like God won't forgive me. That person does not need to hear, well, you can fall away from the faith if you, if you keep sinning, you know, but the person what they need to hear is, I absolve you. I forgive you all of your sins, the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, right? They need that, they need absolution. But when you get that other person that comes into your office and says, I'm just, you know, I left my wife because, you know, I found this other woman and, you know, I thought I was getting bored. Okay, well, that person does not need to hear, I absolve you, that person needs to hear, repent, you, you know, this is, this is a sin and it's, it's such a serious sin that you are in danger of, of hellfire, essentially, you know, so that person needs the law and its fullness is boldly, as you can proclaim the law to bring that person to repentance. So this helps us to understand the pastoral and contextual ways in which scripture is speaking, where we seem to see these tensions at various points in this helps to resolve that tension to say they're not contradictory realities, but the law and the gospel are simply proclaimed in, in different theological contexts. It's really important to understand this distinction and the pastoral place in which this distinction is applied to understand Martin Luther. A lot of misunderstood Luther quotes come from an application that he's giving pastorally, especially in personal letters or in a table talk of the gospel to somebody that is very clearly given in a pastoral context where there is kind of exaggeration for the purpose of bringing comfort to the broken center. What you don't see is the exaggeration on the other end when people are living in sin, Luther has plenty of exaggerated statements on the other end that you could take and say Luther was a crazy legalist and he thought nobody was safe. There are statements of his that you could do that with, but nobody does, because it doesn't fit the narrative that Luther is anti-nomia or something. So you just have to understand these things in their pastoral and proper context. And it is that pastoral concern that goes throughout the formula of Concord. The formula of Concord is mostly concerned with how does this actually impact pastoral ministry, how does this impact, how it is that we are bringing the word of God to sinners. Because if we mix up the law in the gospel, we're going to do one of two things. We are either one going to give comfort to somebody who's living in sin and not confront their sin. This is a danger I see Lutheran pastors fall into all the time because we like to be so like grace focused, which is great. But to the point that sometimes people are like, I don't want to really confront it and I don't really want to deal with that sin and we do this weird thing where we just speak about sin and like these generalities in our sermons where it basically becomes no law at all. And that's a huge issue, not just a Lutheran issue. Come on. I mean, look at Rome. How often do they actually do like church discipline in any coherent way? Not that often. So this is not just a distinctively Lutheran problem here. But then we also have the other danger of somebody feeling the guilt of their sins and they're just hearing conditionality all the time and they're just in terror. And this is what you see among a lot of their reformed Baptist. I mean, you see this with your Paul washer types and a lot of programs on that stuff early on on the podcast, but the stuff just crushes people. It kills faith when somebody is in despair and instead of pointing them to Christ and not just pointing them to Christ intellectually, like one who is ordained into the pastoral ministry is not called to simply point them to theological realities to say, well, Christ died for the elect, you know, or something like that, you know, in Calvinistic theology. But instead, the pastor's call is to say, I forgive you that there's this direct deliverance of the forgiveness of God by the words of the minister. That's God actually uses that to forgive. So there is that actual absolution that is granted to the one who is struggling in sin. And it will, it will kill, it will kill faith. Okay, the other thing that happens when there's a mix of between law and gospel and I mentioned that those two is primary, but I feel like I should probably say this too, is that when the law is given wrongly to the one who is in despair, there is this also this other reaction, which is in order to deal with that despair and hearing the law, you suppress the despair and instead try to say, well, I fulfilled the law, right? I have actually done it. And the way that you try to convince yourself of that is by looking at someone else who has not done as well as you have in some way, because it will kind of give you this assurance of like, maybe I'm okay, because I have stayed within these boundaries and that person hasn't. So we're judging ourselves not by the law, but by other people. And that's a very common response and a very unhealthy response. But what are sinners supposed to do when the law and the gospel are not properly distinguished? This is something that once you have been in a church that distinguishes law and gospel properly