Concordia Journal | Summer 2015

Concordia Journal

Concordia Seminary 801 Seminary Place St. Louis, MO 63105

COncordia Journal

Summer 2015 volume 41 | number 3

Summer 2015 volume 41 | number 3

Word Alive! Connections and Conversations The New Obedience: An Exegetical Glance at Article VI of the Augsburg Confession Pietism on the American Landscape Sanctification

COncordia Journal (ISSN 0145-7233)

publisher

Faculty

David Adams Charles Arand Andrew Bartelt Executive EDITOR Joel Biermann Charles Arand Gerhard Bode Dean of Theological Kent Burreson Research and Publication William Carr, Jr. EDITOR Anthony Cook Travis J. Scholl Timothy Dost Managing Editor of Thomas Egger Theological Publications Joel Elowsky Jeffrey Gibbs assistant editor Dale A. Meyer President

Benjamin Haupt Erik Herrmann David Johnson Todd Jones Jeffrey Kloha David Lewis Richard Marrs David Maxwell Dale Meyer Glenn Nielsen Joel Okamoto Jeffrey Oschwald

David Peter Paul Raabe Victor Raj Paul Robinson Mark Rockenbach Robert Rosin Timothy Saleska Leopoldo Sánchez M. David Schmitt Bruce Schuchard William Schumacher James Voelz

A BIBLICAL, LUTHERAN VIEW OF HIGHER EDUCATION THAT’S ROOTED IN THE INTERACTION OF FAITH

Melanie Appelbaum assistants

Andrew Hatesohl Andrew Jones Emily Ringelberg

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Issued by the faculty of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, the Concordia Journal is the successor of Lehre und Wehre (1855-1929), begun by C. F. W. Walther, a founder of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod.

Lehre und Wehre was absorbed by the Concordia Theological Monthly (1930-1974) which was also published by the faculty of Concordia Seminary as the official theological periodical of the Synod.

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The Concordia Journal (ISSN 0145-7233) is published quarterly (Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall). The annual subscription rate is $25 (individuals) and $75 (institutions) payable to Concordia Seminary, 801 Seminary Place, St. Louis, MO 63105. New subscriptions and renewals also available at http://store.csl.edu. Periodicals postage paid at St. Louis, MO and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Concordia Journal, Concordia Seminary, 801 Seminary Place, St. Louis, MO 63105-3199.

cph.org/christianuniversity ThisLEARNING is an extremely illuminating book that will be of great help to our universities AND and to the LCMS as a whole. At a time when synodical universities are struggling with “Lutheran Identity,” this book serves as a template for faculty, administrators, boards, and students for how that can be achieved and for how that identity can help colleges to be truly excellent at every level.

—Gene Edward Veith, PhD, Professor of Literature, Patrick Henry College

© Copyright by Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri 2015 www.csl.edu | www.concordiatheology.org

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COncordia J ournal CONTENTS

EDITORIALs 189

Editor’s Note

190 Word Alive! Connections and Conversations

Dale A. Meyer 195 Ronald R. Feuerhahn: Historian, Theologian, Churchman, Pastor

Jon Vieker 198 Encomium for William Carr, Upon His Retirement

James W. Voelz

ARTICLES 201 The New Obedience: An Exegetical Glance at Article VI of the Augsburg Confession

Michael P. Middendorf

220 Pietism on the American Landscape

Martin E. Conkling 236 Sanctification

David P. Scaer

253

HOMILETICAL HELPS

275

BOOK REVIEWS

Summer 2015

volume 41 | number 3

editoRIALS

COncordia Journal

Editor’s Note This issue publishes the plenary presentations from the 2014 LCMS Theology Professors Conference, which centered around the theme of the “new obedience” of Article VI of the Augsburg Confession. The conference is a regular opportunity for the theologians of the Concordia University System and the two LCMS seminaries to engage in fruitful conversation, to learn from each other in continuing education and lifelong learning.

We talk a good game about continuing education, but it doesn’t always seem to gain traction. What would it mean for clergy and church workers to be vitally engaged in lifelong learning? Or, perhaps a better way to put it, what would it look like? Educators and DCEs already know. They are engaged in continuing education as a natural, and in many cases mandatory, part of their vocation. On this score, clergy are behind the curve.

Virtually all “learned professions” (the medical professions, law, engineering, et al.) have a process of continuing education built into the exercise of their work.

Why not pastors? In a society and culture that is moving with so much velocity, in so many different directions, why would we even want to persist in the myth that every thing we need to know we learned, if not in kindergarten, then in the four years we spent—in what seems like a century ago—earning the degree that made us eligible for a call? We certainly wouldn’t want our primary care physicians to work that way.

Why then those involved in the work of Seelsorge?

At the heart of a profession that values lifelong learning—whether it is required, encouraged, apprenticed, or simply part of the job—is a deeply personal value for curiosity. Those who recognize that learning is a formative lifelong process that only ends when they are six feet underground have a vital interest in understanding the world. I am becoming increasingly convinced that the loss of a sense of curiosity is one of the most tragic intellectual symptoms of what many have diagnosed as affluenza. And it happens every time we act as if we know the answer before the question is asked.

For Christians, of course, our learning doesn’t even end when we’re six feet under. Its end (telos) is in the certain hope that one day we shall know as fully as we are already fully known (1 Cor 13:12).

As such, it should be clergy who model the most vital sense of curiosity, because our curiosity doesn’t just seek to understand the world. We understand more than most that faith alone—fides quarens intellectum—seeks to understand not only the world, but the God who is at work in the world to make all things new.

Travis J. Scholl Managing Editor of Theological Publications On the cover: Detail from The Good Samaritan (after Delacroix) by Vincent van Gogh (1890), from a significant body of copies van Gogh executed while he was institutionalized in Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (image: Wikimedia Commons).

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Word Alive! Connections and Conversations President Matthew Harrison recently reported to the Concordia Seminary Board of Regents that The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod has lost 18 percent of its membership in the last forty years. To be sure, we’re not the only mainline American denomination in serious decline, and cultural and demographic reasons can be cited, but that’s little comfort to a church which has taken the Great Commission seriously since its founding. I’m not setting out on a guilt trip here. There may well be valid reasons why some congregations are not growing, like the decline of 160-acre family farms in rural America. Growth is not the only measure of congregational health, as Peter Steinke writes knowledgably in A Door Set Open.1 That said, decline in any congregation and in the general synod saddens us and challenges us to strategic thinking for the future, especially in our seminaries as we prepare the pastors who will take our places. When groups talk about our decline, the amazing growth of Christianity in other places, especially Africa, is usually brought up, but in my experience these discussions usually end in resignation and the meeting proceeds. The 800-pound gorilla of decline lumbers off to sit silently in the back of the room and watches us vainly put our energies into lubricating the machinery of an institutional church we love but is in serious decline.

I certainly don’t have a silver-bullet answer, no one does, but we can gain insight by comparing today’s culture to the culture of the early and growing church, which is one reason why our healthy, confessional seminaries are especially important in this time of decline. Professors who are scholars in cultures and historical times different than our own can help us understand the practical problems facing the church today.

“Most of what we do in serious Bible study has to do with overcoming the gaps that separate us from the original audience of the scriptural documents.”2 Learning the differences between the cultures of the first and the twenty-first century can sharpen pastoral presentation of God’s gospel to all the baptized in sermons, Bible classes, and conversation. And the more insightful and incisive we are in our preaching, teaching, and visitation, the more our laity will be enabled to give persuasive reasons for the hope that is in them as they pursue their vocations in the world (1 Pt 3:15). Growth cannot be guaranteed, but we can sing with conviction, “Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore.”3 One key difference between then and now: the first century was an oral culture; ours is largely literate. It is estimated that only about 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire could read, and the percentage of literate Christians may have been even less.4 That has profound implications for our understanding of how the gospel of Jesus Christ got into the hearts of people in the first century and, pending our thoughtful reflection and strategic pastoral and parish action, how we can witness more effectively in the twenty-first century. Begin your thoughtful reflection with this: Ask your parishioners to locate the “word of God” and they’ll most likely point to the “Bible,” which means the “book” or “scroll” containing God’s bound words. On Sunday the lessons are printed in the bulletin, projected on a screen or found on page whatever “in

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Bibles” and many readers follow the print while the lector reads. The sermon your pew explicates and tries to drive home the printed word, which is fine, but the result can be less than a direct interaction between the preacher and the hearer because the “living and active” word has been reduced to a printed point of reference (Heb 4:12). Bible classes gather around the printed word that literate people can read and discuss. Think about it, the very term “Bible class” is symptomatic of our Western-literate culture.

There’s nothing wrong in all this, but it doesn’t replicate the dynamism of the firstcentury church. Largely illiterate, they focused on hearing the spoken gospel, the viva vox evangelii. Jews, probably more literate than Gentiles because of their devotion to the Torah, heard texts read and expounded in their synagogue worship by someone who could read.5 Jesus did just that in Luke 4:16‒19 and notice the sequel, verses 20‒21: “He rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’” After Jesus’s ascension, the “People of the Way” continued in the synagogue but also gathered on “the Lord’s Day” (Rv 1:10) to hear from the eyewitnesses and their companions (see Acts 1:21‒22).6 Sometimes the witness would come in the person of the apostle or evangelist but because of the multiplicity of worship sites the authoritative witness to Jesus’s life and words came more often through the writings of the apostles and evangelists.7 Those writings, especially the works of the canonical New Testament, were read by someone to the largely illiterate congregation. When Mark 13:14 says, “let the reader understand,” it strikes us as strange (“Well, I’m obviously reading this and I am paying attention!”) but it could well be a cue from St. Mark to the person doing the public reading to the worshipers in that first-century Christian synagogue or house church. Similarly, 1 Timothy 4:13, “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture” isn’t a bland encouragement to keep reading the Bible in worship but is an earnest plea to intentional oral reading of the Old and now the New Testament Scriptures because, absent reading, that’s the only way the Spirit will take the authoritative gospel into the lives of the illiterate.

This gives urgency to the plea that the Hebrews not neglect “to meet together, as is the habit of some” (Heb 10:25). “Whoever is of God hears the words of God” (Jn 8:47).

“Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17). The dynamism of the first-century church was, among other things, the orality of the gospel, “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16). The word wasn’t bound and shelved, a source of religious information, it was a powerful agent of transformation, living and active, upon all who heard and believed.

Consider 1 Peter. Christianity had come to the Roman provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia through oral reports carried by religious pilgrims returning from Jerusalem.8 I doubt they brought home slick evangelism brochures! What these pilgrims did bring home to their fellow synagogue members was what they heard with their ears in Jerusalem, the announcement that Old Testament texts are fulfilled in Jesus. Wherever these Jews and the God-fearers fell on the scale of literacy/illiteracy, they did know Old Testament texts from worship. Illiteracy does not preclude familiarity with texts.9 That being the start of these Christian “churches,” Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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actually synagogues filled with People of the Way, Peter is concerned that they remain God’s “peculiar people” in the face of powerful peer pressures against the gospel.10 He sends what we call “The First Letter of Peter,” but calling it a “letter” already slants our understanding, suggesting that the members of those congregations actually read it, as we might read the bulletin before worship or the church newsletter at home. A more accurate picture of how the “letter” was received is one you may remember from your youth, before the internet instantly connected us, when communication was carried on by writing letters. Maybe Aunt Louise wrote to your mother. She gathered the family around to hear her read the letter out loud. Silas/Silvanus may well have been the person who read the letter to the congregations and no doubt shaped the form and many expressions of Peter’s content as he delivered Peter’s witness and encouragement over and over again (1 Pt 5:12). His reading would have conveyed Peter’s heart and his own, not like the lifeless readings we sometimes hear these days in church. The nature of manuscripts and scrolls, especially the lack of space between words and units, required the reader to be intimately familiar with the contents, making for a direct communication to the congregation.11 In fact, the reader would have been so familiar that a short work like 1 Peter, 105 verses, would have been largely or completely memorized.

Peter never speaks about reading but his content and outline reflect the oral communication and rhetorical conventions that were so popular in the first century. After the salutation, Peter, through the reader, begins the body of the letter with a sweeping vision of the inheritance laid up for the hearers, climaxing “in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look” (1:12). “Therefore” in verse 13 alerts the hearer to a shift of thought (oral communication signals such moves) as Peter next presents motivations for holy living (hope in Christ’s return, future; the Father’s present judgment, present; and Christ’s saving work, past).12 Verses 13 to 25 climax with an authoritative quotation from Isaiah (the hearers knew the passage well) and the reader drives home Peter’s point: “And this is the good news that was preached to you.” Sit in your study twenty centuries later, read the entire epistle in this light, as an oral communication, and you’ll find rhetorical devices throughout.13 What does this mean for our gospel ministries twenty centuries later? Nancy Ammerman of Boston University has written about theological education in our changed times. “Those who are on the margins of religious life . . . are more likely alienated because a congregation has failed in its relational work than [that] they have ceased to believe. Connections and conversations are the building blocks of the new kinds of religious communities our best students will learn to lead.”14 In the first century the church grew because the word was alive through personal connections and conversations. Carrying that to our twenty-first century, pastoral and congregational ministries can be more effective through connections and conversations that use oral style more than literary style. From the most literate through the functionally literate to the illiterate, people respond better to imagery and narrative than to linear propositional presentations. And younger people who are native to new communication technologies are literate in a different way than older generations. Many of them won’t abide long 192

lectures about the faith but they will give a hearing to someone they trust, connection, who speaks the viva vox evangelii with the transparency and eye-to-eye contact that marks oral style, conversation. That means we preachers, being thoroughly literate, will in our preparations make a special effort to “lift” the printed word off the biblical page and speak it into the hearer’s heart so that the word “living and active” surgically enters the hearer’s heart (Heb 4:12). Rote reference to printed passages is less effective than the voice of God speaking faithfully through us to our audience and then through our parishioners to the people in their lives.15 By the way, this invites us to the discipline of memory, to memorize biblical texts, the Small Catechism and also the incisive words, phrases, and sentences of devotional writers and theological thinkers. As important as our libraries are, the arsenal for witness must be in our heads and hearts that we take into connections and conversations.

When I first started at The Lutheran Hour, I was asked to attend sessions at, I think this is the name, the Broadcast Center. It was staffed by radio professionals and their purpose was to teach me the peculiarities of speaking on radio. One of the helpful things they taught me was not to use long quotations because long quotations lose the interest of the hearer. That’s true for radio but it’s also true for preaching and teaching and general pastoral communication. The problem with long quotations is that they introduce a third entity, an obstacle to the immediate interaction between speaker and listener. Think about it; reading a long quotation from the pulpit requires you to take your eyes away from direct engagement with the audience. It disrupts the connection and impairs the conversation. No matter how great the quotation is, even from the Bible, it can get in the way of direct interaction. A former CNN executive, a committed Christian, once spoke about the “Gutenberg captivity of the word of God.” We are blessed to read the word in print and our theological tomes and treatises have their place, in our studies, but the living and active word goes into its mission through connections and conversations. “The woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, ‘Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?’ They went out of the town and were coming to him” (Jn 4:28‒30).

“Almighty God, grant to Your Church Your Holy Spirit and the wisdom that comes down from above, that Your Word may not be bound but have free course and be preached to the joy and edifying of Christ’s holy people, that in steadfast faith we may serve You and, in the confession of Your name, abide unto the end; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.”16 Dale A. Meyer President

Endnotes

1 “Many churches . . . will not grow. Some are hospice cases. But, not one of them is outside the realm of mission. I want to underscore that growth, as significant as it is for mission, does not alone define what mission is. To assign ‘mission’ as a title exclusively to numerically growing churches is a mistaken understanding of mission.” Peter Steinke, A Door Set Open (Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2010), 61.

2 Thomas M. Winger, “The Spoken Word: What’s Up with Orality?” Concordia Journal 29 (2003): 136.

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3

“God of Grace and God of Glory,” Lutheran Service Book, 850, 4.

William Harris in Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 4, 7.

5 “Instruction in reading Hebrew was more widely given among Jews than instruction in Greek or Latin was among Gentiles.” Gamble, 7.

6 “People of the Way” seems to have been the first designation for followers of Jesus, Acts 9:2. See also Acts 19:9, 23; 24:14; 24:22. “Christian” was first used in Antioch, Acts 11:26.

7 “Elders” (plural) of the church in Ephesus suggests more than one worship location (Acts 20:17).

The same may be suggested for Corinth, since the Lord’s Supper was celebrated in the triclinium and atrium of a believer’s home, which limited the attendance (see 1 Cor 11:17‒22).

8 Acts 2:5‒11 9 Cf. Acts 4:13 10 For example, 1 Peter 2:4‒10.

11 See F. R. Cowell, Life in Ancient Rome (New York: Penguin, 1961), 165.

12 On the motivations, see Dale A. Meyer, “More Lively Participation,” Concordia Journal 41, 2015: 94‒98.

13 See for example Kenneth J. Thomas and Margaret Orr Thomas, Structure and Orality in 1 Peter: A Guide for Translators (New York: United Bible Society Monograph Series, 2006).

14 Nancy T. Ammerman, “America’s Changing Religious and Cultural Landscape and its Implications for Theological Education,” Theological Education 49, no. 1 (2014): 33.

15 See Dale A. Meyer, “PDAs and the Spirit’s Sword,” Concordia Journal 29 (2003): 166‒176.

16 Collect for the Church, Lutheran Service Book, 305.

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Ronald R. Feuerhahn: Historian, Theologian, Churchman, Pastor Two months before our gracious Lord saw fit to translate Dr. Feuerhahn from this world into “the life everlasting,” Concordia Publishing House released the last of three volumes of Hermann Sasse’s Letters to Lutheran Pastors in English translation. In the foreword to that volume, Dr. Feuerhahn described Hermann Sasse as “an historian with a breadth of learning, a theologian of thorough biblical knowledge, a churchman of wisdom, and a pastor of caring words.”1 Written of Sasse, these words also most fittingly describe the academic and churchly service of Dr. Feuerhahn to both the church and the world.

As an historian, Dr. Feuerhahn focused his academic interests on the ecumenical movement of the twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on the life and works of Hermann Sasse. His doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge (1991) brought to a watershed nearly three decades of study, teaching, and writing—both as preceptor at Westfield House in Cambridge, and at his alma mater, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, where he served as professor and archivist for over two decades.

His groundbreaking bibliography on the works of Sasse (1995) became seminal for Sasse scholars worldwide, providing a meticulously assembled reference work to primary source documents on Sasse and a renewed energy to the Sasse renaissance of English translations launched by his colleague, Norman Nagel, a decade earlier. The thorough and careful nature of Feuerhahn’s scholarship is evident everywhere, but particularly in the footnotes to anything he wrote on Sasse. He also accumulated a personal library of some 6,500 volumes and thousands of periodicals, as well as hundreds of photocopies and originals of critical Sasse documents—all carefully organized and documented, as only an historian of his caliber could do. Last November, Concordia Historical Institute of St. Louis awarded Dr. Feuerhahn its Distinguished Service Award, its highest honor, “for his exemplary historical and archival contributions to the cause of Lutheran history in North America and beyond.”2 As a theologian, Dr. Feuerhahn’s lifelong study of Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions, particularly as they were played out through the life of Sasse and the ecumenical movement, led him to confess and teach the church as truly catholic, not in some sectarian sense of LCMS-only or even Lutherans-only, but as the Lutheran confessors declared it to be made up of “people scattered throughout the world who agree on the gospel and have the same Christ, the same Holy Spirit, and the same sacraments, whether or not they have the same human traditions” (Ap VII/VIII 10). Agreement on the gospel “in all the articles of the faith” (FC SD X 31)—that is, true catholicity and ecumenicity—was Sasse’s contention for church unity throughout his interaction with the ecumenical movement of the twentieth century, and so it became for Feuerhahn.

For true unity, the gospel of Jesus Christ means everything to every article of doctrine, and is therefore all that matters. Dr. Feuerhahn was fond (as was Sasse) of referencing the hymn stanza by Nicolaus Selnecker:

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In these last days of great distress

Grant us, dear Lord, true steadfastness That we keep pure till life is spent Your holy Word and Sacrament. (Lutheran Service Book, 585, stanza 2)

As a churchman, the confession of pure teaching and confession of the faith was manifested in Dr. Feuerhahn’s clarity of thought and gentle spirit. For example, he served with distinction as a member of our synod’s Commission on Worship during the “worship wars” of the 1990s and the advent of the Lutheran Hymnal Project, when he wrote: We pray that God would spare us from despair, from that great sin which lies on the verge of faithlessness (as Luther might describe it). For we do, at times, despair that the church will ever come to face the issues involved in these so-called “worship wars.” And we despair too when we see the faithful champions of a sacramental, means-of-grace churchmanship being put down.

We are called to a renewed churchliness. There was a time when “churchman” seemed to mean a church politician or official; it was a negative designation. But that is the wrong impression. To be churchly is to be catholic (among other things) and to have a high regard for the tradition. . . .

This also serves to remind us that the liturgy is not our property—not the property of any one pastor, nor a single congregation, nor even the entire LCMS—not ours to do with as we please. The liturgy belongs to the church in the broadest sense, and we too are gifted by that tradition. For the liturgy was not formed by a man, but by those men who live together as saints in the church.3 Through challenging times, Feuerhahn called himself and those around him to a “renewed churchliness”—to a heightened awareness of the Lord giving his gifts through those who had come before, gifts of pure doctrine, of right teaching, and of the church’s liturgical treasures in word and song; and of the churchly task to faithfully hand them on to those who follow, with humility and in the confidence of knowing the Giver and whose church it really is.

Dr. Feuerhahn’s students and colleagues remember him as a scholar, theologian, and churchman, but perhaps more than anything, they remember him as a pastor.

Indeed, at his funeral, one student described him as a “pastor’s pastor.” His many years of parish service in Great Britain had made him that. His regular use of a father confessor gave him that. Another student described it well: “There was not a single seminarian or pastor who ever came to him, burdened and struggling under the load of end-time stress, to whom he failed to speak words of comfort, words of grace.” Ron Feuerhahn served so many as a true Seelsorger, as well as a model of pastoral care for seminarians and pastors alike.

In 2002, Dr. Feuerhahn’s students, colleagues, and scholars from around the world prepared a Festschrift in honor of his sixty-fifth birthday.4 The Lord gave Dr.

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Feuerhahn six more years on the faculty of Concordia Seminary, and seven more years in retirement, living on the seminary campus and interacting with students and colleagues as historian, theologian, churchman, pastor . . . and friend.

Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam. (Ps 115:1) Jon Vieker Jon Vieker is the senior assistant to the president of The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and was Professor Feuerhahn’s last doctoral student.

Endnotes

1 Ronald R. Feuerhahn, “Foreword,” in Letters to Lutheran Pastors, 3 vols., trans. and ed. Matthew C. Harrison (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2013–15), 3:ix. Emphasis added.

2 http://www.lutheranhistory.org/2014awards.pdf. Accessed May 25, 2015.

3 Ronald R. Feuerhahn, “Unified in Act and Song,” in Through the Church the Song Goes On: Preparing a Lutheran Hymnal for the 21st Century, ed. Paul J. Grime, D. Richard Stuckwisch, and Jon D. Vieker (St. Louis: Commission on Worship of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, 1999), 222.

4 J. Bart Day, Jon D. Vieker, et al., Lord Jesus Christ, Will You Not Stay: Essays in Honor of Ronald Feuerhahn on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Houston, TX: Feuerhahn Festschrift Committee, 2002).

Available through Concordia Publishing House. For more about Dr. Feuerhahn’s family, life, and career, see Scott A. Bruzek’s introductory essay, “Faith’s Ancient Strength,” 1–8.

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Encomium for William Carr, Upon His Retirement It is a privilege to honor Bill Carr’s retirement from the faculty of Concordia Seminary. Bill has been a good friend and an exemplary colleague for many years. We became acquainted after he returned to campus in the 1990s, first in graduate courses, after years of parish experience—and all that after years of service in the US Navy. The former—his parish service—has given him a deep and abiding love for the Scriptures and for the gospel, on the one hand, and for our Lord and for his people, on the other.

The latter—his Navy service—has given him a deep and abiding interest in and ability to address problems, to craft solutions, and to get things done. If you doubt the former, listen to his chapel sermons—always focused upon the text at hand, always engaging the specific message of that text, as it testifies to Christ, and always wanting to make sure that the impact of its saving message speaks to you. If you doubt the latter, ask him, for example, to spin out a new program for the Graduate School. Perhaps just one day later you will receive a mock-up of an entire evening course of MA studies, just as I did when I was dean of the Graduate School and he was helping in the office. Indeed, it’s that analytical, organizational, and problem-solving ability that has most delighted and amazed me. On April 29, 1962, President John F. Kennedy opined, at a magnificent dinner honoring the Nobel Laureates of the Western Hemisphere: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent . . . that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

I have often used that saying analogically with Bill with regard to administration.

