Against the Holy Blasphemers

by Steven D. Paulson

In his letter to the Romans, Paul writes:

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them (1:24-32).

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in a vote at its 2009 churchwide assembly has now taken upon itself to “approve those who practice” these things. How did this happen? We should know what power we are up against and how to oppose it.

Perhaps it is the old “Lutheran” problem with antinomianism, which literally means to stand “against the law.” Christ is the end of the law, is he not? If you have the Gospel of Jesus Christ, what need is there of the law? The highest trust in Christ is to ignore the law! Yes, of course [the antinomians say].

But this call to ignore is not speaking to your flesh, to give license to the flesh, as if that were the freedom of Christ in the gospel. “Ignore the law! Moses is dead!” is not spoken to the old, sinful self as if that old sinner is now set free to do what it wants. The end of the law is in Christ alone, and so the law only comes to an end in faith in this Christ whose mercy is the *orgiveness of sin.

In Luther’s day a dispute arose when the clever preacher John Agricola proposed that the way to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ was to leave out the preaching of the law entirely. The slogan applied to this idea was, “The law belongs in city hall, the Gospel alone belongs in the pulpit.” Wouldn’t that be nice for a preacher? No more need to accuse anyone or bother with the law even when it is plainly in the Scripture
to be preached. But that is not true preaching.

Moreover, Agricola rejected any role at all for the law in Christian life. He speculated that the story of Christ was the only thing needed to call people to repentance. The law could be left to politicians and police. Now, if there are such preachers who have decided that law is not needed for repentance and who then preach only the assurance of God’s love, they should attend to the Lutheran Confessions and consider
carefully the grave mistake they are making,

The Smalcald Articles also say [III, 3, 4] that the New Testament retains, teaches and emphasizes this function of the law, that it reveals sin and God’s wrath. But “to this it immediately adds the promise of grace through the Gospel.” And the Apology [IV, 257] says: “The preaching of the law is not sufficient for genuine and salutary repentance; the Gospel must also be added to it.” That means that both teachings must be alongside each other and must be taught together, but in a proper order and with the appropriate distinction. The antinomians, or nomoclasts, are properly condemned because they throw the proclamation of the law out of the church and want to reprove sin and teach contrition and sorrow not on the basis of the law but only on the basis of the gospel (Solid Declaration V: Law and Gospel).

The greater problem in the ELCA, however, is called enthusiasm, or fanaticism. Fanatics are a specific type of infiltrating and clandestine false prophet. They are self-righteous. They are on a mission. They believe that they hold the key to the future. They are decidedly *not *antinomian, in fact they believe in the law alone. The trick is that the law is held by them with a twist.

They believe they are the messengers and purveyors of a *new and higher law* than had ever existed before in church and world—even laws given by God himself. Furthermore, this new and higher form of law comes in the person of the Holy Spirit who gives them new spirit-led revelations that are not in Scripture but are supposed to be part of God’s hidden plan.

Plan for what?

For making the church a more righteous, perfect group of saints who will then be a light to the nations by living out the love the law requires. Fanatics are never very creative. Fanatics think that God has communicated the new law through them (such as in a new ecclesiastical vote at a churchwide assembly).

They believe they are enlightened. This is why the issue of homosexuality has been taken up as a matter of rights or righteousness along with the supposed movement of the Holy Spirit to “do a new thing.”

Fanatics think that the Holy Spirit has given them a new word not found in Scripture that approves of homosexual acts because a higher righteousness has now been revealed to them than has ever existed in history.

They know, even though they have no word from God to stand on. The unprecedented newness is considered a mark of the divine itself. When fanatics get rolling, no calls to the importance of a church tradition of 2,000 years matter—in fact it proves their point that they are more spiritual because they are not bound to this tradition. No calls to creation and God’s preservation of it in family, church and state matter, since they live beyond “natural law” and despise “created orders” as if they were Nazi propaganda.

No calls to the impact on ecumenical relations with other churches matter because a higher calling than church fellowship is ringing in their ears. No calls to the words of Scripture matter either. Each of these is considered old law, and now that the spirit has come through them to give new law who would want to go back? The reasoning is empty, the heart is darkened and yet fanatics are positively certain of the
spiritual truth they bring.

It may help you to know that Luther ran into two types of fanatics in his day. One was a type that looks like it comes from the Reformation or Protestantism but opposed our teaching at its core. This was especially prominent in spiritualists like Luther’s onetime colleague at Wittenberg University, Karlstadt, and his destruction of images in churches because the law of Moses should be extended to require it despite the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The other was M?ntzer who thought he was leading the peasants by the revelation of the Holy Spirit to a greater kingdom of peace and prosperity by rebelling against authority—but he only got them killed. They wanted “reform” in the church and society, but not by preaching the law and the Gospel. They wanted a new and higher form of law supposedly revealed to them by the Holy Spirit.

The other fanatic of Luther’s time was the Pope in Rome. As different as these appeared in history, theologically they shared something. They stopped thinking of Christ’s forgiveness of sins as the Gospel and began thinking of the church as a kingdom of the righteous that lives by a higher law than that operating in God’s creation. The problem for them was that yesterday’s law always ended up accusing them, and in order to be free they had to channel a new law for a new day.