and you go somewhere else, you will notice and you will feel empty just just from experience and talking to others who who experience the same things is, man, when you get this and you see something else, you realize how much this matters really, really profoundly. All right, so let me then look further at this article and some of the further distinctions that are being made here. All right, so now I'm looking at three here. The little word gospel is not used and understood in the same single sense at all times but in two different ways. And this is what I was talking about here with these different broader and more narrow definitions. So when we're dealing with the gospel, we're speaking about there's both a broad sense and a narrow sense. Lutherans love to use the broad and narrow sense distinctions, not because we like to make things confusing, but it's just a recognition that scripture uses words in different ways. And in scripture was not written as a systematic theology textbook. The apostles did not sit down and come up with very strict definitions of all the terms that they use. They didn't just, you know, John and Paul and Peter, you know, Matthew, they didn't all just kind of sit down and convene and say, all right, what do we mean by the term justification? Let's make a definition here that we're all working with. What do we mean by the word gospel? So because of that, you have the words being used in some different ways. So in order to just be contextual and be biblical about the way that terms are used, then we have to recognize that sometimes they're just used in different senses. And so we have to understand that in a way that we're doing our theology. We don't want to take a theological category that's constructed from one author and then impose it on another author or another place in that same author if they don't mean it that way, just because we find it easier to use the same term in every way all the time. We're speaking with the development of, you know, 2,000 years of systematic theological categories and developments, not saying the apostles disagree with the theology that we have, hopefully, hopefully here, theology aligns with apostolic preaching. That's what we all desire. But the way that terms develop differs, right? We get more particular about the way we're using certain terms and things like that than happened in the first century. So sometimes it is used, the word gospel, in a way to mean the entire teaching of Christ. This is what we mean when we refer to the books of the gospels as gospel. So we have some reference to the scripture, Mark 1, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God, which includes repentance and the forgiveness of sins. We have repentance as part of the gospel and this is the debate that's going on here. Then we have Mark 16 where after his resurrection, Christ commands the apostles to preach the gospel in the whole world. He summarizes the teaching in a few words and he says this, Luke 24, 46 to 47, "Thus it is written that Christ is to suffer and rise from the dead on the third day in the repentance and the forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations." All right, so in a broad sense, it is fine to speak about gospel as the proclamation of Christ and all that he did. And that includes repentance, conviction, teachings of Christ, all of that in a broad sense. We're referring to all of that as the gospel. The gospel is essentially the message of Jesus, the story of Jesus, the central thing that Scripture is about. This is why in Lutheran congregations and other historically liturgical traditions, people rise at the reading of the gospel because there's a centrality of the life and message of Jesus above everything else within Christianity. This is kind of the main point. It is the whole point of Christianity. Okay. So, then there is a more narrow sense in which gospel simply refers to the promises of God as granted in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. So, here, Mark 115 says, "Repent and believe the gospel." What does that mean? Well, here he's clearly not including repentance under the definition of gospel because you're repenting and then believing in the gospel. So, the gospel is not repent. You're not repenting and believing in repentance, that would be very strange. So, we turn from our sins and instead believe in the gospel. This is the definition of gospel that Saint Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 15 where he says that he delivered unto them the good news or the gospel and then he defines that as the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. So, in the most narrow sense, the gospel is what Jesus did for you. Remember, gospel means good news in the most literal sense. That's how it's translated. Oftentimes, that word Evangelion is used to refer to a kind of military victory. We find it in a number of other writings. And Kamnitz cites this, so this is a good news and it is news that is about someone else. It's not news is not, "I need to do something," in other words. It is a message of victory, a message of victory of the king, the Messianic king, Jesus himself, that is a promise delivered to us of the forgiveness of sins or adoption to God's family and