Tuesdays with Forde

Via On Being a Theologian of the Cross pp. 54-56

Thesis 14. Free will, after the fall, has power to do good only in a passive capacity, but it can always do evil in an active capacity.

Peter Paul Rubens, "Raising of the Cross" (Antwerp Cathedral, 1610)

What does this mean? In its passive capacity the will can do good when it is acted upon from without but not on its own, not in an active capacity. A commonly used physical analogy is water. Water has a passive capacity to be heated, but it can’t heat itself. It has no active capacity to do that.

The example Luther uses in his proof is even more to the point because it deals with death and life. On the one hand, corpses could be said to have a passive capacity for life because they can be raised from the dead. But not, of course, on their own power, not in an active capacity, not even in the slightest. Not even by doing their best! The capacity they have is strictly passive. They can b e raised, but only by divine power. On the other hand, it is of course true that while a people live they have the active capacity to do something about life and death. They can take life, either their own or some other, but they can’t create or give life. Yet that only demonstrates that, after the fall, will in its active capacity can only do evil. Since will after the fall is dead and bound to do deadly sin, it can be rescued only from without, as is indicated by the fact that it could not bring life out of death but could only be commanded from without by our Lord.

Thus, the fact that even after the fall the will is not nothing means that there is something there. What is it? It is a strictly passive capacity, not an active one. That it can be changed but it will not change itself. To be changed, it will have to be accessed “from without.” But that will take radical action. It will take death and resurrection. So we are again pointed toward the cross.

Tuesdays with Forde

Masaccio, "Adam & Eve Expelled from Paradise" (1424-25)

This is an essay about the function of law as it confronts sexual behavior. Therefore the first thing that needs saying is that it cannot be a paper about compassion. To be sure, Christians, not to say human beings in general, are called upon to act with compassion and care toward all, particularly those who suffer, whatever the cause. Since we are enjoined to visit those in prison it is to be assumed that compassion is to encompass even those who have fallen under the punishment of the law. We are indeed also called upon to apply law with compassion. But this essay is not about that. This disclaimer needs to be entered because the vast majority of discussions about sexual behavior, especially of homosexual behavior, become arguments about compassion. Discussants relate tragic and agonizing stories about failures in compassion. Those who wish to talk more “objectively” about law and ethics are faulted for lacking compassion. But we get nowhere arguing about who is more compassionate than whom. Is compassion to be exercised at the expense of law? Toward whom is one then acting compassionately? Of course we are to act compassionately toward those who, are caught in the immense web of tragedy that problems of sexual identity and practice have spun about us today. Of course we are to act justly and compassionately toward those who suffer from AIDS or whose civil rights are violated. Let us assume that from the outset. But this is a discussion about law and sexual behavior, not about compassion. A major dimension of the problem, mostly obscured or forgotten, is that law has no compassion. As the Apology to the Augsburg Confession insists several times over, “Law always accuses.”[1]

The second thing to be noted is that the basic concern here is with law as it relates to sexual behavior, not to “orientation” or “sexuality.” This disclaimer needs to be entered for at least two reasons. First, the major focus here will be on what the Lutheran tradition has called the civil or political use of the law, later—no doubt misleadingly—termed the “first” use of the law.[2] In its civil use, the law directs itself toward behavior and actual practice, not orientation. I tend to agree with James Burtness; when he insists that behavior not orientation is the issue.[3] The second reason for talking about behavior rather than orientation is that claims made about “sexual orientation” and “sexuality” are both too inconclusive and even largely beside the point for our discussion here. Human sexual drives, passions, and obsessions are many and varied—in all of us, no doubt. We are told that there is a broad spectrum of desire, sometimes in one and the same person, such that it would be inaccurate to pin us down to a single “orientation.” The notion that we have something called a “sexuality” of a particular sort within us determining our being that can be discovered scientifically and must be obeyed if we are to be honest with and true to ourselves is a modern invention that seems particularly pernicious.[4] To be sure, such notions have peculiar power and cast us into states and predicaments that are real enough. No doubt it is one of the ways in which law knows no compassion. But our question here is not directly about all of that. Our question is about how we are called to behave in our sexual relations with others under law, particularly in its civil use, whatever our “orientations.”

The End and Establishment of Law

Before becoming more specific we must make some more general observations about the way law works from a theological perspective. Scriptural passages about sexual behavior provide a good illustration. First off, one who takes those passages with any degree of seriousness should soon become terrified. This is particularly true of passages about sexual behavior such as Romans 1:16-32, where Paul concludes his announcement of the revelation of the wrath of God with the frightening words, “They know God’s decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.” The most appropriate response to law in the first instance would no doubt be something like that of Paul in Romans 7:24: Who will deliver us? If what the Scripture says is true, how shall we escape? The only real answer of course is Christ. Christ and Christ alone is the end of the law to faith (Rom. 10:4). But if Christ is the end of the law to faith does that mean that law is now “overthrown” as Paul puts it in Romans 3:31? Is the law rendered useless? By no means, Paul replies. Rather the law is “upheld” or “established,” set in its rightful place. As I have argued elsewhere,[5] the proper Christian understanding of law therefore “resonates,” to borrow an image from chemistry, between two poles. The first is the gospel declaration that Christ is the end of the law that everyone who has faith may be justified (Rom. 10:4). The second is a question posed for us: “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith?” To which the reply is, “By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.” Faith in the end, that is, does not impatiently try to abrogate the law, but puts it in its proper place (Rom. 3:31).

We need to look at this “resonance” more closely. Christ is the end of the law that those who have faith may be justified. That is the first and most crucial pole in the resonance. One cannot begin to understand the place of law in theology unless one is absolutely clear that in Christ it is all over, done with. This is simply another way to say that law is not the way of salvation. There is no way one can buy salvation by the doing of the law. The issue before us is not directly one of salvation. Proper behavior does not merit salvation. Salvation begins not when law begins but when law ends. In Christ we are free from the law. Legalism is over as and to the degree that one is in Christ.

But it must be noted carefully that only Christ is the end of the law, nothing else, no one else. Human beings have just two possibilities in this regard. We can live either “under the law” or “in Christ.” And for the time being, of course, since we are simultaneously just by faith and sinners in actuality, we live under both. But only Christ is the end of the law and only when Christ conquers all does law stop. One must be grasped firmly by this, particularly with regard to sexual behavior, because when we come up against laws that call our behavior into question we usually attempt by one means or another to erase, discredit, or change the laws. We become antinomians. If we don’t like the law we seek to remove or abolish it by exegetical circumlocution, appeals to progress, to genetics, to the authority of ecclesiastical task-force pronouncements, or perhaps just the assurance that “things have changed.” But all of these moves are not the end of the law. It is folly to believe they are. As Luther put it, this is a drama played in an empty theater.[6] Law just changes its form and comes back at us—usually worse than before. Law is authoritative ultimately not because it is written in law books or even in the Bible, but rather because it is written “in the heart.” So only one who is stronger can end it. That is Christ, the bringer of the new age and a new “heart.” Christ, as Luther insisted, must reign in the conscience.[7] That is easily talked about, he constantly warned, but hard to hold in actual experience.

But Christ the end of the law is only one pole of the resonance. The second comes in the question, “Do we then by this faith render the law of no effect?” Is the law then useless? “Absolutely not!” says Paul. On the contrary precisely by faith in Christ we uphold the law; we establish it in its rightful place. How are we to understand this? How is law established by a faith that believes its end? There is truly a “resonance” here. A faith that knows of the true end of law in the double sense of goal and cessation will at the same time “establish the law,” that is, allow the law to stand just as it is. In the light of the end one can gain some understanding of how God puts the law to its proper uses. Indeed, knowing the end, faith supports the law until the end is given. If the end is given and assured, there is no need to try to “‘make the law of no effect.” That happens only when faith is lost. Without faith, that is, there is no hope. There is no end in sight. Law just goes on forever. Since I know of no end, I lose trust. Then I must fend for myself. Reduced to my own resources, I have no recourse but to exercise the antinomian option. I must bring the law to an end somehow, explain it away, reduce it to a size I can manage, or erase it entirely. When faith is gone the self arrogates to itself mastery over the law. But that of course is a futile game. Law has no compassion. It does not end at our say-so.

The Uses of the Law

The proper establishment of the law through faith in Christ means that in Christ the law comes up against its real limit. Only then can we begin to see what it is truly for. Law, according to Luther, has two uses, the civil and the theological use.[8] But we must take some care here. The doctrine is often wrongly taken to mean that the two uses could easily be separated and assigned, perhaps, to different spheres of operation, the civil having to do with politics and the natural, perhaps, and the theological with “religion” and the sacred. It is no doubt true that in the two uses we do face, so to speak, in different directions—toward the world of the neighbor and the civil realm on the one hand and toward our relation to God on the other—but the separation cannot be rigidly maintained in practice. That would be much too simplistic and could lead to a superficial reading of our situation, especially in matters of sexual behavior. The doctrine of the uses of the law is simply an attempt analytically to discern what law actually does. Law does two things to us, come what may. It sets limits to sinful and destructive behavior, usually by some sort of persuasion or coercion—ultimately by death itself;[9] and it accuses of sin. That is simply what it does. We have no choice in the matter. It works that way. To be noted also in this is what law does not do and cannot do. Law does not save. It is not a way of salvation. Nor is law a remedy for sin. In its civil use law insists upon and promotes moral behavior but it does not stop sin thereby. As a matter of fact, as more astute interpreters like Paul knew, precisely in coercing morality law only makes sin worse (Cf. Rom. 7).

The Civil Use of Law and Sexual Behavior

Since we do not, in matters of sexual behavior, have to do directly with the question of salvation, we are concerned first and foremost with the question of the civil use of law. The civil use of law ushers us into a strange and exciting new world, the world of the neighbor. Talk of the end of the law is unfortunately often taken to imply that the door is suddenly open to a certain relaxation and permissiveness. To think so, however, would be a fatal mistake. What the end of the law opens the door to is the world of the neighbor, the world in which the self is turned outward toward the other. As Luther put it in “The Freedom of the Christian,” the believer who is “free lord of all, subject to none” is at the same time “the perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”[10] Being in Christ means being set free from self for the neighbor. Thus the purpose of the civil use of law is to take care of God’s creation and God’s creatures. To be sure, law is not therefore to be imposed as an absolute which must be obeyed for its own sake. “The sabbath was made for humankind not humankind for the sabbath.” In its civil use, law is rather to be applied so as best to exercise the care demanded in particular situations.

But here considerable caution must be invoked, particularly in the case of sexual behavior lest we take the antinomian turn. The pressure to set the law aside by reinterpretation, accommodation, declaring it obsolete (e.g., on the ground that biblical writers were not aware of current understandings of sexual “orientation”), and so forth, is immense. Such attempts to circumvent the law usually proceed by appealing to the supposed adaptability of the civil use of law. This is perhaps the neuralgic point in the discussion. The argument from compassion takes center stage. Would it not be more “caring” and more gracious for the Christian church simply to go the route of accommodation? Should the church not relax the conditions for entrance to the estate of marriage enough to welcome loving and committed homosexual couples or at least devise a parallel or related form of “blessing” for such unions? As the argument usually goes, “What harm is done if it is a relationship between consenting adults?” That is to say, does not our particular situation enjoin a revision in the civil use of law?

