The Law of Faith

Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther

Indeed, the law is to be regarded in the same light as works. “For through the law a hatred of the law is awakened, but through faith a love for the law is infused.” For with the love of God who loves us, the love of His law is born in us. One could say that only when we have found God who does not speak in the language of the law by saying, “You should” but rather says, “I am the Lord your God,” – only then can we love the law. In the former we hear the command of a tyrant; in the latter we hear the will of the Father. Of course, here, as with works, a change is effected in terms of the Law. For the law that we love is now not the same law that was “against us,” namely, the law that we love is not the letter of the law; the law of works; the old law; the law of the flesh; the laws of Moses; the laws of sin and death; the law that condemns everyone and declares everyone guilty. The law that we love is not the law that fosters resentment and in which death is hidden and all the more so as it has appearance of spirituality (Luther has innumerable names to describe the breadth and depth of this kind of law), but is the law that we begin to love as the “law of faith.” It is the new law, the law of Christ, the law of grace, and of the Spirit. It is, as Luther says, “the living will itself and the life of experience… that is written in the heart only by the finger of God.” Very likely Luther had the pre-Christian congregations of the church with their ethical viewpoints in mind when he wrote: “Indeed, we would make new decalogues (commandments), as Paul does in all the epistles, and Peter, but above all Christ in the gospel. And these decalogues are clearer than the decalogue of Moses, just as the countenance of Christ is brighter than the countenance of Moses. Here we can now see how Luther himself understood his so-called practical writings. They were “new commandments,” with which he tries to show the love and value of God’s will to the Christian nobility, merchants, magistrates, husbands, wives, and parents. For it is at the same time a new commandment and an old one. Today we have lost the consciousness that not only the Gospel, but also the law needs to be experienced anew and constantly interpreted anew and that our greatest task as Christians lies in doing just that. To understand the Gospel in spiritual terms means for God’s Word to come always for us in a contemporary and practical sense – in the midst of our everyday lives and our jobs – so that we do not view the law as a burden under which we labor, but that fulfilling it is a joy and a comfort because we heed its commandments as free people. For the law has already been fulfilled in Christ so that it now can help us and cannot accuse us anymore.