God's coming kingdom that we are brought into. Then, we have repentance. We're talking about does repentance belong to the gospel? We have to say what exactly does repentance mean? Okay. So, repentance also means a number of things in Scripture. It's not just using one sense. So, in certain passages in Holy Scripture, and I'm in seven here, it is used and understood as the entire conversion of the person, Luke 13.5, "Unless you repent, you will all perish," Luke 15.7, "there will be joy over one sinner who repents." Other places where repentance and faith in Christ are put together here, Acts 2024, "repentance and forgiveness of sins." So, here, they're two different things. Repentance is distinct from the forgiveness of sins. So, sometimes repentance refers to just general conversion, including sorrow for sins, including looking to Christ, including believing in the promise and receiving the forgiveness of sins. All of that kind of summarized, repentance, but other times we see repentance and the forgiveness of sins. They're distinct things here. Okay, repentance means nothing else than to recognize sin, to be truly, to recognize sin truly, to be heartily sorrowful for it, and to abstain from it. This recognition comes from the law, but is not sufficient for a salutary conversion to God, if faith in Christ is not joined to it. Notice that it does say and to abstain from it as part of the definition of repentance here, but the Lutheran tradition is going to focus here on this repentance as primarily sorrow, primarily this understanding of guilt, this notion that I am recognizing that there is sin. What we usually call contrition. So repentance is really summarized primarily by contrition. And then we also have this definition of repentance in a broader sense, in a twofold way, and to some extent in a threefold way. And that is that repentance includes contrition, sorrow for sins, recognition of our sins, and then faith. So repentance includes then in that sense, this sorrow for our sins, but then it turning to Christ in faith. Because repentance is a change of mind, I mean, literally, Metanoia, it's this turning around, this changing of mind. So what does that change of mind mean? I don't think it means I now live in perfection, and what it means is that we turn from our sins, we are sorrowful for them, we recognize that we shouldn't do them and don't want to continue in them, and then turn to faith in Christ for forgiveness. That's what the turning is to Christ ultimately. Then we do have this third element that is not properly repentance itself, but is deeply connected, and that is what we call the fruits of repentance, and Scripture uses that language. And so repentance has this fruit that flows forth from it, that are the good works of the repentant heart. So that we are sorrowful for our sins, we trust in Christ, receive the forgiveness of sins, and then out of that flows, flows obedience. This is the Go and Sin no more aspect of this. The genuineness of repentance, or the saving nature of repentance coming to faith, is not dependent upon those fruits. It's not like you are only repentant if you have X number of fruits, but that is a reality that there are fruits of faith that flow forth from that life of repentance. If you come to God in repentance saying, okay, I'm going to say I'm sorry, but I had every intention to go out and do that sin again right away, that's not repentance, right? It's not actual contrition for your sins. So the fruits are not there because you weren't really contrite. Now, to be clear, and I've got to say this because this comes up a lot too, and especially dealing with some more legalistic, Calvinistic circles. Your contrition is not going to be perfect. You are not going to, your repentance is not judged by how sincere you are. Now, I know some Lutherans that want to take out sincerely from the confession, the corporate confession, that we sincerely repent of our sins. They say, well, I just pointing you inward too much. So what we want people to not sincerely repent and also be forgiven, that's not how this works. That's certainly not biblical. So it's fine. We should be talking about sincere repentance, but sincerity of repentance doesn't mean perfection of repentance. It means that we are sorrowful for what we have done, but it doesn't mean that we have a perfect and absolute hatred of sin that flows forth from a perfect to complete love of God. That's not the case at all. You may repent of your sins with that sinful part of your nature, that old Adam, that sinful self, still is like whispering, but I still want to do it, but I still want to do it. Right. So God forgives your imperfect repentance. So your repentance is going to be perfect. Your contrition is not going to be perfect. It's not a meritor, your repentance is not a meritorious deed by which you are forgiven because you are repentant enough that that's totally missing, missing the point. Okay. In nine, the gospel proclaims forgiveness of sins, not to crude, secure hearts, but to those who have been crushed or are repented. So there is repentance, this contrition in that contrition that sorrow over sins needs to hear the gospel. So the gospel comforts the one who is in that state of sorrow and contrition. And