To such questions at least two things need to be said. First of all, the widespread notion that the doctrine of the uses of the law gives permission for fundamental changes in the content of the law is quite mistaken.[11] The doctrine of the uses of the law is just what it says. It concerns the use and not the content of the law. The idea that law could be so altered in content that the civil use would be somehow milder than or even contrary to the theological use is quite foreign to the doctrine. Law may indeed be applied variously according to the situation but the basic content remains the same. Some like to point out that we no longer demand the death penalty for sexual misbehavior as was the case in Old Testament times. But that does not mean that what was once prohibited is now suddenly considered acceptable. A change in penalty does not mean change in content. It can also be the case, as Luther insisted, that commands issued to the people of God in Old Testament times do not apply universally. This was particularly true of commands to attack and destroy enemies in specific instances. Some at the time of the Reformation were tempted to use such commands as legitimation for a species of holy war. But this would be a misuse of law. It is not enough just to say that a given command is “The Word of God.” We must always be careful to note whether a command applies to us.[12] But even this does not mean that the content is altered. It is simply a matter of whether a given law applies universally or not. Some in the church like to argue also that since the church has changed its mind on matters like divorce or ordination of women it seems consequent that it could change its stance on sexual behavior as well. But in questions of the civil use of law it is not legitimate to argue that one example of change justifies another. Each case has to be argued individually.[13]

The second thing that needs to be said is that the fundamental concern of the civil use of the law is for the care of the social order. The purpose of laws regulating sexual behavior is to foster healthy, joyous, and socially fruitful sexual relationships and to guard against the social destruction that results from aberrant sexual behavior. The struggle to establish an order within which sexual behavior can be beneficial to society has been a long and arduous one. According to some, the very foundation of Western civilization itself rests on the success of this struggle. Dennis Prager, for instance, argues very powerfully that the biblical demand for all sexual activity to be channeled into marriage changed the world. The prohibition of non-marital sex, he insists, “quite simply made the creation of Western civilization, possible.”[14] When there are no controls on or boundaries to sexual activity, sex dominates both religion and social life. Sex is then a means of exercising power and establishing dominance. Advocates for relaxing the traditional Judeo-Christian stand against homosexual behavior often like to argue that such behavior was common and accepted in ancient societies. But a moment’s reflection ought to be sufficient to reveal that such arguments can hardly be advantageous to their cause. Ancients, it seems, were simply not concerned about gender. Boys, women, slaves, could all equally be objects of desire. What was important socially was to dominate, to penetrate rather than be penetrated. Such considerations ought in any case to be sufficient to waken us to the realization that the civil order itself hangs in the balance in this discussion. It is really not sufficient just to lay claim to a little compassion or to muse a bit about “what harm does it do?” What is being harmed is the very social order itself. And that is the concern of the civil use of the law. In its civil use, law has to be concerned about the whole social order itself, not just about individual convenience. A faith which knows the end of the law sees also that the law is established thereby and will be watchful about all attempts to alter its fundamental content.[15]

The Estate of Marriage

The product of the concern for the social order in Christian tradition is the estate of marriage. Marriage is the publicly acknowledged joining of a man and a woman together. But marriage is not only the public and ceremonial ratification of their mutual consent. That is indeed essential but it is more than a contract between two people. It involves admittance to and entrance into an estate, a civil reality above and beyond the mutual consent and/or even the loving commitment of the man and the woman involved. The tradition has always insisted that the estate of marriage is divinely ordained and thus especially God-pleasing.[16] It is Simply not the case that marriage was looked upon as a kind of necessary evil, a hedge against lust. Luther, for instance, used the I Corinthian 7:9 passage that “it is better to marry than to burn” primarily as a criticism of Roman attempts to claim celibacy as a state higher than marriage. It was better to marry than burn under the burden of falsely required vows. The foundation for the idea of marriage as an estate ordained by God, however, is much more positive. It is to be found in such passages as the account of creation in which God blesses the man and the woman and enjoins that they “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28) and also the subsequent ratification of the creation account by Jesus in Matthew 19:4-6, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” The estate of marriage has a positive purpose. The two become one flesh, a substantial unity in difference. The estate is to be a blessing to the married couple, to protect against the vagaries of passion, feeling, and sexual waywardness. And, of course, it is concerned to foster a family life conducive to the raising of children. Society has a tremendous stake in this. The law in its civil use is one expression of this concern.

If we are at all concerned to restore some sanity to social life today in an age of rampant sexual irresponsibility and egocentrism we would do well to pay some heed to what the tradition has to say about the estate of marriage as an application of the civil use of law that flows from it. Attacks on marriage are nothing new. It has always been a rather precarious venture and the butt of much ridicule, satire, and cynicism. Luther even in his day notes that “the estate of marriage has universally fallen into . . . awful disrepute.” Pagan books, he laments, “treat of nothing but the depravity of womankind and the unhappiness of the estate of marriage . . . ” Nor will Luther tolerate the idea that women are only a necessary evil to assuage the lust of men. Such ideas Luther insists are “the words of blind heathen, who are ignorant of the fact that man and woman are God’s creation.” It is blasphemy against God’s creation. He even anticipates that if women were to write books they would say the same things about men![17] A passage from Luther’s treatise on “The Estate of Marriage” both recognizes the threat to marriage and indicates the protection the estate intends.

The world says of marriage, “Brief is the joy, lasting the bitterness.” Let them say what they please, what God wills and creates is bound to be a laughingstock to them. The kind of joy and pleasure they have outside of wedlock they will be most acutely aware of, I suspect, in their consciences. To recognize the estate of marriage is something quite different from merely being married. He who is married but does not recognize the estate of marriage cannot continue in wedlock without bitterness, drudgery, and anguish; he will inevitably complain and blaspheme like the pagans and blind irrational men. But he who recognizes the estate of marriage will find therein delight, love and joy without end …“[18]

Indeed, in what will probably seem to us a kind of simplistic naivete, Luther can say that recognition of the estate of marriage as pleasing to God should override even its most difficult trials.

We err in that we judge the work of God according to our own feelings, and regard not his will but our own desire. This is why we are unable to recognize his works and persist in making evil that which is good, and regarding as bitter that which is pleasant. Nothing is so bad, not even death itself, but what it becomes sweet and tolerable if only I know and am certain that it is pleasing to God.[19]

Such words may cause moderns to shudder or shake their heads but that is only an indication of how little concern there is about pleasing God—which is quite probably at the root of all our problems to begin with![20]

The Homosexual and the Uses of the Law

We have now arrived at the most difficult and controverted part of the discussion, the use of law in either approval or disapproval of sexual misbehavior—in this case specifically of genital sexual relations between people of the same gender. The question before the church is whether law in its civil use can under any conditions be extended to approve or condone such behavior. Two things must be said at the outset to get the question in proper focus. First of all, we may take it for granted that the Bible and the Christian tradition following it unambiguously rejects genital sexual relations between people of the same gender as it was known to them in their day.[21] Any attempt to deny that would be pure sophistry. The argument today thus has to take the form of asserting that new knowledge or insight has fundamentally changed the conditions for judgment and application of the law in its civil use. So the question usually comes down to whether current experience of “homosexuality” as an “orientation” does not call for a change in the church’s stance. The Bible, it is usually admitted, condemns homogenital acts but ostensibly knows nothing about orientation. So, it is said, conditions have changed. The question therefore is whether such argument is sufficient to alter the long-standing biblical tradition.

Second, since in the Christian tradition genital sexual activity is permitted only within the estate of marriage our question must be as specific as possible. Can or should the church modify or expand its understanding of marriage so as to put its blessing on life-long committed relationships between persons of the same gender involving genital sexual activity? If so, on what grounds? What social or moral good would such sexual activity per se promote such that the biblical rejection of it could be set aside? Since the church holds that genital sexual activity is in any case permissible only within marriage, that must give the question precise form. All such relationships outside of marriage, whether between those of the same or of opposite gender are unacceptable. If genital sexual relations between people of the same gender are to be approved and/or blessed, the only way that could be done would be to bring them within something akin (at least) to the estate of marriage. Can this be done in terms consonant with our understanding of the uses of the law?

The thesis of this paper is that it cannot. Since our primary concern here is with the civil use of law we had best begin with that. Separation of the two uses cannot, ultimately be made, so in the end we shall have to say something about the theological use of law as well’. But first, about the civil use. As we have seen, the law in its civil use is concerned with the moral and social import and consequences of our actions. As we have already indicated, “orientation” is much too ambiguous both conceptually and in application to be of use as a basis for ethical decisions. Humans, apparently can have various “orientations,” inborn or otherwise but that is not sufficient ground for ethical approval of what they are “oriented” toward. Indeed, if the doctrine of original sin is still valid, many of our “orientations” would be restrained or opposed by the civil use of the law. That certainly is why law is necessary.

The question to be answered, therefore, must be about the social and moral value of genital sex acts between people of the same gender. In much of the discussion that follows I lean rather heavily but loosely on the arguments of James P. Hanigan in his helpful book, Homosexuality: The Test Case for Christian Sexual Ethics.[22] Hanigan rightly insists that the question must be very specifically focused on the sex act itseIf.[23] Homosexuals, of course, can and indeed do become intimate friends and have “loving, committed, relationships,” and can be mutually supportive and so on. But so can single friends of the same sex who may share living quarters, care and concerns, be sustaining and supportive and even enjoy a common life together but neither have nor desire sexual relations with one another. Life-long loving and committed relationships are in themselves not sufficient to justify genital sexual activity. We have many such relationships in which genital sexual activity either plays no part or would even be harmful and destructive—most obviously, as we are tragically aware today, relationships with children. Therefore the question we cannot get around is what social or moral value would same-gender genital sexual acts add even for the most loving and committed couples such that they should be recognized as valuable by society or blessed by the church? It is no doubt true that the genital sexual activity of homosexuals has personal and private significance for them. But our question has to be about the social and moral import. In what way does it build up the community, or preserve its unity, or perpetuate it? Why should it be recognized or promoted as a “life-style”?

Some might like to argue that societal legitimization for committed homosexual couples can serve to heal the wounds of society and/or assuage the personal agony and suffering of homosexuals, curb the spread of AIDS and so forth. But that is hardly an argument for the social value of such genital relations. It would seem rather to be an indication of social danger. It is of course true that our mutual experience of having to care for and about one another in the midst of crises like these can teach us vital social lessons. But that is not to say that there is social value in what causes the crisis.

When it is held that society and/or the church ought to “bless” committed homosexual unions what inevitably results is a kind of double standard. Homosexual unions come to be looked upon as something less than ideal, less than marriages between man and woman.[24] They are permissible for the satisfaction of the individuals involved as a kind of defensive and protective measure to forestall greater discomfort or tragedy. They are permitted and thus apparently justified morally out of sympathy simply because that appears to be the only way sexual satisfaction can be realized. The end (sexual satisfaction) justifies the means (“blessing the union”). We succumb to the prevailing assumption that everyone has a basic right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of sexual satisfaction.” But there is no such positive right to sexual satisfaction and the means one uses to achieve it are not justified just because it is the only way satisfaction can be realized. “The goodness of what is desired as a means must be established as worthy of moral choice by something other than the end they may or may not realize in and through this choice.”[25] There can be no double standard. If homosexual unions are to be blessed by church or society it would have to be on the same ground and for the same reasons that marriages of persons of opposite sexes are blessed.[26] Nor is there an unquestionable right to marriage.[27] Society has always claimed the right to refuse marriage in some cases (incest, for instance) and to see to the fulfillment of legitimate social and personal responsibilities. Hence society also rules on the permissibility of dissolving marriages.