In fact, it reflects my own solution to most seminary administrative problems: “Bill Carr and a bottle of Scotch”—or, more accurately, Bill Carr and a bottle of Jameson. Give Bill this type of problem, with a little encouragement or reward—depending upon how you look at it—and you’re home free! It sure helped me during my administrative days.

Bill Carr will always be remembered as a fine Christian man, a fine Christian husband, and a fine member of this faculty. But most of all, he will be remembered at this place as a fine colleague. Do you need information on something that happened years ago? Ask Bill. He will take the time to research it thoroughly. Do you have an idea that you would like to bounce off of someone? Talk to Bill. He’s always got a ready ear, and probably something from the Chronicle of Higher Education to help you out. Do you need someone to fill out your golf foursome? Bill will oblige, and he might even have his clubs stashed in his truck. Do you need someone to work hard on a project that requires insight, effort, imagination, and a nimble mind? Ask this ex-Navy guy, who has a thousand analogies and just as many of his own ideas. Finally, do you need someone to interpret a biblical text, whether in the pulpit or in the classroom—especially an Isaianic one—with complete integrity, with the ability to find Christ—legitimately—within its contours, and to listen to its meaning and to detect its impact, also for us today? Then I advise you to talk to this man, while you still are able.

Concordia Seminary is going to miss you, Bill. And so am I. James W. Voelz

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ARTICLES

COncordia Journal

The New Obedience

An Exegetical Glance at Article VI of the Augsburg Confession Michael P. Middendorf ­ Introduction: Colloquy Interviews Over the last decade, I have probably conducted more than forty teacher colloquy interviews. These have been through Concordia University, Irvine and the CUENet program. One of the questions these teachers usually answer for their final interview is: “What about good works?” The typical answer is brief: “Yes, we are supposed to do them,” followed by a paragraph of denunciations against thinking good works earn or merit anything before God. Thus the respondents typically spend much more time speaking against good works than defining what they are.

Laying Article VI of the Augsburg Confession before Us When asked to write this paper I re-read Article VI of the Augsburg Confession.

I found these colloquy teachers were in fine company.

In the Kolb/Wengert edition of the Book of Concord, the article begins: “It is also taught that such faith should yield good fruit and good works and that a person must do such good works as God has commanded.”1 One wonders what would happen if the Confessors had stopped there. Would they pass muster (or doctrinal review) with words like “should” or “must?” The German even asserts we must do “all such things” (allerlei) as God has commanded.2 In the context of the sixteenth century and the abuses of the Roman church, the remainder of the article raises red flags against presuming these works earn or merit grace, while also reaffirming the truth of the gospel.

But we should do them for God’s sake but not place trust in them as if thereby to earn grace before God. For we receive forgiveness of sin and righteousness through faith in Christ, as Christ himself says [Lk 17:10]: “When you have done all [things] . . . say, ‘We are worthless slaves.’” The Fathers also teach the same thing. For Ambrose says, “It is determined by God that whoever believes in Christ shall be saved and have forgiveness of sins, not through works but through faith alone, without merit.3 Mike Middendorf is a professor of theology at Concordia University, Irvine, California. This paper was delivered at the LCMS Theologians’ Conference on Article VI of the Augsburg Confession at Concordia University, St. Paul, Minnesota in May 2014. Limited modifications have been made for this article.

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The quotations of Luke 17:10 and from Ambrose counter any misunderstanding of thinking our good works deserve anything toward justification before God. To be sure, those red flags should always be flying. They remain particularly relevant in a context like Galatians,4 in dealing with the Pharisees of our day, or when our own academic prowess rears its head.

Yet the order of the articles in the Augsburg Confession, as we are covering them in these conferences, is pure genius. When one hears the second and third sentences here, they restate or, at least, reaffirm the previous two articles on Justification and the Ministry. Note, however, that AC VI does not swerve back into the second use of the Law, but simply reasserts the exclusive truth of the gospel, namely, that grace, forgiveness, and righteousness come through faith in Christ apart from any of our works.

Defining the Terms and Categories Let us endeavor to hear the first part of AC VI through the theme of this conference, “The New Obedience.”5 So, what’s new? The commandments themselves are not new, something Jesus (Mt 19:19; 22:34‒40; Mk 10:19; Lk 18:20) and Paul (Rom 13:8‒10) make clear (see also FC Ep VI 7). Rather, the person has been renewed and regenerated. As Titus 3:5‒6 states, “Not from works, the ones which we did in righteousness, but according to his mercy he saved us through [the] washing of rebirth and renewal of [the] Holy Spirit,6 whom he poured out upon us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior” (cf. Rom 6:4, 6; 12:2; Eph 4:21‒24).

What then is biblical obedience? In English “obey” generally conveys the notion of something we must do. The Oxford English Dictionaries define the verb as: (a) to comply with, or perform the bidding of; to do what is commanded by (a person); to submit to the rule or authority of, to be obedient to. (b) to comply with, perform (a command, etc.). (c) to submit to, subject oneself to, act in accordance with (a principle, authority, etc.).6 However, the basic biblical sense means to listen and respond appropriately. The underlying Hebrew is usually šəma‘ lə, “to hearken to,” often to the word of Yahweh.

The NT uses the Greek word group of ὑπακούω similarly. When one hears God’s condemning law, the appropriate response is to acknowledge, that is, confess, that what God says about me and all people apart from Christ is true (e.g., 1 Jn 1:8‒10). At times, however, what is mistranslated “obey” is intended to be a receptive response to the gospel. For example, Hebrews 5:9 declares that Christ “became the cause of eternal salvation for all the ones who ὑπακούουσιν him” (Heb 5:9). To translate with a form of “obey” here, as most translations do (e.g., ESV, KJV, NASB, NIV, RSV, NRSV), makes salvation contingent upon our “obedience.” The same appears to be true with the cognate noun in 1 Peter 1:22, “Having purified your souls ἐν τῇ ὑπακοῇ of the truth.” Again, all the translations referenced above use forms of “obey.” But our souls could never be purified by our obedience; it happens, instead, “by the responsive hearing of the truth” of the gospel. Paul even uses the verb ὑπακούω as a parallel for 202

in Romans 10:16. Thus, when one hears the gospel, the appropriate response πιστεύω of ὑπακοή is to “listen responsively,” to “heed” or “hearken to” it with receptive faith (as in Rom 1:5; 6:16; 15:18; 16:26; cf. Rom 10:9).7 Well, that was law and then gospel confessed, as in Articles I‒V of the Augsburg Confession). So let’s just get on with the church in Articles VII and VIII, and skip this pesky notion of the new obedience.

But to do so is to disregard much of Jesus’s teaching and, typically, the latter portion of Paul’s letters as well (e.g., Rom 12‒16; Gal 5‒6; Col 3‒4; Eph 4‒6; 1 Thes 5; see below). Article VI affirms, “It is also taught that such faith should yield good fruit and good works and that a person must do such good works as God has commanded.” Thus when we hear the Lord tell us what to do and not do, the appropriate response for the renewed believer is to obey, that is, to do and not do according to his word. Is there as much room for this in our teaching as there was in that of Jesus’s? Is the new obedience as prominent in our proclamation as it was in Paul’s? Does it have the same significance in our lives as it did in theirs?

Here, I think, our tendency to make all law second use in our proclamation and to be wary of most or even all third use obscures the matter of the new obedience we confess. For example, can we proclaim the parable of the Good Samaritan without changing the intended referent of the characters and, instead, affirm Jesus’s own application: “Go and do likewise!” (Lk 10:37). Can we tell sheep—who have been re-created from goat hood and who inherit the kingdom by the Father’s grace (Mt 25:34)—that they are to respond with new obedience, consciously and actively caring for the needy, unaware that they are doing it to Jesus himself (Mt 25:35‒40)? I recently heard a great sermon on these two phrases from 1 Corinthians 6. “You are not your own; you were bought at a price” (1 Cor 6:19b‒20a). Amen. Yet Paul reminds us of those precious gospel truths in order to lead up to this specific exhortation: “Therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Cor 6:20b).

In my own teaching, I have generally moved beyond the two categories of law and gospel, to use three, law, gospel and response.8 I like “response” better than the third use of the law since we still seem to be debating whether such a use even exists (cf. Article VI of the Formula of Concord). But the term “response” does what AC VI does. It raises the question, response to what? Not my merits, but for God and because of Christ. This is where the new obedience comes from. It is the focus of much of Scripture’s teaching as will be highlighted briefly in the remainder of this article.

The New Obedience in the Old Testament In his recent article in Lutheran Forum, Scott Ashmon affirms that, particularly in the prophets, “the judgment-restoration pattern dominates so much that it appears to be the proper order of prophecy,” a sequence equivalent to the “law-gospel paradigm”9 But Ashmon continues by observing other patterns in the OT, particularly a grace-law sequence. Genesis begins in just such a manner.

It recounts God’s gracious love toward creation in general, and humanity in particular, by giving them life, making them “exceptionally good”

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(ṭôb me’ōd), and giving them all they need for an “exceptionally good”

life. It is only after God has graciously created humanity that He commands them to multiply, fill the earth, and have dominion over it, and, in Genesis 2, prohibits them from eating of the tree of knowledge.10

Similarly, he observes that in Genesis 12 God does not begin with Law in addressing Abram, even though he is a sinner, but with grace. Only later does God, based on His gracious election of and promises to Abram, obligate him to live uprightly (Gn 17:1).11 This grace-law pattern exhibits itself most prominently in the exodus, culminating at Sinai. Against any works righteous notions, God does not give the law to Israel in Egypt and declare that he will save them from their slavery if they obey the commands. Neither, however, does Yahweh give them the law, call them to confess their failures as poor, miserable sinners, and only then come to the rescue. Instead, God just delivers them! At the Yam Suph, Israel responds appropriately by trusting in Yahweh and in Moses, his servant (Ex 14:31). That sounds a lot like Articles IV and V of the Augsburg Confession.

Then, at Mt. Sinai, God gives what the Scriptures exclusively call the “Ten Words.”12 It is shocking for many people to hear that the Scriptures themselves never use the phrase, “the Ten Commandments.” Instead, whenever “ten” is used in reference to them, another noun is being modified. Exodus 34:28 identifies “the words of the covenant” appositionally as “the ten words” (’êṯ diḇrê habbərîṯ, ‘ăśereṯ haddəḇārîm).

The Septuagint renders the latter phrase literally as τοὺς δέκα λόγους which produces the transliterated term “Decalogue.”13 Why no Ten Commandments? Because the first word is gospel, reminding Israel that Yahweh has graciously chosen them as his own and already rescued them.14 “I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of Egypt, from the house of slaves” (Ex 20:2). Hummel affirms, “Two later Jewish usages underscore the same general point: (1) continuing the Biblical usage of speaking of ten “words,” not “commandments”; and (2) counting [Ex 20] v. 2, which plainly is indicative, as “word” #1.”15 Within the context of Israel’s salvation history as recounted in Exodus and later in Deuteronomy, the remaining nine words or, “commandments,” describe the new obedience, a way to live in response to mercies already received. The dominant use of imperfect verb forms corroborates the point. Hummel advises: It is of utmost importance to underscore the fact that grammatically the Decalogue is in indicative, not imperative form (the negative lo’, not ‘al).

These are statements of what the believer who has experienced God’s grace will voluntarily do, not commands of what he must do to deserve or earn God’s love. They represent perimeters or boundaries of God’s kingship, beyond which the believer will not stray, but within which He is essentially free to respond joyfully and voluntarily, as illustrated by the rest of the “laws” or “codes” of the Old Testament.16

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Luther’s explanations to the commandments in his Small Catechism nicely express the new obedience as well. For example, he explains the lone imperative in the Ten Words, “Honor (kabbêḏ) your father and your mother” (Ex 20:12; Dt 5:16), as follows: “We should fear and love God so that we do not despise our parents and other authorities, but honor them, serve and obey them, love and cherish them.”17 Ashmon goes on to identify all of Deuteronomy, Psalm 78, and Ezekiel 36 as indicative of a similar grace-law or grace-law-grace pattern. For more information on the Old Testament, see Ashmon’s article.

The New Obedience in the New Testament As we segue to the NT, 1 Peter follows a similar grace-law pattern. Scharlemann expresses it with the catchy phrases, “Be what you already are” and “Exodus Ethics.”18 Peter essentially reminds believers, “Here’s who you are in Christ, so live like it!” (e.g., 1 Pet 1:312 into 1:13-17; 1:18-21 into 1:22; 1:23-25 into 2:13; etc.). But I specialize in St. Paul and we are pretty much a Pauline church so we’ll spend most of our remaining time there.

Romans Interestingly, St. Paul references specific commandments from the Decalogue in only two letters. One of them, Ephesians, contains an echo of the command against stealing (Eph 4:28) and a direct citation of the commandment to “honor your father and mother” (6:2). The other letter is Romans whose argument the opening articles of the Augsburg Confession follows quite well. In fact, a book by Paulson titled Lutheran Theology simply walks through Romans!19 Walther contends that in Romans 1‒3 we find “the sharpest preaching of the Law.”20 In Romans 2 Paul uses the Decalogue as a “second use” mirror. While addressing a Jew who relies upon the law and boasts in God (Rom 2:17), he asks, Therefore the one who teaches another, are you not teaching yourself? The one who proclaims, “Do not steal!” are you stealing? The one who says, “Do not commit adultery!” are you committing adultery? The one who abhors idols, are you robbing temples? You who are boasting in the Law, through the transgression of the Law you are dishonoring God (Rom 2:21‒23).21 This is “the old obedience.” Walther continues: This [sharpest preaching of the law] is followed, towards the end of the third chapter and in chapters 4 and 5, by the doctrine of justification— nothing but that. Beginning at chapter 6, the apostle treats nothing else than sanctification. Here we have a true pattern of the correct sequence: first the Law, threatening men with the wrath of God; next the Gospel, announcing the comforting promises of God. This is followed by instruction regarding things we do after we have become new man.22 Note Walther’s three parts. They sound like law, gospel, and response.

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Romans 6:11‒19 Romans contains sixty-two imperatives. But aside from 6:11‒19, only one appears in the first ten chapters! And that lone form has God as its subject (“Let God be true,” γινέσθω δὲ ὁ θεὸς ἀληθής, 3:4).23 Therefore the five imperatives in 6:11‒19 are significant. They exhort those who “have become new man” by virtue of the one-time aorist act of baptism to resist sin and, instead, to walk in the renewal of life which only now is possible (6:4).

Thus you also count (λογίζεσθε) yourselves to be dead to sin (6:11). . . .

Continually resist the reign (βασιλευέτω) of sin in your mortal body (6:12) . . . and do not continue to present (μηδὲ παριστάνετε) your bodily members to sin [as] instruments of unrighteousness; instead, present (παραστήσατε) yourselves to God as living from [the] dead and your bodily members to God [as] instruments of righteousness (6:13). . . . Now present (παραστήσατε) your bodily members as slavish to righteousness leading to sanctification (6:19).24 In keeping with AC VI, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession cites verse 19 to affirm that “after penitence (that is, conversion or regeneration) must come good fruits and good works in every phase of life” (Ap AC XII 131‒32).

My commentary on Romans asserts the following: The 18 indicative statements which permeate [the last half of Romans 6] counter the notion of viewing it predominantly as imperative commands. . . . But to exclude Paul’s exhortations to continually resist sin and, instead, to present one’s entire self to God in righteousness which has fruit for sanctified living also obscures Paul’s purpose. To choose either indicative or imperative presents a false alternative. The key, of course, is to consider both fully, with proper balance, and in the right order. The indicatives of God come first, as in 6:1‒11, and also throughout 6:12‒23.

They are passively received. But Paul also calls for, indeed, even commands, a response which entails active resistance against sin, as well as the offering of one’s bodily members in righteous service and for fruitful holy living to God. Both Paul’s indicatives and his imperatives are . . . not properly comprehended if one adopts a “God-does-it-all” attitude toward sanctified living. Yes, “God-does-it-all” in our justification (e.g., Rom 3:21‒26, 28). We do well to reject all moralism and legalism. At the same time, we ought to confess that a “God-does-it-all” attitude in sanctification is not what Paul teaches. As the Formula of Concord states, From this it follows that as soon as the Holy Spirit has initiated his work of regeneration and renewal in us through the Word and the holy sacraments, it is certain that we can and

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must cooperate by the power of the Holy Spirit, even though we still do so in great weakness. (FC SD II 65)

Christian living is “our responsibility,” yet, thankfully, not ours alone. It is possible only “in Jesus Christ our Lord” (6:23) and empowered by the Spirit who baptized us into his Name “so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, thus also we might walk in life’s renewal” (6:4).25

Romans 7:14‒8:4 Of course, sin throws a wrench into our new obedience. As a result, Romans 7:14‒25 vividly depicts how the law performs a double function in the Christian’s life.26 Paul’s portrayal of his own experience fits squarely within his theology of the “now” and the “not yet.”27 The believer is “now” no longer under the dominion and condemnation of the law (6:14; 7:4), but belongs, instead, to the age to come through the mercies of God. Therein, the renewed mind joyfully delights to enslave itself in obedience to the good which the law commands (7:22, 25). Yet believers also still live in the “not-yet” world into which sin entered and spread to all people (5:12). As a result, Paul the believer continues to admit, “I am flesh­ly, sold under sin . . . Sin dwells in me . . . this is, in my flesh” (7:14, 17, 18). Here the formula observes how Paul “himself learns from the law that his works are still imperfect and impure” (FC SD VI 21). The frustration expressed by Paul in 7:14‒25 employs the first person singular to give his own perspective regarding himself, the law, and sin.

But what really counts is God’s perspective.28 God’s declaration regarding Paul’s and our reality is that “nothing is condemnation for the ones in Christ Jesus” (8:1).

This change of perspective explains why Paul moves away from first person language to speak authoritatively of God’s view in 8:1‒4, rather than his/our own. The decisive change happened by virtue of “God sending his own Son” whose Spirit sets us free (8:2‒3). This is why, even in the midst of the ongoing not-yet reality, all who know how God regards them in Christ can join Paul in declaring all of Romans 7:25. “But thanks to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! Consequently, then, on the one hand, I myself am a slave to the law of God with my mind. But, on the other hand, with my flesh [I am a slave] to the law of sin.”

Because sin continues to reside in our flesh (simul peccator; e.g., Rom 7:14, 17, 20), “the law always accuses” (lex semper accusat, Ap AC IV 128, 295). Indeed, to some degree, any standard reveals if one measures up or not, and to what degree; when one falls short, as is the case for all people (Rom 3:9, 22), the law properly exposes the shortcoming (Rom 3:19‒20; 7:7‒11, 14‒25). But while the law may still function to accuse those in Christ for continuing to do what is wrong and failing to do what is right (7:14‒25), it cannot condemn. Surely God does not use the law to condemn those in Christ either. Instead, God sent Christ who has fully fulfilled the law for us (8:3‒4a; cf. Mt 5:17).29 If the gospel is proclaimed clearly, repeatedly, and powerfully, as Paul does in Romans, his and our hearers will understand they are no longer subject to the law’s condemnation. Christ who fulfilled the law is its τέλος (Mt 5:17; Rom 10:4).

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Therefore, they can then hear the imperatives of Romans 6 and 12‒16 as exhortations to live out the new obedience while walking “in accord with the Spirit” (8:4).

The exhortations of Romans 12‒1630 Romans 5‒8 largely gives theological expression to the renewal of life God gives (e.g., 6:4); chapters 12‒16 then offer practical guidelines for the life a believer lives.31 Paul fleshes out the new obedience in great detail in Romans 12‒16 where, in marked contrast with the earlier chapters, he uses forty-nine imperatives.32 Raabe and Voelz point that out: Paul’s intent in paraenesis is not to accuse the Romans as sinners. He does that in chapters 1–3, where the tone is notably different. Paraenesis uses the language of urging, appealing, and beseeching rather than that of harsh demanding and condemning.33 Paul’s opening appeal in chapter 12 comes through the mercies of God (12:1) which have been expounded at great length thus far in the letter. These mercies are for all (11:32) and graciously renewed for us each and every morning (Lam 3:23). What follows is the new obedience. Here, the Formula of Concord says, the Holy Spirit “employs the law to instruct the regenerate out of it and to show and indicate to them in the Ten Commandments what the acceptable will of God is” (FC SD VI 12).

In addition to Paul’s move from indicative toward imperative, his use of the ἀγάπη word group in Romans also provides helpful validation. Thus far, except for 8:28, every use speaks of the love of God and Christ for us (5:5, 8; 8:35, 37, 39; 9:18, 25). But that changes in 12:9 where Paul begins a description of the believer’s authentic love in action toward others, a topic which runs all the way through Romans 13:10.

In keeping with AC VI, the Formula of Concord refers to Romans 13:5, 6 and 9 as evidence that “good works are necessary”; these passages indicate “what we are bound to do because of God’s ordinance, commandment, and will” (FC SD IV 14). Then, in 13:8‒10, “when Paul admonishes those who have been born anew to do good works, he holds up before them precisely the Ten Commandments” (FC VI 21) by citing four of them. In this way, the law reaches the loving “fullness” God lovingly intends.

According to Schreiner, Paul sees love and law as compatible in a wider way. . . . The specific commands cited help Christians discern how love expresses itself in specific situations, but the other moral norms of the law also help believers define love. . . . If love is cut free from any commandments, it easily dissolves into sentimentality, and virtually any course of action can be defined as “loving.”34 Then, in Romans 14:1‒15:7, Paul deals with a situation where believers have different convictions about foods and holy days. As a result of the work and words of Christ, these OT regulations have now become adiaphora. Interestingly, the Augsburg

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Confession mirrors the sequence of Romans here as well. Article VI on the new obedience (cf. Rom 12:1‒13:14) leads into AC VII’s assertion that having the same rites and ceremonies in worship is neither necessary for nor determinative of unity.35 The Lutheran Confessions do not insist upon, and Paul does not even seek, uniformity of practice as a desired outcome (see the Formula of Concord, Article X). In the new obedience, Dunn describes how “the liberty of the Christian assembly should be able to embrace divergent views and practices without feeling that they must be resolved or that a common mind must be achieved on every point of disagreement.”36 In addition to what he writes in Romans 14:1‒15:7, the conduct of Paul’s ministry further exemplifies his incredibly flexible behavior, even in regard to the law, and all in service to the gospel (e.g., Rom 9:13‒14; 15:15‒21; 1 Cor 9:19‒23).

Ephesians As indicated above, the only other letter where Paul cites the Decalogue is Ephesians (6:2; cf. 4:28), probably the most generic or least contextual of his letters.

In keeping with the creation account, the Ten Words, and Romans 1:1‒17, Paul starts off with glorious gospel throughout Ephesians 1. Then the familiar chapter 2 concisely and universally articulates a classic expression of law and gospel. In so doing, it depicts who we were (past tense) apart from God’s loving kindness—dead in trespasses and sin; by nature children of wrath, as are all people (2:1‒3). To be sure, it is always helpful to be reminded of who we were and where we would be apart from God’s rich mercy and love. But we are so no longer! God made us alive in Christ and saved us by grace through faith (2:4‒10a). The remainder of chapters 2 and 3 affirm the eternal inheritance which belongs to all those who have been brought into God’s household. Jews and Gentiles alike are now one people in the body of Christ.

What then do we do with the second half of Ephesians? AC VI points us in the right direction: “It is also taught that such faith should yield good fruit and good works and that a person must do such good works as God has commanded.” But, as the rest of AC VI reminds us, as soon as one loses sight of “by grace through faith” as a gift of God (2:8), Ephesians 4‒6 will likely be misunderstood and misapplied. Yet one should also not lose sight of the fact that God’s love and kindness call forth a certain lifestyle in response. Ephesians 5:8 summarizes the entire letter and all of Paul’s theology well: “For you were formerly darkness; now [you are] light in the Lord; walk as children of light!” (ἦτε γάρ ποτε σκότος, νῦν δὲ φῶς ἐν κυρίῳ· ὡς τέκνα φωτὸς περιπατεῖτε). There we have it—law in the past tense, gospel in the Lord, and response with an active imperative. To walk as children of light is the new obedience.

Ephesians 4 begins, “I urge you, therefore . . . to walk worthy of the calling of which you were called” (Παρακαλῶ οὖν ὑμᾶς ἐγὼ ὁ δέσμιος ἐν κυρίῳ ἀξίως περιπατῆσαι τῆς κλήσεως ἧς ἐκλήθητε). Later in the chapter, Paul adds: You . . . were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus,to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires,and to be renewed (ἀνανεοῦσθαι) in the spirit of your

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minds,and to put on the new self (τὸν καινὸν ἄνθρωπον), created after

the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. (Eph 4:21‒24, ESV)

So don’t walk and talk like the old. Walk like a new person! Talk like a new person! To offer an analogy, are we like an inert bicycle sitting there until the Spirit puts us in motion? Or, are we more like a hiker who has been given life and lungs, body and breath? The Spirit implores, “Get up and walk with me!”