this is something, an issue that I see with a lot of Lutheran preaching and pastoral care to is that sometimes, and the intention is good, okay, because the intention is we want to bring people to the gospel and we should. That's the central proclamation of the church. That's why we exist, but sometimes I see people not really letting the law do its work, almost like, like if you're preaching a sermon and you're hammering on the law, it's, you want to jump from sin to, but you're forgiven immediately. In order to do that work of crushing, sometimes like people need to sit in their sins. So there are times for people to just feel bad for a while, not an extended period of time. I'm not saying you just make somebody feel as bad as they possibly can to bring the gospel to them, but sometimes they should sit with the guilt of their sin for a while. And we need to make sure that it's actually happening. And sometimes I see that we are so fearful of missing the gospel that we don't really do that, but contrition necessitates a little bit of self-reflection. This is why we observe the season of Lent partially is that Lent is a time for that more intensive self-reflection over the nature of our sins. And we need that. We need those times of fasting. We need those times of really spending time in God's law, not looking at God's law and saying, "Okay, yeah, I've broken it, but I'm forgiven." No, I mean looking at God's law, like looking at the commandments of God and thinking through your life, in your day, in your week, in your year, and saying, "Where have I explicitly specifically disobeyed?" Because contrition has to have some specificity to it. Yeah, there, of course, is that, "Forgive me in my hidden faults, God forgives us. We don't recall or remember every sin, and we don't need to confess every little evil, bad thought that we've ever had." It's impossible anyway, but I'm just talking about some real self-reflection being necessary here. All right, 12, "How do we define God's law? Everything that proclaims something about our sin in God's wrath is the proclamation of the law." So we're talking about God's wrath, our sins, all of this is that what Paul referred to as that ministry of death, or what Paul describes, as I said in Romans 3, 20, is that bringing about the reality of guilt, mouth being stopped before God, that is the function of the law. So when we are preaching, that which leads you to that, is law. That's the purpose or function of the law. The gospel is the kind of proclamation that points to it bestows nothing else than grace and forgiveness in Christ. So we have the proclamation of sin and then the proclamation of Christ. Note that this is not simply speaking about the forgiveness of sins in Christ, but the gospel is a mode of proclamation. So the law is also a mode of proclamation. Think about the prophets of the Old Testament as kind of paradigmatic here, what's being said. So on the one hand, we have the theological distinction between what is definitionally the law and then what is definitionally the gospel and then how are those two distinct, which is essential. But then we also have the proclamatory distinction, the distinction in terms of how this actually is proclaimed from the pulpit. How does this function? What mode of speech differentiates the law from the gospel? And the Old Testament prophets are really the example here. Luther draws on them a lot. Luther lectured heavily on the Old Testament prophets. So the prophets have these kind of two modes of prophetic voices. On the one hand, they have these prophecies of condemnation, of God's wrath towards sin, calling them out, calling them to repentance. And then there is this other prophetic mode, which is deliverance of divine promises. And those prophetic modes of speech are not just theologically talking about what those things are, but they're actually kind of delivering the wrath of God in the threats and delivering the promises of God in the promises of Christ. So the pastor takes on this prophetic mode and there are these connections between the pastoral office and the prophetic and priestly offices of the Old Testament. Don't want to go too far with that because you could get weird about it, but those are two elements of what the pastor's calling is within his pulpit, within the pulpit and within his ministry. So the pastor then takes on that kind of prophetic, preclamatory mode of law and of gospel. And in that gospel mode, there is actually the deliverance of the grace of Christ, this understanding that God's grace is found within his word. And as that word is proclaimed, it is delivered by means of that word. So it is actually a means of grace itself. So preaching is is sacramental in a sense. We're not just talking about preaching that is just a theological lecture. I do think that we should probably do more catechesis in our preaching than many Lutherans have over the last century or half century. We've kind of moved away. I think there's been a bit of a kind of fear of the evangelicals just kind of give this TED talk and those weren't a thing back then, but a TED talk type of sermon that's just kind of nice advice or talking about stuff and it's not really sacramental in any sense. There's kind of been