Focusing attention on the moral and social value of the genital sex act itself as we have done here quite naturally requires deeper reflection on the kind of value sex is. Why, finally, should the genital sexual activity of a married man and woman be of value morally and socially where that of persons of the same gender is not? That is the question. What kind of value is sex? As Hanigan points out, sex can be and has been variously valued. It can be valued as a means to an end: a means to earn a living (prostitution); a way to manipulate and control others; to enhance one’s self-esteem; to gain attention; to be popular; feel alive. But if it is only a means to an end one treats others only as means, the occasion for one’s enrichment, or “self-fulfillment.”[28] Such a valuing would, of course, be quite contrary to the law in its proper civil use. The law is there to see to it that we serve the neighbor, not use him or her merely as occasions for self-fulfillment.

But the attempt can also be made to value sex simply for its own intrinsic worth as a physical experience. But where that is the case, technique takes over. The most moral sex is the most physically pleasurable and the sexual virtuouso the most virtuous. While concern for technique has its rightful place, valuing sex in this manner is completely to individualize it. The other is treated once again just as an occasion for one’s self-gratification. One need not even have a sexual companion since masturbation or even a machine would do just as well, perhaps better.[29]

But if genital sexual activity cannot be properly valued only as a means to an end or simply for its own intrinsic worth that means it can find proper value only within a higher purpose. It can only signal participation in larger reality. Its true value consists in the fact that it is a symbolic activity.[30] One should say, I believe, that it is a symbolic activity in Paul Tillich’s sense of symbol as participating in the reality which it symbolizes. The sexual activity itself symbolizes and participates in the great mystery of unity encompassed by the biblical calling that the “two shall become one flesh.” It is even said to be a unity akin to that between Christ and the church (Eph. 5:31-32). Participating in that gift of unity as a symbolic act, it focuses, celebrates, expresses and enhances the meaning of all substantive activities and relationships.[31] The most significant aspect of these relationships, no doubt, is the personal relationship, love and care, between the sexual partners. But it is more even than that. The sexual act itself is a participation in the mystery of unity.

But could this not be said to be the case between homosexual partners as well? It is difficult if not impossible to see how it could be. If the genital sexual act is symbolic as we have suggested, what does such an act between homosexuals symbolize? In what reality does it participate? It is not enough just to say that it symbolizes “committed, interpersonal love.” As already pointed out, genital sexual activity is in no way necessary to such love and in many instances would be destructive of it. Committed relationships do not justify just any sort of sexual behavior. If they did why should not those “oriented” toward “bisexuality” be justified in having both male and female as permanent partners? Once again we are thrown back on the question of what specific value homosexual genital intercourse adds such that it should be blessed.

If marriage is to be understood as entry into an estate under the civil use of law, then it should be the case that genital sexual activity involved must itself be seen in the light of one’s vocation to serve God and the neighbor through a life of love in the world. “The heart of the matter rests with the claim that the sexual activity itself must be an essential aspect of the exercise and realization of [one's] vocational calling and have social as well as personal import.”[32] Same-gender sexual relations cannot fulfill this vocational calling. In the first place, the calling is that in sexual activity the “two shall become one flesh.” This is not possible for persons of the same sex.[33] The most obvious outcome and instance of two becoming one flesh is in their children. Homosexual sexual intercourse obviously cannot do that. Furthermore, persons of the same gender cannot become one flesh in the sense of a shared life of love as a unity in difference. They cannot become one out of two in the sexual act itself.[34] At best the sexual activity of homosexuals can only imitate but not participate in what the act symbolizes.

In the estate of marriage, however, sexual intercourse participates in the reality symbolized. Hanigan puts it well.

When married couples engage in sexual intercourse and realize the substantial goods of their actions, they are exercising and realizing both the personal and social meaning of their calling, to be for one another … and thereby to establish and secure that center of life and love around which family develops and grows and serves society. Their sexual relationship is fundamentally essential to carrying out the vocation.[35]

This is quite obviously not to say that sexual intercourse has meaning and is justified only in relation to procreation. That should be clear from the manner in which the symbolic nature of the sex act has been maintained. Thus even couples who for one reason cannot have children participate in the reality symbolized and carry out their particular vocations in that light. It is to say, however, that the relation between sexual intercourse within the estate of marriage and procreation ought not be broken or denied. Procreation is not, indeed, the M only justification for sexual intercourse, but it is part of the reality being symbolized. In reacting against stricter “natural law” views and possessing the means to sever the relation between intercourse and procreation altogether society today has too readily succumbed to making sex simply a means of self-gratification. Society has always had and must take a vital interest in its children and must pay attention to them today. Children all too often are the victims sacrificed on the altar of sexual self-gratification. This too is the concern of the civil use of law.

To bring this section of the paper to a close we set again the question with which we began. Should the civil use of law be so extended as to allow the church, or even society itself, to bless committed same-gender relationships? Shall such relationships be taken within something akin to the estate of marriage? The civil use of law is concerned with moral and social good. So in the end we are left with our question: What social and moral good is created specifically by the genital sexual activity of persons of the same gender? The conclusion of this paper is that no such social or moral good can be discovered. There appears to be no good reason why church or society should alter its understanding of the estate of marriage to include or bless same-gender genital sexual activity. indeed, to do so is to put society itself at great risk.

Concluding Observations on the Theological Use of Law

The argument pursued in this paper is not likely to be of much comfort to anyone. Those who consider themselves “homosexuals,” should they read it, will no doubt be angered, hurt, perhaps depressed. Many whose sexual “preferences” are otherwise may also feel themselves put off or offended. They might even sense that their own sexual autonomy is under attack. They would, of course, be right. Or one might, as I do, find considerable sadness in the fact that words such as these have to be written. There is no joy in this, or in the writing of it. But that is simply a result of the fact that law has no compassion and, indeed, always turns to accuse and to worm its way into the conscience. As Gustav Wingren could put it, the civil use of law always passes over into the theological.[36] We cannot stop it. It always accuses because we fail to put it to its proper use. As I have indicated throughout, it is not possible to make a clean or absolute separation between the civil and theological use. In “establishing the law,” attempting to set forth the civil use clearly and forthrightly as we have done here, the accusing voice inevitably begins to sound as well. And we should make no mistake about it. It will sound even if we attempt to silence it by altering or abolishing the laws that attack us.[37]
We need to understand this if we are at all to comprehend the nature of the crisis that confronts us. Appeal is repeatedly made to society and church today to make laws in regard to sexual behavior more permissive. Anyone who writes on the subject no doubt feels the pressure of such appeal. But we cannot offer false comfort. To succumb to the pressure is to take the antinomian turn, to think one can wish the problem away by the simple expedient of erasure. It may, of course, be true that many laws concerning sexual behavior ought to be changed. But the problem is deeper, especially when law passes over into its theological use. What used to be called the “natural” law, in the sense of the law “written on the heart,” inexorably does its work. What that law enjoins is love of and service to the neighbor. That is its fundamental and inerradicable content. Whenever any form of behavior, sexual or otherwise, becomes solely a means of self-gratification, rather than finding its higher reason for being in service the law attacks. Sexual behavior is of course particularly vulnerable here. But it is surely not the only culprit. Hatred, violence, cruelty, and injustice toward those whose sexual behavior is improper under the law comes also under accusation. But if I, thinking to do those who plead for laxity a favor, propose to use whatever authority I have to change or abolish the laws supporting service to the neighbor I will likely only make matters worse. I will only have justified the self-gratification all the more and made the accusation potentially more insistent.

This is to say that pastorally the church simply cannot do the rampant sexual misbehavior of our day any good by accommodation or erasure. The law will never go away, as long as sin and death remain. Antinomianism is the one heresy that is theologically impossible. That is why Luther called it a drama played in an empty theater. There is no audience before which it could possibly play. One can erase laws on the civil level, of course, and that will most often be socially debilitating, but theologically the accusation remains. Law has no compassion. It does not go away, it just changes its shape. Can we not see the law taking its revenge today? Is it not tragic that in order to accommodate “sexual preference” society should be divided into camps by “sexuality”—each according to its own “law”? Is it not tragic that human beings should be driven to define their very essence first and foremost in terms of their “sexuality”? Is it not tragic that we come, willy-nilly, to see ourselves as driven by some supposed species of biological fate? That we have to discover or come to some understanding of who we are? The law, it seems, is no longer “in the heart” but somewhere in the genes or the DNA. Is it the case that now at last by appealing to a law written in the genes we have discovered the ultimate protection from the law “written in the heart”? Long ago it was said: “I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members” (Rom. 7:23-24). Has the old battle between the spirit and the flesh now decisively and finally been settled in favor of the flesh by biology? But are we then at the mercy of the lab technician? When or where will it end? Our supposed protection becomes our prison. Thus does the law work its way among us. There are no loopholes.

Law has no compassion. That is just as it should be. But it is not the end of the matter. Compassion is the business of the gospel. To return to what we said at the outset, there is another pole to the doctrine of the law. Christ is the end of the law to everyone who has faith. Christ is the only end. There is no other. That is the reason the treatment of law can and must be so uncompromising. For where the law is watered down or jettisoned we come under the most diabolical illusion of all—that there is no longer any need for Christ. We must not take that road. What the church has to offer in these, as in all matters, is not accommodation but absolution and a new life. That is the greatest service to the neighbor we can do. True, many today may find this to be of small comfort. But that may be only because they fail to realize how desperate the battle is.

Notes

1 The Book of Concord, translated and edited by Theodore ‘G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1959) 112:38; 125:128; 130:167.

2 Even though Luther generally mentions the civil use of law first, he apparently never adopted the practice of numbering the uses of the law, no doubt for good reason. Numbering gives the impression that there is a kind of succession or order in which the first, as a kind of general or “non-christian” use, precedes the second, and then of course the third comes as the final step. The practice of numbering arises only when one wants to set apart and advocate a “third” and distinctively “Christian” use. Distinction in the uses of the law then becomes the outline of a progress from “civil” to “Christian” life and eventually a paradigm for the “process” of salvation history. Luther’s original view is simply an account of the way law actually and always works—and is supposed to work in this life. Law restrains evil in civil and political life. Theologically it accuses of sin. The distinction between the civil and theological uses of law is an analytical move. The uses arc not temporally distinguishable functions but an analytical account from the point of view of faith of what law actually does. See Lauri Haikola, Usus Legis (Uppsala Universitets Aarsskrift 1958: 3) Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz. 30, n. 13, and Gustaf Wingren, Creation and Law, Translated by Ross MacKenzie (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1961) 149-150. Wingren’s chapters on the uses of the law 149-197 as well as Haikola’s book on the subject are exceedingly important and helpful.

3 James Burtness, “Is Orientation the Issue?” Word & World. 14:3 (1994): 233-238.

4 At present I find the “constructionist” interpretation of sexual behavior like that of David Halperin in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge 1990) 15-53, most persuasive. The best way to account for the great variations in sexual behavior and preference throughout history and across cultural lines is to postulate that they are the product of social constructs. Categories like “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” are constructs of very recent vintage. To hold that they are social constructs, however, is not to say that the conditions that result from them are unreal or merely illusory. Social constructs construct social realities. It is precisely this to which we have to attend and about which we have to make critical judgments. That is where law in its civil use enters the picture.

5 “The Normative Character of Scripture for Matters of Faith and Life: Human Sexuality in Light of Romans 1:16-32,” Word & World, 14:3 (1994): 305-314.