Ephesians’ imperatives In the rest of the letter, Paul is not at all shy about giving specific directions and repeatedly commanding us where to walk. As with Romans, indicatives dominate the first half of Ephesians which has only one imperative; but then, in the second half, after the gospel has been proclaimed, further indicatives are joined by lots of “new obedience” imperatives. In fact, the lone imperative in Ephesians 1‒3 issues an appeal to “remember” μνημονεύετε (2:11), sort of like to “hearken to.” In Ephesians 4‒6, however, Paul uses forty imperative forms! These tell believers how to respond properly to the gospel in their lives.37 Is this what we typically do with these imperatives?

For example, Ephesians 5:1 states, “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children” (Γίνεσθε οὖν μιμηταὶ τοῦ θεοῦ ὡς τέκνα ἀγαπητὰ). In my own formation, I was taught to shape a text like this into a proclamation of the second use of the law followed by the gospel. The malady would be: “All of you fall short and fail miserably at living up to imitating God.” Then the gospel: “But you are God’s dearly loved children anyway. Amen.” At this point in Ephesians, however, that is not Paul’s point.

You were dead in trespasses and sin; formerly you were darkness. By grace you are now dearly loved children. Respond intentionally to that gospel! Imitate the Father who loves you dearly because of who you now are in Christ (cf. Mt 5:44‒48).

In verse 2, Paul similarly pleads: “And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (καὶ περιπατεῖτε ἐν ἀγάπῃ, καθὼς καὶ ὁ Χριστὸς ἠγάπησεν ἡμᾶς καὶ παρέδωκεν ἑαυτὸν ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν προσφορὰν καὶ θυσίαν τῷ θεῷ). The law/gospel tendency is to admonish our hearers for failing to walk in love, but then to assure them that Christ loves us anyway. Yet the past tense indicatives proclaim that Christ loved us and gave himself up for us. In response to having been so loved, Paul exhorts us to live love!

Later in chapter 5, verse 21, Paul writes, “Submitting to one another in reverence for Christ” (Ὑποτασσόμενοι ἀλλήλοις ἐν φόβῳ Χριστοῦ). The second use of the law accuses our hearers for failing to submit to their parents, spouse, boss, dean, president, pastor, and one another. But that does not communicate Paul’s point. Instead, he presumes our reverence for Christ because he gave himself up for us (5:2). As a result, he urges us to respond submissively to others. My colleague Mark Brighton points out that the governing verb here is an imperative in Ephesians 5:18: “But be filled with the Spirit” (ἀλλὰ πληροῦσθε ἐν πνεύματι). From that point on, Paul describes how the Spirit’s filling is actively displayed in our lives by singing (5:19), giving thanks (5:20), and submitting (5:21).

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all three of these cases, Paul formulates his appeal as “walk this way,” followed In by a gospel reminder of what God or Christ has already done. This is precisely what AC VI does. After affirming that a person must do such good works as God has commanded, the rest of the article reaffirms the gospel as a gift from God. But neither Paul nor AC VI revert to the second use of the law, accusing us of falling short. Rather, the forty imperatives in Ephesians 4‒6 function positively to identify and to call forth the new obedience by telling us what to do and what to avoid. We should, therefore, proclaim these imperatives as they are meant to be heard, as exhortations to respond actively and intentionally to the gospel.

Concluding Thoughts on the New Obedience Homiletical Implications In his article “Freedom of Form: Law/Gospel and Sermon Structure in Contemporary Lutheran Proclamation,” Schmitt observes, Recently, “Law” and “Gospel” seems to summarize the predominant form of Lutheran preaching. It defines how the sermon is structured. This new type of sermon consists of two major divisions: the first part Law and the second part Gospel. . . . We might appropriately call it “Law then Gospel” preaching.38 He demonstrates that this fixed form is neither “Waltherian” or “Caemmererian,”39 and asserts, Lutheran preaching can embrace much more. It is not bound by a formulaic “Law then Gospel” pattern but recognizes and utilizes the freedom of sermon form for the sake of Gospel proclamation. . . .

Within such broad homiletical horizons, “Law and Gospel” referred to how one offered a proper distinction of Law and Gospel in both the content and function of the sermon while using a variety of forms.40 So which form to use? Ashmon advises, “let Scripture direct the form and function of the sermon, rather than placing Scripture and the sermon into a fixed form-critical straightjacket. In other words . . . let exegesis predominate in interpretation and proclamation, not eisegesis.”41 So if a law text is intended as second-use accusation, “Let ‘em have it!” preach it to the peccator (e.g., Rom 1:18‒3:20; Eph 2:1‒3). But if a passage describes the new obedience (e.g., Rom 12‒15; Eph 4‒6), neither Paul, nor AC VI, nor Walther calls us to turn it into second use. Instead, proclaim it as intended—God calling his simul justus children to live in ways “well-pleasing” (εὐάρεστον) to him (Rom 12:1, 2).

As demonstrated above with Romans and Ephesians, Paul’s regular sequence is not so much imperative accusations of the law followed by gospel. Instead, he generally articulates law and gospel indicatives followed, in Walther’s words, “by instruction regarding things we do after we have become new man.”42 A similar use of “new obedience” imperatives occurs in a number of Paul’s other letters as well.43 Colossians 1‒2

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four imperatives (2:6, 8, 16, 18), while chapters 3‒4 add twenty-six more. has only Philippians 1‒2 has seven; chapters 3‒4 contain eighteen. Galatians 1‒4 has seven (four of them in OT quotes; 4:27[3], 30), and then thirteen in chapters 5‒6. There is only one in 1 Thessalonians 1‒4 (4:18), while chapter 5 has eighteen.44 According to Paul’s regular pattern, these imperatives should be used to instruct and exhort believers to respond properly to the gospel. In summary, they urge us, and sermons on these sections should urge parishioners: “Be imitators of God, as his beloved children” (Eph 5:1).

An Analogy: “Children of the Heavenly Father”45 The father/child relationship is dominant in Jesus’s teaching and prominent in Paul’s portrayal of our relationship with God (e.g., “father” occurs fifteen times in the Sermon on the Mount, thirteen of which are “your father”; also Jn 5:36‒37; 17:1‒5; 20:17; Lk 6:39; 11:1‒13; Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6).46 What does this relationship tell us about the new obedience?

When earthly parents give commands to their children, they do not generally make rules and demand obedience in order to repeatedly convince children that they are disobedient and unworthy of anything good from their parents. Nor do they intend for such rules to drive their children to continually confess their failures or to despair of their unworthiness to even belong in the family. If so, or if they were perceived as such, a child would probably want to stay distant from such a parent and the relationship would become stunted. A child’s perception of this kind of parents’ love would likely degenerate into seeing it mainly as something which tolerates failures and which is forced, again and again, to deal negatively with disobedience and somehow love the child anyway. The goal, from the child’s perspective, might be to obey, but primarily the goal is to avoid anger and punishment. That’s the old obedience.

At least in healthy families, this is not generally the case. Good, though imperfect, parents tend to give their children good rules to obey. When appropriate, they also impose loving discipline so that children see and suffer the consequences of their disobedience. But parents do this to benefit their children so that that they will become happy, healthy, content, and fulfilled as they mature to live a disciplined, godly life.

Once children perceive this to be the purpose of the rules and even the reprimands, their relationship with their mother and father, established by birth and maintained by loving provisions freely given by their parents, will grow and deepen as the loving intention behind the laws is acknowledged. Eventually, a “new obedience” to parental commands will come out of gratitude and respect, rather than fear of punishment.

If we continually assert that God’s law is always, or even predominantly, his instrument to catch and convict unruly children for their mistakes, how will people respond? Instead of drawing near, they may want to keep their distance from such a demanding and demeaning father. Or they may come to do their religious duty, and then try to obey mainly to keep their father from getting mad. Will a growing and maturing relationship likely develop with a father who makes such demands?

But does God continue to see his children in Christ as lost and condemned people who still deserve the full fury of his eternal wrath? Or does our heavenly Father 212

that we are eternally his redeemed and dearly loved children because Christ assure us has fully and completely finished (τετέλεσται) suffering our punishment (Jn 19:30) so that in him “nothing [is] condemnation” (νῦν κατάκριμα) (Rom 8:1)? Thank God that the latter has become our reality. God, the Father of lights who graciously bestows “every good gift and every perfect gift . . . determined to give us birth by his word of truth” (Jas 1:17, 18; cf. Jn 3:3, 5; Ti 3:5). Through the renewing and adoptive work of the Holy Spirit we now call him “Abba, Father!” (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6).

Then, to paraphrase Jesus, if you who are evil know how to give good rules to your earthly children, how much more will your Father in heaven give positive, maturing guidelines for his children to obey (Lk 10:13)? Such a Father gives instructions and commands, as well as loving discipline when we fall short (Heb 12:5‒11), for our ultimate good. He does so in order to build us up and mature us, as Paul describes it six times in Ephesians 4:12‒16.47 As we grow in our faith relationship with him, we join with St. Paul in willingly and joyfully doing his holy, righteous and good commands (Rom 7:12, 16, 21, 25b), while also being increasingly frustrated by our failures to live according to his Law (Rom 7:14‒15, 18‒20, 23‒24, 25b).48 Nevertheless, with the confident assurance that we remain his children by grace and in Christ, we persist in the new obedience, striving to live out his “good, well-pleasing and perfect will” (Rom 12:2) for the benefit of our neighbor (Rom 13:8‒10), for our own good, and all to the glory of our gracious God. Indeed, those who really “get” the gospel eagerly join the psalmist in crying out,

Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes; and I will keep it to the end. Give me understanding, that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart. Lead me in the path of your commandments, for I delight in it. (Ps 119:33‒35; cf. Ps 86:11) Divine Causation and/or Human Cooperation?

All of this perhaps raises the question, “Does this new obedience happen apart from the conscious intent of our will, without any effort on our part?” The notion that a sanctified life of good works consists solely of God’s work was rebutted in the discussion of Rom 6:11-19 above. Yet it seems to have been popularized in Lutheran circles through an essay by Gerhard Forde.49 There Forde defines “a truly good work” as being “free, uncalculating, spontaneous.”50 While commenting on Romans 12:1, Douglas Moo responds, “That God’s mercy does not automatically produce the obedience God expects is clear from the imperatives in this passage.”51 This is because appeals based upon grace and mercy are resistible and not coercive.

The active imperatives Paul addresses to Christians throughout his letters indicate that willing human involvement remains necessary. Thus the notion that a sanctified life of good works is totally the work of God or done solely by the Holy Spirit should be rejected. The Formula of Concord observes, After the Holy Spirit has performed and accomplished this [conversion] and the will of man has been changed and renewed solely by God’s power Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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and activity, man’s new will becomes an instrument and means of God the Holy Spirit, so that man not only lays hold on grace but also cooperates with the Holy Spirit in the works that follow. (FC Ep II 18; cf. FC SC II 65 cited above) But the believer without any coercion and with a willing spirit, in so far as he is reborn, does what no threat of the law could ever have wrung from him. (FC Ep VI 7)52

In order to explain the new obedience, I have used this musical analogy with students. Are we like a trumpet which can only sit lifeless in a case until the Spirit irresistibly picks it up and blows life into and through it? Or is the new obedience more like a singer to whom God has given life, breath, talent, and even songs to sing; who then says, “Sing for me!” or, better yet, “Sing with me!” The latter more accurately depicts the Christian. It also aligns with the “very basic and practical [Pauline] anthropology” articulated by Raabe and Voelz.

The hearers are assumed to be ordinary, concrete human beings who actively participate in their everyday living. They seem to be in a position to make decisions, to be led astray, to be reminded, to be encouraged, and to be persuaded, just as we all are. Paul addresses them as if they are a third party standing before two powers, sin and the Spirit, and he exhorts them to pay attention to the impulses of the Spirit and to resist those of sin. He urges them, for example, to be transformed by the renewing of their mind [Rom 12:2], to present their hands and feet, their intentions and actions, as weapons for God’s service, and to offer their bodies as living sacrifices to God.53 Paul urges us to respond actively and freely on the basis of mercies graciously given and already received (Rom 12:1).

Various definitions of the words used to label categories have caused some of the confusion. For example, Pieper defines sanctification in the following ways: (1) In its wide sense, sanctification comprises all that the Holy Ghost does in separating man from sin and making him God’s own, so that he may live for God and serve Him. (2) In its narrow sense, sanctification designates the internal spiritual transformation of the believer or the holiness of life which follows upon justification.

(3) In another respect good works are identical with sanctification, since sanctification in concreto takes place through the performance of good acts.54 Sanctification is commonly understood as the new obedience, namely, the Christian life of good works which flows from the gospel in the lives of believers (i.e., the end of definitions 1 and 2, as well as definition 3 above). Forde, however, defines the term this way: “Sanctification is Die Heiligung—which would perhaps best be translated as ‘being

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salvationed.’ . . . Sanctification is thus simply the art of getting used to justification. . . . It is the justified life.”55 By his definition, sanctification belongs within the gospel category of justification and we are no longer talking about the new obedience at all.

The confusion in terminology is understandable. On the one hand, the Bible’s use of “holiness” language predominantly expresses the gospel, rather than the new obedience. For example, Paul uses “justification” and “sanctification” in parallel fashion, asserting in 1 Corinthians 1:30 that Christ Jesus has become for us “righteousness and also sanctification and redemption” (δικαιοσύνη τε καὶ ἁγιασμὸς καὶ ἀπολύτρωσις). And in 1 Corinthians 6:11 he reminds believers of what sets us apart: “But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were declared righteous in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God” (ἀπελούσασθε, ἀλλὰ ἡγιάσθητε, ἀλλὰ ἐδικαιώθητε ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ καὶ ἐν τῷ πνεύματι τοῦ θεοῦ ἡμῶν). Although such passages use “sanctification” language, they are articulating the gospel (so also in the OT; see Ex 31:13; Lv 20:8; 21:8).

At other times, however, believers are in fact called to live holy or sanctified lives (e.g., Lv 19:2; 20:7; 1 Thes 4:7; 1 Pt 1:17; 2 Pt 3:11; cf. Mt 5:48). Such passages express the new obedience; in Pieper’s words they depict “the holiness of life which follows upon justification.”56 But such a life always and only flows from holiness already freely given by our sanctifying God and Father.

Jesus’s Promise It’s always good to end with Jesus. The passage from Luke 17 in AC VI describes slaves who work all day for their master out in the fields or with his sheep. Then they come in and, as expected, serve their master his dinner before receiving their own. Jesus asks, Does [the master] have grace (χάριν) for his slave because he did all the things which were ordered? No! Thus also you, when you might do all the things ordered to you, say, “We are unworthy slaves, we have done what we ought to do.” (Lk 17:9‒10)57 No, we do not deserve grace, mercy, or forgiveness. But Jesus, in the way of the gospel, flips things on their head. At the Lord’s Supper, he is the master who serves his servants (Lk 22:27‒30). Indeed, he came not to be served but to serve (Mt 20:28) and tells his disciples, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant” (Mt 20:26). To serve as we have been served, to love one another as he has first loved us (Jn 15:12; cf. 1 Jn 4:11)—this is the new obedience. Thus Jesus identifies his family members as those who both hear and “do” (ποιέω) the Lord’s word (in Lk 6:47; 8:21; also Mt 7:21, 24); similarly in John 10:27, he characterizes his sheep as those who both hear his voice and actively follow him (ἀκολουθοῦσιν).

While we have no warrant to place any obligation on Christ (Lk 17:9‒10), our ascended Lord does speak of his return as a time when he will reward us for all we do in his name. In Matthew 16 Jesus predicts his passion and resurrection (16:21), and then describes the self-denial and forfeiting of life necessary for those who would follow after him (16:24‒26). But he adds this blessed assurance in Matthew 16:27, “For the Son of Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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Man is about to come in the glory of his Father with his angels and then he will give back to each one according to his work” (kai. to,te avpodw,sei e`ka,stw| kata. th.n pra/ xin auvtou). Revelation 22:12 draws the NT toward its close with these words from Jesus, “Look! I am coming suddenly and my reward is with me to give back to each one as is his work” (kai. o` misqo,j mou metV evmou/ avpodou/nai e`ka,stw| w`j to. e;rgon evsti.n auvtou). (See also Mt 25:14‒23; Lk 14:14; 19:12‒19; 2 Cor 6:9‒7; 1 Tm 4:8; Ps 62:12; Dan 12:3.)

It is always appropriate to remind ourselves and our hearers, as AC VI does, that Scripture always teaches that God’s grace, the forgiveness of sin, righteousness, and salvation come “not through works but through faith alone without merit” (AC VI). There is nothing to apologize for here and, fittingly, the Apology says nothing explicitly on AC VI. But, in closing, the Apology to Article 4 confesses this about the new obedience: We teach that rewards have been offered and promised to the works of the faithful. We teach that good works are meritorious—not for the forgiveness of sins, grace, or justification (for we obtain these only by faith) but for other physical and spiritual rewards in this life and in that which is to come, as Paul says (1 Cor 3:8), “Each shall receive his wages according to his labor.” (Ap AC IV 194)58 Or, as Jesus will say, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (Mt 25:21, 23). And that’s how our new obedience turns out in the end.

Endnotes

1 According to the Concordia Triglotta (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1921), 44‒46, the Latin reads, Item docent, quod fides illa debeat bonos fructus parare, et quod operteat bona opera mandata a Deo facere propter voluntatem Dei. Note: citations from the Book of Concord other than AC VI are from The Book of Concord, trans. and ed. Theodore Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981); it is the version used in the Concordia Electronic Theological Library in Logos and by the Concordia Commentary series.

2 Concordia Triglotta, 44.

3 Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 40; Tappert, 31‒32, translates as follows: It is also taught among us that such faith should produce good fruits and good works and that we must do all such good works as God has commanded, but we should do them for God’s sake and not place our trust in them as if thereby to merit favor before God. For we receive forgiveness of sin and righteousness through faith in Christ, as Christ himself says, “So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, ‘We are unworthy servants’ ” (Lk 17:10).

The Fathers also teach thus, for Ambrose says, “It is ordained of God that whoever believes in Christ shall be saved, and he shall have forgiveness of sins, not through works but through faith alone, without merit.”

4 See “The Situation in Galatia” in Andrew Das, Galatians, Concordia Commentary (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2014), 1‒19.

5 The title, “The New Obedience,” is a later insertion. While titles were put in place as early as 1532, they were not included in the 1580 edition of the Book of Concord. Kolb and Wengert, 36, n. 26..

6 J. Simpson and E. Weiner, The Oxford English Dictionaries, 2nd ed., 15 vols (New York: Oxford University, 1989), 10:637. Though largely lost in contemporary usage, the English “obey” stems from the Latin verb “to hear” (audio). According to Simpson and Weiner, 10:637, “obey” is derived from the Latin ob audire, “give ear, hearken, obey.”

7 See Michael Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, Concordia Commentary (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2013), 60, 66‒67, 500‒501; material in this paragraph has also been adapted from the author’s forthcoming commentary on Romans 9–16, to be published by Concordia Publishing House.

8 See Michael Middendorf and Mark Schuler, Called by the Gospel (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2007), 155‒156, 322‒324.

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9 Scott Ashmon, “Preaching Law and Gospel in the Old Testament,” Lutheran Forum 47:4 (Winter

2013): 12; he adds that this aligns with “the motives of the Formula of Concord and Walther” (see the section on “Homiletical Implications”).

10 Ibid., 12.

11 Ibid., 13.

12 This paragraph and the next were developed in relation to Romans 13:8‒10 and are adapted from the author’s forthcoming commentary on Romans 9–16.

13 The title “The Ten Words” is also present in Deuteronomy 10:4 (as well as in Philo, Heir 168; Decalogue, 32; Josephus, Ant. 3.138).

14 Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 200.

15 Horace Hummel, The Word Becoming Flesh (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1979), 75.

16 Ibid., 74; though he continues by affirming an ongoing “second use of the Law” for those who remain “sinners as well as saints.”

17 Lutheran Service Book (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2006), 321‒322.

18 Martin Scharlemann, God’s Word for Today: 1 Peter, God’s Chosen People (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1994), 73; the slogan, “Be what you already are,” is also adopted by Paul Deterding, Colossians, Concordia Commentary (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2003), 138, in commenting on Colossians 3:1‒4, citing also 1 Corinthians 5:7a; Ephesians 5:8. See also Martin Scharlemann, “Exodus Ethics,” Concordia Journal, 1976: 165‒170; he rephrases the overall sentiment later, 169, as “God has already declared you to be His saints; now show it.”

19 Steven Paulson, Lutheran Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2011).

20 C. F. W. Walther, Law and Gospel (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, n.d.), 93.

21 Translation from Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 190.

22 Walther, Law and Gospel, 93, emphasis added. For a discussion of the “old” and “new” man, see Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 459‒462.

23 Romans 11 then contains seven imperatives. Yet three of these occur in the citation from Psalm 69 in Romans 11:10‒11. The other four are addressed primarily to Gentile believers, stating how they ought and ought not to regard their own in-grafting into the people of God over and against Jewish believers and unbelievers (11:18, 20 [2], 22).

24 Translations from Middendorf, Romans 1-8, 443, 486.

25 Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 509‒511. A portion of the omitted section, at the beginning of the second paragraph here, states: “Paul’s exhortations make no sense to an unbeliever; they make no sense to those who are still slaves to sin, even if that slavery is cleverly masquerading itself as slavery to some supposed autonomous self.

The ongoing struggle expressed in 6:12‒23 also betrays the notion that holiness of living is somehow completely attainable, rather than on enduring struggle. Yet they also do not make sense if our struggle against sin and our efforts to live for God are a matter of complete futility and, therefore, not to be energetically pursued. This is an improper misunderstanding of Luther’s ‘sin boldly’ and a simplistic misapplication of simul justus et peccator.”

26 See Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 567‒576. James Dunn, Romans, Word Biblical Commentary 38, 2 vols (Dallas: Word, 1988), 392, calls it a “two-dimensional character.”

27 See Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 441‒442.

28 See Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 49; this paragraph is adapted from the author’s forthcoming commentary on Romans 9–16.

29 Brian Rosner, Paul and the Law (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2013), 124; he adds, “In Romans 13 and Galatians 5 Christ fulfils the law through us.” Unfortunately, this would seem to imply a second or ongoing fulfilling of the law by Christ, something he has finished “once for all” (Rom 6:10; 8:3).

30 A significant portion of this section is abridged and adapted from the author’s forthcoming commentary on Romans 9–16.

31 Paul Raabe and James Voelz, “Why Exhort a Good Tree?,” Concordia Journal 22 (1996): 161, develop their analogy “by comparing two different approaches to physics, that of Newton and that of Einstein. There is an everyday sort of experiential and phenomenological understanding of the universe (= Newton), and there is a deeper, more theoretical, and ontological understanding (= Einstein).”

32 Granted, sixteen of these imperatives occur in Romans 16 in requests to “greet” (ἀσπάσασθε) various members of the Roman house churches. Additionally, all of Romans 1‒11 contains only two hortatory subjunctives. Both are notions Paul vehemently rejects by responding to them with μὴ γένοιτο (Rom 6:1, 15). However, in chapters 12‒16, Paul uses three or four hortatory subjunctives positively to call forth proper conduct in response to God’s mercies (13:12, 13; 14:13; probably 14:19). See Daniel Wallace, Greek Grammar beyond the Basics (Grand

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Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 464‒465.

33 Raabe and Voelz, “Why Exhort a Good Tree?,” 160; they previously, 158‒160, also assert the following: “The first point that needs to be stressed is that Paul’s exhortations are addressed to Christians, to those in Christ who want to and are able to live for God. Second, it is clear that, although the addressees are Christians, they cannot live for God by their own power and abilities. The power comes from the Spirit working through the Gospel. Therefore, Paul’s exhortations are based on Gospel indicative statements. Third, Paul exhorts his hearers to live out their lives practically and experientially in a way that conforms with what they are already by virtue of Baptism. He calls for their new status to be actualized in their daily life. Fourth, Pauline paraenesis exhibits a twofold character of negative warning and positive encouraging. This is necessary because . . . sin remains an everpresent threat.”

34 Thomas Schreiner, Romans, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, vol. 6 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998), 694; C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, International Critical Commentary, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 679, states this similarly by utilizing the metaphor of seeing both the forest and the trees. “We most certainly need the summary to save us from missing the wood for the trees and from understanding the particular commandments in a rigid, literalistic, unimaginative, pedantic, or loveless way. We are equally in need of the particular commandments, into which the law breaks down the general obligation to love, to save us from resting content with vague, and often hypocritical sentiments.”

35 Article VII of the Augsburg Confession states, “For it is sufficient for the true unity of the Christian church that the Gospel be preached in conformity with a pure understanding of it and that the sacraments be administered in accordance with the divine Word. 3 It is not necessary for the true unity of the Christian church that ceremonies, instituted by men, should be observed uniformly in all places. 4 It is as Paul says in Eph. 4:4, 5, ‘There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism.’”

