Grace, Forgiveness & Moses
Via The Righteousness of Faith according to Luther, p. 45-46
…wherever grace and forgiveness are proclaimed in the present tense, even in the Old Testament, the Gospel is present. For the Gospel does not bring a new conception of God, a new morality, or a new religion. Rather, the Newness that it brings to us is the proclamation that what was before a command and a promise is now a present reality. “Therefore, those who interpret the term ‘Gospel’ as something else than the ‘good news’ do not understand the Gospel, just as those people do who have turned the Gospel into a law rather than grace and have made Christ a Moses for us. (LW 25, 327)” When one understands this position in Luther, then it is not difficult to understand why Luther is not an Antinomianist and why his teachings, even those on St. Paul, do not neglect the teachings of the Law, but rather bring a new and a positive understanding of it. As we know, Luther had fought the Antinomianist battle with great intensity. The people with whom he had to fight this battle were not those of the Catholic Scholastic tradition, but were Luther’s own students. Their intention was to hold up Luther’s own position and to complete it – to radicalize it. With the question of Antinomianism, we are dealing with a problem at the inner core of Protestantism and one that has perhaps shaped contemporary Protestantism more than any other. The entire modern battle against the Old Testament has its roots here: “Commandments belong in the courthouse and not in the pulpit,” say the Antinomians. “Everyone that has anything to do with Moses must go to the devil and to the gallows with Moses.” They start from the position that repentance and justification flow only from the Gospel and that the law in any form does men harm. The law, they believe, make men into hypocrites, and therefore has no business being included in a theology of the Gospel. This is why they are called Antinomians (against the Law), because they will allow nothing other than the forgiveness of sins to be preached.