6 WA 39[1]:355.

7 LW 26:120 et passim. WA 40[1]:213.9-214.7 et passim.

8 Discussion about a “third use” is beyond the scope of this paper.

9 Many will object that this is far too negative a view of law and try to spell out a more “positive” use. Perhaps that can be done. However, all too often what results is simply a kind of covert antinomianism. The law is “tamed” and its coercive and accusing function forgotten. This leads to wholesale ignorance of the way law works. One does not need to apologize for the law, nor does it work to “tame” it. Law will not become a domestic house pet in any case. Furthermore, is it not a “good” and “positive” thing to restrain evil and preserve society from self-destruction?

10 LW 31:344; WA 7:21.1-4.

11 See Lauri Haikola, Usus Legis, 25 ff.

12 LW 35:170; WA 16:384.19-386.14.

13 One ought to distinguish carefully among different sorts of change and the various reasons for them. The church may have changed its practice of remarrying and admitting divorced persons, but it has not declared divorce to be a good thing. Or one may change because the original position was not solidly based on biblical teaching or because the biblical teaching itself is not completely clear or consistent. I would argue that to be the case in the question of women’s ordination. But it is beyond the scope of this paper to open such questions. For further reference, see the fine discussion by Craig R. Koester, “The Bible and Sexual Boundaries,” Lutheran Quarterly, 7:1 (1993): 375-390.

14 Dennis Prager, “Judaism’s Sexual Revolution,” Crisis. (1993): 30.

15 Wingren appropriately reminds us that entering into the world of the neighbor does, of course, involve entering into a society which we have not created. Simply to disregard the conventions and rules of solidarity in that society is to disregard the forces which check and restrain human tendencies to evil. One may indeed criticize inadequacies but that is not the same as rejection or the attempt to put something entirely new in place. Creation and Law, 165.

16 For a comprehensive treatment of these matters see William H. Lazareth, Luther on the Christian Home. (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1960), especially chs. 6 and 7.

17 LW 45:36; WA 10[2]:293.7-18.

18 LW 45:38; WA 10[2]:294.18-26. Emphasis mine.

19 LW 45:39; WA 10[2]:295.9-15.

20 One cannot help but wonder whether the change of wording in the marriage ceremony in the recent revision of the hymnal of the ELCA (The Lutheran Book of Worship – the “green book”) does not already reflect a down-playing and weakening of the idea of the estate of marriage. The old Service Book and Hymnal (the “red book”) began the ceremony forthrightly with the traditional words: “Dearly beloved: Forasmuch as Marriage is a holy estate, ordained of God, and to be held in honor by all, it becometh those who enter therein to weigh, with reverent minds, what the Word of God teacheth concerning it… ” Then follow the foundational passages. The Lutheran Book of Worship however, begins with a prayer that the joy brought by the presence of the Lord at the wedding at Cana might also be present now. There is no reference to the estate of marriage as such even though, to be fair, one must note the repeated acknowledgement that marriage is established by God. But the basic idea that the couple is entering into the estate of marriage seems missing.

21 See the helpful article by Donald H. Juel, “Homosexuality and the Christian Tradition,” Word & World 10 (1990): 166-169, and again the article by Craig R. Koester.

22 New York: Paulist Press. 1988. Especially chapters 3 and 4, 59-112. We can only briefly recount parts of Hanigan’s much more comprehensive argument here and may thereby do him an injustice. Readers are directed to his book for the full picture. To be sure, Hanigan is Roman Catholic. But his arguments can stand on their own account. Roman Catholic moral theologians who have rejected simple obeisance to authoritarianism are often much cleaner and straightforward in the kind of argument needed to support the civil use of law than their Protestant counterparts. Cited hereafter simply as Hanigan.

23 Hanigan, 77.

24 bid., 72-73.

25 bid., 72.

26 Ibid., 73.

27 Ibid., 71.

28 Ibid., 75.

29 Ibid., 76.

30 Ibid., 89 f. Hanigan speaks of it as a symbolic or ritual activity. However, I have several questions about his understanding of the nature of ritual activity so I prefer to limit the discussion here to the value of sexual intercourse as a symbolic activity

31 Ibid., 77.

32 Ibid., 99.

33 Ibid., 99.

34 Ibid., 100.

35 Ibid., 103.

36 “The first work of the Law, that of compulsion, is continually passing into the second work of the Law, that of accusation. It exercises both of these functions at the same time. It differs only in the mode of its reception. At one time I am forced to look outwards to the world which is purer than I am, and which has a right to my services. At another time I am forced to look inwards to myself, but I am less pure than the world, and remain so whatever I may do. The first and the second uses of the Law coincide.” Wingren, Creation and Law, 181.

37 Frederick Gaiser ["A New Word on Homosexuality? Isaiah 56:1-8 as Case Study," Word & World, 14:3 (1994): 280-293] uses a case of prophetic abrogation of the Torah’s law forbidding eunuchs entry into the assembly to raise the question whether such prophetic authority could or should be exercised today to abrogate biblical proscription of homogenital sexual acts, thus granting entry and welcome to practicing homosexuals in the church. The argument perhaps needs more attention than can be given here, but from what has already been said the following points can be made. First, the question is not one of abrogating this or that law. In Christ the whole law has been abrogated. Christ is the eschaton, the end of the law to faith. Second, the problem is not one of gaining entry to the “assembly” or the church. Since Christ is the end of the law, the door is open. No one can shut it and as far as I can see, no one is doing so. But it is only as repentant sinners that we all enter through that door. But then the real question begins: “What happens now?” Third, I have tried to argue that abrogation is no simple matter. We could, of course, simply declare a given law invalid. Gaiser uses Luther’s astonishing freedom in claiming that Christians are now free to write their own decalogue as evidence for this. Nevertheless Gaiser apparently believes that the more difficult question is whether we should do so. That is correct as far as it goes. But as this paper argues, beyond the should is the troublesome question of whether and to what degree we can actually succeed in doing so. Does not the law most of the time have too much “weight” from Bible, tradition, and “nature?” Only Christ can end it, and that eschatologically. To believe is to be grasped by that. So we live for the time being in the “resonance” between the end and the establishment of the law. The Christian, however, is precisely the one freed to enter the world of the neighbor as dutiful servant of all. The Christian, it is to be assumed, will write a new decalogue precisely to establish the law on a more careful basis, not to abrogate it. But this means that for now we are cast back upon the appropriate civil use of the law and the way in which the civil threatens to turn over into the theological use, driving us always to Christ.

Via WordAlone, reprinted from Lutheran Quarterly Volume IX, Number 1, Spring 1995

Tuesdays with Forde

Thesis 13. Free will, after the fall, exists in name only, and as long as it does what it is able to do it commits a mortal sin.

Gustave Doré, "Adam and Eve Driven out of Eden" (1865)

After the fall, free will exists in name only and not in reality. How is this audacious claim to be understood? It is, of course, a very controversial and sensitive issue. We would think it to require a lengthy and involved discussion and demonstration. Luther’s proof in the Disputation is very simple and brief, however. It is a direct conclusion from the fact, nature, and power of sin. The first part of the thesis, he insists, is evident because the fallen will is captive and subject to sin. “Not that it is nothing,” he continues, “but that it is not free except to do evil.” It is important to notice carefully what is being said here. There is indeed a will. We are not dealing here with determinism or fate. The will is not forced to do something “against its will.” It is rather captive and thus bound to sin. The will does what it does because it wills to, and it will not do otherwise. The will is bound to will what it wills. After the fall, it is bound by sin, hence not free.

The scriptural authority Luther cites in this instance is John 8:34, 36, “Every one who commits sin is a slave to sin. … So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Further backup comes from St. Augustine, “Free will without grace has the power to do nothing but sin” and “You call the will free, but in fact it is an enslaved will.” Sin makes it impossible for the will really to be called free because sin means an enslavement and bondage from which it is impossible for the will to escape. The self seeks its own self in all things, even in its piety. There is no way out. From this point of view the second part of the thesis is almost self-evident. It follows quite naturally that when the will, bound to its own self, tries to do its best, it only commits deadly sin. It commits deadly sin because it refuses to recognize the power of God to save and cuts off from grace. As we have pointed out in reference to the question of works, doing our best becomes a defense against the totality of grace. We refuse to live by the cross. Luther quotes Hosea 13:9, “Israel, you are bringing misfortune upon yourself, for your salvation is alone with me.”

Tuesdays with Forde

Via On Being a Theologian of the Cross pp. 50-51

…we always come back to the question of the “little bit,” one of the telltale signs of the theology of glory. This is the issue in theses 13-18. Can we or will we by our own natural powers, doing our best, prepare for the reception of grace? Are we free to will that? Does the will actually want to receive grace?

The question of will and its freedom over against God and his sovereign grace has, of course, always been a difficult one for biblical faith. When it is asserted that we are saved by divine election, the protest is always raised, “We aren’t puppets, are we? If everything happens by divine will, how can we be held responsible? We just can’t accept such a God! There must be some freedom of choice!” But the point is that kind of protest is precisely the proof of the pudding. It is evidence of theologians of glory at work defending themselves to the end. They actually admit that they cannot and will not “will” God to be God. Theologians of the cross who “see what a thing is” perceive what is going on here. They see finally that the will is bound to itself and cannot will God. This is just an honest observation of the truth of the matter, seeing the way things are. The will cannot move. It must say no to God, it wills to do so, and so will do it. If there is to be salvation, it cannot come by the will’s own movement. That means there must be a death and a resurrection. The cross stands behind the question of the will. The cross itself is the evidence that we did not choose him but that he, nevertheless, chose us (John 15:16).

Tuesdays with Forde

Via On Being a Theologian of the Cross pp. 46-48

Thesis 11. Arrogance cannot be avoided or true hope be present unless the judgment of condemnation is feared in every work.

Thesis 12. In the sight of God sins are then truly venial when they are feared by men to be mortal.

William Blake, "God Judging Adam"

Luther knows that due to sin it is impossible to avoid creaturely confidence completely. Arrogance always attends the slightest success. To avoid it not only in works but also in affections we must fear the judgment of God in every work. Thesis 12 gives some indication of the shape of this judgment. When are sins truly venial (i.e. forgivable)? When they are feared to be mortal! Luther here employs the distinction between venial and mortal sin in its original sense to undercut its use. Sins are truly forgivable when they are feared to be damning. All possibility of confidence in our own works and all pleading on the basis of the distinction are impossible. This, of course, seems quite depressing to inveterate theologians of glory. Yet we should not miss the new note that sounds out of the rubble of rejected human works. It is the note of hope. It is not possible, Luther declares, for true hope to be present unless the judgment of condemnation is feared in every work. Every hope built on human work will prove untrue. The hope that arises out of the ashes of the refining fire will not disappoint. The way, however, is the way of the cross.

Tuesdays with Forde

Via On Being a Theologian of the Cross, pp. 43-45

Thesis 8. By so much more are the orks of man mortal sins when they are done without fear and in unadulterated, evil self-security.

If the works even of the righteous are not just venial but deadly sins when done without fear of God, quite obviously works done entirely without fear of God in complete self-security or heedlessness are all the more deadly.

Theses 9. To say that works without Christ are dead, but not mortal, appears to constitute a perilous surrender fo the fear of God.

Thesis 10. Indeed, it is very difficult to see how a work can be dead and at the same time not a harmful and mortal sin.