this reaction against that, which is good. Sometimes then it's overreaction to so catechesis is all Bible study. We don't teach theology in the public, we just do the proclaiming. You need both is really what you need from the pulpit, but there is a sacramental reality going on in the pulpit, which is why it's only the ordained that should be preaching because it is by its nature, sacramental in some way. So that the deliverance of Christ occurs in the preaching, which is why it matters who's in the pulpit because it's one who's been divinely called to deliver the gifts of Christ by the church. Okay, then we're talking about the law here in 17 in the strict sense. The law is a divine teaching in which the righteous unchanging will of God revealed how human beings were created in their nature, thoughts, words, and deeds to be pleasing and acceptable to God. This is really important. So I have a book named after this, so this idea of the unchanging is an eternal and unchanging will of God. I have a book called Lexay Turner that talks about this, which addresses the nature of the law and is a criticism of keyhard Ferdy and some others that it starts way before Ferdy, but Werner Ehler to an example of this, but those who starting in the 19th century with von Hoffman start to shift discussion of the law away from something that is eternal towards something that is more redemptive, historical in a sense, temporal, or is more of a kind of existential encounter. The Lutheran Confessions here in the formula of Concord affirm that the law is divine teaching that is unchanging. And so what the law is, it's the unchanging will of God. That's the definition of the law. And specifically, when we're talking about the will of God here, we are identifying the moral law of God. So it is an eternal and unchanging moral law that's more will that is defined as law. And so law is not arbitrary. This means that God doesn't change his mind about law. Now, we're not talking about civic and ceremonial laws that were for a particular period of redemptive history in the Old Testament, what we're talking about is moral law. So if we're speaking about the moral law, the moral law is the unchanging will of God. And that means that it is not arbitrary. In fact, the law is moral, like what is morally right and morally wrong as prescribed in the law is so because it is a reflection of God. And so the moral law is a display or a way of communicating the moral nature of God himself. And so as he is the standard of what is good and right, so his creatures in modeling him or imaging him are called to obey in being like him in following those commandments he has given so that we may share in the goodness that is in God himself. So this notice that this has to do with how human beings are created. Like this, this, the law shows us what we're created to do, how we're created to function, how we're created to be, what we are as creatures it defines us, it defines our limits, it defines how we mirror God, how it is that we are to interact with others. And this is how it is that we are acceptable to God. If God created us to follow this law and to conform to this law, if we do not conform to that law of God, we are now no longer pleasing to God or acceptable to God. And this then leads toward punishments if we disobey that law. So as Saint Paul quotes from Deuteronomy where he says that cursed is the one just not continuing all the things written in the book of the law. So there is a curse upon us if we do not do all, there's that universality. So there is that curse that's given to us and then curse it is the one who was hanged on a tree, that's the prophecy about Christ, so that we are cursed if we disobey the law, if we do not do all things in the law, that's God's eternal will for us, we can't do it, therefore we break it, therefore we're under a curse. However, Christ on the tree or on the cross has taken the curse upon himself. So that's how this, all these pieces here fit together. Okay, reproving sin and teaching good works remain the proper function of the law. That's what the law does. It reproves sin, it calls out our sin, calling out our sin, it brings us to a knowledge of the guilt of our sins and it also teaches us good works. The law teaches us what good works are. We need that from the law. The law does not only show us our sin. If humans do not have the law to guide their good works, what are we supposed to do, trust our internal instinct about what is a good work? That's a terrible idea. People do this all the time. Everybody has an ocean of good works, are what is righteous or what is good. We have a conscience and we have the law written on the heart and to some extent when we do things that are in our conscience, there are elements of goodness there, like there are elements of things that are correct, but sin distorts the conscience. So what we generally do is take something that is righteous and say, I know that's good, but then we distort it and then drive that toward ends that benefit us instead of other people and then we say, that's a good work and then we condemn other people for not doing whatever we decided a good work was. That's just how people have functioned throughout the entirety of human history. That's