36 Dunn, Romans, 799; later, 820, he properly states that Paul views different convictions regarding clean and unclean foods “not as a boundary dividing one group from another and preventing communion, but as an issue affecting the expression of liberty within a community which embraces diverse viewpoints.”

37 For a similar us of imperatives in Paul’s other letters, see the statistics under “Homiletical Implications;” see also Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 441‒442, 484‒485.

38 David Schmitt, “Freedom of Form,” Concordia Journal 25 (1999): 42.

39 Ibid., 46; see 45‒50.

40 Ibid., 43.

41 Ashmon, “Preaching Law and Gospel in the Old Testament,” 14; Schmitt, “Freedom of Form,” 50, further contends, “Using a variety of forms for a variety of hearers, pastors preach from a variety of texts and avoid boring their hearers or misinterpreting the texts with a repetitive ‘Law then Gospel’ form.”

42 Walther, Law and Gospel, 93.

43 If one takes the verbal forms in the Ten Words/Commandments as imperatives and prohibitions, their rhetorical force is intended to function in much the same way as the imperatives Paul typically utilizes in the latter portion of his letters (Ex 20; Dt 5; see “The New Obedience in the Old Testament”).

44 These statistics were developed for and have been adapted from the author’s forthcoming commentary on Romans 9–16.

45 The title is from the song by Carolina Sandell Berg, Lutheran Service Book, 725.

46 For example, see Middendorf and Schuler, Called by the Gospel, 369‒370; Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 644‒646. Jesus also contrasts God’s perfect fathering (e.g., Mt 5:44‒48; Heb 12:5‒11) with the imperfect parenting of our earthly fathers (Lk 11:12‒13).

47 Note these phrases: εἰς οἰκοδομὴν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστου (Eph 4:12), εἰς ἄνδρα τέλειον (Eph 4:13), ἵνα μηκέτι ὦμεν νήπιοι (Eph 4:14), αὐξήσωμεν εἰς αὐτὸν (Eph 4:15), τὴν αὔξησιν τοῦ σώματος . . . εἰς οἰκοδομὴν (Eph 4:16).

48 The exasperation expressed in Romans 7:14‒25 is not present in an unbeliever or characteristic of a “weak” Christian, as so often asserted, but signals the maturity evident in the Apostle himself; see Middendorf, The “I” in the Storm (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1997), 175‒84; 201‒25; also Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 582‒583, 590‒597.

49 Gerhard Forde, “The Lutheran View” in Christian Spirituality: Five Views of Sanctification, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1988), 13‒32; cf. also Adolf Koberle, The Quest for Holiness (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1964); Senkbeil, Sanctification: Christ in Action (Milwaukee: Northwestern, 1989).

50 Forde, “The Lutheran View,” 30.

51 Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, New International Commentary on the New Testament

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(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 749‒750; but this does not warrant speaking, as Moo does on page 750, about

“the obedience that the gospel demands.” The language of Paul and the Confessions serve us better.

52 See also Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 510‒11.

53 Raabe and Voelz, “Why Exhort a Good Tree?,” 160.

54 Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 4 vols (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1950‒1953), 3:3, 4, and 5 respectively.

55 Forde, “The Lutheran View,” 13.

56 Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 3:4.

57 The Greek reads, μὴ ἔχει χάριν τῷ δούλῳ ὅτι ἐποίησεν τὰ διαταχθέντα; οὕτως καὶ ὑμεῖς, ὅταν ποιήσητε πάντα τὰ διαταχθέντα ὑμῖν, λέγετε ὅτι δοῦλοι ἀχρεῖοί ἐσμεν, ὃ ὠφείλομεν ποιῆσαι πεποιήκαμεν (Lk 17:9‒10).

58 The notion of rewards for works done in faith is also taught in Matthew 5:12; 25:14-23; Luke 6:23, 25; 14:14; 19:12-19; 1 Corinthians 3:8; 2 Corinthians 9:6-7; 1 Timothy 4:8; Daniel 12:3. See Middendorf, Romans 1‒8, 163‒165; also Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 3:52, who similarly affirms, “Scripture teaches that the good works of Christians receive a reward (1 Cor. 3:8), yea, a very great reward (misqo.j polu,j—Mt 5:12; Lk 6:23, 25)” (see also 3:552‒553); and Heinrich Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 3rd ed., trans. Charles Hay and Henry Jacobs (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1889), 498‒499. Article VI of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession cites Romans 2:6 among a number of other passages (e.g. Jn 5:29; Mt 25:35) and concludes, “Therefore, when eternal life is granted to works, it is granted to the justified. None can do good works except the justified, who are led by the Spirit of Christ” (Ap VI 372). The Kolb/Wengert edition of the Book of Concord, 171, translates Ap AC IV 194 as: “Moreover, we concede that works are truly meritorious, but not for the forgiveness of sins or justification. For they are not pleasing to [God] except in those who are justified on account of faith. Nor are they worthy of eternal life. . . . Works are meritorious for other bodily and spiritual rewards, which are bestowed both in this life and in the life to come. . . . Since therefore works constitute a kind of fulfillment of the law, they are rightly said to be meritorious, and it is rightly said that a reward is owed them. And these rewards produce degrees of return, according to that passage in Paul [1 Cor 3:8], ‘Each will receive wages according to the labor of each.’ These degrees are rewards for works and afflictions.”

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Pietism on the American Landscape

Martin E. Conkling

Introduction The history of the movement called Pietism provides more proof that life as the church, while not always good, is always interesting. Consider a group of Lutheran Christians that consciously attempts to honor Article VI of the Augsburg Confession, which states, “It is also taught that such faith should yield good fruit and good works and that a person must do such good works as God has commanded for God’s sake.”

They were also aware of the words of Luther in the introduction to his Commentary on Romans. Extolling faith, Luther asserts, “O it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing this faith. It is impossible for it not to be doing good works incessantly.”1 Additionally, in the Smalcald Articles, Luther addresses the relation between saving faith and good works, “If good works do not follow then faith is false and not true.”2 These words inspired those we today call Pietists and the irony here is: if one is labelled a Pietist, it is not considered a compliment.

This paper seeks to examine the Pietist movement in light of scholarship performed within the last generation. Scholars in both America and Germany in recent years have shed new light on this spiritual movement. The task includes an examination both of the religious and social factors giving rise to Pietism, the movement in Europe, and then Pietism as it manifested itself in America and asserted itself as the most common form of Lutheran theology and practice from colonial times until the decade before the Civil War. The movement left its mark in many areas, and leaves historians to answer that most difficult question, “What does this mean?”

For example, writing in the 1960s, in an account many of us accessed in seminary training, Bergt Hägglund presents us with a movement that replaced an orthodoxy that had proceeded on the basis of objective reality and ground the certainty of theological knowledge on the Scriptural principle. . . . Pietism, on the other hand, proceeded on the ground of experience; it looked upon the experience of the individual as being fundamental to religious knowledge or insight. Pietistic theological exposition came to deal primarily with empirical religious events, just as it was assumed that theological knowlMarty Conkling recently retired as professor of religion at Concordia College, Bronxville. This paper was delivered at the LCMS Theologians’ Conference on Article VI of the Augsburg Confession at Concordia University, St. Paul, Minnesota in May 2014.

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edge could not be acquired apart from the experience of regeneration (the new birth). . . . Pietism bore within itself tendencies which came into full bloom in the thought world of the Enlightenment, in the secular area as well as in the theological sphere.3 August R. Sueflow extended a similar assessment: Pietism broke the hold of orthodoxy, but in so doing left the intellectual field in Germany and Scandinavia open to the inroads of English Deism and French skepticism. The resulting Enlightenment had the overall effect of promoting among intellectuals both a critical-literary approach to Scripture and the view that biblical truths are essentially the same as those of natural religion and morality.4 More recently, historian Paul Kuennig maintains in a work primarily addressing the history of American Pietism, that since American Pietism did not prevail on the American landscape and was overwhelmed by more orthodox Lutheranism the histories produced by the winners did not fail to do what winners typically do: they write the histories; they assess the defeated negatively.

One result of the defeat of American Lutheran Pietism was predictable, for losers rarely fare well in the eyes of history. Pietism has remained one of the “most misunderstood and maligned movements within the Church of the Reformation,” especially North America. It became the whipping boy, upon which Lutheran theologians and historians of every persuasion heaped uninhibited diatribes. It was occasionally paid the compliment of having contributed a warmth and feeling, depth of devotion and charitable concern to the Lutheran heritage.5 And if we excavate through these heaped diatribes, Kuenning asserts, we discover that Pietism was accused of having been not only anticonfessional, but antiintellectual, antisacramental, legalistic, subjective, and otherworldly. In a word it was condemned as an aberration from authentic Lutheranism and as a deviation from historic Lutheran traditions. Obviously this view was exaggerated, and it is gradually being questioned, reexamined, and reevaluated.6 He then continues with a positive assessment: “Other scholars have [more recently] discovered in what has been called the classic form of German Pietism a Lutheranism that was nonseparatist, churchly, and reforming in nature.”7 An assessment of the movement and the reaction against Lutheran orthodoxy would profit by the now-classic appraisal of doctrine provided by George Lindbeck.

Though Pietism developed over the centuries, it is fair to classify it throughout with Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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Lindbeck’s term, “experiential-expressive,” to signify a religion that considers “doctrines to be noninformative and nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, or existential orientations.”8 Though Lindbeck identifies this attitude as conducive to the kind of Christianity promoted by Friedrich Schleiermacher, a theology appearing long after the advent of Pietism nevertheless, Pietism has been identified by historians as a precursor to this brand of modern liberal theology.9

Lutheran Origins German historian Martin Schmidt defines Pietism [in Europe] as “the far-reaching spiritual movement of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which set for itself the goal of a new Reformation because the first Reformation had become stuck in the Old Protestant Orthodoxy, in the institutional and dogmatic.”10 In this regard, Lindbeck again proves useful by presenting us with a category to describe this kind of traditional orthodoxy, “with cognitive or informational meaningfulness” where doctrines “function as informative propositions or truth claims about objective realities.”11 Whatever its deviations from Lutheranism, it certainly emerged from Lutheranism despite antecedents extending back to Middle Ages mysticism and the influence of Reformed Protestant groups. We can see that Pietism in its vital concerns was inconceivable without Luther in three respects: the Bible, personal faith, and the activity of faith in love.

The Pietist Bible was of course Luther’s translation that he put into the hands of the German people. They emphasized, as had Luther, that the Bible was what made theology, theology.

The Pietist emphasis upon personal faith as a living faith reflects Luther’s saying, “What help is it to you that God is God if he is not God to you?”12 Pietists promoted education and schools, just as Luther exhorted the German princes to undertake, and also established orphanages; their passion for missions, both domestic and foreign, was also in agreement with Luther’s emphasis on the unity of faith and love.13 Additionally, three features belong to a narrow definition of Pietism. The first is religious edification in small circles known as collegia pietatis or conventicles, regarded by the participants as more important than formal worship and the teaching of church doctrine. Along with the individual emphasis, membership in the conventicle was essential. The members supported on another and contrasted themselves with the world and “children of the world.” Sometimes when individual Pietists doubted their salvation they turned for encouragement to those in their conventicle whom they addressed as “brothers.”14 Along with its emphasis on individual renewal or rebirth, it surprisingly remained a clergy-dominated movement. The clerical elements offered the accepted understanding of both church history and the Bible. Later a type of naïve Biblicism emerged where the Bible was considered the source of guidance for every area of life.

This movement is usually described as an affective religion, calling for a different tone in religious discourse and practice. Instead of polemical theology it called for a 222

living faith. While not dismissing doctrines such as the Lutheran Confessions, practical, it nevertheless emphasized the ethical and affective in seeking union with Christ. This effort was not confined to the individual but sought manifestation in social reforms.

While inheriting some aspects from earlier Christian movements such as moral rigorism, mysticism, and creation of ascetic communities, it appeared in the seventeenth century after a period of Christian bloodshed in the Thirty Years War on continental Europe and in religious and political strife in Britain. These struggles were accompanied by frustration, uncertainty, and a sense of futility.15 Rather than a rejection of Lutheran symbols from the start, it is likely more accurate to say that the movement sought a different emphasis and over time, the symbols had little meaning for them.

German Beginnings We can trace the development of this movement by the leaders who stepped forward to bring the church to a new desired holiness. They are initially all, of course, Germans. Johann Arndt became the spiritual inspiration for those who followed; Philip Jakob Spener provided the form for commonly accepted practices and goals; August Hermann Francke founded many of the institutions typical of later Pietism, and then the exegetical scholar, Johann Albrecht Bengel.

Arndt It is commonly recognized that the roots of Lutheran Pietism lie with Johann Arndt (1555‒1621), and especially with his published work, Vier Bücher von wahren Christentum or True Christianity, appearing in the spring of 1606. Speaking of Arndt, Heiko Oberman maintains that far from rejecting Luther and the Confessions found in the Book of Concord, Arndt discerned behind the theological conclusions of Luther the function of true doctrine as the perimeter around the experience of penance and salvation; in short, he brought to light again the spontaneity of Christian service as the true fruit of a living faith. Arndt is entitled to the honor of being the first “Luther scholar” to see, underscore, and apply Luther’s vision that justification by faith alone does not preclude but, to the contrary, unleashes good works in the terms of the whole Christian, his actions in the Church and the world.16 And though they acknowledged Luther as deserving first place, Pietists recognized an historical progression, “At the time of [Jan] Hus in the year 1415 the tree of life took root; at the time of Luther in 1517, this tree started to flower; in the year 1618 the harvesters went out to gather in its fruits.”17 This spiritual forebear of Pietism had been a student of Philip Melanchthon and was an admired colleague of such luminaries of the Orthodox period of European Lutheranism as John Gerhard (1582‒1637), Johann V. Andreae (1586‒1656), George Calixtus (1586‒1656), and Paul Gerhardt (1607‒1676).18 Arndt’s True Christianity became immediately popular, and outside of the Bible and the Small Catechism, no book Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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widely read by Lutherans. He summed up his purpose as an effort to “lead was more Christians away from a dead . . . to a living faith, and to wean [them] from a bare intellectual understanding to the real practice of faith and godliness.”19 Throughout, True Christianity emphasizes that love for Christ can only be expressed in tangible love for one’s neighbor. Thus a new chapter on practical piety entered the Lutheran tradition. “Where one does not follow Christ in his life through faith, there is neither faith nor Christ.”20 Deploring doctrinal, internecine polemics dominating much of the discourse following Luther’s death, Arndt advocated a true witness to Christianity in service to one’s neighbor. Various orthodox theologians opposed him for placing too much emphasis on sanctification. He defended himself, successfully, through his knowledge of Luther and his teaching. He pointed to numerous passages of Luther’s writings to support his own writings. He especially referred to the Smalcald Articles where Luther wrote “if good works do not follow [justifying grace], our faith is false and not true” (Article 13).

Johann Valentin Andreae attributed to him the honor of being the “first Luther scholar [to] apply Luther’s vision that justification by faith alone does not preclude, but to the contrary, unleashes good works.”21 His tone is clearly moralistic. He emphasizes that Christ has set an example and we should follow in his footsteps (1 Pt 2:21).

God has given us his beloved Son as a prophet, doctor, and teacher. . . .

The Son of God fulfilled his teaching capacity not only with words but also with actions and with the beautiful examples of his most holy life as was fitting for a righteous teacher. Saint Luke speaks of this in Acts 1:1, “In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day he was taken up.” In this verse, the evangelist puts the word “do” before the word “teach” to point out that doing and teaching belong together. Indeed a perfect teacher must first do and then teach. Thus, Christ’s life is the true teaching and the true Book of Life.22

Spener If Arndt was the inspiration, then Philip Jakob Spener (1635‒1705) earned the title “Father of Pietism.” He indeed assumed the role of its foremost theologian, and accordingly became the most influential figure in the rise of Pietism and its early development. In fact historian Martin Schmidt said Spener “remains only a little behind Martin Luther himself.”23 Spener grew up in Alsace where Lutheran faith had given way to Pietism. In his father’s library were well-worn copies of True Christianity and the Reformed Praxis Pietatis. He studied Hebrew in Basel and French in Geneva. He studied at Tübingen and completed doctoral studies at Strasbourg in 1663. He became senior pastor in Frankfurt am Main in 1666. There he made an immediate impact through his preaching and his use of catechesis as an aid to spiritual life and learning.

While in Basel, Spener imbibed the piety of Jean de Labadie (1610‒1674).

Labadie converted from Catholicism to the Reformed faith in 1652 and preached in various churches in France, the United Provinces, and Switzerland. In The Reform of the 224

Church through the Pastorate (1667), Labadie sought a better trained pastorate and catechized laity, and took such measures as forming conventicles in his church. He marked a confluence of the various traditions in his life, from Jansenism to Quakerism, into a form more easily identified as Pietism. Labadie died a year before Spener’s seminal work, Pia Desideria (Holy Desires), was published in Frankfurt am Main in 1675.

Next Spener introduced the collegia pietatis, or conventicles, often described as ecclesiola in ecclesia. Now Lutheran Pietism took form. Spener’s contributions to Pietism include: • Expanding the reading of the whole Bible, not just the pericopes, and not just by pastors, but by lay people in private meetings.

• A renewed emphasis on the priesthood of believers and their responsibilities including Bible study, teaching, consoling, and leading a holy life.

• Exhortation to move people from a mere knowledge of doctrine to the pious praxis of a living faith, by both laity and clergy.

• Establishment of true doctrine by repentance and a holy life and not by controversy and confessional polemics.

• And sermons that emphasized rhetoric less, as he described it, and edification more.

For as Spener wrote: Let us remember that in the last judgment we shall not be asked how learned we were and whether we displayed our learning before the world; to what extent we enjoyed the favor of men and knew how to keep it; with what honors we were exalted and how great a reputation in the world we left behind us; or how many treasures of earthly goods we amassed for our children and thereby drew a curse on ourselves. Instead, we shall be asked how faithfully and with how childlike a heart we sought to further the kingdom of God; with how pure a godly teaching and how worthy an example we tried to edify our hearers amid the scorn of the world, denial of self, taking up the cross, and imitation of our Savior.24 Spener’s reforms in catechesis, confirmation and church discipline were accepted in many German cities but also caused much controversy. Because of this hostility from orthodox theologians who accused him of enthusiasm (Schwärmerei) and separatism, he left Frankfurt. He accepted a call as court chaplain in Saxony in 1686 and left in 1691 after attacking the morals—probably excessive drinking—of the Elector. He accepted a call to St. Nicholas Church in Berlin where the he spent his last years in favor with Friedrich I of Prussia. One other achievement was to bring influence to bear in order to establish the University of Halle as a Pietist center.25

Francke August Herrmann Francke (1663‒1727) lent institutional stability to the new movement, and under his leadership at the University of Halle, Pietism reached its Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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highest achievements in Germany. Francke excelled at languages and went to Leipzig in 1684 to teach Hebrew. In reflecting on John 20:31, “But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name,” he sought to distinguish between a true living faith and one born only of authority and custom. An existential crisis resulted and he felt himself reborn.

“He had personally experienced the central point of all Pietist thinking and aspiration—rebirth.”26 At this point he cultivated a close, spiritual friendship with Spener who was instrumental in Francke’s move to Halle in 1691. Francke became professor of oriental languages and then professor of theology in 1696. In 1695 Francke invited some beggar children into his home and began teaching them with regular periods of instruction. (Many of the social and educational institutions promoted by Luther and other reformers had broken down in the course of the Thirty Years War that ravaged much of Germany.)

Pietism sought in its origins an alternative to the polemical nature of theological discourse, orthodoxy’s scholastic method using Aristotolian concepts and methods of argument, and the resulting vast Summae of men like Johann Gerhard’s Loci Theologici (1610‒1621) running to nine volumes and culminating in David Holzasius’s Examen theologium (1707). And against the backdrop of failed social institutions, we also find broader social needs for which Pietism sought to provide. The economy of German lands had been wrecked; educational institutions had not recovered in many places.

Many churches and schools had been destroyed; many left standing had no leaders. The state of care for the sick and poor was not the vision that Luther had pictured when he said no one should have to beg in a Christian land. The bureaucracy of the church appeared remote from most people; orthodox pastors used scholastic arguments distant from the concerns of the majority. Addressing these matters, Francke established at Halle what are generally known as the “Francke Institutions.”27 Within a few years of Francke taking in these beggar children, a number of institutions had sprung up at Halle, including its famous orphanage and several preparatory schools with over 2200 children enrolled at the time of Francke’s death. Another 250 indigent children received a free daily meal. These initiatives were funded almost completely with private donations. (Later, several business enterprises helped support these initiatives.) The pioneer achievement of the orphanage served as a model for similar institutions around the world. With Francke, Pietism’s influence over the entire German church reached a high point and began a gradual decline only after his death.28

A Biblical Hermeneutic For all Pietist leaders, the programmatic call was for biblical theology as the means of growth and renewal in place of dogmatic scholastic theology. In Pietism’s teaching, the Bible was the word of God, but ironically, their teaching shook and loosened “Luther’s bond between Scripture and the Holy Spirit.” The Scriptures endured among the Pietists to the end as psychologizing and historicizing personal edification and guidance to the validation of rebirth.29 Francke’s teaching, commonly followed 226

throughout these circles, was the distinction between the kernel and the husk. Only a regenerate person could understand the truth of the Bible; the unregenerate could grasp the message superficially but could not attain it spiritually.

Bible study played an important role both academically and practically. Pietism is credited with providing significant studies on the history, grammar, and languages of the Bible. They pursued studies in philology and produced new translations from critical study of Greek texts of the New Testament.

One of the most significant of these scholars was Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687‒1752), a leader in Pietism in Württemberg Pietism. He produced a scholarly Greek New Testament (1734) and an influential book of biblical annotations, Gnomon Novi Tesamenti (1742) where he emphasized the total application of the person to the text and the text to the person (“Te totum applica ad textum; rem totam applica ad te”).

Thus the reading and encounter with God form a circle. As Martin Brecht observed, “Faith believes the authority of Scripture and the reality of God, and experience confirms faith.”30 Like other Pietists, Bengel emphasized the exposition of Scripture in contrast to orthodoxy’s stress on systematic theology. Through his exegesis of passages such as 2 Thessalonians 2:8 and Revelation 18‒20 he lent an exegetical basis to the chiliastic hopes of Spener. Spener in his Pia Desideria was very concerned about the hope and the possibility of earthly renovation. “If we consult the Holy Scriptures we can have no doubt that God promised his church here on earth a better state than this.”31 Spener, Bengel, and others believed that God would use humanity to introduce the millennium that had not already arrived. Today we label this kind of theology postmillennialism.

Bengel thought that one directly encountered God in something resembling a mystical union through his word in the Bible. Yet Scripture was the mediated means of encounter with God and also the place where God spoke directly into the most profound recesses of the heart. Thus, emerging from this view of the role of Scripture came a new piety: the direct relationship of the heart to the words of the Bible. In this scheme, prayer, exegesis, and meditation merge.

Bengel’s mysticism led to an interpretation of the book of Revelation that identified the end of the world as taking place in 1836. Thus Bengel carried Spener’s eschatology further by predicting the precise time when the millennium would arrive. Bengel’s view of the book of Revelation confined its descriptions to the future.

Expectations were optimistic since God would bring the millennium as promised, and he would use human hands to do it. Traditional “last things” in Lutheran theology were left in the background with little attention.

Transplanted to America: Invasive Species or Exotic Growth?

The fate of Pietism in America in the nineteenth century, rejected by more orthodox Lutheran bodies such as the Missourians, the Buffalo Lutherans, and the synods we identify with the orthodox Henkels, often overshadows its long history on this continent. In the eyes of some historians, Pietism remains one of the “most misunderstood and maligned movements within the Church of the Reformation.”32 Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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The origins of Pietism in the New World can be located in Halle where

Lutheran leaders received their education and theological orientation. The first Lutheran pastor ordained in the colonies, Justus Flackner, trained under Francke and served in the Philadelphia area for two decades before his death in 1723. Halle-trained pastors, Martin Bolzius and Israel Christian Gronau came with Salzburg and Palatinate refugees to New Ebenezer, Georgia in 1734. Four years later they built an orphanage there, the first Protestant institution of its kind in North America, completed even before the settlers built their first church. But the man most responsible for diffusing Pietism as the principle Lutheran practice in North America was Henry M. Muhlenberg (1711‒1787).

Muhlenberg Muhlenberg’s considerable talents and achievements established him as the founder and organizer of the Lutheran Church in North America. As Henry E. Jacobs maintained, “the history of [the Lutheran Church in America] from his landing in 1742 to his death . . . is scarcely more than his biography.”33 Some historians have portrayed him as an amalgamation of orthodoxy and Pietism. Born in Einbeck in Hannover, he attended the University of Göttingen where he was influenced by a Pietist professor and several students who had studied at Halle. He underwent a gradual conversion experience according to the Pietist understanding of rebirth. While at Göttingen he helped to establish a school for poor children. In 1738 he was at Halle studying under Gotthilf Francke, son of Herman.