Theses 9 and 10 belong together and undercut another scholastic distinction that compromises the true fear of God, the distinction between dead works and deadly (mortal) works. Theses 7 and 8 have insisted that works done without fear of God by either the righteous or unrighteous are mortal sins. But theologians of glory are always looking for loopholes. What is one to say of works that are genuinely good but done by nonbelievers, that is, works “without Christ”? Are they also simply mortal sins? It is a question any theology professor knows well. Students constantly worry about the “benevolent pagan.” The scholastic tradition tried to handle this, as usual, by making a distinction between works that are dead but not deadly (mortal). Good works done “without Christ” are said to be dead in the sense that (being without grace) they are not meritorious, but still they were not such as to be mortal, that is, deserving of eternal condemnation. There was apparently some debate over whether the works actually prepared one for grace or even earned some lesser punishment.

Luther finds the distinction both perilous for piety and ultimately incomprehensible. Once again the issue is the fear of God. To say that a work is dead but not deadly is perilous for piety because it leaves the unbeliever some room for avoiding the crisis inherent in the command to fear God. As long as we can comfort ourselves that our works are only dead, but not deadly, we can “postpone” both giving glory to God and, consequently, turning to God. Thus, for Luther the scholastic distinction between dead and deadly is a very dangerous move that will only result in taking glory from God and delaying the conversion of the unbeliever. We do the unbeliever no favors thereby. “For if that person offends [God] who withdraws glory from him, how much more does that person offend him who continues to withdraw glory from him and does this boldly!” Theological attempts to be “gracious” to the nonbeliever only lead to further disaster.

Tuesdays with Forde

Via On Being a Theologian of the Cross p. 42

Thesis 7. The works of the righteous would be mortal sins if they would not be feared as mortal sins by the righteous themselves out of pious fear of God.

The point here is that when we have no fear of the Lord and we instead presume to come before the Lord bustling with self-confidence in our own accomplishments, enjoying ourselves in our works, as Luther puts it, our works are deadly sins even if we think they are done with the help of grace. For then our works stand between us and God; they usurp the honor belonging only to God. This is a transgression of the first commandment. The self sets itself as an idol. Piety is no protection.

Fear of God on the contrary means precisely letting God be God. True, the fear of God is something of a stranger in the contemporary house of religious experience with its saccharine love-piety. But perhaps there are hints and remnants of what such fear means in the argument before us. As theologians of glory we react against the idea that our best works may be deadly sins. Why? Is it out of fear? Fear that we are reduced to nothing before God? Fear that the sovereign mercy of God is an attack we as old beings cannot survive? Could that be what the Psalmist had in mind when he cried “out of the depths”: “If thou, O Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared” (Ps. 130:3-4)? Perhaps the unconditional mercy of God is the only place left now where a spark of the fear of God is kindled! It strikes at least antipathy and maybe even an echo of terror into the heart of the self-assured.

Tuesdays with Forde

Via On Being a Theologian of the Cross pp. 36-38

Thesis 5. The works of men are thus not mortal sins (we speak of works that are apparently good), as though they were crimes.

Thesis 6. The works of God (we speak of those that he does through man) are thus not merits, as though they were sinless.

Luther here points to a deepening of the concept of mortal or deadly sin. What makes a sin “mortal” or “deadly”? Not just that it is a violation of law so flagrant that everyone would condemn it. We would quite readily recognize and perhaps even confess to that. A deadly sin is one that actually separates and seals us off from God. That occurs when the apparent goodness of our works seduces us into putting our trust in them, that is, it occurs when the very goodness of the work is such that it dissuades us from confessing. We are in reality then, not just in theory, sealed off from grace. As we put it earlier, the works of the law are used as a defense against the very unconditionality of the gift of grace. A human work, no matter how good, is deadly sin because it in actual fact entices us away from “naked trust in the mercy of God” to a trust in self. The symptoms of such deadly sin can be detected, therefore, in the very midst of our piety when complaint is unthinkingly launched against the “cheapness” of grace, or the fear that it leads too readily to moral laxity, permissiveness, and so forth. These are words that bespeak trust in the apparent goodness of human works and distrust in the power of divine grace. Thus they cut the sinner off from God — deadly sin! In actual fact we fall very easily into calling evil good and good evil!

This means, consequently, that we must be very careful about how we regard even those works God does in us. Deadly sin lurks in the most pious places. This is the concern of thesis 6. Even those works that God does in us are not accounted as “eternal merits” because they are supposedly sinless. None of our works, not even those done in us by God are sinless. Luther’s proof is a discussion of Ecclesiastes 7:20, “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” Some would want to interpret the passage to say that a righteous man may indeed sin, but not when he is doing good. Luther dismisses that interpretation by claiming that had the Holy Spirit meant that it would have been said much simpler: “There is not a righteous man on earth who does not sin.” But it is not the habit of the Holy Spirit to babble such platitudes. The passage should be taken to mean therefore that even the good deeds done in the righteous by God are not sinless. That is to say, the righteous are simultaneously just and sinners (simul iustus et peccator), a fundamental tenet of Luther’s doctrine of sin and grace. Being theologians of the cross means also looking at ourselves through suffering and the cross and being able to “say what a thing is,” to confess the truth. We look to God and not to ourselves — not even to those works that God does in us.

Tuesdays with Forde

An essay on “The Viability of Luther Today”

Via Word & World 7/1 (1987) 22-31.

Forde Viability of Luther

Tuesdays with Forde

Forde Confessional Subscription

Tuesdays with Forde

Via Word & World, “The Normative Character of Scripture for Matters of Faith and Life”

Forde, The Normative Character of Scripture

Tuesdays with Forde

Via A More Radical Gospel, pp. 218-219

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire, and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells. So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this, make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him. (II Peter 3:8-14)

The Day of the Lord shall come like a thief! I have always been tempted to think of that as a singularly inappropriate simile for the advent of our Lord! There are, after all, few things so upsetting, outrageous, and sometimes terrifying as the discovery that your home, your turf, your sphere, has been broken into, invaded, even violated by a thief. And most everyone in this evil generation has experienced it at one time or another. The Day of the Lord shall come like that? Surely there must be some mistake. Thieves come stealthily to take things away. Does not our Lord come to give? But before we rush — as is our habit these days — to take this as another instance of the ineptitude of the biblical authors in choosing their metaphors, we should note that it appears several times in the New Testament. Indeed, it is something of a favorite image for the second coming of our Lord. Surely that is no mere coincidence.

And it is not just a metaphor for the suddenness or unexpectedness of our Lord’s advent. Rather, it is a reminder (not to say a warning) that he comes finally to close down the whole enterprise and to take away all that which we have so carefully hoarded, coddled, and tended. The sharp-eyed ones have always known that. The demons knew it: “What have we to do with you, O Holy One?” Satan even tried to give him this world. Imagine that! Herod suspected it and his fear drove him to slaughter the innocents at Bethlehem. He didn’t want to lose his kingdom, after all! The author of our text is well aware of it, as shown in the claim that “the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire an the earth and the works that are upon it will be burned up.” And we have, of course, already been told: whoever would save his life, whoever tries to hang on to life at all costs, shall lose it. And now we are told that the second time it will be for keeps. One day it has all got to go — al lof it — burned to a crisp! And there is no insurance policy to cover it!

What is that to you? The text is quite explicit: don’t trade on the fact that it hasn’t happend yet. “The Lord is not slow about his promise, but is forbearing toward you, not wishing any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” There is yet time, but the time is now for repentance, for detachment from all your things, yes, perhaps even to think about giving some of it away before it all gets taken away. In some small measure that is what the giving of gifts means during this season.

The day of the Lord shall come like a thief! Ponder that, and repent! Repent even now as he comes to you today in the bread and the wine. There is, you might say, even a foretaste of the divine “thievery” in this meeting as he takes form us all our reliance on our own devices and reclaims his creation: “This bread, this wine, is mine and I mean to have it back. I shall not drink of it again until I drink it anew with you in the Kingdom.” Ponder that and you will begin to see in the offense of this thievery that it is, after all, the gospel. For, after all, will it not be grand? Suddenly it will all be gone: the whole “works,” and all the bitter and the sweet fruit of our need and crazy ambition, the poverty and the riches, the fretting about the economy, the budget, the war machine, even all the hurts, the resentments and bitterness we have so carefully coddled and that in some crazy way keep us going — yes, even this lovely chapel and its magnificent organ — burned to a crisp! Won’t that be grand? There is a real “Bonfire of the Vanities” to end all bonfires! And then there will be a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. Is that not really good news?

Yes, indeed, the day of the Lord shall come like a thief! In response, let all God’s people say: “Even so, come Lord Jesus!”

Tuesdays with Forde

Forde, Eucharist or Lord’s Supper

Tuesdays with Forde

Presented as the Opening Address at the Eighth International Congress for Luther Research, Gerhard O. Forde, President (Originally printed in the Luther Jahrbuch 62 (1995): 13-27)

Exsurqe Domine, et iudica causam tuam! Arise, 0 Lord, and judge your cause!…. Arise O Peter…, Arise thou also, O Paul, we beg thee…Let every saint arise and the whole remaining universal Church… Let intercession be made to almighty God, that his sheep may be purged of the their errors and every heresy be expelled….”

These dramatic words from the Bull of Pope Leo X (June 15, 1520) threatening Martin Luther with excommmication remind us that we have to do here with one who was judged by his Church to be a heretic. The dramatic language doubtless bespeaks the fact that His Holiness was at the time exercising his role as vicar of Christ on earth from the vantage point of his hunting lodge. “… Foxes are tearing down the vines. . .. An especially wild boar out of the woods is snorting about and rooting the vineyard!1 The carefully groomed gardens of civilization and church are in peril! The hunters must to the rescue!

A wild boar indeed! And it can hardly be disputed that the most wild and uprooting of his “heresies” is our subject at this Eighth International Conference for Luther Research: Luther’s understanding of freedom and liberation. And judging from current complaint this understanding seems to be about as “heretical” today as it was in the 16th century and probably for about the same reasons. Luther is usually charged with “heresy” on two counts: too much bondage on the one hand and too much freedom on the other. The fact that the charges appear contradictory is no doubt a measure of the world’s puzzlement. So it is fitting that we should take some time for consideration of the Luther’s vision of freedom. My purpose in this paper is to concentrate as directly as possible just on this vision of freedom, to the virtual exclusion of a host of questions about the law, ethics, social responsibility, politics, etc., that need also to be talked about. I gladly leave that to others! That means I plan to concentrate on freedom as a theological rather that as a ethical, social, or political concern, I do so because usually when we set out to talk about Luther’s view of freedom we find ample excuse to talk about everything else but. There is a reason for that, of course. As I shall try to point out, Luther’s idea of freedom is itself radical enough to engender an anxiety which sends us scurrying to do damage control. So it would seem that some attention just to the understanding of freedom itself might be the proper place to start in the session of the congress.

Freedom! Liberty! Liberation! Just to say the words it to enter into the Holy of Holies of modern society itself. We sing it; we preach it—-though perhaps only too rarely; we march for it; we protest about it; we fight for it; our documents claim it; our politicians promise it’ we die for it; everyone wants it desperately and claims it as a right, yet few, if any, are ever satisfied that they have found it. Do we even know what we are looking for? Can Luther help us? That, I take it, is what we are here to consider.