human nature. So we cannot trust our conscience. Don't let your conscience be your guide. That's horrible advice. Add, align yourselves with the external law of God. So it is a blessing that God has revealed his will to us. It is a blessing that he has given us as more will because then we don't need to just guess and we don't need to sit in prayer and say, spirit, lead me and give me impulses of what it is that I am supposed to do where we just kind of sit around and hope that we feel the right thing and then if we feel the right thing, we make a decision and hope that was the spirit and not the like beans we ate with your Mexican food for dinner, just making you feel weird, like whatever we cannot trust whatever is going on inside of us. A great example of how this works is just looking at the LDS Church and when you see the way that Mormon groups splinter, within the LDS Church, if you talk to like a Mormon missionary, for example, they're generally going to tell you read the Book of Mormon, when you read the Book of Mormon, pray and ask God if this is true, the church is true. Ask if these words are really words from God and then what they're hoping for is you get this kind of burning in the bosom which they refer to as your testimony of what is true and you feel that and then it's been confirmed by the spirit. The problem is that when you talk to people in all of these break off or offshoot groups that are Mormons in one way or another, and I know they don't use the term Mormon anymore, when I started studying Mormonism, you had your "I'm a Mormon" campaign, I'm not trying to be offensive but that's like ever, you just decided all of a sudden that you can't use the name anymore, I don't know what to call you, so okay, not meant to be offensive or at all, but these break off Mormon groups then start to say the same thing, right? They say like, "Well, our prophet is the true prophet and how do you know that? We'll pray and see if you have that feeling," and a lot of people do and they go to those groups thinking, "Well, I had that feeling," the same feeling I had when I discovered the Book of Mormon and started to believe that was true, I had the same feeling when I asked is this, you know, the All Reds, you know, are they the true prophets of God or whoever, well, then you get this feeling that they are, so your conscience or your inner feelings can tell you all sorts of things and generally it's not a very reliable God. So what we need is the external declarations of God that says, "This is right and this is wrong," and well, it may sound rigid, it makes life a lot easier, it's pretty great because we don't have to guess. We just say, "All right, this is the same thing if you're making a decision, say, about a job," and I see Christians do this, they say, "I don't know, should I take this job or should I move here?" or "I got into these schools, which one should I go to?" and they're really kind of wrestling with this and in this almost despair of like, "I don't know, I hope God makes it clear to me," now, yeah, we should pray. You know, when I made my decision to step down from the presidential role of the seminary, to step just into my teaching dogmatics, that wasn't just a random decision, I spent the season of Lent fasting and praying about it and I think that's the right thing to do, so we should fast and pray about things. But we shouldn't have this anxiety about our decisions because ultimately we're guided by the external word of God and God says certain things like serve your neighbor and obey and serve in your vocation and you don't have to have this anxiety because whatever choice you make, as long as it's not a sinful profession or something like that, you can serve God in that and it's okay. You don't have to have 100% certainty that what you're doing is the very specific will of God for you and if you don't do the right thing, you've missed it. It's a horrible way to live and it's nothing that Scripture ever tells us to do. So they're having the limits that we have here and not having to trust the inner self is I think very freeing for us. It's not up to us. Okay, then let's see, I'm looking at 25, the law is proclaimed so that people may be comforted and strengthen through the proclamation of the Holy Gospel of our Lord Christ. This gospel proclaims that through Christ, God forgives all the sins of those who believe the gospel accepts them for Christ's sake as his children out of sheer grace without any merit of their own and makes them righteous and saves them. However, this does not mean that they may abuse God's grace and sin against it. In 2 Corinthians 3, 6 through 9, Paul demonstrates this distinction between law and gospel in a thorough and powerful fashion. That's what I was talking about before. Okay, so the law is proclaimed for the purpose of bringing someone to the gospel. That is the purpose of the law. The law is not proclaimed just to make you feel really bad. The law is not, and there are pastors that do that. You go into your like IFB kind of churches and I'm sure they're not all the same, but you get certain, you know, IFB churches where it seems like the pastor is just up there to kind of, I don't know, make people feel terrible about themselves. You know, you