While there he instructed children in the orphan school, taught languages in the seminary, and, in the businesses he established there, learned about medicine and pharmaceuticals. He accepted a call to a congregation near Herrnhut, Saxony but with no connection to Count von Zinzendorf’s restored Church of the United Brethren. While there he defended Pietist practices including the pietatis collegia, upheld the doctrine of sanctification as the fruit of justification, and embraced the importance of awakening or rebirth. He supported the proper call of pastors to churches, avoiding the charge of separatism. Yet he made it clear he was more concerned about teaching the spirit rather than the letter of the symbols of the church.34 In 1741 he received a call from Francke to pastor several churches in Pennsylvania. Mission work was always an emphasis of the Pietist movement, and Muhlenberg was no exception. These congregations had requested a pastor for years from Halle, but the matter became urgent when Moravians under Count Zinzendorf had made serious inroads among American Lutherans. Muhlenberg did not hesitate to seek out Zinzendorf when he arrived and confronted him in a stormy session. Two days later the Moravian leader departed for London.

In August 1748 came the climax of Muhlenberg’s early labors. When he ordained a minister, coinciding with the consecration of Saint Michael’s Church in Philadelphia, he brought together six Swedish and German pastors and twenty-four lay delegates. This gathering marks the beginning of the Pennsylvania Ministerium, “the most important single event in American Lutheran History.”35 His great formative 228

actions came not a moment too soon. The main lines of Lutheran development were manifest just as the rate of immigration increased sharply. Twelve thousand Germans landed in Philadelphia in 1749 alone. By 1771 there were eighty-one congregations in Pennsylvania and adjacent colonies. Thirty more existed in other American regions. At this juncture the idea of a purely missionary effort from Europe found itself replaced with “an American church with an American ministry and an American future.”36 A practical way to establish Lutheran identity remained with liturgy and allegiance to the Augsburg Confession, both matters Pietism did not renounce. Though embracing both of these, Muhlenberg remained opposed to anyone who embraced correct doctrine at the expense of Christian conduct. The “Unaltered Augsburg Confession” did not excuse one from an unaltered life. A favorite motto was ubi vita fulgur, ubi doctrina tonitru (“true doctrine is proclaimed where godly life is manifest”).

His evangelical concerns transcended denominational and doctrinal differences. On one occasion he invited George Whitfield to preach in his Philadelphia church and did not hesitate to preach in the pulpits of Reformed and Episcopal congregations. His preaching accented repentance and conversion. “He embraced revivalism but insisted it be kept in a framework of liturgy. His synthesis of expressed emotion and liturgical order is recognized as one of his great achievements.”37

Schmucker The most famous or notorious Pietist, depending on one’s point of view, was Samuel Simon Schmucker (1799‒1873). The son of a Pietist minister, he was present at the organization of the General Synod in Hagerstown, Maryland on October 22, 1820.

He was then a young pastor, and though not a voting delegate, he was to assume the leading role in its polity, organization, and confessional position for nearly forty years.

He served as president of the organization from 1828 until 1845. He is recognized in this period as “the most capable and qualified leader of the majority of Lutherans in the United States. Under his leadership, promoting the Spener-Francke style of Pietism, the movement reached its pinnacle of power and influence.38 Graduating from the new Princeton Presbyterian Seminary in 1820, he claimed three pia desideria of his own: an English translation of an important Lutheran dogmatic work, a Lutheran seminary, and a Lutheran college. Within ten years these desires had become realities.

His translation, Biblical Theology of Storr and Flatt, was published in Andover in 1826. He was the prime mover of overtures to the General Synod for a seminary to be founded under its auspices; in 1826 the Gettysburg Seminary was founded and Schmucker became the first professor there, taking an oath under the organization’s constitution that he had largely written, affirming the Augsburg Confession and the Small Catechism as “summary and just exhibitions of the fundamental doctrines of the Word of God,” and promising to “vindicate and inculcate these doctrines in opposition to all errorists.”39 These words may surprise those who know about the Definite Platform he later proposed.40 So within fifty years of the Declaration of Independence, Lutherans had established their second seminary in America. Finally, recognizing the Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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better preparation of students planning to attend the Gettysburg institution, need for he established a small classical school that later became Pennsylvania College, and today is known as Gettysburg College. It was chiefly through his teaching at this college that the traditions of German Pietism were adapted to the cultural and political environment of the United States.

Another development was his book Elements of a Popular Theology (1834) in which he denounced slavery, basing his position primarily on Acts 17:26, that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth,” as well as the Golden Rule. Further, he quoted AC XVI stating that Christians are to “yield obedience to civil officers and laws of the land, unless they should command something sinful.” From this he held that the Augsburg Confession upheld the justice of revolution. So, long after the American Revolution, an act justified in the AC, he pointed out that slavery was a violation of the same basic human rights that were the Spirit of ’76. His activism was confined largely to the African colonization movement that sought to return former slaves to the African coast. His belief that slavery’s days were numbered prevented him from supporting more radical groups calling for immediate abolition.

The Frankean Synod This sentiment found substantial support in the Frankean Synod of New York, formed in May 1837 by twenty-one congregations with a total of 1650 communicants, in the Western District of the New York Ministerium. These congregations had left the Hartwick Synod to pursue more aggressively the new methods of popular revivals, home missions, and moral reforms such as temperance and Sabbath observances. Also the Hartwick Synod did not provide pastors at a satisfactory rate and the founders were disenchanted with the slow, time-consuming education required for the pastoral ministry.

One officer of the Hartwick Synod, Philip Wieting, a pastor in Sharon, Schoharie County, NY, became a primary of those who broke away from the Hartwick Synod in order to form the Frankean Synod. While still at the Hartwick seminary, Wieting “was converted” by Charles G. Finney.

A graduate of the Hartwick seminary, [Wieting] later dismissed the seven years he spent there as a “waste of time.”41 Another leader of the Synod identified a need “‘to call and induct into the ministry pious men, endowed with talents, sound in faith and alive to work, willing and ready to supply the destitute, and save souls.’ This task overshadowed the importance of a well-educated clergy.”42 The new synod’s constitution specifically forbade any slave holder, or one “who trafficked in human beings, or who advocated the system of slavery as it existed in the United States to a seat in its conventions as a delegate.” The first convention passed four resolutions labeling slavery an outrage and a sin. With these actions in regard to slavery, the Frankean Synod gained immediate censure of the General Synod and, among many historians of succeeding generations, the reputation of being radical.43 230

The subscription of this new synod to the Augsburg Confession was quatenus. At its second convention, the Synod’s first president, John D. Lawyer, “asserted that their ‘declaration of faith contains doctrines plainly revealed in the Bible, and so far as the Augsburg Confession agrees with the Bible, so far it agrees with our declaration.’”44 It is worth noting that the General Synod simultaneously condemned the Frankean Synod for its abolitionism and condemned the Tennesee Synod for its quia subscription to the Augsburg Confession.

In 1842 the Frankeans issued a Fraternal Appeal to all other Lutheran Synods.

There was little response. The Maryland Synod advised them that abolition was not appropriate synodical business to which the Frankeans replied how then could temperance be considered the business of the Maryland Synod since it had already advocated that issue. In 1844 the Synod dissolved altar and pulpit fellowship with any Lutherans whose views on slavery did not match their own. By this time only three other synods, the Pittsburg, Allegheny, and East Ohio Synods, had denounced slavery.45 The Dred Scott decision of 1857 earned the Synod’s official condemnation of the US Supreme Court. The Eilsen Synod had condemned slavery in 1850. The Wittenberg Synod followed suit in 1852. The Synod of Northern Indiana denounced slavery along with the evil of alcohol in 1859.

The growth of the Frankean Synod was remarkable. “Beginning in 1837 with twenty-one congregations and 1,650 communicant members, by 1851 it would be able to count fifty congregations with a total of 3,213 members. It had extended the borders of its Synod beyond the borders of the ‘Burned-over District’ of western New York into regions as far west as Illinois and Wisconsin, and it had some supervised parishes in Canada. In 1864 with the absence of its members from the South, the Frankean Synod became a member of the General Synod.”46

The Definite Platform A renewed confessionalism in Europe resulted in many Lutheran immigrants who subscribed to the Augsburg Confession and even to all the Lutheran symbols. Also in America, without the influence of immigration, there was a sharpening of denominational distinctions. Churches attempted to find a unique sense of identity to distinguish it from others. Sometimes this effort grew into an assertive spirit that wanted doctrinal distinction at the expense of the more liberal tendency for widespread agreement on certain fundamental principles.

Schmucker had always sought to define confessional allegiance in broad terms, believing that Protestants could agree on the fundamental doctrines; the flaw in this approach was determining just what constituted a fundamental doctrine. Schmucker believed that the Augsburg Confession was substantially correct. He was challenged by his more conservative colleagues to define what “substantially” actually meant. In 1850 Charles Porterfield Kraut delivered the opening sermon for the Convention of the General Synod. He had already identified the Lutheran teaching on the sacrament of the altar in his book, The Conservative Reformation, as the doctrine that was “the most fundamental of all fundamentals.” Now in his sermon he appealed to the General Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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Synod to make the Synod’s doctrinal position with regard to the Augsburg Confession more firm. He maintained that to say that the Confession was “substantially” correct, as Schmucker had, was to imply that it contained doctrines that were not correct. In light of this a committee was formed, with Schmucker as the chair, to frame “a clear and concise view of the doctrines and practices of the American Lutheran Church.”47 The committee report reflecting the views of Schmucker’s American Lutheran party was rejected by the convention.

In an article published in October 1850 in the Evangelical Review, Schmucker sought to answer the question of confessional subscription with a procedure that called for pastors to “enumerate the doctrines . . . which we regard as fundamental.”48 His opponents such as Krauth and especially Charles F. Schaeffer rejected the proposal for agreement on fundamental doctrines as “an impossible dream.”

In 1853 Schaeffer brought a proposal to the Pennsylvania Ministerium that all clergy subscribe to all confessional symbols. The Convention rejected his proposal but did require subscription to the Augsburg Confession, a move that reflected a growing orthodoxy in their ranks since their constitution did not mention the Augsburg Confession until the middle of the century. That same convention voted to rejoin the General Synod which they had left thirty years before. Their deliberations had great import for the General Synod and for Schmucker. Pennsylvania was the oldest ministerium and by far the largest of all district groups, constituting about one-third of all clergy and nearly half of the entire General Synod membership. Clearly things were not moving in Schmucker’s direction. Schmucker published an irenic commentary on the Augsburg Confession, Lutheran Manual on Scriptural Principles. There he sought to appease the growing severity of his critics, agreeing with the Symbol only reserving a primary allegiance to Scripture. His critics became even more passionate in their criticism of this defense of a quatenus subscription.

These attacks provoked a response. In the summer of 1858, Schmucker, assisted

by Samuel Sprecher and Benjamin Kurtz, published a forty-two page document that he sent to all the pastors of the General Synod. Its title, The American Recension of the Augsburg Confession, was later known as the Definite Synodical Platform. Not since the days of Philip Melanchthon, who considered the document a private possession, had anyone so tampered with the text of the Confession. Five errors in the Confession were identified: 1. The approval of the ceremonies of the mass.

2. Private confession and absolution.

3. Denial of divine obligation on the Sabbath.

4. Baptismal regeneration.

5. The real presence of the body and blood of the Savior in the Eucharist.

Not only was his proposal received with derision, but a further negative response was elicited when he proposed that all pastors consent to the recension or be denied membership in the Synod. Further it was mailed out without a signature, a measure that added to the suspicion surrounding Schmucker. Schmucker later owned up as 232

author, but only three small synods in Ohio, influenced by Sprecher, agreed with it.

The rest rejected it as a reckless attempt to change the doctrine of the General Synod.

Their unqualified disapproval, according to historian Abdel Ross Wentz, marked the end of “American Lutheranism,” and revealed the conservatism and orthodoxy that characterized many Lutherans in the nation and specifically the General Synod at that period.49 On July 1, 1863, forces of the Confederacy overran Federal Army positions around Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary where the well-known Pietist president, Samuel Schmucker, resided. He had been responsible for training over five hundred Lutheran pastors who had been taught that slavery was a moral evil. Therefore the Southerners knew his reputation as an abolitionist. Schmucker’s house was sacked and his library destroyed. His immediate departure from town might have been the only move that saved his life. During the battle, federal artillery from Cemetery Ridge further damaged the house, leading one to wonder in retrospect if anyone on the North American continent would any longer support Pietism.50 Vergilius Ferm concluded, “Conservative Lutheranism had won, and ‘American Lutheranism [of the Definite Platform]’ was buried in the debris of outworn and outgrown vestures of an earlier day.”51

Conclusion: Effects and Contributions of Pietism According to Carter Lindberg, the Pietist movement’s “dissolution of the Orthodoxy’s confessional consciousness is directly related to its own self-understanding as an international and interconfessional movement.” It was a decisive preparation for the modern, ecumenical movement. It sought to lead the church out of dogmatic rigidity, replacing an ecclesial-confessional tradition with “a strong new community consciousness formed by the reborn individuals’ consciousness of a personal relationship to God and brotherhood with those of similar experiences.”52 The movement also introduced significant changes to hymnody and preaching. Content appealing to the individual soul and encouragement in pious living began replacing the doctrinal. The image of the pastor as the minister of the word of God shifted to that of a witness of godliness in the course of life. The sermon was supplemented

by Bible study and small group discussion. This interest resulted in increased and intensive work in exegesis, the appearance of annotated editions, revisions, and historical and biographic studies. The locus for this activity was the conventicle or collegia pietatis, known as “Stunde” among its German speaking members. This practice certainly helped individuals gain support for strength and edification. This concern for individuals also constituted a weakness. The practice drove a wedge between those who attended the Stunde and those in the church within the church (ecclesiola in ecclesia), that is, the “better Christians” and the regular churchgoers. Though Spener did not intend it, the conventicle became a place of escape from the church for devout Christians.53 Lindberg also argues that Pietism enriched dogmatics with a renewed emphasis on topics such as love and sin as concrete phenomena. It sought to change the world by changing the hearts of individuals. However, in spite of its hospitals, orphanages, and educational and other charitable efforts, it never produced a social ethic, confining the Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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on the individual. It sought to emulate early Christianity by recognizing comemphasis munities of faith and fellowship.

As noted earlier, the word as a means of grace became separated from the Holy Spirit. “As a consequence, radical doubt is to be overcome in Pietism, not by hearing the Word of God as an address of promise (the authority of the Word) but by experientially verified faith. Thus it is Pietism that introduces modifiers to faith: ‘weak faith, dead faith, living faith, powerful faith, etc.’” According to Martin Schmidt this understanding allows the Bible to become a manual for the pattern of life. And Pietists viewed Scripture as the confirmation and legitimation of their own experience. Thus it replaced Luther’s emphasis on pro nobis, thereby the paradoxical simul justus et peccator. A new emphasis emerges on the visible formation of a person born anew, verified by the fruits of faith, thus signifying a higher nature and quality of being. Luther’s understanding of the new man engaged in a battle with the old man is never transformed into visible victory on earth. Rather the victory is left to God and not to the individual. So for Pietism the dynamic was not “Luther’s dialectic of law and gospel, sin and grace, damnation and faith, but the development of the power of faith in renewal and good works.”54

Endnotes

1 Martin Schmidt, Wiedergeburt und Neuer Mensch: Gesamelte Studien zur Geshicht des Pietismus (Wittenberg: Luter Verlag, 1969), 299‒330, quoted in Carter Lindberg, The Third Reformation? Charismatic Movements and the Lutheran Tradition (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983), 140.

2 Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, ed. The Book of Concord, Part 3, Art. 13 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 325.

3 Bergt Hägglund, History of Theology, 4th ed., trans. Gene J. Lund (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2007), 329‒330.

4 E. Clifford Nelson, The Lutherans in North America (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 149.

5 Paul P. Kuenning, The Rise and Fall of American Lutheran Pietism: The Rejection of an Activist Heritage (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1988), 2‒3.

6 Ibid., 3.

7 Ibid.

8 George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), 16.

9 Ronald Feuerhahn, “The Roots and Fruits of Pietsim,” paper presented at the Pieper Lectures, September 17‒18, 1998, 9.

10 Martin Schmidt, “Pietism,” Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Dritte Auflage (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1957), quoted in Carter Lindberg, Third Reformation, 133.

11 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 16.

12 WA, 2, 137, 6.

13 Lindberg, Third Reformation, 139.

14 Ibid., 134.

15 Ted A. Campbell, The Religion of the Heart: A Study of European Religious Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), 14.

16 Jakob Arndt, True Christianity, Classics of Western Spirituality, preface by Heiko Oberman, trans. Peter Erb (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), xv.

17 Ibid., xiii.

18 Kuenning, The Rise and Fall of American Lutheran Pietism, 9.

19 John Arndt, True Christianity: A Treatise on Sincere Repentance, True Faith, the Holy Walk of the True Christian, trans. A. W. Boehm (London: 1712), revised, corrected, and furnished with additional material from the original German by Charles F. Schaeffer (Philadelphia: United Lutheran Publication House, 1868), 176, quoted in Kunning, 9.

20 Ibid.

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21 Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century, trans. Felix Emil Held (New York: Oxford Press, 1916), dedication page, quoted in Kuenning, 9.

22 Arndt, True Christianity, 64.

23 Martin Schmidt, “Spener and Luther,” Luther Jahrbuch 24 (1957), 102 (Berlin: Lutherische Verlaghuas), quoted in Kunneing.

24 Philip Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria, trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964), 36.

25 Lindberg, Third Reformation, 150.

26 Ibid., 151.

27 Ibid., 135‒139.

28 Kuenning, American Lutheran Pietism, 12.

29 Ibid., 166.

30 Martin Brecht, “Johann Albrecht Bengel und der schwäbische Biblizismus,” in Pietismus und Bibel, Kurt Aland, ed. (Wittenburg: Luther Verlag, 1980), 194, quoted in Lindberg, Third Reformation, 167.

31 Spener, Pia Desideria, 76.

32 Trygve R. Skarsten, “The Doctrine of Justification in Classical Lutheran Pietism: A Revisionist Perspective,” Trinity Seminary Review 2 (Fall 1981): 20, quoted in Paul P. Kuenning, The Rise and Fall of American Lutheran Pietism: The Rejection of an Activist Heritage (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 2.

33 Henry E. Jacobs, A History of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Unites States (New York, 1893), quoted in Ahlstrom, Religious History, 255.

34 Kuenning, American Lutheran Pietism, 36.

35 Ahlstrom, Religious History, 258.

36 Ibid., 259.

37 Kuenning, American Lutheran Pietism, 38.

38 Ibid., 60.

39 Kuenning, American Lutheran Pietism, 67‒68.

40 LIndbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 16‒17.

41 Martin E. Conkling, “The Frankean Synod: A Voice in the Silence,” Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly LXXII, 4 (Winter 1999): 212.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., 213.

44 Minutes, Frankean Synod Oct., 1837, 29‒30; quoted in Harry J. Kreider, History of the United Lutheran Synod of New York and New England, vol. 1, (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1954), 110.

45 Ibid., 223. It is then ironic that the Tennessee Synod in 1822 answered the question, “Is slavery to be considered as evil?” The Synod resolved unanimously that it is to be “regarded as a great evil in our land and it desires the government, if it be possible, to devise some way by which this evil can be removed. Synod also advised every minister to admonish every master to treat his slaves properly, and to exercise his Christian duties.” This resolution may have been the first of its kind in the South.

46 Ibid., 224.

47 Kuenning, American Lutheran Pietism, 164‒167.

48 Paul P. Kuenning, The Rise and Fall of American Lutheran Pietism (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1988), 168.

49 Ross, Lutheranism in America, 137.

50 Abdul Ross Wentz, A Basic History of Lutheranism in America, Rev. Ed. (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1955), 167.

51 Vergilias Ferm, The Crisis in American Lutheran Theology: A Study of the Issue between American Lutheranism and Old Lutheranism (New York: Century Co., 1927), 344.

52 CarterLindberg, The Third Reformation? Charismatic Movements and the Lutheran Tradition (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1983), 17.

53 Ibid..

54 Ibid., 174.

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Sanctification

David P. Scaer

Sanctification as All Inclusive Article VI of the Augsburg Confession on the new obedience says that faith necessarily produces good works for the sake of God’s commands and immediately adds the demur that we are not to trust in them. Article IV on justification reverses the order and warns that works have no place in justification and only then defines it. Lutherans rarely deviate from this approach in any discussion on sanctification. What starts out as a discussion on sanctification reverts to one on justification in which it is made clear that works have no part. Putting a more positive twist on things, works do not constitute faith, but without them faith is nonexistent. James said as much. Faith without works is dead or really no faith at all (2:17, 26). In the dogmatic sequence sanctification follows and is the result of being justified by faith, but it is not all that simple.

Sanctification, involves such topics (loci) in the dogmatic spectrum beginning with the doctrine of God, that is, theology in the narrow sense, including the Trinitarian life; predestination; anthropology including the restoration of the image of God in believers; Christology, in that Jesus is the perfection, embodiment and source of all good works; the sacraments through which the Holy Spirit effects the good works God requires; and eschatology, in that at the judgment we will be assessed by our good works. Then mankind as it is embodied in the church will reach and excel the holiness that was once Adam’s.1 Sanctification embraces and permeates the entire theological task and like justification has a determinative role in how theology is pursued. In the Scriptures no doctrine is given in isolation from another, but one doctrine is intertwined with and imbedded in another. To use catechism language one doctrine is in, with, and under another. For example Matthew’s institution of the supper contains that gospel’s most explicit description of the atonement in that the blood Jesus gives in the cup is the same blood Jesus sacrificed to God so sins could be forgiven (26:28). Atonement, sacrament and forgiveness constitute one reality. So also sanctification is presented in, with, and under other doctrines. Though dogmatics lays out its task in topics of loci, the Scriptures do not.

David P. Scaer has been on the faculty of Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne since 1966 and holds the David P. Scaer Chair of Biblical and Systematic Theology. He is the author of several volumes in the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatic series. This paper was presented at the LCMS Theologians’ Conference on Article VI of the Augsburg Confession at Concordia University, St. Paul, Minnesota in May 2014.

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The Triumph of Justification and Its Negatives Since the beginning of the Reformation, Lutherans have had to fight a rear guard action in defending that justification is without works. So the Augsburg Confession set out to convince Catholic opponents that good works are not superfluous. From there matters went from bad to worse. In less than fifty years differences among Lutherans had to be resolved in the Formula of Concord in the articles on the righteousness of faith (III), good works (IV), law and gospel (V) and the law’s third use (VI). With justification seen as the chief article, discussions on other articles soon reverted to this one.

This has not been without its negative consequences, since the chief doctrine for some came to be regarded as the only one. Rudolph Bultmann’s existential view of justification allowed biblical history to become expendable. This took form in gospel reductionism that first led to the formation of Seminex and then of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.2 Arguments for ordaining women are varied, but a prominent one is that any law disallowing the practice is superceded by the gospel which makes men and women equal before God. Agreement in the gospel was seen as sufficient for Lutheran churches to establish fellowship with churches in the Reformed tradition. Common to these arguments is that gospel trumps the law that has no place in sanctification. This was reason enough for some to challenge the third use of the law as set down in Article VI of the Formula.

God as the Source of Sanctification One of the more valuable assignments from seminary days came from the late Arthur Carl Piepkorn: write a theological discourse on a collect. Though brief, the ancient collects are gems in showing how one aspect of theology is involved in another.

The Collect for Peace sees the origin of sanctification in God: “all holy desires, good counsels, and all just works . . . proceed” from God. The one for Palm Sunday holds up Christ as the origin and example of the sanctification. Christ took upon himself “our flesh and to suffer death upon the cross that all mankind should follow the example of his great humility.” It defines sanctification by Christ’s humility, and we petition God to “mercifully grant that we may both follow the example of his patience and also be partakers of his resurrection.” Following the example of Christ’s humility in suffering is rewarded by our sharing in his resurrection.

Setting forth Christology, sanctification, and resurrection as parts of one reality follows a pattern proposed by Paul. “[God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (Col 1:30). Faith produces good works, but it comes at the end and not the beginning.

It is not a thing or quantity but Christ working in believers. Faith has no autonomous existence, but like justification and redemption, sanctification has a prior (universal, objective) existence in Christ, even before we come to faith.

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While we struggle with residual sin and unbelief as individuals, sanctification like justification is complete in the church as Christ’s body. We confess but do not see the church as una sancta. The true humanity of the collect “which follow[s Christ’s] patience” is the church. God destined us in Christ Jesus to do good works and so we cannot take credit for them. What God works in us is present in Christ (Eph 2:10). Though from our perspective our good works are incomplete, from God’s perspective they are complete. Seeing perfection in ourselves is the sin of the Pharisees (Lk 18:9).

Sanctification as Christology A christological understanding of sanctification was essential to Jesus’s preaching.

Peter’s confession that Jesus was the Christ arose in response to unacceptable options that he was simply another prophet. This led Jesus to predict his death and resurrection with the understanding that his disciples will follow him in taking up their crosses.