So the dream naturally arose that if yesterday’s law accused, perhaps a higher, better law could be attained that would actually make the church and its people the kind of righteous kingdom Christ wants. They thought the law as it applies to Christians in particular must be adaptable to changes in history, and some special mechanism must have had to supervise and direct this change. Since the Bible was yesterday’s law, some Spirit-given power outside Scripture must be available to them to make new Christian laws.

Yesterday’s law kills, tomorrow’s opens up the possibility of a new, better society, so goes the fanatic. They think the Spirit works through them to reveal a new, better law than the ones found in the past—yes even better than Scripture’s laws. They see Moses not as dead, but as old and stuck in the past and in need of “reform” and so they spout slogans like, “Reformed and always reforming!” They look at people who preach the letter of the law in Scripture as “fundamentalists” who have lost the hope that the law can be improved. The Pope thinks Lutherans are stuck on “Scripture alone” this way!

So do the fanatics today in the ELCA. But whereas the Pope has come to believe that the Holy Spirit works through the magisterium of the church of which he is the head, the ELCA now has come to believe that the Spirit has moved through their meetings and convocations and studies and finally the calling down of the Holy Spirit at an assembly and voting as if they were instruments of the Spirit’s new wisdom. They say, “Come Holy Spirit,” but they should beware of when that true Holy Spirit comes and finds them masquerading as his helpers.

For at least 200 years this kind of spiritualism has been brewing in the “enlightened” world that is Europe and America. Such spiritualists call this a *zeitgeist*—a spirit of the times that is moving away from past morals and doctrines to something higher, better, more free. They see people who disagree with them as “traditionalists,” “conservative,” “patriarchal,” “fundamentalists,” who think of God as Father, and the
law as unchanging.

Instead, fanatics think they are “of the spirit,” not as the Spirit that blows where God wills—to Christ—but as a spirit of the age that provides new and better laws that are supposed to foster the inevitable progress of society. In other words, for fanatics, spirit is simply “oral law” that fills in where written laws have become outdated. Jesus faced such Pharisees almost daily, and never tired of twisting them into knots over their plans for applying the law to new situations. But it is not the law that will make you righteous, but Christ’s forgiveness alone.

Even while the fanatics have virtually emptied all of their churches, they have a sense of fate that they are bound to win. History is on their side, so it seems. Who did not see this vote in the ELCA coming for years? Fanaticism appears inevitable, as if it is fate itself. It is bewitching because the devil gives the impression that it cannot be beat.

People keep saying this matter in the ELCA is only a generational issue; young people “get it,” because they have not grown up with fears and false information, and so the church must simply wait for the elders to die. Others say that it is a “moral” issue that does not touch “doctrine,” and therefore people can agree to disagree. There is no place for pointing out the blasphemy in the ELCA.

Religion has become, for fanatics, a way of establishing righteousness for people who have been on the margins of society and they do appear truly holy for doing this. Religion then becomes inclusion in the higher law of love. It tries to make people righteous by giving them a new law, and so their consciences can finally be comforted. Before, homosexual acts were excluded, now they are approved. This, however, is not the Gospel; it is a change in law, in the form of a new law that is put before people as the place for their hope.

We are in a time of fanaticism. Coming to grips with this is necessary for preachers and for hearers of the Gospel. Will you cling to your old Father God, or will you go with the future—the spirit? So it seems one must choose sides between two types of legalism fighting for the right to be the true church—the conservative or progressive.

Of course, the odd man out in fanaticism is always Jesus Christ. He brings nothing other than the forgiveness of sins. The true preacher applies forgiveness to actual, ungodly sinners, who have been revealed as such by the preaching of the law. The solution to getting rid of fanatics is true preaching, even though it appears as the weakest thing in the world. There are always two words in preaching: the “rebuke”, and the “forgiveness”. Fanatics do not want to be sinners, so they gather together, vote on it and find they are not!

These are self-righteous idolaters. Luther once called them “holy blasphemers.” Simon the Pharisee did not recognize his sin and wanted nothing to do with Mary Magdalene who was a sinner who had met her Christ. Mary did recognize her sins and poured them out in tears on the One who took the sin upon Himself. Jesus then forgave Mary, but not Simon.

The holy blasphemer is a fanatic who blasphemes God in the first commandment while holding up their higher form of righteousness that sees itself as progressive, welcoming, gracious, open, marching on the road of civil rights, inspired and the like.

Luther continues, “Let us not be found in the number of those who are without sin and imagine themselves holy, or justify their sins and refuse to be corrected.” Removing homosexuality from the need of forgiveness, while thinking yourself just, is heartless, eternal cruelty. After all, Christians know they are sinners in the eyes of God. They not only know it, they feel it in desires of a sinful nature, but they do not let these rule over them or let this sin rage against the hope that is in Christ himself and alone.

True Christians are in a battle whose final victory is already won, but while this old world lasts we feel the sins, confess them, submit to discipline, resist them—and the whole while are confident that these sins are forgiven. No fanatic can give you this, even a whole group of fanatics or a whole epoch of them. Until we die bodily and spiritually to the old leaven of sin we remain “godly sinners in Christ”, not “holy
blasphemers.”

This paper is one of several prepared by WordAlone’s Theological Advisory Board as a resource for individuals and churches considering their responses to the crisis over the authority of God’s Word in the ELCA. The papers will soon be available as a packet at WordAlone.org.