What is Luther’s contribution to our quest? First of all, I think we must say that it was Luther who initiated the modern discussion of and quest for freedom when he called for a reform of the Church’s teaching on the matter.2 He raised the discussion to a level and pitch unknown since days of St. Paul. He understood freedom first of all as an actual liberation, not as a convert enslavement of the self. This uproots everything. Prior and even to Luther, freedom appears predominately as a defensive doctrine. In early Christianity it appeared as a defense against Gnostic and Manichaean fatalisms. Freedom had to be postulated to make sense of the Christian claims. How can humans be held responsible for their sin on the one hand and redeemable on the other if there is no freedom? So humans had to be accorded at least some freedom in order in order to shift the blame for sin and evil from God to human beings. God didn’t cause evil, humans did by a wrong exercise of freedom. Recent interpreters put their finger on the defensive nature of the argument when they dud it “The Free Will Defense.”2 Erasmus used standard defense in his argument against Luther.4 If there is no free will, how can we be held responsible for our misdeeds or be rewarded for our good ones? So the argument went—often still goes. We justify God and indict ourselves in the same move.

The effect of the free will defense, however, is not to liberate but to enslave. Human beings are granted just enough freedom to be found guilty for their sin and perhaps to cooperate with divine grace in doing meritorious deeds, but not much more. As a defensive doctrine, freedom of the will does not liberate, but precisely makes certain that one remains enslaved under the law. It is the Law that gives freedom its opportunity. The result is that law takes over the conscience and traps the self in its own deeds, whether they are good or evil. We cannot escape.

Luther raised this whole discussion to a new level by insisting that freedom was not a defensive but an offensive doctrine. He rejected the free will defense and saw freedom as the fruit of the gospel, not the law. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17). Like Paul, he proclaimed freedom in the gospel as an offensive doctrine in the double sense of the word, liberation, a setting free of captives, and at the same time and for that very reason something of a offense, a scandal. We have to do with something entirely new, a new creation, a new age. Thus the problem of freedom is a theological problem, first and foremost, a spiritual matter.5 It is a matter of what we believe in and hope for. Christian freedom, for Luther, means in the first place to be liberated from the pervasive power of the Law in the inner life, the conscience.6 It means to get the law “out of there,” to be made a new creature. This is something quite literally fantastic. We stand, as Luther liked to say, like a cow staring at a new gate. What is this freedom? How can it be? Is it not dangerous? Can we really be set free from the Law? This is the question of the house.

We need to look at it more closely. What is the power of the Law? It rests in the matter of temptation. The power of the Law is not merely its intellectual or moral persuasiveness. Rather it is that as fallen beings, we are tempted—by the devil, for Luther—to believe that the Law is our salvation, the remedy for sin, our escape hatch over against the sting of death. The result is that we are trapped by temptation, trapped in our own projects, be they good, bad, or indifferent.7 Luther’s scandalous claim that in the sight of God even our best works are mortal sins indicates the radical nature of the shift that is being proposed. We cannot get out of ourselves because we are under temptation. That means we can’t because we really don’t want to. The temptation in this case is to be convinced that freedom is really a dangerous idea. And such a temptation is the devil’s art. That freedom from the Law is dangerous and impossible seems quite sane to us. What should we do if there were no Law? How can we answer? We have no defense.

The problem we face is seduction of the spirit. That is to say that we are quite convinced by the arguments against freedom. But how then shall we escape the seducer? Christ is for Luther the only answer. Christ must simply defeat the tempter and drive the Law out of the conscience. Christ is the end, i.e., both goal and cessation of the Law to those who have faith (Rom. 10:4). The freedom which Luther championed was the freedom of faith, the freedom for which Christ has set us free (Gal. 5:1), liberation of the conscience from the power of the Law, sin and death. We are set free, Luther says, “not from some human slavery or tyrannical authority but from eternal wrath from God.” Such freedom “comes to a halt” in the conscience, “it goes no further”.8 Indeed, for Luther, this is the highest reach of freedom. “This is the most genuine (Latin: verissima) freedom; it is immeasurable. When other kinds of freedom—political freedom and the freedom of the flesh—are compared with the greatness and the glory of this kind of freedom, they hardly amount to one little drop.”9

But now it seems that such freedom of the “inner man,” freedom of conscience, is as much a heresy for the modern world as it was in the 16th Century. For the world, modern as well as ancient, does not believe in either the value or power of such inner freedom. The modern world especially has complained that since freedom, for Luther, is pure inwardness, it doesn’t get out into the “real world” where it can do some actual good.10 Indeed, where it is taken with any seriousness at all, the most prevalent reaction seems to be a kind of skepticism and anxiety. Can it really be? Has not Luther gone too far? Is he not too naïve about freedom’s possibilities? Does his view not lead to license and antinomianism? (Being an antinomian is about the worst thing one can be! Almost any heresy can be permitted these days, but not that!) Is it not subversive to social order? And so on and on and on.

What are we to say to such complaints? First of all, it is in place to point out that here as in many cases opposition to Luther’s argument does not refute but rather substantiates and illustrates it. To say that freedom will never work is precisely to show that one doesn’t have it and to betray one’s unbelief. The skepticism expressed is simply a reenactment of one’s bondage. It is simply to illustrate what has been claimed: that we are under temptation and cannot escape enslavement to the Law. Arguments with Luther usually turn out to be confessions. Unless, Luther said, Christ dwells in the conscience and drives out all fear, we are captive and there is no hope. To believe in freedom, on must be liberated.

What conscience under temptation by Law is afraid of is precisely that freedom isn’t going to work. Things will get out of hand. So freedom will be considered dangerous and will have to be curtailed. Law returns with great fanfare as the savior.

But the assertion that anxiety about freedom only causes us to reenact our bondage leads us more deeply into the subtly and complexity of the matter. It is in the nature of the case not strange that the world and even the church has rarely, and certainly not wholeheartedly followed what Luther has to say about freedom. The papers for this conference—particularly those on the reception of Luther’s view in the years following the Reformation all the way down to the present—certainly indicate that unqualified reception of Luther’s view is rare.11 But Luther was well aware that his view—which he believed to be Biblical and Pauline—had never found much favor in the Church or the world. “Thy fled this morning star,” he said, “yes, this sun, as if their lives depended on it; for they were in the grip of their own carnal ideas…”12

Through the years, therefore, anxiety seems to have dictated that discourses on Luther’s view of freedom are always expected finally to reassure us that things are not so bad as they seem. Everyone waits for the other shoe to drop! In one way or another, moralisms reassert themselves, all with the aim of bringing freedom under control and forestalling the damage it might do to our little moralistic kingdoms. We always seek the comfort that along with the Gabe there is the Aufgabe; that hidden in the indicative is the imperative; that we must not only think of freedom as freedom from something, but also freedom for something. Freedom is never the last word, the ultimate goal. A vast defensive rhetoric builds on the foundation of anxiety that reduces Luther’s vision to the banalities against which he directed his scorn. The offense is leeched out of freedom and it dies in lingering death. It is, I think we could say, a dangerous thing to have a congress on Luther’s contribution to the understanding of freedom because it is all too likely to turn it into one more defense against Luther’s view! We could set out yet once again to have at domesticating the wild boar! Theologically both before and after the Reformation the most common domesticating move has been the attempt to qualify the Pauline claim that Christ is the end of the Law to those of faith. “Reason,” as Luther would put it, simply cannot entertain such an idea, the idea that in Christ the Law comes to an end, that Law is over and freedom begins. As we have seen, freedom as usually conceived needs Law as the mediator of possibility. What shall we do if there is not Law as the mediator of possibility. What shall we do it there is not Law to tell us what to do? But is Paul then wrong in his claim? Theologians as usual, however, found a way to have their cake and eat it, too. They made a distinction in the content of the Law—something Paul had never done—a distinction between ceremonial or ritual laws on the one hand and moral law on the other. Then they proceed to say that Christ was the end of ceremonial law but not the moral law. Christ ended the necessity, that is, for sacrifice, circumcision, food and ritual regulations, etc., but not the demands of moral law (e.g. the Decalogue). Christ died, it seems, to save us from the liturgiologists! One might grant, of course, that that is not small accomplishment, but the price does seem a bit high!

Luther categorically rejects all attempts to qualify the claim that Christ is the end of the Law, the whole Law. Freedom is not a defensive doctrine. It is “offensive.” It is about the new creature, the new creation. Both early and late Luther attacks the idea that Christ is the end of the ritual law but not the whole law. In both the early (1519) and (1531-36) Galatians lectures he pounds away on the issue when ever he gets a chance. In his argument against Erasmus he says that this error has made it impossible to understand Paul and has obscured the knowledge of Christ. Indeed, he claims that “even if there had never been any other error in the Church, this one alone was pestilent and potent enough to make havoc of the gospel.”14 The presupposition for true freedom, for Luther, is that Christ is the end of the Law in its entirety. The freedom from the treatise on “The Freedom of the Christian.” It is for Luther as for Paul a matter of a new creation.

But, to say it again, such pronouncements cannot fail to be rather frightening or even maddening to us. Is it not dangerous so to speak? Can humans really handle such freedom? Surely the other shoe must drop! What usually happens is that we hurry on by that first thesis into the save haven of the second: “The Christ is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” At last we are saved from the specter of freedom! But is not the price a bit high? Servant? Of all? Hold on a minute! You see, you have to be free to say that. But Luther would not bid us to hurry. The second thesis is not a defense against the first, not its contradiction. It is rather the quite natural outcome of the first. The point of the treatise on Christian freedom, Luther said, is to see how they fit together. Indeed, we will never get to the second thesis unless al our moralistic pretense has been shattered by the first. It is really the first thesis we have the hardest time with. That we should be free Lords of all, subject to none, free from the Law, is inconceivable for us. It is just not reasonable. Reason can only cast us back to the Law. And “as soon as reason and the Law are joined,” Luther could put it, “ faith immediately loses its virginity.” There is no way for the trapped conscience from the Law to freedom, simply no way. No real argument can be made to dissuade the Law from their hold on the conscience. The only was is that Christ and his work simply throw out the law, expel all dependence on our own work from the conscience. Faith means to be so grasped by Christ that the demands of reason and Law are simply no longer heard. They are ended, killed, devoured. It is, for Luther, hardly a matter of argument—as though faith could argue reason to freedom. There is no way across the chasm from the law to freedom. For reason is committed to Law. There can only be a violent break. “Faith,” Luther pronounces, “slaughters reason and kills the beast that the whole world and all creatures cannot kill.”

It is in the light that one should consider the images used in “The Freedom of a Christian.” They are explicitly not such as could be drawn from the realm of reason and Law. Faith is “intoxicated” by the promises of God. The faith that clings to the promises of God will be so closely united with and altogether absorb by the promises “that it will not only share in all their power but will be saturated and intoxicated by them.” Faith in the promises of God is itself the greatest obedience. Any trust in one’s own works is the ultimate in rebellion and idolatry. And finally, of course, there is the celebrated image of the union of the soul with Christ as a bride with her bridegroom. Christ displaces reason and Law in the conscience by means of a “marvelous exchange.” Because of the wedding ring of faith everything Christ has—all his righteousness and works—becomes the believer’s and everything the believer has—all the sin and death—is taken by Christ.

The point of the violent talk and the move to different images is precisely to move to a different view of freedom. Freedom means actually to be set free, free from the law, free from sin, free from the flesh and it’s lusts, free to be the creature God intended. To be sure, that is not yet entirely possible in this life. Death, sin, and the Law constantly beset us. So for the time being we can have it only in the union with Christ through the “wedding ring of faith.”

