Preaching Repentance from the Gospel?
Just as foolish is the argument of Agricola that the Law is not to be taught because it does not justify. Inverted the argument makes sense: Because the Law does not justify, but condemns, it must be preached before the Gospel. Justification presupposes condemnation by the Law. Luther therefore asked Agricola to consider: “Is not this blindness without measure that he does not want to preach the Law without or before the Gospel? Why, that is an impossible thing. How is it possible to preach of forgiveness of sins if one has not first established the sins? How can one proclaim life without death being there?” “For grace must war and win in us against the Law and sin that we may be kept from despair.” (St. L. XX: 1859 ,1656) Luther is therefore not stretching the truth when he claims that Agricola’s objection to the preaching of the Law must as a natural result do away with the Gospel, with Christ and His active obedience to the Law, and thus with the whole Christian church.
Furthermore, Agricola wants contrition or repentance taught from the Gospel and not from the Law, because a contrition or repentance from love of God can come only from the Gospel. The last part of this sentence is true, of course. But when he then says of the contrition which flows from love of God: This is “the first rung of the new birth, the real blowing and breathing upon by the Holy Spirit; after that the heart gains the sincere confidence in God that He will overlook its foolishness,” he is actually making trust in God, or faith in the remission of sins, follow on the contrition which proceeds from love of God, hence dependent on renewal and sanctification. With his new “methodus” he is not saving the doctrine of justification, but has turned his steps toward Rome.
Taking into account the further fact that Agricola, in spite of his logical and theological fogginess, presented himself as the savior of the purity of the Christian doctrine and rejected as false the teaching of the Wittenberg faculty, and particularly of Luther, one easily understands why Luther at times employed strong language against Agricola and listed his advent with the “tempests” by which the devil was forever trying to extinguish the restored light of the Gospel.