Believers are like Jesus in that losing their lives, they gain them. One sure way to lose them is attempting to keep them (Mt 16:13‒26).

A discourse on sanctification also emerges in Jesus’s third prediction of his death and resurrection. A request from the mother of James and John for special places in Jesus’s kingdom ignites a quarrel among the others about the greatest in the kingdom.

Jesus responds that such ambition common among pagans has no place among his followers who are to follow Jesus in serving others just as he served in giving his life as a ransom. As Matthew and Mark present it, Jesus makes his death for others a subcategory of sanctification and that death is a pattern for the death of his followers (Mt 20:20‒28; Mk 10:42‒45).

Paul’s ode to Christ’s humiliation in his taking on a human form to the point of dying an excruciating death follows an admonition to quarreling Philippians to have the mind of Christ (Phil 2:1‒12). To address the question of the propriety of eating meat offered to idols, Paul cites the Shema Israel, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” In Deuteronomy 6:4 God’s exclusive claim to deity is contrasted with polytheism and so participation in pagan rites is forbidden. Paul, always the master theologian, turns the argument around. Idols have no existence, so eating meat offered to them is allowed. He then expounds on the Shema to give a Trinitarian definition of God identifying the one God as the Father and the one Lord as Jesus (1 Cor 8:6).3

Sanctification as Trinitarian and Sacramental Martyrdom as living and then dying for others is the highest form of sanctification. Jesus said, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you” (Jn 15:13‒14). He was referring first to himself and then his followers whom he calls his friends.4 This theme also begins and concludes the Beatitudes.

The poor to whom the kingdom of the heavens belongs are those who are persecuted for Jesus’s sake and this persecution comes with the promise of reward (Mt 5:3, 10‒12). Self-giving in martyrdom is the most profound form of sanctification because it 238

mirrors and flows from the Father’s offering the Son as an eternal sacrifice for sin (Heb 9:12) and in the Son’s willing compliance to the Father’s will.

Origins for our sanctification lie further back in God’s Trinitarian existence in the Father eternally begetting the Son. From this inner Trinitarian relationship comes the sacrificial love by which the Father sends the Son into the world. Redemptive love originates in the Father giving of himself in begetting the Son and in this shows himself to be the Father. From the mutual love of the Father and the Son for each other, the Spirit is sent into our hearts so that we recognize God as Father (Gal 4:6) and now we do the works of God (Jn 5:20). In loving us by sending the Son and the Spirit to do the works of God, the Father is not engaged in an arbitrary work. This is not alien to what he is. Rather in loving us, God is doing what he is. So in our loving others, we replicate and extend God’s love in Christ into the world. Good works come from faith, but we can with equal conviction say they have prior origin in Christ’s giving himself for us and before that in God’s Trinitarian existence.

Sanctification has sacramental dimensions. Christ speaks of his death as baptism; “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how I am constrained until it is accomplished!”

(Lk 12:50). In Matthew, Jesus describes his death of drinking the cup from which his disciples will also drink (Mt 20:22‒23). Mark brings Luke and Matthew together so that in their deaths, Jesus’s followers will share in the bitter cup of his crucifixion and be baptized into his death. Here Mark shows himself as a brilliant theologian in making baptism and the supper not only the source but the destiny of the Christian life.5 While we are accustomed to putting baptism before the supper, Mark reverses the order in which the supper as participation in Christ’s death and its proclamation precedes baptism which corresponds to Christ’s burial that is then consummated by resurrection. Sacramental participation in Christ concludes in the believer’s death, burial and resurrection. So also Paul says in Romans 6:4-5, We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

In the Book of Hebrews the Holy Communion is presented as a source of good works. Christ’s resurrection and our receiving the blood in Holy Communion by which he made atonement to God and our sanctification in our doing the works God desires constitute one reality.

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in you that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.6 One can hardly argue with the Catholics in the Confutation that works “proceed from the merits of Christ’s passion,”7 but locating the role of the law in sanctification is Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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another matter. Mention of the law’s third use introduces disagreement over its origin and meaning.8 Though the Formula’s discourse on the third use might need expansion, its definition is clear that believers “without command, threat, or reward” do the works of the Spirit.

Threats presented in the second use have been removed by what God accomplished in Christ and the law takes on the positive character not unlike what Adam knew, but this cannot simply be called the third use which is law fulfilled by Christ.

This would be law in its the primeval or primitive sense in which the will of man conformed to the will of God. Luther argues that speaking of the righteous Adam before the fall requires that he knew the law, but this was different from the last given to the unrighteous Adam.9 Calvin defines the third use as God using the threats of law to prod believers to do good works.10 Threats of the law supplement the promises of the gospel; call it the carrot and stick method. What the gospel cannot do by itself, the law does and so the gospel is confused with the law. To avert this perversion that law as accusation has a place in the sanctified life, some have denied the law’s third use or at least redefined it.

For example, Lowell C. Green and Timothy Wengert define the third use of the law as no more than the first and second uses applied to Christians.11 This preserves the phrase, the third use, but substitutes another meaning. By devoting more space to the law’s accusatory function, Article Six of the Formula opens the way to let the third use slip into the second (SD VI, 21‒22).

Luther provides a way out of the dilemma by regarding the law as only accusation (second use) in his explanations of the Ten Commandments which not only list prohibitive behaviors, but begin with a call to faith, that is, the gospel. Fearing, trusting, and loving God, above all things, praying to him, and believing his word are what faith is all about. Then follows the description of the life of sanctification, what the third use of the law is all about: honoring parents, helping neighbors in their needs, improving their property and business and speaking well of them. Since each explanation begins with fearing and loving, faith is the context of the sanctified life. By beginning with faith followed by the warning against falling into sins, the order of the simul iustus et peccator is preserved. What God requires are descriptions of what we have become by faith. Imperatives or subjunctives are nothing less than the indicatives describing what we already are, what we are capable of doing, what we indeed do and what we must do.

The Image of God: Its Loss and Restoration Made in the image of God Adam perfectly corresponded to who God was and this correspondence was reflected in man’s relation to others and to the creation. In that brief primeval time the law resembled what is called the third use with this proviso that

by Christ’s death the second use of the law as accusation morphed into the third use.

Adam’s sin was unique in that he took all mankind down with him and it was different from transgressing a moral infringement such as killing or stealing. His infraction was that in desiring to be like God he attempted to remove the boundary separating him from his creator. His offense was a First Article one, if we dare speak like that. He 240

was discontent with his condition as creature. To make matters worse, in his ambition to become God’s equal, he lost the image that made him like God. To borrow ancient church language, in desiring to be homoousios, Adam was no longer homoioousios.

In the moment of transgression the law that was descriptive of what Adam actually was transformed into accusation of what he was not and so the lex semper accusat was born and would continue to reign wherever sin spread. Brother killing brother gave birth to the first use. Without the first use prohibiting one person from destroying another, society would not be possible.

These prohibitions were clarified for Israel in the Ten Commandments. By faith the image of God is being restored in believers, not as Adam possessed it, but as Christ enhanced it. By his life Jesus showed himself to be the true Adam and by his death removed from us the curses placed on the first Adam (Col 1:15). Now the third use of the law, almost in the way that Adam knew it, becomes the norm for sanctification. In Christ we see God differently than when we were sinners, but since we still sin, we have a double vision. We still see the law as accusation, but in Christ we see the law as Adam once saw it and begin to see God as he really is.12

Good Samaritan as Divine Figure Since Jesus or God is the lawgiver (depending on how James 4:12 is interpreted and I prefer the former) the law reflects who and what he is, a revelation of what God is in himself. Law is not arbitrary. God cannot act contrary to who he is.

The parable of the Good Samaritan tells us as much about God and Christ as it does about sanctification (Lk 10:30‒36.) Jesus’s answer to the lawyer’s question that he is to help the stricken neighbor is an exposition of Christians helping others in distress.

In terms of the catechism, the Samaritan helps the neighbor in his bodily need. At the same time the parable is a description of what God is and does in Jesus and it belongs to the loci of theology in the narrow sense, that is, what we know about God, and of Christology.

The Samaritan’s lavish, unlimited generosity in giving the innkeeper a blank check to cover the expenses of the stricken man is a more appropriate description of God who completely gives of himself in rescuing those who could never rescue themselves than it is of us. On one level sanctification is about how Christians are to live, but it has a prior reality in what God has always done and specifically his giving himself in Christ for us. In our sanctified lives God extends his mercy to the distressed.

This takes us back to the prior discussion on the Trinity because it requires that we take seriously that God loves because he is love and out of this love he begets the Son. Creation, redemption, and ultimately, our sanctification originate in God’s Trinitarian existence. The opera Trinitatis ad extra are distinct from the opera Trinitatis ad intra, with the understanding that through opera ad extra extend the opera ad intra into our existence. What God is and does is completed in sanctification. “God is love. . . . His love is perfected in us” (1 Jn 4:8, 12).

A preferred translation is that in us God’s love has reached its telos, its goal, its intended and ultimate purpose.13 In ourselves we find sin and condemnation for our Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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transgressing the law, but God sees perfection in those who are in Christ. Perfection in sanctification which we have by faith exists side by side with that total imperfection we find in ourselves. Self-reflection creates despair or Phariseeism. From the dilemma of the iustus et peccator there is no escape.

Law and Gospel as Insoluble Dilemma Relief from our misery can only be found in that our helpless condition has been relieved by Christ. Now comes the letdown. In the moment of ecstatic joy in finding rescue in the gospel, we are again confronted by the law. What at first looked like a commutation turns out to be a reprieve and we are caught in a revolving door of alternating words of condemnation and reprieve. As soon as we think we are extricated from the law by the gospel, the door makes a full rotation and we find ourselves face to face with the law as accusation. Christian life, at least as Lutherans see it, has all the marks of a tragic comedy. At the moment of confidence given in the gospel, the rug is pulled out from us and we face a God who has no use for us.

This tragic existence is not without salvific purpose. Without the internal torment provided by how God deals with us in law and the gospel, Christians will think they are acceptable to God for what they have done. Our sanctification is acceptable to God not because of what we have accomplished. Rather our sanctification was present in Christ before the world’s foundation and now God in Christ works in us. As Paul says, Christ is as much our sanctification as he is our righteousness. In being continually rejected and accepted by God, justification is the most existential of all Christian doctrines and accounts for the misery to which we are sentenced as long as we live.14 If law has a negative connotation among Christians, this is also so for non-Christians. Preaching the law means letting the other person have it. In our litigious culture, law as accusation takes precedence. In the controversy with Rome, Lutherans gave pride of place to the law’s accusatory function, which some argue is its only function.

In today’s theological climate this has not been without its consequences. Norms disallowing the ordination of women have been pushed to the side and churches are blessing same-sex marriage. To misapply Paul, against these there is no law.15 Lex Semper Accusat?

Support for seeing the law as a monstrous negative in the lives of Christians is found in the Apology, lex semper accusat, and reinforced by the next line that the law “always shows us that God is angry.”16 This citation provided reason for some Lutherans to challenge the law’s normative function in sanctification and dismissing Article VI of the Formula as not in line with Luther’s thought. Some firmly committed to the Lutheran Confessions may be guilty of the same infraction. In letting law’s accusatory function predominate in their preaching, they in effect nullify the third use. Here the simul iustus et peccator helps to clarify.

As sinners we know the law only as accusation from which we cannot escape, but as believers we see the law in a totally positive sense in our being conformed to what God is and wants. Readjusting the language of the Athanasian Creed that Jesus is per242

and perfect man, Christians are perfect saints in performing the things that are fect God completely acceptable to God, but as sinners they are as wretched as anyone else. Here the image of a revolving door helps. Just as the Christian finds himself doing the right thing, he finds himself doing the wrong thing first in his thoughts and then in his words and actions. A thing done to others for the sake of God becomes a thing done for oneself. We see ourselves, and not God, as the source of good things we do. Now comes the question of how absolute is the lex semper accusat. In looking at what follows, we may find this absoluteness is not all that absolute. “Therefore God is not loved until we grasp his mercy by faith; not until then does he become someone who can be loved.”17 Removing the simul from simul iustus et peccator creates a Eutychian sanctification, an homogenized mixtum compositum, a tertium, in which sinner and saint are blended into one thing or person, so that sanctification can be quantitatively measured. Believers can track and record their moral improvement in diaries and their progress can awake the admiration of others. Here the Catholic canonization of saints and Wesleyan perfectionism are on the same page. Jesus warned against the deliberate display of piety.

A variant of this view is that believers, as everyone else, have a body and soul.

But in baptism they acquire a third item called the “spirit” or the “new man” with an almost autonomous existence that increases in holiness by abstaining from sin. This view of the autonomous new man allows and, at least for Calvin who holds that the new man is lazy, requires not only the gospel but the threats of law for good works.18 The Scriptures do not know this view. Rather, given in baptism the new man is Christ himself. As Charles Gieschen says, “For Paul ‘the new man’ is not ‘the new self’ (ESV), but he is Christ in the Christian and at work in the Christian by virtue of the baptismal union (Gal 2:20)”19 As sinners, Christians and non-Christians can know the law in either the first or second uses as accusation, lex semper accusat, but by faith another reality comes into play. Believers become one with Christ and see the law not only as a pattern for their lives but also as a description of God. What God is the believer becomes, and what God does the believer does and thus the believer lives according to the law. In the believer the law’s third use takes form, if we dare speak like this, and I think we can, since Paul does: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Gal 6:2).

Problematic is that using “third use of the law” terminology we impose a sixteenth-century term on first-century literature. Just as the word “law” has various meanings, such as Torah, Scriptures, and even the gospel, so the phrase “the third use of the law” has acquired another meaning as when it is interpreted to mean the law accuses believers. Even those who are committed to the law’s third use may in their attempt to preach the third use really be preaching the second use.

Had the Formula spelled out the christological character of the law’s third use in more detail, the second and third uses may have remained more distinct from each other. Where this happens, the lex semper accusat lurks as such an absolute theological principle that the third use is not fully expressed. Law known as accusation and threat has a place in civil righteousness and justification. Left to itself lex semper accusat results in dualism, a Manicheanism, a bifurcated God, with two opposing wills, a good one Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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in the gospel and a condemnatory one in the law or two gods or two eternally revealed opposing principles.

In our fallen condition the law always accuses, but it is diagnostic in bringing us to our senses about our estrangement from God. In this sense the law as accusation is an act of mercy so that in the gospel we recognize that God has already supplied in Christ a solution to our wretched condition. Though the Formula outlines the law’s three functions, law in itself is God’s unchanging will according to which we human beings are to conduct ourselves in this life (VI, 16). As sinner, one is condemned by the law, but as believer one comes to see the law differently and loves it and by faith intuitively does the positive things the law it requires and so in the sense of the third use Christians fulfill the law. This is sanctification.

Sanctification or the Third Use of the Law as Possibility and Accomplishment For the most part the law-gospel paradigm defines LCMS preaching and in some cases serves as an outline. Such a sermon begins with law alerting the congregation to their aberrations and predictably ends with the gospel relieving the pain imposed by the law.20 Time allotted to the law is monopolized by the second use and little time, if any, is left for its third use or sanctification, that is, what the people should do. Should good works be specified—this is what the law’s third use is all about—some preachers are quick to remind their hearers of the impossibility of doing good works, and so, the second use is substituted for the third that is in effect denied. In contrast, Paul’s epistles often unabashedly conclude with the third use.

When Phoebe comes, the Romans are to help her as befits the saints (Rom 16:1).

Contributions from the Corinthians are expected (1 Cor 16:1‒2). The Galatians are to bear one another’s burden’s (Gal 6:1). Paul commends the Philippians for their generosity and calls these gifts sacrifices (Phil 4:18‒22). Colossians are to be gracious in their speech (4:1). First Thessalonians lists respect for the clergy among the good works Christians are to do (5:13). Second Thessalonians requires idle members of the congregation to substitute that idleness with work that helps others (3:6‒13.) Paul’s anticipation of financial support from the Romans (15:22‒29) is an appropriate follow-up to his asking them to present their bodies as living sacrifices (12:1).

Following the lead of Horace Hummel, Scott Ashmon wonders if sermons can follow a law-gospel-law pattern that he finds in the Old Testament instead of lawgospel. He supports his argument from the Formula of Concord and C. F. W. Walther who says the gospel “is followed by an instruction regarding things we are to do after we have become new men.”21 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson provides an attractive solution: the law is instructional in its political or first use in coercing behavior and in its third use in laying out the good things that only believers do; in its second use the law is relational in its condemnation for which the gospel is the only solution.22 In his fulfillment of the law by his life and death, Christ provides the perfect and only model for sanctification. Sacrifice is the ideal synonym for sanctification.

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Sanctification and the Judgment Sanctification presupposes refrain from sin; as James says, “keep oneself unstained from the world” (1:27). Paul details works of the flesh as “fornication, impurity, licentiousness” and so on, and adds that they who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God (Gal 5:19‒21). Outward morality is part of sanctification, but Paul makes it clear that he will never be able to conquer evil and do all the good he desires (Rom 7:19). In fact he calls himself the chief of sinners, a term he uses for those who do heinous things (1 Tm 1:9‒15).

However, the principal distinguishing mark of sanctification is doing good things such as caring for widows and orphans in their affliction (Jas 1:27). Here James seems to have in mind Jesus’s discourse on the final judgment in which those who have cared for the hungry and naked and visited them on their sick beds and in prisons are rewarded by being placed at Jesus’s right hand (Mt 25: 35‒40). These things they have done without either thought of reward or unawareness that they have done them to Jesus.

The writer of Hebrews may have had this judgment scene in view in defining brotherly love as remembering those who are in prison and ill-treated (Heb 13:3). Those who visit the imprisoned share in the prisoner’s suffering because both are in Christ’s body.

So suffering as sanctification has an ecclesial dimension as well as a christological one.

Christ is on both sides of the sanctification equation. Jesus is as much the doer of the good works as he is the recipient.

Roman Catholics look at sanctification almost as an account that can be increased by good works and depleted by sins. Moral deficits can be balanced by what the Augsburg Confession calls childish works “such as rosaries, the cult of the saints, joining religious orders, pilgrimages appointed fasts, holy days, and brotherhoods” (AC XX, 20). Serious deficits can be rectified by applying for the good works of the saints.

Should faith later take hold, works done in the pre-sanctification period can be credited to one’s account. In response to Catholics who saw salvific value in ritual or liturgical acts, Luther with his doctrine of vocation secularized sanctification or, to put it another way, he sanctified the secular life. Ordinary tasks of believers are good works, but this insight does not exhaust the doctrine of sanctification.23

“You Will Be Perfect” Informative for defining sanctification is the pericope of the rich young man applying for tenured-track apostleship. His question of how one inherited the kingdom should not be occasion for a sermon on his deficient understanding of justification, especially since Paul says that those who do gross sins shall not inherit the kingdom of God. We might be satisfied with his claim that he has met the first qualification in having kept the commandments, but Jesus is not. Such concerns distract from the purpose of the narrative that he disqualified himself in refusing to sell his possessions to give them to the poor (Mt 19:16‒21; Mk 10:17‒14; Lk 18:18‒23).24 In terms of the Sermon on the Mount, he chose mammon over God (Mt 6:24). This conversation gives reason to the disciples who have given up everything to follow Jesus to ask about their rewards.

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them thrones next to his and then expands the promise to include other followers.25 A clue to what is intended by perfection in sanctification can be found in Jesus’s challenge to the young man, “If you would be perfect [Eiv qe,leij te,leioj ei=nai]” (Mt 19:21). The English translation might allow the view that Jesus was requiring moral perfection if it were not for what follows, “Go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.” Only then would he have treasure in heaven. Jesus defines perfection as depriving oneself to help the poor. In place of “if you would be perfect,” Luke substitutes, “one thing you still lack” (18:22), and Mark follows Luke but with another word for “lack” (10:21). The absence of external moral fault qualifies him for apostleship. He is academically and theologically qualified, but lacks the perfection that requires him to give up his possessions to help those who have nothing.

This understanding is supported by what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “You will be perfect as your Father in the heavens is perfect” (5:48),26 a passage used to present the law as accusation when the assigned pericope proves to be inadequate for this purpose. If some use “be perfect” to show the impossibility of fulfilling the law, that is, its second use, and as introduction to the part of the sermon providing relief in the gospel, Arminians use the passage to show that moral perfection is an attainable goal. In Matthew 5:48, “be perfect” is future indicative and not an imperative. Claiming the future indicative has an imperative sense is playing fast and free with the grammar to support an already determined conclusion that this is law. “Be perfect” is not law but a promise of a future condition, a promise of what we will be.27 Preceding contexts in both Matthew (5:38‒47) and Luke (5:31‒35) speak of us loving our enemies—the good, the bad and the ungracious—just as God loves them.

God’s perfection is seen in the perfection of believers who forgive as he forgives and love as he loves. Matters are clinched or at least should be by Luke’s interpretative parallel, “You will be perfect, as your Father is merciful” (10:36).28 Perfection is not a matter of the second use of the law giving God opportunity to accuse the sinner, but the third use in that the believer is promised to be like the Father of Jesus in his indiscriminating love and forgiveness. Sanctification exists primarily in God and then in believers who by forgiving others are recognized as his true children. Any idea that believers can totally overcome sin is ruled out in the words of Jesus “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Mt 7:11). So also in Luke 11:13.

An image opposite to the young man who could not give his wealth to follow Jesus is found in Paul’s description of Jesus, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (1 Cor 8:9). Sanctification is held out not as an abstract ethical code, but as Christ himself. Jesus is our sanctification.

The Triumph of the Third Use Jesus cited Deuteronomy 6:5 that we should love God with our whole being as the great commandment, words that might be considered part of, or an interpretation of, the Shema. This call to complete faith in God corresponds with Luther’s interpreta246

tion of the First Commandment as a call to faith. By saying that the second command is like the first Jesus connected sanctification to faith (Mt 22:37; Mk 12:30; Lk 10:27).

The Greek word for like, o`moi,a, suggests that the second command shares in some way in the substance of the first; at least this is implied in 1 John 4:20‒21, “If any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also.”

Challenged now is the long-held view of the therapeutic power of self-love. In other words one cannot love others unless and until one loves himself.29 Christian life is vicarious in that we push ourselves to the side to benefit the other person. In asking us to love the neighbor God is asking of us nothing other than what he asks of himself and does. We are God’s neighbors and instead of loving himself he loved us. This is the manifestation of the christological mystery.

Our loving God and our loving the neighbor are two sides of one coin and in this love the Trinitarian mystery is manifested. “In this is love perfected with us [that is, it reaches its intended conclusion, evn tou,tw| tetelei,wtai h` avga,ph( meqV h`mw/n], that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so are we in this world” (1 Jn 4:17). Love for the neighbor will be the standard for the final judgment.

Law in its third use is proleptic of that time when the second use will pass away and sanctification will replace justification as the determinative reality between God and man. Paul said as much, “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13:7). We will see what we believed in and receive for what we hoped and so they will have outlived their purpose. Then the love by which we now love God and neighbor will reach its perfect and intended goal in the resurrection.

Luther said as much at the end of the explanation to the second article, that we will serve God in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.

An Appendix Evangelicals see sanctification as living according to what they call “biblical principles,” the ordinary things of life like marriage, family, business, finances, and diet. These principles do not define sanctification, lacking is the christological dimension of living and dying for others. (Nearly fifty years ago the late evangelical theologian Carl F. H. Henry sat in my living room speaking of the merits of the diet of the priests who were allowed to eat of the meat but not the fat of the sacrifices. Now the rage is the heavily bean loaded diet of Daniel. We might as well follow a diet of manna, quail, barley, fish, and wine—a menu not without appeal.) Who knows whether a life following biblical principles will result in success in business, marriage, and family, but this is not a life of sanctification, which cannot be measured by the quality and length of our lives.

Endnotes 1 Thus these lines from Isaac Watts’s hymn, “Jesus Shall Reign Where’er the Sun,” “In Him the tribes of Adam boast more blessings than their father lost.”

2 Gerhard Forde’s highly regarded exposition of the law and the gospel was not based on the atonement which he denied. Here again justification operates as an autonomous principle. Jack D. Kilcrease, “Atonement and

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Justification in Gerhard Forde,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 76/3/4 (July/October 2012): 269‒292.

3 1 Corinthians 6:4‒6 “Hence, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that ‘an idol has no real existence,’ and that “there is no God but one.” For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”

4 The command here refers to more than our required submission to a word of God and in itself does not address the question of whether that word is law or gospel. See Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, eds. GreekEnglish Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains 2 vols. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1988), 2:426.

5 Mark 10:38‒39 “But Jesus said to them, ‘You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?’ And they said to him, ‘We are able.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.’”

