Meditations for Radical Lutherans on Luther’s Antinomian Disputations (part 2 of 6)

“A free will is that which wills nothing of its own, but submits only to the will of God.” — Luther (quote not from that work)

 

Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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Happily Obedient in the Garden (Part 2)

First, to begin this post, a meditation from Martin Luther, from the “First Disputation Against the Antinomians”:

First Argument

Against the entire disputation.

We are not obliged to do the impossible. The law is impossible. Therefore we are not obliged to do it.

Now brace yourself like a man.

 

Response:

It is said improperly, that is, not rightly and not fittingly, that we are obliged to do what is impossible by the law. When Adam was first cre­ated, the law was for him not only something possible, but even something enjoyable. He rendered the obedience the law required with all his will and with gladness of heart, and did so perfectly. Yet what now, after the fall, is impossible, is so not by fault of the law, but by our fault. It is not the fault of the one binding, but of the one sinning, hence this statement, The law urges us to do what is impossible, needs to be understood fittingly, for if you want to preserve the strict sense of the words, it sounds as if God himself is being accused of burdening us with the impossible law. Yet it is sin and Satan, who made the possible and enjoyable law impossible and terrifying, who are to be accused.

Christ, however, by willingly submitting himself to the law and enduring all its curses, earned for those who believe in him the Spirit, being driven by whom they also in this life begin to fulfill the law; and in the life to come the most joyful and perfect obedience will be within them, so that they will do in body and soul as now do the angels (SDEA 47, 49, bold mine).

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One of the things that Radical Lutherans warn about is how we as human beings inevitably look to trust in our own righteousness, creating a “ladder theology” or “law story”.

In other words, human beings – and Christians to! – feel like He is obligated to reward them with heaven for what they understand to be their good behavior. They would make God accountable to them. In other words: follow the laws of the universe (perhaps that even God must be subject to!), and reap the rewards!

Ladder theologies everywhere!

 

Certainly, the Radical Lutherans are right to have this concern. The old Lutheran theologians called this the “opinio legis,” or the “opinion of the law”. Nevertheless, Radical Lutherans Steve Paulson and Nicholas Hopman, in their article “The Hated God,” go so far to write:

“Heresies always fall into an obsessive rut that pulls Christ’s story back into the framework of the law and draws a line between Jesus the man and God. People want to tell the gospel as if it were a law story… Preachers work overtime to make Christ’s story in Scripture fit their own legal tale and spare their hearers any death…”

Sinners don’t just want to help, they say, but want to save themselves: “The temptation of the law is to assume that its presence infers the possibility of doing it, and more importantly, that its purpose from the beginning was salvation from sin” (12).

Acknowledging that there those who claim Christ who believe this, or are at least often tempted to believe this (see Gal. 3:10-14 here), two questions should nevertheless be asked: 1) Did God from the beginning give human beings commands – law – as a means of being saved from sin? ; and 2) Didn’t Luther, per the quote above from the Antinomian Disputations, believe that originally, in Eden, Adam and Eve could do the law?

The answers are “no” and “yes,” respectively. Key for Luther is that the law in Eden may have contained a threat but this by no means meant that Adam and Eve felt threatened. In fact, he gives exactly the contrary impression: Adam and Eve felt no threat whatsoever from this law, command… teaching of God!

It allowed Adam and Eve to see that, as powerful as they were, they still weren’t God. He’s the boss. And they liked Him being the boss… for a while. https://t.co/V7rXc7S7r5

— Lewis (@lewispolzin) July 10, 2018

And now, then, we come to the critical question: are, for example, all Lutherans who talk about “preaching sanctification” and administering the “third use of the law” (i.e. preaching the law with the intent to guide the Christian) necessarily doing what Paulson and Hopman describes above?

After all, Paulson and Hopman imply as much when they say:

“The fundamental concern of a legal myth is to motivate hearers to take a journey that corresponds or collaborates with God (along with the various ‘co’s’ like covenant, contract, or ‘the Great Com-mision’ that all assume cooperation between divine and human for salvation). In this way, law is taken as God’s gift to provide direction in life (reciprocation). Grace is empowerment to fulfill law’s movement, which is what sinners want most from the story: what can we do to help?” (11)[i]

Or, on the contrary, could anything be further from the truth? In fact, is it possible that the opposite could be the case? That it is the Radical Lutherans who, in promoting a “theology of the cross” which deviates from Luther’s own, open up the door themselves to a “ladder theology” and/or “law story” by which we can be saved?

I know that sounds radical (no pun intended), but hear me out here. One of the main problems with the Radical Lutheran approach to the issue is that, ironically, it simply is not “existential” enough! And this can be said both as regards their description of the Christian life and their understanding of human nature in general.

How well do you know you? “Our nature is such that we always desire new things. We are not content with the doctrine that has been handed down and received. And because the devil knows that our nature is like this, he attacks it with his snares and introduces his light.” — Luther, AE 33, 229

 

As regards the Christian life, after all, they do not talk like Luther:

“Yet Christ,” [these antinomians] say, “has removed your sin. Why are you sad?” This is why they continue to do what they do in an utterly secure manner. They translate the merit of the passion of Christ and of the remission of sins into luxuriousness….

Christ fulfilled the law, but it needs to be added: “Later see to it that you lead a holy, pious, and irreproachable life, as it is fit­ting for a Christian. This is what you have heard so far: Be forgiven. But lest you complain that you are utterly forsaken, I will give you my Holy Spirit, who makes you a soldier; he will even produce mighty and unspeakable cries against sin in your heart, so that you thus finally do what you wish.” But am I not unable? “Pray that I may hear you, and I will make you able…” (SDEA 303, 305, italics mine)[ii]

Luther knows that he can speak like this because those who have been saved delight in following God’s commands. He does not say it so honest and sincere people can work hard to climb the ladder of salvation, having only the possibility of being saved.

And when it comes to Radical Lutherans and the simple matter of human nature, take, for example, this very matter of obedience and submission. Simply put, the idea of delighting in a command is not foreign to human nature. You gotta serve somebody and you will, very often delighting in that fact (even if you realize you are a perpetually miserable “serial server”).

And – contrary to the claims of postmodernists – this phenomena of delighting in loving obedience and submission is not necessarily something that demands to be questioned, interrogated, and deconstructed (note the fourth point in this post as well).[iii]

Do you, generally speaking, want to will nothing of your own — but to follow commands from Your Humble and Simple King!? Or is He just not impressive or attractive enough for you, your lusts, your pride? Who is really secure and free?

 

Think about those things for now, and be sure to tune in again in future posts where we will discuss how it is those who downplay the importance of God’s law – including its eternal nature – who are most susceptible to the problem of “ladder theologies” and “law stories”.

That issue will be explored in the meditations to come.

FIN

 

Notes:

[i] This certainly does sound a lot like the theology/philosophy that the popular Jordan Peterson advocates.

[ii] Hopman sometimes goes in the opposite direction, giving the impression that we really ought to shy away from talking about the Christian’s active faith at all. He states, for instance, things like “[t]he law (First Commandment) demands faith, which is the presence of the living God, who is not the dead Decalogue (law) written on stone tablets (2 Cor. 3:7)” (167, italics mine)

[iii] And the deeper fact of the matter is that postmodernists themselves are selective about the particular power structures they see fit to critique.