Now I have referred to Luther’s view as a vision of the freedom granted in Christ which will one day be completed. Luther believed that we would actually on day be free—free from sin, free from Law, free from wrath, free from death. Free! To be sure we don’t have it yet. We don’t even have a very good idea of what that is. But in faith, Luther thought, we can begin to sense it, to catch the vision. And it can, by the grace of God, grow. Not, indeed, the kind of growth one might trace according tour theories of progress—immanent improvement according to some legal or developmental scheme. It is rather to be increasingly possessed, or as Luther put it, intoxicated, by the promise, the vision itself. And it will one day reach its goal. We will be free.

Now this has profound implications for who we are and what life is meant to be, for theological anthropology. We will, one day be free. That meant for Luther that we will freely, joyously, and spontaneously live in love to God and neighbor and in care of the earth. That will be who we are. We will live, that is to say, as the creatures God had in mind when he first called the cosmos into being. But that means that what stands behind this vision of freedom ultimately, is a belief in creation. Humans are created precisely for this kind of freedom, free spontaneously and joyously to love and care, quite apart from the Law, to be free lords of all, to do with creation as they want. Think of that!

Thus in “The Freedom of the Christian” Luther says that the works of those justified by faith in the free mercy of God should be thought of in the same way as the works which Adam and Eve did in Paradise before the fall. They would be the freest works, done spontaneously only to please God. “The works of the believer,” Luther says, “are like this. Through his faith he has been restored to Paradise and created anew, has no need of works that he may become righteous…” The believer, like Adam and Eve in Paradise, does works out of freedom only to please God, to care for the body and the creation God has given. Of course Luther is well aware that we are not there yet, not wholly recreated, but that doesn’t alter the vision. Freedom is at the very heart of creation itself. We are created to be free. But this also means that the skepticism so often expressed about Luther’s naïveté in matters of freedom and spontaneity is in the last analysis also a skepticism about creation itself. The suspicion that freedom will never work is at the same time the suspicion that creation was a bad job! Luther believed in creation. His doctrine of freedom is a measure of that belief. His celebrate statements about faith in his preface to Romans is but one example of what it means to be free.

Faith… is a divine work in us which changes us and makes us to be born anew of God…It kills the old Adam and makes us altogether different [people], in heart and spirit and mind and power; and it brings with it the Holy Spirit. O it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith. It does not ask whether good works are to be done, but before the question is asked, it has already done them, and is constantly doing them.

Freedom, for Luther and Paul, is therefore not something peripheral or dispensable for the Christian. It belongs to the very fabric of creation; it is that to which human beings are called. It is not incidental or accidental to the Christian life, it is that life itself. In his judgment in Monastic Vows Luther comments on Paul’s declaration in Gal. 5:13, “You… are called to freedom,” by saying:

You can take it from this that no one may teach or permit anything against evangelical freedom. This freedom comes from divine authority. God ordained it. He will never revoke it. He can neither accept anything that runs counter to it, nor allow anyone to violate it even by the most insignificant ordinace.

One need not ask, for Luther, what such freedom is for. It is as St. Paul pronounced, for freedom itself. “For freedom Christ has set you free” (Gal. 5:1). It is a freedom in Christ, not apart from or for something. To retreat from freedom is simply to make Christ of no effect. If it is our purpose to ask what Luther’s contribution to the quest for freedom and liberation is, it is simply that Luther unlike virtually everyone believed that what the fallen world really needs first and foremost is more freedom, not less. What is distinctive about Luther’s view is the hilaritas, a certain fearlessness, even recklessness, in setting forth the claims of freedom.

Whence comes this fearlessness and recklessness? It comes from the fact that Luther also knew the nature of human bondage. The vision of freedom can be understood only over against what he has to say about human bondage. Indeed, as we have contended throughout, the promise of freedom itself exposes and even drives us to enact our bondage. Because Luther knew the nature of that bondage he was not afraid of the gospel which sets people free. One who has some idea of what bondage is can be trusted with freedom. But still is this not all too naïve, yes, even optimistic? The question will always be with us no doubt. What if it doesn’t work? There is always, of course, a back-up plan, the rather menacing left-hand rule ready to use all the force of the law to see it that we will stay in line whether we like it or not. There is always the judge, the jury, and the hangman. But that is a rather grim business and not the subject of our present inquiry. Our question is about freedom. What do we do if the gospel of freedom does not work? Shall we just cease preaching it? Shall we just sign the whole enterprise over to that judge, jury, and hangman? The question can be put to Luther himself since he was so often depressed in his later years by what he thought was the limited success of the Reformation. The following comment is, I think, typical.

…When the rabble hear from the Gospel that righteousness comes by the sheer grace of God and by faith alone, without the Law or works, they draw the same conclusion the Jews drew then: “Then let us not do any works!” And they really live up to this.

What then are we to do? This evil troubles us so severely, but we cannot stop it. When Christ preached, he had to hear that he was a blasphemer and a rebel; that is that His teaching was seducing men and making them seditious against Caesar. The same thing happened to Paul and to all the Apostles. No wonder the world accuses us in a similar way today. All right, let it slander and persecute us! Still we must not keep silence on account of their troubled consciences; but we must speak right out in order to rescue them from the snares of the devil…

Therefore when Paul saw that some were opposing his doctrine…he comforted himself with this, that he was an apostle of Jesus Christ for the proclamation of the faith to the elect of God…, in the dame way we today are doing everything for the sake of the elect to whom we know our doctrine is beneficial. I am so bitterly opposed to the dogs and swine, some of whom persecute our doctrine while others tread our liberty underfoot, that I am not willing to utter a single sound on their behalf in my whole life.

What is one to do if the gospel of freedom in Christ doesn’t seem to work? Luther’s answer appears at first, no doubt, to be utterly uninspiring. Nothing! One can do nothing about it! One can only go on preaching to liberate the consciences from the snares of the devil. One might be tempted to try the Law, but the wicked will most surely not be helped thereby. Yes, we can and no doubt will exhort and admonish but Luther seems to realize more and more, that the only makes matters worse. One can only go on preaching the gospel.

This is the final step in the reconstruction of the doctrine of freedom. Luther recognizes that freedom, if it is truly to be liberation, cannot be forced. There is no way to argue that one ought or must be free. To do so would be to make a law out of it and thereby lose the whole game. Freedom can only be its own apology. Freedom, that is, can be propagated only by setting people free. It is the end of the law. It must not betray itself in its own defense. Luther is supremely aware that the preacher of the gospel of freedom is in a real sense without levers. “Therefore anyone who wants to proclaim Christ,” he says, “and to confess that he is our righteousness will immediately be forced to hear that he is a pestilent fellow who is stirring up everything.” But there is nothing to do about that but suffer the abuse—which will come from both the righteous and the unrighteous—and go on preaching. And if there is fear that nothing is being done, if the Law accuses of laziness and indolence, the only thing to do first and foremost is just to be still and listen. Luther has a marvelously shocking and gusty comment on Gal.4:27 (For it is written; Rejoice, O barren one that does not bear; break forth and shout, thou who art not in travail; for the desolate hath more children than she hath a husband.)

…Sarah, the free woman…that is, the true church, seems to be barren; for the Gospel, the Word of the cross, which the church preaches, is not as brilliant as is the teaching about the Law and works, and therefore it has few pupils who cling to it. Besides, it has the reputation of forbidding good works, making men idle and faint, stirring up heresies and sedition, and being the cause of every evil. Therefore it does not seem to have any success or prosperity; but everything seems to be filled with barrenness, waste, and despair. Hence the wicked are fully persuaded that the church will soon perish along with its doctrine.

Our temptation is always to resort to the Law, to some scheme or other, to some attempt to prove our relevance, some program for church growth or other to preserve ourselves from distinction. But Luther will not go that way. He sticks to his guns. He carries out our argument for us: “But I have not done anything good and am not doing anything now!” Luther’s reply:

Here you neither can nor must do anything. Merely listen to this joyful message, which the Spirit is bringing to you through the prophet: “Rejoice, O barren one that does not bear!” It is as though He were saying: “Why are you so sorrowful when you have not reason to be sorrowful?” “But I am barren and desolate.” “Regardless of how much you are that way, since you have no righteousness on the basis of the Law, Christ is still your Righteousness…Moreover, you are not barren either, because you have more children than she who has a husband.

Freedom comes from the gospel. It cannot be sold out under any circumstances, lest everything be lost.

But now we must draw this to a close. Much, of course, remains to be said. Some words are called for, no doubt, on the persistent questions about whether this view of freedom actually leads us out into the “real world,” as we like to call it, where it might contribute to the struggle for liberation from the ills, political and social, that continue to plague us. I have two comments to make. First of all, Luther’s understanding of freedom through the gospel of Jesus Christ in fact gives us an entirely new world, the world of the neighbor. It is a sheer gift. It is what Luther called the world of the “outer man.” The world of the neighbor, the “outer world” or the left-hand rule of God is never just completely “there” like the physical, empirical world. It is a world given back to faith. It is of the essence of sin that we are curved inward upon ourselves we can never make it into the “outer” world. We are not content to do our work in the left-hand kingdom. That is just our bondage, our enslavement. What we so often call the “real world,” a world supposedly something other than the purely “spiritual,” is not what Luther meant by the world of the “outer,” but mostly just a projection of our own agendas beyond ourselves. We can’t get out of ourselves. We have to be freed for that. The fact that freedom is a spiritual matter, that it occurs “in the conscience,” and that there it “comes to a halt” and “goes on further” means precisely that one so liberated is now given a wondrous new world, the world of the neighbor—to take care. For every possibility that one might turn inward on one’s own projects is excluded by the fact that Christ is the end of the law. All the space in the “inner world,” the conscience, is occupied by Christ. There is no room for a self that wants to feed only on its own self. One is turned back to the world where it belongs to be used to do what it is supposed to: take care of people not tyrannize them.

The fact that freedom “comes to a halt” and “goes no further” than the conscience is and indication of the eschatological nature of the matter. The Kingdom of God comes by faith alone. But that means that for the time being there is a big sign on the eschatological kingdom: KEEP OUT! GOD ALONE AT WORK! COMING SOON—BUT IN THE MEATIME, MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS! But the line must be drawn absolutely. Luther’s absolute HALT! here is precisely the driving force behind any move of freedom into the outer world. It is the key to how Luther’s two theses in “The Freedom of a Christian” fit together. Only the free Lord of all can make it to the outer world to be perfectly dutiful servant of all. All genuine movements of liberation have to be movements of freedom.

My second comment flows quite naturally from this. To be a liberator in any sense that could correspond with what Luther was talking about, I believe, on has to be liberated. Surely the collapse of so many movements in our day which pretended to liberate but did not ought to make us acutely aware of that. Too many of these movements turned out to be just the worldly double of the law’s invasion of the conscience. And like the law, they end by tyrannizing and killing. Luther’s contribution is to try to tell us that before we set out to liberate we had best look to our own liberation lest we submit again to a yoke of bondage and tyrannize others with it.

Ever since Luther raised the discussion about freedom to a new level, there have been repeated attempts to correct, augment, change, revise, and of course, reject his vision. The freedom in Christ he preached has usually been deemed either too dangerous or too fragile to survive on its own. Luther apparently believed that there was a power in freedom itself. It is, after all, the gospel. It may indeed be a tender plant in this age. But one would think that it needs to be nurtured and encouraged, not stifled. Why the terrible shape or the world today? Have we lacked for schemes and programs? Have we lacked for laws? Is the only way to betterment purchased at the cost of freedom? Have we not tried all this? Luther believed that what the world needs is more freedom, not less. It might just be interesting to pay some heed to that belief. For freedom Christ has set you free. So St. Paul said. Luther was one of the few who heard a echoed that. So it comes to us. We are called to freedom.