get those clips where you got these IFB guys who are just like calling out specific people in the congregation and calling them out for specific sins. It's like, what are you doing? You're just there to exert your power and you're on some power trip and enjoy making people feel bad and showing that you can make a mockery of somebody or embarrass somebody. It's not the purpose of the law. Now, the purpose of the law is ultimately for the good of the other person. We should not proclaim the law in order to condemn people. We proclaim the law in order that they may recognize that they are condemned so that we can bring the gospel so that they can be brought out of that so that they can be redeemed so that they can receive the forgiveness of sins, the promises of God in Christ. That's the purpose and function of the law. Yeah, and then there is that other reiteration once again that it doesn't mean that you may abuse God's grace. This is reiterated over and over and over again in the entire formula of Concord because now you've dealt with Rome for a number of years. You've got Luther writing his great treatise on Christian liberty in 1520 at this point. Now you're over 50 years after that when this is being written. And so you've got 50 years of Rome claiming the same things about what Lutherans believe over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And continuing to say you guys think you could send as much as you want and you guys think that you can just be saved even if you don't don't have any intention of giving up your sin and that you can live with that repentance and still be a Christian and like these accusations over. So you've been dealing with them for 50 years at this point. We have now been dealing with them for literally over 400 years and or sorry five I meant 500 years and it hasn't stopped. It doesn't matter. It's like we can you can make this point a billion times but it doesn't it doesn't make a difference. The very obnoxious Roman Catholic apologists will continue to just assert the same straw man over and over and over and over again without without any concern for for truth or what it is that you actually believe. Not that I'm saying all Roman Catholic apologists do that believe me. I think there are plenty that are quite respectable people that I've interacted with and dealt with and talked to and and and our thoughtful careful faithful Christian people but but it's this certain kind of you know, tradcath that I find commenting on my videos over and over again saying these same like like I had this one guy recently just start commenting on a bunch of my videos saying the Bible talks about good works and citing a bunch of things that just say like he's not even making an argument that scripture says that good works are related justification. No, he's just like you're wrong because the Bible says good works as if like really do you think that's what we think? Maybe she actually watched the videos you're commenting on. I don't know. It's just it's kind of silly but but it gets for I'm sure it gets it gets very frustrating. I get very frustrated. So dealing with the same things over and over and over again and and sometimes yeah sometimes those are people that get platforms on some pretty big you know YouTube channels and things like that. Good example of that would be I did a response to a guy named Ben Handelman. I don't really remember who he is exactly to be honest. I don't remember what his like what his profession was or I don't know but it was on it was on Pines with Aquinas. So it was a response to Luther. It was a criticism of Luther and it was it was just a good example of this total misunderstanding without any like reading of the primary sources or talking to to any Lutherans at all. So so that kind of stuff does certainly still still exist. I'm not trying to be you know call that that guy out. That was a while ago and I responded to him and that's what led to that discussion with Jimmy Akin on Pines which was obviously very different conversation than with somebody like that but but you do get these complete misunderstandings. Okay so that brings us then to to the end of this article on the distinction between law and gospel. We didn't really get into what are some of the current debates about the distinction between law and gospel and that's really because I'm not prioritizing that. I'm prioritizing what it is that the formula of Concord actually says though if you do want to understand some of those contemporary debates on the distinction between law and gospel my book Lex Aeterna is all about that and you could also find my program that I did on one on Guillard Ferdy and one on Stephen Paulson. Those are just two contemporary examples of theologians who very much argue against what is this idea that the law is eternal. So there's a very different conception of the law that you find in some of those some of those thinkers that I think very much differs from what's found in the formula of Concord. I hope you found this helpful and lightening whatever and make sure you subscribe here on YouTube as well as on your podcast app and we'll be continuing this formula of Concord series. Thanks so much. God bless. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]