6 Hebrews 13:20‒21. ~O de. Qeo.j th/j eivrh,nhj o` avnagagw.n evk nekrw/n to.n poime,na tw/n proba,twn to.n me,gan evn ai[mati diaqh,khj aivwni,ou( to.n Ku,rion h`mw/n Vihsou/n( katarti,sai u`ma/j evn panti. avgaqw/| eivj to. poih/ sai to. qe,lhma auvtou/( poiw/n evn h`mi/n to. euva,reston evnw,pion auvtou/( dia. VIhsou/ Cristou/( w-| h` do,xa eivj tou.j aivw/naj tw/n aivw,nwnÅ avmh,nÅ 7 Robert Kolb and James A. Nestigen, eds. Sources and Contexts of The Book of Concord (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 118.

8 Melanchthon offered this definition: “The third office of the law in those who have been justified by faith, is this, that it teaches them concerning good works which one are pleasing works to God, and in commands certain works in which one’s obedience to God is put into practice.” “Lowell Green, “The ‘Third Use of the Law’ and Werner Elert’s Position,” Logia XXII/2 (Eastertide 2013): 28. Green claims Melanchthon introduced the phrase in his Loci theologici of 1535. Scott R. Murray argues that the phrase occurs a couple of times in the 1521 edition of Loci communes. Ibid., 36, n. 11.

9 Martin Luther, “Lectures on Genesis Chapters 1‒4,” trans. George V. Schick, Luther’s Works, ed.

Jaroslav Pelikan 54 vols. (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), 109.

10 David P. Scaer, Law and Gospel and the Means of Grace, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics Vol. 5. (Saint Louis: The Luther Academy, 2008), 77‒84.

11 Green, “The ‘Third Use of the Law,” 33. Timothy J. Wengert, Reading the Bible with Martin Luther (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 39.

12 See Scott Murray, “The Third Use of the Law Revisited,” Logia XXII 1/2 (Eastertide 2013). According to the Formula, “the word ‘law’ has one single meaning, namely, the unchanging will of God, according to which human beings are to conduct themselves in this life,” but as saints and sinners, simul iustus et peccator, we see it differently.

13 eva.n avgapw/men avllh,louj( o` Qeo.j evn h`mi/n me,nei( kai. h` avga,ph auvtou/( teteleiwme,nh evn h`mi/nÅ evstin 14 For good reason the law-gospel provided a scaffolding on which the neo-orthodox theologians Rudolph Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and Emil Brunner constructed their existential theologies.

15 Since in justifying sinners, God makes no distinction between male and female, the prohibitions against women and gay clergy and homosexual behavior were made inoperative by the gospel.

16 The full reference is lex autem semper accusat, but absence of one word does not change the meaning, 17 Here is the entire section: “Again, how can the human heart love God as long as it believes that he is terribly angry and that he oppresses us with temporal and eternal calamities? However, the law always accuses us; it always shows that God is angry. Therefore God is not loved until we grasp his mercy faith. Not until then can we become something who can be loved. (Apology IV:129).”

18 David P. Scaer, Law and Gospel and the Means of Grace, 80.

19 See Charles A. Gieschen, “The Son as Creator and Source of the New Creation in Colossians,” The Restoration of Creation in Christ: Essays in Honor of Dean O. Wenthe, ed. Arthur A. Just Jr. and Paul J. Grime (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2014), 136‒137. Gieschen goes on to say, “The ‘new man’ cannot be understood apart from Christ. Paul uses similar language of ‘inner man’ elsewhere as a reference to Christian in each Christian (Romans 7:22; Ephesians 3:16‒17; and 2 Corinthians 4:16).”

20 Scott A. Ashmon shows that the Scriptures do not necessarily follow this outline. “Preaching Law and Gospel in the Old Testament,” Lutheran Forum 47/4 (Winter/Christmas 2013):12‒15.

21 Ibid.

22 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, “The Law of God,” Lutheran Quarterly XXVI/4 (Winter 2013): 373‒398.

23 The March 2014 issue of Lutheran Witness 133/3 contains four articles on vocation: Paul Mumme,

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“Persecuted but Not Forsaken”; Edie Wadsworth, “Leveling the Field”; Cheryl Naumann, “God is with You”; and Peter Bender, “More Than a Job.” 24 The episode of Jesus with the rich young man is reported by all three evangelists ((Mt 19:16‒21; Mk 10:17‒14; Lk 18:18‒23). While the three accounts are similar, their differences are significant. Whereas Matthew uses the milder negative with the future, e.g., ouv foneu,seij, to set forth each commandment, Mark and Luke use the stronger negative with the subjunctive, Mh. foneu,sh|j, so that it would carry this meaning “don’t even think of think of killing.” Since Jesus embodies divine authority, it was not necessary for him to use the stranger negative.

Matthew also introduces the listing of the commands with the definite neuter article, To. ouv foneu,seij, allowing that the several commandments constitute a whole (Jas 2:10). Even though the rich young man is anonymous in the three accounts, it is not unlikely that his identity is known to the readers and could be the evangelist himself.

“And Jesus looking upon him loved him” (v.21) was hardly an observation by a third party. Another hint to the rich man being an evangelist is provided in v. 19. While Luke has only Mh. yeudomarturh,sh|j (18:20), “do not bear false witness,” Mark adds mh. avposterh,sh|j( “do not defraud.” Richard Hicks proposes that the addition reinforces this gospel’s theme of repentance and points to Jesus’s “prophetic ability to detect inconspicuous wrong doing” (“Markan Discipleship according to Malachi: The significance of mh. avposterh,sh|j in the Story of the Rich Man (Mark 10:17‒22),” Journal of Biblical Literature 132/1:179‒199). While Matthew and Luke provide a more positive picture of the man’s intent to follow Jesus, by adding “do not deceive,” Mark suggests that in acquiring his wealth the young man was guilty of deception. If the young man is the evangelist, this would be a self-confession of the kind of person he really was. Another self-reference is that Jesus looked at him and loved him.

25 Matthew 19:27‒29: “Then Peter said in reply, ‘Lo, we have left everything and followed you. What then shall we have?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Truly, I say to you, in the new world, when the Son of man shall sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life.’”

26 e;sesqe ou=n u`mei/j te,leioi( w`j o` path.r u`mw/n o` ouvra,nioj te,leio,j evstin 27 The RSV suggests an imperative by offering “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

28 gi,nesqe oivkti,rmonej( kaqw.j o` path.r u`mw/n oivkti,rmwn evsti,n 29 Roy F. Baumeister, Jennifer D. Campbell, Joachim I. Krueger, and Kathleen D. Vohs, “Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth,” Scientific American 292/1 (January 2005): 84‒91; Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (New York: Mariner Books, 2008).

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Homiletical Helps

COncordia Journal

Homiletical Helps on LSB Series B—Epistles Proper 14 • Ephesians 4:17–5:2 • August 9, 2015

This pericope is typical of the latter portion of Paul’s letters, that is, it deals with everyday matters of the Christian life (cf. 2 Thes 3). As is the case in most of Paul’s letters the first portion of Ephesians focuses upon more overtly doctrinal matters, the second on more practical concerns. In this study, I will discuss several grammatical matters first, and then turn to a more general discussion of apostolic paraenesis, that is, exhortations from the apostle to believers in the addressed congregation concerning Christian living.

Grammar 4:17: μηκέτι περιπατεῖν: Note the use of the present/first principal part infinitive, in apposition to τοῦτο at the beginning of the verse. This indirect discourse construction after a verb of speaking represents an imperative mood verb. With μηκέτι, it indicates that people should “sever the connection,” that is, stop doing what they are doing. ὑμᾶς is the accusative subject of the infinitive.

4:18: ἐσκοτωμένοι: A fine perfect passive participle, denoting the condition of the nations/Gentiles. (ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι functions in the same way.) Note the construction ad sensum: while ἔθνη is neuter, the sense is multiple people, so the participle is masculine (rather than neuter) plural.

4:22: ἀποθέσθαι ὑμᾶς: The pronoun is the subject of this infinitive, not its object. Note that the infinitive is middle voice, not active, indicating that this is something important and something about which the subject is concerned.

4:23: ἀνανεοῦσθαι: this infinitive continues the construction of v. 22, but notice that it is first principal part/present, not aorist. This stem indicates some sort of connection, for example, that the “you” actually be renewed or continually be renewed.

4:24: ἐνδύσασθαι: Verbs of dressing and personal hygiene normally take the middle voice.

4:25: Note the appeal to being members of one another (μέλη). See the parallel in Romans 12:5.

4:26, 28, 29, 31: In each of these verses there is a third person singular imperative. These are normally translated “let . . .” (or “do not let . . .”), but this must not be understood as indicating giving or withholding permission. (To convey permission, Greek uses another construction.) This is a command to someone who/something which is not present or unknown. Thus, it conveys the idea of “ought”: “The sun ought never go down on your wrath” (v. 26); “The thief ought no longer steal” (v. 27).

4:32, 5:1: γίνεσθε: This is a present/first principal part middle imperative, second person plural. Why isn’t the verb “to be” (εἰμί) used instead? Oddly, there are no occurrences of the second person plural imperative of the verb “to be” in all of Greek literature!

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Larger Considerations Generally speaking, passages such as this are a challenge for Lutherans. They are extremely directive concerning conduct and appear to be law rather than gospel.

Certainly there is little explicit articulation of the good news of salvation in the cross and resurrection of Christ (probably why 5:1–2 are included in the pericope!). How are we to approach this text?

This section is one of many of the NT that takes an everyday, experiential, phenomenological approach to the Christian life. It details how Christians should act, and it assumes that believers can so act. Similar is Romans 6:12: “Let sin [= sin ought] never reign in your mortal bodies so as to obey its desires.” Also similar is the response of Paul to the question of the jailer of Philippi, “What must I actually/try to do in order to be saved?” (Acts 16:30). Answer: “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, and your house!” (v. 31). (Note that Paul does not say that you can do nothing in order to be saved.) In taking this approach, both our text and the two examples here cited are quite unlike other passages that take a “real/deeper explanation”/fuller understanding approach. In contrast to Romans 6:12 stands Romans 7:19, 24: “Not the good that I desire do I do, but the bad that I do not desire, this is what I do. . . . I am a most wretched man! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” Or, Psalm 51:10: “(You) create in me a clean heart, O God!” Indeed, we can see these two approaches sitting with one another, cheek by jowl, as it were, in Philippians 2:12b–13: “Work out your own salvation in fear and trembling, for God it is who works in you both actually to will and to do, on behalf of his good pleasure.” To give an analogy to what we are here contending, these two approaches can be compared to the relationship between classical physics (e.g., that of Isaac Newton) used for everyday understandings of our world, with its predictability and “normalcy,” on the one hand, and quantum mechanics and relativity theory (e.g., the theories of Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein), used for more foundational investigation and understanding, with its seeming randomness, abnormality, and absurdity. Our present text is a Newtonian passage, so to speak, and it should not be understood, therefore, as a deep theological assertion that the “old Adam” no longer has power in the Christian’s life (cf. 4:22 [also 4:17–19, 27, 31]).

Also observe that Paul does not, in his appeals and argumentation, invoke the law of God, understood in its most basic sense of the Ten Commandments and OT regulations. Otherwise expressed, Paul does not admonish the thief no longer to steal (4:28) because stealing breaks the seventh commandment, and he does not proscribe wrath and blasphemy (4:31) because these actions break the fifth and second commandments, respectively. What does Paul do? He appeals to the presence of the Holy Spirit (4:30) and to God’s action in Christ (4:32; 5:2). We are in the new covenant (1 Cor 11:25). The purpose of the new covenant is not the establishment of the contours of the old covenant. On the contrary, the new covenant brings a new reality characterized

by Christ and the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:11). Indeed, the Holy Spirit is a critical component of this new covenant, as envisioned by the OT prophets (see Ez 36:26; Jl 3:1–2 [ET 2:28–9]). The Spirit’s fruit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, and self-control (Gal 5:22–23), and all of these are actions that paral254

lel the admonitions of Ephesians 4:17–5:2, either positively or negatively (see especially 4:19, 31, 32; 5:1, 2). Paul, with his admonitions, gives guidance to people whose lives are under the reign and rule of God, guided by the Holy Spirit. For an in-depth consideration of this matter, see my comments on pages 469–474 of the Concordia Commentary Mark 1:1–8:26.

James Voelz

Editor’s note: The following homiletical help is adapted from Concordia Journal, April 2008.

Proper 15 • Ephesians 5:6–21 • August 16, 2015

This epistle reading turns our attention toward living the Christian life. It builds off the foundation that St. Paul laid earlier in Ephesians, namely 2:8–9: “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” Now we can freely do the works that we are created in Christ Jesus to do.

Even though most of the text is exhortation to good works, notice that Paul’s appeal is not compulsion by the law. It is a gospel appeal: “At one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord” (5:8). Also, Paul does not merely indicate that one is lost in darkness before conversion, even though that is certainly true. That person is darkness itself. One’s very essence and being is sin. The gospel enlightens darkness.

It turns darkness into light. In the office of Evening Prayer we sing, “Jesus Christ is the light of the world, the light no darkness can overcome.” He is the life and light of every man (Jn 1:4). To be light “in the Lord” implies relationship, a connection to Christ and his forgiveness. It is his light that produces light in the lives of God’s children.

Therefore, even the works we do are not done by us, but by him.

For Christians, the temptation is always to revert to darkness. We live in the midst of those who cut themselves off from the light, who continually live in darkness.

Darkness cannot produce fruit. Those who cut themselves off from Christ cannot produce good works. Even the works they do, what the world would call “good,” are sin.

Association with darkness is clearly harmful, even detrimental to the Christian. How often do we take part in the unfruitful deeds of darkness? How often do we find ourselves doing shameful things when we cut ourselves off from the light, Jesus Christ, and from our fellow believers? In his first epistle, John says, “But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin” (1:7). Our fellowship with the Lord Jesus, and our fellowship with one another, is clearly important in our walk as children of the light.

Walking together as children of light is a critical witness to the light, Jesus Christ, in this world of darkness. In chapter 4 Paul rejoiced in the unity we have as believers in the body of Christ. Together we are strong, not easily tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, not easily pulled back into the darkness. First and foremost, in Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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love, our duty is to expose the deeds of darkness done by our own brothers Christian and sisters in the faith. We confront one another in our sin, always with the goal of winning our brother or sister over and proclaiming Christ’s forgiveness.

Secondly, walking as children of light, we expose the deeds of darkness in the world. As the light of Christ shines upon the ungodly, we see the true nature of their deeds—death. It is our prayer that as the light of Christ shines on them, their eyes may be opened to this as well.

Paul concludes with what is most likely a stanza from an early Christian hymn. It proclaims the truth of what has taken place for the believer—a resurrection or an awakening by the light of the gospel. This is our prayer each and every day, as each day we awake anew with the light of Christ shining on us. Each day we awake in the grace of our baptism. Each day is a resurrection from death, a rescue from the deeds of darkness, a deliverance from the clutches of the evil one. This is also our prayer for unbelievers, that the light of Christ would awaken them, expose their deeds of darkness, and make them fellow children of light. Just as it is the light that produces fruit in our lives, so it is the light of Christ, the gospel, that enlightens the unbeliever and calls him to faith and a life of good works. To walk as children of light is to walk in the power of the word made flesh, the lamp for our feet and the light for our path, who shines upon us with his grace.

A sermon on this text could build on the theme (taken from verse 14): “A Wakeup Call.” There is ample material in the text to proclaim the dangers of drifting back to the darkness of sin and death as well as the blessing of the light of Christ.

Rather than the darkness of sin, our Lord calls us to the darkness of Good Friday, through which we receive the light of his forgiveness won on the cross. Through baptism we are children of the light, bearing the fruit of goodness, righteousness, and truth, exposing the deeds of darkness in our own lives, in the lives of fellow believers, and in the lives of the lost.

Joel P. Fritsche

Proper 16 • Ephesians 5:22–33 • August 23, 2015

Marriage. A man and a woman united. The standard for this union has been established by God and is fully rooted in his love for us in Jesus Christ.

A quick review of the readings from Ephesians for the prior two Sundays will frame our reading for today; we are imitators of Christ and his love. Ephesians 5 continues to draw us away from partnering ourselves with “the sons of disobedience” and has us “walk as children of light” while discerning “what is pleasing to God.” Now, as we move into Ephesians 5:22–33, we are invited to look more closely, to drill down, and consider very specifically how to incorporate the previous verses into the model for loving one another as imitators of Christ.

For most of us, it’s important to acknowledge that we and so many others hit a

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major barrier simply by reading the word “submit.” Is this really new with our generation? Given that this was written when marriages were arranged, it’s doubtful that this message was received any more easily by the people in Ephesus. It’s imperative that we not stop here but continue on to see the wonderful relationship established by God with each of us and how that has a direct impact on every other relationship.

The bulk of this passage has as its focus the role of husbands and how they are to love (v. 25ff). “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Here’s where the weight on the shoulders of the husband grows heavier all the way to the point of it being impossible to carry. In verse 28, the obligation is for the husband to love his wife not only for a moment but as a binding and lasting obligation. This means that it is unacceptable for a husband to love to the best of his ability and call it good. Rather, he is to love as Christ loves the church (v. 29). This love Christ has for the church is both a profound mystery and an impossible standard for any husband to meet.

In taking this message to people, it would be wrong to soft pedal the clear message we have about the relationship between a woman and a man. Even the most wonderful husband is an imitator, not Christ himself. As an imitator, the husband is going to fall far short of the standard set by Christ. All husbands will not only fall short here but in every aspect of their lives and must receive forgiveness and be fortified by the means of grace. Our imitation is imperfect but we still reflect the love given to us. How blessed is the woman who sees the reflection of Christ in the man to whom she is married. How blessed are we, in all of our Christian relationships, to see the love of Christ in our brothers and sisters, the body of Christ.

In the Broadway musical Les Miserables, we watch the life of Jean Valjean as he is freed from prison and struggles to reinvent himself and spend the rest of his life keeping a promise to love an orphan girl as his own. As the end of the show arrives, we find Valjean dying and being greeted by the ghosts of the child’s mother, Fantine, and that of another character, Eponine. The epilogue carries with it a message of love, relationships, and forgiveness. Now, in death, Valjean, Fantine, and Eponine join in singing:

And remember The truth that once was spoken To love another person Is to see the face of God. William Wrede

Proper 17 • Ephesians 6:10–20 • August 30, 2015

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However, the hymn presents an image, not of a lone soldier, but of a unified of peace. army following Christ in love and charity.

Like a mighty army moves the Church of God; Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod.

We are not divided, all one body we, One in hope and doctrine, one in charity. (LSB 662) This image fits with the picture present in our pericope.

Paul does not shy away from military imagery in his letters (2 Cor 6:7; 10:4; 1 Thes 5:8; etc.), and this passage makes it clear Christians are very much in the midst of conflict. Our war however is not with the culture, capitalism, or government, but with the “rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (v. 6). Many sermons on this text move from this realization into an analysis of the armor the Christian is called to put on, perhaps offering a comparison between each physical item and its spiritual counterpart. One must be careful not to push the analogy too far and in so doing miss the importance of the image as a whole. Paul calls the Christian to put on “the whole armor of God” but not to lead the charge. Instead we are called to stand firm. Three times in verses 11–14 Paul calls Christians to stand firm in the faith as they wrestle with the principalities of darkness.

One must remember that we may still be in combat, but the war is already won.

Words like “authorities” and “powers” should bring the reader’s attention back to the first chapter of the epistle. Paul makes clear the war is won. Jesus has risen from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father. There Christ sits “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come” (Eph 1:21). Christians are not called to win a war already won; they are called to stand firm as the final skirmishes are played out around them.

And they do not do this alone. Paul has been at pains throughout the letter to the Ephesians to emphasize the unity of the church in Christ. We are the “body Christ,” “fellow citizens with the saints,” “members of the household of God.” The image may be of each soldier putting on armor, but in the context of the letter as a whole it is hard to imagine one soldier standing alone. One pictures an army standing in unity so no enemy may pass through. The armor these soldiers are wearing is not gained by their own merit, but spiritual gifts they are blessed with (see chapter 1 and following). Their one weapon is drawn at the ready. Paul calls for this sword of the spirit to be used at all times in prayer and supplication.

Some scholars have taken this even further and, given the perceived liturgical nature of the letter as a whole, argue the armor is put on in and through corporate worship. Where better for the people of God to put on his armor and stand together? In the church service we are covered with the word of truth, the righteousness of Christ, presented with the gospel of peace, and pray as one body in the Spirit.

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during worship and how we are armored by God to protect us from the “spiritogether tual forces of evil.”

Jason Broge

Editor’s note: The following homiletical help is adapted from Concordia Journal, July 2006.

Proper 18 • James 2:1–10, 14–18 • September 6, 2015

In chapter two of his epistle James warns these Christians about the danger of “head faith.” He doesn’t specifically label it as head faith, but that seems to be what he is referring to. Note what James says in 2:19, the verse immediately following our text, “You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe and tremble.”

He’s talking about faith that is based solely on knowledge about God—head faith—but which bears no fruit. Even Satan and his demons have that kind of faith, yet still they tremble. This is not saving faith. They are damned for eternity.

What about Christians? Can a Christian have only this kind of faith? How can you tell? James points to good works as being evidence of saving faith? If one’s faith does not produce good works, it cannot be saving faith. Faith doesn’t show partiality.

Faith moves you to love your neighbor as yourself. Faith is active in love. But faith without works is dead. In 2:14 James asks, “Can such faith save?” The expected answer is no. So, a Christian who has only head faith, doesn’t have saving faith, and is therefore not really a Christian at all.

James is not accusing his readers of not having saving faith. He addresses them as “brothers” (2:1). He does this fifteen times throughout the entire epistle. However, certain actions and attitudes prevalent among them caused him to issue a warning about the place of good works in the life of a Christian. They are not immune from falling away. James uses the example of showing partiality to the rich who come into their assembly. He also uses the example of not helping a brother or sister in need. This is not how a brother who holds the faith of our glorious Lord Jesus Christ lives.

As Christians, there is always the temptation for us to be more “head-faith” than “heart-faith” people. We are all sinners whose works and very lives are tainted by sin.

The preaching of the law in the sermon should bring the hearers to the point of selfexamination, to recognize their failures when it comes to good works. Specifically, in what ways have you shown partiality in the congregation? Have you refused or avoided helping a brother or sister who is truly in need? On the other hand, lest a person think he is full of good works and making progress at rooting out sin, let him hear James 2:10, “For whoever keeps the whole law, but stumbles at one point, has become guilty of all.” In other words, even one sin means we are guilty of breaking the whole law.

While works are certainly evidence of a living faith, they will never provide certainty for salvation. That is found not in us, but in the objective gospel of Christ.

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of good works. Much of popular preaching, especially what our people hear on TV, is filled with the urgency of doing more works. “Stop doing that and do more of this” is often the advice given. But doing more works is not the remedy for dead faith. That’s confusing law and gospel. Those who have been convicted by the law and are aware of their sin, perhaps even to the point of questioning their salvation, need the comfort of the gospel of Jesus Christ, lest they be left in turmoil and despair. More law preaching will produce not more works, but terror.

Here, we as Lutherans, have the opportunity to clarify the biblical teaching of faith and good works with the proper distinction of law and gospel. Stanza five of “Salvation unto Us Has Come” summarizes it well: Faith clings to Jesus’ cross alone And rests in Him unceasing; And by its fruit true faith is known, With love and hope increasing.

For faith alone can justify; Works serve our neighbor and supply The proof that faith is living.

Good works are certainly a result, a fruit of faith to serve our neighbor. As James says, they even give evidence of faith. However, we don’t increase faith by doing more good works. Faith clings to the cross of Jesus Christ alone! Only the Holy Spirit can create and strengthen faith—heart faith—by the gospel. Christians need a solid connection to Jesus, the Vine (Jn 15), to receive the fruits of his cross and to bear much fruit.

God shows no partiality. He offers his Son to the whole world, to all sinners.

We have been gifted with a rock-solid connection to Jesus through his promise to be present for us in his word and in the sacraments. This wonderful connection was begun in your baptism and continues in absolution and Holy Communion. Faith filled with Christ himself can’t help but be active in love toward others. In the liturgy following our reception of the sacrament of the altar we even pray, “Strengthen us through the same in faith toward you and in fervent love toward one another.” It is no wonder then that we also pray in the Collect of the Day: “O God, without whose blessing we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and govern our hearts; through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord. . . . Amen.”

Joel P. Fritsche

Proper 19 • James 3:1–12 • September 13, 2015

The text of this passage from the Epistle of James is interesting both grammatically and lexically. The passage is rich in imagery, and the vocabulary is rather unusual.

The preacher is invited to echo the colorful, creative language in a sermon that does not reduce the message to simplistic platitudes and customary theological jargon.