Tuesdays with Forde

Caught in the Act

Tuesdays with Forde

Forde Radical Lutheran Ism

Tuesdays with Forde

Via On Being a Theologian of the Cross, pp. 29-30.

Thesis 2: Much less can human works, which are done over and over again with the aid of natural precepts, so to speak, lead to that end.

“We should perhaps note, however, that the issues reflected here are not just ancient history. The modern world too tends to reject the law of God as a word from without. The self is encouraged to turn inward to the “moral law within” and the self’s own inner resources for assurance and power. Whatever may be the usefulness of such encouragement in the human sphere, this thesis insists that it can hardly advance the cause of righteousness before God. If the most holy law of God, given from without to enlighten, inspire, and move, only makes humans worse, how can turning inward upon ourselves be of any help? The cross makes it clear that the law, whether from without or within, is a dead-end street when it comes to the question of righteousness before God. For the law demands love. It is quite right in so doing. It is “holy, just, and good.” But it is not able to produce or induce what it demands. Law is over when the gift of love comes. In Leif Grane’s fine phrase, “What the law requires is freedom from the law!” Or as Luther could say, putting words in God’s mouth, “I am obliged to forgive them their sins if I want the law fulfilled by them; indeed, I must also put away the law, for I see that they are unable not to sin, especially when they are fighting, that it, when they are laboring to fulfill the law in their own strength” [LW 33.218]. What God finally wants is for us to do what the law points to but can’t accomplish: the freedom, joy, and spontaneity of faith, hope, and love. But that is, of course, an entirely different story!”

Tuesdays with Forde

Given today is the anniversary of the death of Desiderius Erasmus (October 27, 1466), here is a brief selection from the first chapter of Forde’s The Captivation of the Will (p. 27).

“We can see that a major parting of the ways begins to announce itself already in the interpretation of Scripture and in the argument about assertions. It is hardly surprising to find that the opponents disagree on Scripture itself. Erasmus wants to use Scripture to build his theory. Since this theory is rooted in the claims of free choice Erasmus cannot but find Scripture ambiguous and contradictory. Some passages in it appear to be for free choice and some appear to be against it. What is to be done? The interpreter must come to the rescue. The interpreter must go to work on the text to resolve the alleged contradictions. For Luther, as we shall see, it is just the opposite. The text goes to work on the interpreter to do what it talks about.

It is consequent, therefore, that the argument about Scripture should take the form of a battle over the claritas, the clarity, of Scripture. This means, of course, that the fault is attributed to Scripture, not to the interpreter. The question, putatively, is whether Scripture is unclear, not whether the interpreter is unclear! The difficulty in the whole procedure lies in the fact that Scripture does not deliver “the goods” sufficient to turn free choice theory into reality. The “scheme” drives only to a collision. To save the theory one must claim that the ambiguity is the fault of Scripture, not the fault of the interpreter. Interpreters of an Erasmian type are driven to take refuge in the Scriptures’ supposed lack of clarity. Where one encounters passages casting doubt on free choice or rejecting it altogether one must take refuge in tropes, figures of speech that end up explaining those passages away. What Luther was doing with Scripture was a symbolic interpretation, not allegorical. The allegorical is an exegetical trick used when one already knows what the text means, but uses a trope to escape the text and preserve the initial theory in the face of clear words to the contrary.”

Tuesdays with Forde

Via On Being a Theologian of the Cross, pp. 24-25

Thesis I. The law of God, the most salutary doctrine of life, cannot advance humans on their way to righteousness, but rather hinders them.

Theologians are confronted at the start with basic questions about what story they are to tell. Do they tell the story of the law and merit or of the cross? Three things should be noted carefully here that sharpen the paradox. First, in this thesis it is the very law of God himself, “the most salutary doctrine of life,” that is being arraigned, not some lesser or perhaps “natural” law. Second, Luther is here talking about those who stand under the revealed law of God, the people of God, not those “outside.” Third, not only is this law powerless to save, but it actually makes matters worse! It is commonplace among evangelical Christians to believe that we can’t perfectly fulfill the law, but we often try to because we assume that if we only could we would do it. So we believe that we must try to do something at least, and then, it is assumed, Christ will make up for our “shortcomings.” But here is the bombshell: doing the law does not advance the cause of righteousness one whit. It only makes matters worse. Luther’s proof for this is straightforward, from Paul and Augustine:

This is made clear by the Apostle in his letter to the Romans (3[:21]): “But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.” St. Augustine interprets this in his book, The Spirit and the Letter (De Spiritu et Littera): “Without the law, that is, without its support.” In Rom. 5[:20] the Apostle states, “Law intervened, to increase the trespass,” and in Rom. 7[:9] he adds, “But when the commandment came, sin revived.” For this reason he calls the law a law of death and a law of sin in Rom. 8[:2]. Indeed, in 2 Cor. 3[:6] he says, “the written code kills,” which St. Augustine throughout his book, The Spirit and the Letter, understands as applying to every law, even the holiest law of God.

Gustave Dore, "Moses Breaking the Tables of the Law"

Tuesdays with Forde

Via A More Radical Gospel (pp. 75-81):

Tuesdays with Forde

Via “Confessional Subscription: What Does It Mean for Lutherans Today?”

What is the language supposed to mean? To what does it commit us?

Confessionalists, and particularly Lutherans in this country, have had and continue to have considerable difficulty with such questions. Such difficulty arises mainly because of a failure to apply what the confessors confess to the interpretation and use of the onfessional
documents themselves. The confessors confess the liberating and life-giving power of the gospel over against all law and demonic power which enslaves and kills—wherever it may be found, even (or perhaps especially!) if that be in the church itself.

In the first instance, therefore, the question for subscription is not whether one is bound enough to teach and preach in accordance with these confessions, but whether one is actually going to be free enough to do so. The fundamental question is not whether we will feel legalistically constrained by the confession, but whether we will actually be so liberated by what they confess that we will dare to be so bold as they, and thus con-fess, i.e., speak with one voice together with them. The confession, that is to say, was an act of daring, a declaration of the liberating power of the gospel over against enslavement. To subscribe to the confession cannot be less than that. When one comes to understand the confessions in that light they are a source of strength and comfort for pastoral ministry, and not a strait-jacket or a burden.

Read the full article (download .pdf)

Tuesdays with Forde

From On Being a Theologian of the Cross (pp. 17-19):

The theology of the cross is the true and ultimate source of human optimism because it always presupposes the resurrection. We should always bear in mind in pondering texts like the Heidelberg Disputation that resurrection is always taken together with the cross. The fundamental question of the Disputation is how to arrive at that righteousness that will enable us to stand before God. It is about resurrection, finally, even when the word is not explicitly spoken. Indeed, it is not possible to have a theology of the cross without resurrection. The powerful attacks launched against even the best of human works that put the sinner to death would simply not be possible if the resurrection were not presupposed. Some theologians of the cross seem afraid to bring in talk of resurrection because they apparently fear it will mitigate the unrelieved “tragedy” of the cross and its attack. But the opposite is the case. Without the resurrection theologians will always be tempted to tone down the attack in order to leave room for at least some optimism, some hope for the survival of the old self. They end by telling sweet lies, calling the bad good and the good bad. Without the resurrection theologians cannot speak the truth about the human condition, and without hearing and confessing such truth we have no hope, no resurrectiion. For a resurrection to happen, there must first be a death. The truth must be heard and confessed; then there is hope. A new life can begin, and with it a new sense of self worth can blossom. That it the ultimate aim of the Heidelberg Disputation. For in the end we arrive, as we shall see, at the love of God, which creates anew out of nothing.

Tuesdays with Forde

A selection from On Being a Theologian of the Cross (pp. 3-4):

The word of the cross kills and makes alive. It crucifies the old being in anticipation of the resurrection of the new. “The cross alone is our theology,” Luther could say. And those oft-quoted words are to be taken literally. But we cannot fail to notice what an odd claim it is. how can the cross be a theology? The cross is an event. Theology is reflection on and explanation of the event. Theology is about the event, is it not? However, that is what makes writing some definitive theology of the cross impossible. At best all such theology can do is to clear the way for the proclamation of the cross, to drive us actually to preach the word of the cross as that folly that destroys the wisdom of the wise.

The cross, that is, is not quiescent or dead. The cross is itself in the first instance the attack of God on the old sinner and the sinner’s theology. The cross is the doing of God to us. But that same cross itself, and only the cross, at the same time opens a new and unheard-of possibility over against the sinner’s old self and its theology. The means that a theology of the cross is inevitably quite polemical. It constantly seeks to uncover and expose the ways in which sinners hide their perfidy behind pious facades. The delicate thing about it is that it attacks the best we have to offer, not the worst. This explais why the theology of the cross is generally spoken of in contrast to a theology of glory. The two theologies are always locked in mortal combat. Wherever there is mention of a theology of the cross without indication of this combat, it is not truly the theology of the cross that is being expressed. The preacher-theologian must know this and learn how to use the word of the cross in that combat.

The second of our weekly feature columns, “Tuesdays with Forde,” begins today with this brief selection from On Being a Theologian of the Cross, by Gerhard O. Forde. One of the most important parts of Forde’s work on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation is his insistence on framing the issue of the theology of glory vs. the theology of the cross in the terms action as opposed to abstraction, i.e. they are not theologies primarily in the sense of being theological theories, but rather constitute two drastically different ways of being a theologian.

From the Introductory Matters (pp. 12-13):

“Claimed, that is to say killed and made alive by the cross alone as the story, theologians of the cross attack the way of glory, the way of law, human works, and free will, because the way of glory simply operates as a defense mechanism against the cross. Theologians of glory operate with fundamentally different presuppositions about how one comes to know God. They think one can see through the created world and the acts of God to the invisible realm of glory beyond it, and they must think this because for the system to work there must be a “glory road,” a way of law, which the fallen creature can traverse by willing and working and thus gain the necessary merit eventually to arrive at glory.

The cross too is transparent. The theologian of glory sees through the cross so as to fit it into the scheme of works. The cross “makes up” for failures along the glory road. The upshot of it all is a fundamental misreading of reality. The theologian of glory ends by calling evil good and good evil. Works are good and suffering is evil. The God who presides over this enterprise must therefore be excused from all blame for what was termed “evil.” The theology of glory ends in a simplistic understanding of God. God, according to philosophers like Plato, is not the cause of the all things but only what we might call “good.” It is hard to see how such a god could even be involved in the cross.

Theologians of the cross, however, “say what a thing is.” That is, a characteristic mark of theologians of the cross is that they learn to call a spade a spade. Since the cross story alone is their story, they are not driven by the attempt to see through it, but are drawn into the story. They know that faith means to live in the Christ of the story. Likewise they do not believe that we come to proper knowledge of God by attempting to see through the created world to the “invisible things of God.” So theologians of the cross look on all things “through suffering and the cross.” They, in other words, are led by the cross to look at the trials, the sufferings, the pangs of conscience, the troubles–and joys–of daily life as God’s doing and do not try to see through them as mere accidental problems to be solved by metaphysical adjustment. They are not driven to simplistic theodicies because with St. Paul they believe that God justifies himself precisely in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. They know that, dying to the old, the believer lives in Christ and looks forward to being raised with him.”