I have had pastors tell me that we must never imitate Paul’s style in his epistles of preaching Law/Gospel/urging to good works.

And various and sundry assorted nonsense like that.

The aversion to speaking about the Christian life of holiness, good works and service to Christ and neighbor is bearing its bitter fruit throughout American Lutheranism.

V.Elert, I couldn’t agree more. However, what I think Dr. Root, and with him a large portion of the Christian tradition, is advocating is not our own “system of morality,” but the gift given by God in Scripture of clearly constructive teaching about how to pursue receiving, living into, and using, the grace of justification given through faith. If we truly believe that we are adopted as children of God and given God’s Spirit, this confers a certain degree of dignity and with it an expectation to take hold of the teachings of Scripture as God-enabled possibilities – always in co-operation with, and ultimately, led by, the Holy Sprit and the Church community.

I believe it is a larger hubris to be so concerned about keeping oneself at what one considers a respectable distance from what one calls atheism, works righteousness, etc, that we fail to hear the entire Gospel – a Gospel which includes Christ’s invitation to “be ye perfect.” Not something we achieve by our own efforts or by our own system of reality – but by allowing the Holy Spirit to move us to act as children of God and heirs to the Kingdom.

Take the analogy of a sailboat on a lake. When the wind does not blow, it can do nothing except haplessly turn its rudder rapidly hoping to gain some movement. But it is without power to attain the goal it had set out to reach. But should the wind blow, the sails are made full, and suddenly, one is able to work the rudder – not independent of the wind, but in co-operation with and empowered by that wind’s force. I believe that this is what Scripture ‘s picture of sanctification is about. Our efforts are themselves the work of the Spirit, yet part of that gift is the call to work the rudder. Which also means using the navigational assistance of the Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, as well as most of the New Testament and Old Testament material which speaks of injunctions, recommendations, exhortations, and commands to love God and neighbor, concretely and intentionally. If we fail, we are not lost. But if we fail to try, and believe a mere passive (read: non-existent) view of sanctification, we simply are being unfaithful to the Gospel, preventing ourselves from proclaiming it not only by Word, but also in Witness and in mission.

Hardly bordering on atheism.

To re-engage what Luther and the early PM (embedded in the unaltered Augsburg Confession as well as the Apology) thought about this, look at Werner Elert’s works and see the beginnings of renewing a methodology for ethics based on the evangelical basis, cf. Das Christliche Ethos.

The primary shift within current systematic theology and esp. ethics is to fall prey to the old problem of descriptive vs. embedded methods. In our reflection on Scripture we continually approach issues as if human self-reflection is all that we can ever hope to gain from being impacted by God’s authority. The latin term “extra nos” radically posits the issue into God’s hands and therefore inflicted upon his creatures. We so-called moderns resist the effect of the “extra nos” and conclude that the only impact that is made upon us is only our own self-reflection.
This borders on atheism at its most extreme.

God as both Creator, Preserve and Judge inflicts upon us all the changes and chances of history and we cannot escape these changes esp. in the certainty that we are creatures who are headed toward death. To continually affirm that we are both sinner and saint is a self-reflection with both critique and resolution based on our self-created ways and means for solving the issue. In God’s eyes alone are we saints and it is hubris for us to believe what that looks like least of all believe that we can manage what sanctification looks like based on our own systems of morality. We stand as sinners alone before Christ’s cross, ie. within the very arena where genuine resolution is operative. What lies beyond Christ’s cross is a walk in faith.

Two things: I cannot say I haven’t murdered. Before you call the FBI though(!) remember Jesus taught that even though we’ve been told not to murder, we do so even if we are angry with another and are therefore “liable to the hell of fire.” (Mt 5:22) Jesus totally flipped on it’s head what the listeners at the time, including the Jews, thought they knew about the Law. Something to think about…

>>>Now here’s the rub: Luther, I think, ordered his faith around the notion that God measures the extent to which we fail to uphold God’s law.
I’d say Luther DID order his faith around that notion before his wacky “grace through faith” revelation. What was driving him nuts was overwhelming guilt not being able to follow God’s law. Only God’s grace through Jesus Christ alleviated his conscience!

That’s all. Thanks for reading.
Chuck

I’m assuming that you’re speaking only with regards to salvation (either that, or the Old Adam is indeed speaking). In terms of human action, Luther frequently talks about doing what is pleasing to God. This is frequently in the “vertical,” e.g., the first three commandments. Given that Luther taught that the Ten Commandments are ordered from most important to least, I would say the “vertical” dimension of human action is primary for Luther. To put it another way, true love of the neighbor is impossible without love of God.

Instead of doing what the church commanded apart from the Scriptures and therefore being saved, Luther turns this around into being saved and therefore free to do the works pleasing to God, as known through the Scriptures. The simple reason that Christians do good works is because God commands them.

Luther writes that the Creed was “given in order to help us do what the Ten Commandments require of us” (Kolb/Wengert 431) and of the Lord’s Prayer: “Consequently nothing is so necessary as to call upon God incessantly and drum into his ears our prayer that he may give, preserve, and increase in us faith and fulfillment of the Ten Commandments and remove all that stands in our way and hinders us in this regard” (440-41). And of course, the Ten Commandments command faith and prayer, so Luther can say that the entire Christian life is obedience to the Ten Commandments. This might help explain why Luther himself recited the Ten Commandments daily.

To summarize, paraphrasing Luther: We are neither to trust in our worthiness nor to relax in our unworthiness, but simply to pray and work as God commanded.

The use of certain trodden and worn Lutheran slogans and of certain reiterations of interpretations of the Confessions are themselves kinds of actions. But are they truly loving – even loving of God? And, irregardless of what Luther, Melanchton, or any other fallible human beings say in acting, are we to reduce the clear teachings of Christ as merely abstract ideals, and with them, the entire Christian life?

It seems to me that when St. Paul declares that “In Christ there is a new creation,” this describes more than forensic justification of individual sinners. In Baptism, in the gift of the Holy Spirit, God is raising up a people to proclaim the Good News to all the earth, to be agents and progenitors of the work begun in Christ through the Spirit’s power. Are the only actions we are given speech-acts? Or, are we to take seriously Christ’s own promise of power, to grasp THAT promise in faith, which means, consequently, utilizing that power, under God’s guidance and empowerment by the Spirit, for the sake of love? And might Gospels like Matthew, whose overall focus is not merely kerygmatic but precisely the ways in which the kerygma is made manifest by the life of discipleship made possible by the death and resurrection of Israel’s God’s Son, furnish us with a more robust sense of mission, one in which preaching and practice are as inseparable as Word and Sacrament?

Because we have failed to be missional in the ways imagined and commanded by Christ, we have reduced obligations of the law and the challenges of God’s Word to pretenses to pursue false humility under the guise of remaining as much a sinner as we can. We are always sinners, yes. But it is such as these that God’s Word calls and adopts as God’s children, giving them the gift of the Spirit so that they might bear fruit, and, in the process, proclaim the Gospel of Christ through word and deed. Now that everything old has passed away and everything has become new (we do believe this, right?), how might we accept this gift by sharing it with others?

Perhaps Dr. Root’s implication is that our Scriptures offer more resources than we care to admit. We are always sinners – but also saints. Its time we started living like the latter, even as we confess like the former.