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The Tswana people in Botswana will sometimes quote a wise traditional proverb, which translates: “A pointing finger may turn back, but a word does not return.” The meaning is that an angry gesture (shaking your finger at someone) can be forgotten as tempers cool, but our angry, hurtful words, once spoken, take on a life of their own and continue to cause damage. Words cannot be called back or unsaid. Like a lit match in a dry forest, a hurtful word quickly ignites a chain reaction of offense, anger, pain, guilt, rumor, slander, deception, and hostility. That cultural insight among the Tswana resonates with the text from James, because our common human experience confirms the piercing diagnosis of the word of God. Important preparation for a sermon on this text is a review of Luther’s discussion of the Eighth Commandment in the Large Catechism (Kolb-Wengert, 420ff). “‘Bearing false witness’ is nothing but a work of the tongue.” As Luther explains the commandment, Christians are absolutely forbidden to speak evil of other people—even if what they say is technically “true.” The only exceptions are those who are commanded, in their God-given vocations (as magistrates, preachers, and parents), to judge others so that evil does not go unpunished. But the commandment also enjoins a number of positive good works of love and service to others. “We should use our tongue,” says Luther, “to speak only the best of all people, to cover the sins and infirmities of our neighbors, to justify their actions, and to cloak and veil them with our own honor.” The right use of words is so difficult (and rare!), and the abuse and perversion so pervasive, that Luther concludes, “There is nothing around us or in us that can do greater good or greater harm in temporal or spiritual matters than the tongue, although it is the smallest and weakest member.”

It is not hard to multiply examples of this destructive power unleashed so often through our words and speech. Simple lies are everywhere; they mask our selfishness, cover our sins, and corrode our relationships. We lie to other people and we even lie to ourselves. But the evil of the tongue is not limited to lies: we often enough turn even the truth (at least partial truth) into a weapon and an untamed fire. And then we excuse the loveless damage and the cascading pain we cause by saying, “It’s just the truth!”

Spiritually, we lie even when we tell the truth, and the tendency is at least as conspicuous in the way we talk about each other in the church as it is “out there” in the unbelieving world. If anything, we might be tempted more strongly to excuse and justify our slander and backbiting and lies by claiming that we are defending the Truth. (The peril of such a temptation may help explain the connection between James 3:1 and the following verses: we should not be too eager to set ourselves up as the spiritual judges of others!)

It should be obvious (though perhaps it should be pointed out) that what is called a sin of the “tongue” by James (and Luther) is now performed and extended on a shocking scale with the help of technology, even if we don’t utter a word out loud. Text messages, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, email, and who knows what else all serve as powerful amplifiers for our flaming, poisonous tongues—or rather, our flaming, poisonous hearts. In fact, technology seems to give us license to fling nasty words out into the world that we might be ashamed or embarrassed to say aloud, to someone’s face. Every day we are invited to slander people and spread lies and filth by simply clicking “like” or “share.”

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For the “tongue” itself is not the real root of the problem. Our words are a

vicious, contagious symptom, but the disease is one of the heart. “For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person” (Mk 7:21–23).

“From the same mouth”—our mouth—“come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so.” Indeed, they should not, but they are. This text from James offers scant explicit gospel, but it does remind us who (and whose) we are.

In spite of the restless evil of our tongues (and hearts), we have been harnessed by a new Master and turned to a different kind of speech: “blessing our Lord and Father.”

That, in fact, is the miracle of faith and salvation in Christ. The evil power of our words is common human experience; but our Creator has done something new and wonderfully surprising: he has “worded our mouths” with praise and prayers and blessing. He makes a fig tree bear olives, and a brackish pool spring forth fresh water. In short, he makes Christians out of us. “A pointing finger may turn back, but a word does not return.” And God’s word of mercy does not turn back, either, and it does wonderful things—for us, in us, and through us—with a power that comes from God (cf. Is 55:10–11).

William W. Schumacher

Proper 20 • James 3:13–4:10 • September 20, 2015

James 3 and 4 stand among the harshest condemnations found in the NT. To be called “earthly, unspiritual, demonic” is certainly not the life to which the saints have been called. But it is nevertheless evident among us: bitter jealousy (3:14), strife (3:14, 16), disorder (3:16), foul deeds (3:16), quarrels, fights, (4:1–2), and covetousness (4:2) are all present in our world, in our congregations, in our families, on our blogs, and, most troubling, in our hearts (3:14, 4:1). Preaching the law to our congregations—and to ourselves—will not be difficult from this text.

In fact, the law may be all that we see in this text. But what is the purpose of this preaching of the law by James? It is to call to repentance, with the result that the Lord “lifts us up.” James 4:8–10 is, in fact, the heart of the book. Far from teaching “works righteousness,” James drives his hearers to the realization that they have abandoned their Lord, sought to live for themselves alone, and as a result have nothing but death.

They are, using the language of the Old Testament, “adulterous people” (cf. Jer 3, esp.

3:20) who have become “friends of the world.” They are “double-minded” (Jas 1:8), people who claim to be God’s people yet live as people of the world. The final condemnation comes in 4:5 best rendered as a pair of condemning questions: “Or do you suppose that the Scripture speaks uselessly? Does the Spirit that he causes to dwell in us crave jealously?” These rebukes expose the self-delusion of thinking that God allows us to get away with living double-minded lives.

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But. As in Paul, James shifts from law to gospel with a δὲ (4:6). The Scriptures do not speak uselessly, and indeed they speak a promise: “he gives a greater gift.” While the ESV and other translations render χάριν as “grace,” here James refers again to God as the giver of the gifts (1:5 and 1:17). His gift is greater than our failure. It is upon the “humble” that God bestows gifts, upon those who repent and trust his promise.

Verses 4:8–10 is the call to repentance and new life in this God who lifts up. The verses are an inclusion of repentance: “Therefore, submit yourselves to God” (4:8) and “Humble yourselves before the Lord” (4:10) are the actions of the penitent, of those who can only trust the promise. What does the act of repentance look like? Turning from the devil and toward God (4:7–8), cleansing and purifying (4:8), mourning and contrition (4:8–9). All actions of the covenant people of God, and also the actions of those who are now in Christ—those who live not by their own power and strength but solely by the precious blood of Jesus.

Jesus, of course, is not explicitly mentioned in this text, and scarcely at all in the Epistle of James. But it is addressed to those who “hold the faith of our Lord, Jesus Christ.” In what does this faith consist? In being “lifted up” to new life in him (Jn 12:32). This new life no longer consists in jealousy, strife, quarrels, bitter deeds, etc.

Rather, in Christ we are lifted up to a life that is above such self-serving and destructive behavior; lifted up to help and befriend our neighbor in every bodily need; lifted up to speak well of our neighbor and put the best construction on everything. For we have been lifted up.

Jeffrey Kloha

Proper 21 • James 5:(1–12) 13–20 • September 27, 2015

The book of James is a collection of exhortations written to encourage Christians to live out their Christian identity in their daily lives until Christ returns. Due to the nature of the book, James feels more like a collection of proverbs than a narrative that flows from beginning to end. A common fear when preaching on a text from the book of James is that it may be heard only as condemning law. Because of this, a sermon from James must emphasize the grace-based identity of the hearer so the exhortations are taken as instructions for Christian living and not as works righteousness.

Chapter five is a prime example. There are at least three distinct topics in this pericope: a warning to the rich, exhortation for patience in suffering, and the role of prayer in Christian life. The pericope suggests one might focus on the first two topics in verses 1–12 (warning to the rich and patience in suffering) or the third topic in verses 13–20 (the role of prayer). While it is possible to lump them together, each topic warrants its own treatment.

In the context of James, the first exhortation (Jas 5:1–6) can feel like it does not fit the flow of the text. The sudden seeming shift in audience emphasizes the proverbial nature of the book as a whole and differs from the two that follow. Scholars debate who Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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talking about, but based on James 1:6, I am inclined to think James is speakJames is ing about the rich who are oppressing Christians with a description of the Christian at the close of the verse. The attitude of the Christian, the righteous man, in light of the oppression he experiences by the rich is clear. While the rich oppressed and even murdered the righteous, the righteous did not resist. It might be tempting to preach about the sins of wealthy Christians, but I believe focusing on the response of Christians to the oppression of the rich is more in line with the overall theme of James as highlighted in the section on patience in suffering that follows.

The second exhortation on patience in suffering (Jas 5:7–12) is likely the easiest of the three sections to preach. In this section, James encourages Christians to endure suffering patiently in light of the imminent return of Jesus. He encourages a steadfast faith that resists the temptation to grumble, recalls the faithful examples of the saints, and displays an integrity that allows others to take us at our word as we await Christ’s return.

The third exhortation (Jas 5:13–20) to pray emphasizes the importance of prayer in the daily life of a Christian. Prayer in times of suffering, joy, praise, sickness, confession, and need is seen as a powerful mark of a righteous follower of Christ. Prayer is not only a cry of faith to God or a therapeutic practice; it is an essential quality of the Christian life. Included in verses 19–20 of this third exhortation is a statement that emphasizes the importance of the community of faith in assisting fellow believers in remaining on the path of truth until Christ comes again. In this section, we learn that James’s exhortations are not only explicating Christian identity, but are also designed to protect followers of Christ from wandering away from the faith.

Regardless of which section of the pericope one selects, all three share the following themes: we are to live out our identity in Christ even in the face of suffering, we are to assist our brothers and sisters in staying true to the faith, and in light of James 1:2–4, suffering works to test and refine our faith until Jesus comes again. If one desires to discuss all three sections in one sermon, using these three themes as a sermonic structure is one possible way. Another way to address all three sections is to consider James 5:1–6 as a contextual description of suffering, James 5:7–12 as the call for patience in suffering, and James 5:13–20 as the role of prayer in suffering.

Anthony Cook

Proper 22 • Hebrews 2:1–13 (14–18) • October 4, 2015

Twice Honored By God This particular lectionary provides an opportunity to connect the text with the overarching storyline of Scripture. At the heart of this reading is the quotation from Psalm 8 regarding how God made man a little lower than the angels but crowned him with glory by giving him dominion over the works of his hands. The psalmist cannot help but wonder about how it is that God is so mindful of human creatures that he gives them a role of privilege and responsibility within creation.

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Now, there has been debate as to whether this text refers to Adam and Eve or if

it refers to Christ. The answer is probably yes to both. The language of Psalm 8 cannot help but evoke in the reader’s mind the imagery of Genesis 1:26–31 in which God gave Adam and Eve dominion over the earth. At the same time, this Hebrews text clearly connects to Christ. So, how might we do justice to both at the same time? We can do so by setting them within the overarching story of Scripture. Psalm 8 brings the past and future together.

First, Psalm 8 echoes the language of Genesis and asserts that humbleness of humans as creatures of God. What is man that God is mindful of him? He is simply a creature along with all the other creatures. Yet God has made him a little lower than the angels and given us dominion. Such dominion was to reflect God’s own dominion over creation. So how does God rule? So that everything blooms and blossoms like in a well-watered garden (Isaiah). God rules so that everything flourishes by his work. That includes the creation, animals, and humans. That was God’s vision for his creation.

That became our responsibility as image bearers of God. That brings us to how the author to the Hebrews connects Psalm 8 to Christ.

Verse 8 of Hebrews 2 notes that we don’t see that dominion that God intended.

Clearly something has gone wrong with the original intention. Humans did not rule for the benefit of creation. They did not want to rule as a reflection of God’s gracious rule.

They wanted to rule and be in control as God himself. They wanted to rule for their own benefit. And as a result, everything has gone wrong.

Verse 9 then points us to Christ. Of interest is the language of 1 Corinthians 8 picked up here by speaking of the Son of God as the creator (“for whom and through whom all things exist”). Now we see a double honor by God. Not only did God honor us with the role of being responsible over creation, he now honors us by becoming a human creature so that in him, that right dominion would be restored. The Creator enters his creation by becoming incarnate. The wording about Christ, that “for a little while” he is made lower than the angels, suggests the state of humiliation. Jesus voluntarily set aside the divine majesty that had been shared with his human nature in the incarnation so that he might suffer and die for us. And even more, that he might be raised up and seated at the right hand of God for us.

In this, as a man the Creator becomes our brother. The man Jesus rules over all creation. As God, he had always ruled. But it is as man that he reacquires the proper dominion over creation as God had given it to Adam and Eve. He does so as one of us, as our brother.

The sermon can be organized into two parts for the double honor God has bestowed upon us: (1) Honored by God with the privilege of looking after his creation, (2) Honored by Christ’s incarnation and dominion.

Charles Arand

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Proper 23 • Hebrews 3:12–19 • October 11, 2015

This text hardly ranks among the most popular or familiar of those gathered in the pericopes; but with its stern warnings, emphasis on Christian responsibility, and explicit OT imagery, it serves nicely as a representative of the entire book, and offers some interesting opportunities for the preacher.

These vital points can be gleaned from these verses: An evil unbelieving heart is avoidable. This is not quite the axiomatic statement that it might seem. With our right emphasis on divine monergism and the gift of faith as entirely God’s work from start to finish, it is tempting to read against the text and insist that perseverance in faith is God’s business, period. But, that is clearly not the author’s point. Without diminishing God’s sovereign work in our lives (he is a living and active God who impacts us directly), we must teach and insist that each Christian is fully responsible for resisting sin and curbing unbelief, or more literally, unfaith. A related question, worth consideration and exploration, but without a clear answer, is the precise relationship between a sinning heart and an unbelieving heart. The writer to the Hebrews doesn’t seem opposed to treating them as synonyms.

The means of preventing unfaith, or more exactly, apostasy, is the giving and receiving of mutual encouragement. It is perhaps self-evident, but by no means widely admitted or practiced, that such a remedy demands active communities of faith. “One anothers” exist only in such communities. The power of Christian edification to sustain faith enjoys scriptural and even confessional support, but it’s too often given short shrift in deference to the more potent means of absolution—preaching and sacrament. This text provides the preacher the chance to propound the great gift of “one another” and the sustenance that comes when we not only receive but also deliver words of edification and encouragement.

Sin is deceitful. Again, while the tautological aspect is evident, the realities of parish ministry expose the failure of both people and pastors to more honestly recognize and admit this truth. Sin becomes altogether too common and familiar and so “safe.”

The writer to the Hebrews screams the contrary alert: Sin kills. His pointed illustration from Exodus history is particularly poignant. It is unnerving to recall that the failed generation of Israelites had all heard, as well as seen, the concrete actions of God on their behalf, and nevertheless succumbed to the lure of sin, evil, and unfaith. Corpses and bleached bones in the wilderness show the score. Sin is never what it seems. No sinner ever has his sin under control. Imperceptibly, yet certainly, arteries harden until the fact is suddenly manifest: a dead body via heart attack or stroke. Sin works the same hardening effect on faith. Believers can also grow old and hard and succumb suddenly to unfaith. What a Christian “used to do” is irrelevant. What matters is what is done today. No one is immune from the deceit and danger of sin.

The time to act is today. The writer reminds us that hackneyed truth may still be truth: yesterday and tomorrow are beyond our grasp, only today matters. Thus, the day to encourage is today—an ever-present task. Ultimately, of course, it is the long succession of todays lived faithfully that eventuates in God’s eternal rest.

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Suggested Outline: “What day is it?

I. The immediacy of the threat.

A. Warning! Watch your heart, today.

1. God gives faith.

2. You need to maintain it.

B. Warning! No one is exempt from sin’s deceit.

1. Israel heard God’s grace and still fell.

2. Yesterday’s faith does not save a person today.

II. The immediacy of the work to meet the threat.

A. Encourage each other right now.

1. This is a sure defense against unfaith.

2. To do this requires a community of faith.

B. Every “today” becomes part of a succession of todays.

1. This creates a legacy.

2. This ends in eternity (which is a continual “today”).

Conclusion: “What day is it? It’s today, so go and do the work of today.”

Joel Biermann

Proper 23 • Hebrews 3:12–19 • October 11, 2015

Notes on the pericope The pericope urges Christians to believe God’s promise of eternal rest and to hold on to it by faithfulness.

The pericope is part of a passage that exhorts Christians to persevere in faith and faithfulness. The first part of the exhortation begins by quoting part of Psalm 95 (Heb 3:7–11). These verses (Ps 95:7–11b) call on God’s people today (σήμερον; 3:7) to hear and believe God’s voice, not to respond like the Israelites in the desert. The hardness of their hearts provoked God to swear: “They will certainly not enter my rest (τὴν κατάπαυσίν μου)” (3:11). They did not enter God’s rest because of their unbelief (δι’ ἀπιστίαν) (3:18).

At 4:1, Christians are warned: “Therefore let us fear, lest some of you, because you left behind the promise to enter his rest, appear to come up short.” They had been evangelized just as the Israelites had been. The word did not help the Israelites, because they did not combine faith with hearing (4:2; see also 4:6). Christians are urged not to fall into that error and therefore fail to enter God’s rest.

But what was the rest that remained a promise even for Christians living long after the wanderings in the desert? It was not the entrance into the promised land, “for if Joshua had given [the Israelites] rest, then God would not have spoken about another [rest] after these days” (4:8). Rather, it was God’s own rest on the seventh day, “for somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in this way: ‘And God rested on Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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the seventh day from all his works’” (4:4, quoting Gn 2:2). So the author concludes: “Therefore there remains a Sabbath rest (σαββατισμὸς) for the people of God, because whoever enters God’s rest also rests from his labors, just as God rested from his.

Therefore, let us make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one should fall by the same example of disobedience” (4:9–11). From this, we see that the promised rest is ultimate and eternal, not temporary.

The promise is eschatological, a promise of life with God and all his people in the new creation, enjoying the life of the age to come.

The topic changes in the final two verses of the pericope (vv. 12–13). We can understand the change as a shift from a focus on the promise of rest and exhortation to remain faithful to a focus on promise and exhortation themselves, that is, to the word itself and to God himself, who speaks the word and makes the promises. This word should not be taken lightly, because it is “living” and “active” and “sharper than any double-edged sword,” just as everything is open to the eyes of God. These verses reinforce the urgency of the message.

Notes for preaching A sermon based on this text should urge hearers to strive to enter God’s Sabbath rest. They will do this by living by faith in the promise and in faithfulness to the God who made it. This sermon should explain the concept of “rest” and the promise of rest.

This text not only explains what rest is but also defends its interpretation. This sermon also should be clear and concrete about the faithful obedience that is called for. This passage helps by making a comparison with Israel, who neither believed the promise given to them nor obeyed the God who made it. And it will be important to keep in mind that just as faith and obedience go together, so also do unbelief and disobedience.

This passage is strong on this connection, and so any sermon based on it should be just as strong.

How might you organize this sermon? You might organize it around the theme of “rest.” This may not be as obvious as it sounds, because “work” dominates our lives.

It dominates them not only in that it fills our lives, but also in how we understand ourselves and give value to our lives. We are known by what we do for a living. Formal education is training for lives of work. Many so-called leisure activities are filled with activity and accomplishment. Even when they are not, they are supposed to make us ready to “get back to work.”

Then point out that the promise of rest—of enjoying God’s Sabbath rest—implies a radical revaluation. We are to look forward to end all of our labors. To lead your hearers to look forward for rest, explain the promise of rest in this text and assure your hearers that God made it to each of them in the means of grace.

Conclude by urging your hearers always to look forward to this rest, and not to let go of it through disobedience. If you begin with the “economic” theme that I suggest, then it makes sense to return to this theme. Jesus’s warning against worry (Mt 6:25–34) and Paul’s exhortation about contentment (1 Tm 6:6–10) are relevant.

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Reformation Sunday • Romans 3:19–28 • October 25, 2015

“Greeks seek wisdom,” Paul once wrote, and they had plenty to offer. Over the centuries, sages had tried to make sense of things with varied results. Their wisdom of the time had come to accept the idea of fundamental chaos as a starting reality, which they then sought to overlay with some kind of organic order, with each part of the physical and social world assigned to its proper slot. After early attempts sought a foundation with air, fire, water, or numbers but found no real bottom, Plato upped the ante with a structure tied to ultimate ideas that gave shape to all below. It was a scheme he really could not prove, but with people looking for answers, this seemed like the “killer app.” Aristotle would modify (though not precisely counter) that framework while adding a kind of logic and a sense of morality that would prove so persuasive and useful that Aristotle would come to rule the roost, theology included, in the centuries before Martin Luther. “If . . . if . . . therefore” became received wisdom and drove the answer to the central question that dogged people: how can I be saved? If God is perfect and makes no mistakes, and if God gives the law and says “keep it,” therefore . . . Make sense? Unfortunately, yes—with a logic, a wisdom, that would (and still does) drive to distraction. Okay, grace assists, and there’s no pure works-righteousness. That would be Pelagianism, which the church had spurned. But in the end, when lives are weighed in the balance, even when enabled by grace is it wise with a wave of the hand to dismiss what we do? And how much is enough?

St. Paul is anti-wisdom of this sort (and he’d studied it plenty and knew whereof he spoke). While today’s text is Romans 3, for a moment reach over to 1 Corinthians 1:19 and watch the cross do demolition, echoing Isaiah (29:14): I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and make rubbish out of the intelligence of the intelligent. So Christianity madly turns its back on “if . . . if . . . therefore.” Here in Romans in the first two verses Paul piles on just to make sure we get the point: if we had any ideas of striking a bargain, to weasel out, or to try another way, forget it. Laid low, the believer can only ’fess up to reality and confess, with no right to expect anything. God has got us dead to rights.

And then comes one of the most beautiful words in verse 21: “But.” But—not because of the law but in spite of and apart from it . . . It’s not a matter of “righteousness” as a quantity being amassed and presented (and just how much is enough?), but rather it’s “righteousness” as a quality given from and by Christ Jesus. There is still a cost—verses 23–25—but . . . What comes after the “but” makes all the difference.

The gospel flies in the face of logic, which is why Luther (in his 1517 “Disputation against Scholastic Theology”) said Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light. The cross is such obvious folly as even a child can see. A grandmother was once telling her granddaughter what happened on Good Friday and why this was important—that we have done wrong (and we know what happens when people do wrong)— but instead God gave up his Son to die on the cross. The little girl thought a moment and then said, “I think God must be crazy.” Yes! Crazy, indeed. Crazy to do it because he is crazy in love with us. For no good reason, except he just is. There’s no making of Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

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logical reasons to hang on to us, to do what he did. Nevertheless. It’s unbelists with lievable—but believe it! Gates of paradise are flung wide open, Luther wrote, trying to describe the realization. Thank God God is a contrarian.

And so God puts his stamp, his order on the chaos we have unleashed. In Christ he mixes in, hands-on with hands pierced, silencing those who would boast, even as that silence fills instead with laughter and joy and praise for his grace, love, and mercy—his gift.

Robert Rosin

Editor’s note: The following homiletical help is adapted from Concordia Journal, January 1988.

All Saints’ Day • 1 John 3:1–3 • November 1, 2015

Our modern rockets are useful for other than scientific and military purposes.

In addition, they suggest a profound spiritual truth. It is characteristic of rockets to go through multiple stages. At some point after the initial liftoff, the rocket, amoeba-like, divides; the one part may be left behind to disintegrate, and the other part enters a new trajectory and begins a new phase. This process may occur again at a later point.

Well, the Christian life, in some respects at least, resembles a multiple-phase rocket: the first phase is from conception to birth; the second phase is from birth to death; and the third phase is from death into eternity. And just as there is a critical point in the progress of a rocket at which a certain phenomenon or activity needs to occur if the rocket is to complete its mission successfully, so there is a critical point in the life of a human being at which a certain phenomenon or activity needs to occur in order to attain the goals. At some time in the second phase (and the earlier the better), a human being needs to experience the phenomenon we call conversion. Having been born already, we need to be “born again”—that is the urgent language in which the Bible describes this critical stage. Having gotten bodily life, we need to receive spiritual life as well, or else the whole process fizzles out into eternal death. The success of the second and third phases depends one hundred percent upon at some point accepting Christ as the Savior.

You and I are now in the second phase of our multiple-phase existence. Each of us has successfully undergone the critical phenomenon called conversion. “Beloved, now are we the children of God,” our text assures us. The Holy Spirit’s application to us through the gospel of the saving work of Jesus has given us this glorious status. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that it is only the second phase. Another one, the final one, still lies ahead. Glorious and significant as is this present phase, from womb to tomb, there is an even more glorious and significant phase ahead, a phase that staggers the imagination and with which nothing in this present mode of existence is worthy to be compared. I refer, of course, to heaven. “And it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see 270

him as he is,” our text says. Our goal today is to fix our sights a bit more firmly on this, the last and grandest stage in our progress.

It is common knowledge that many in our world, either by design or by oversight, regard these seventy to eighty years of existence on this earth as the whole meaning of life. They mistake what is a mere phase for the goal of the journey. Even Christians sometimes have their weaker moments, and I suppose this is even sometimes true of those Christians in attendance this morning. The lonely sound of a train whistle at night, the rhythmic lapping of water on a beach, the sonorous hum of an electric fan on a hot summer day, the monotonous drone of the officiant at a graveside, a page from Hemingway—and our doubts are triggered. How can a person live forever? What kind of life can it possibly be? Maybe the grave is the end of it, after all, and we might as well face it bravely.

Well, perhaps we can better keep in mind the final phase of our journey, heaven, by thinking for a moment of the first phase. I refer to that nine-month existence before we were born. None of us, now that we’re at this stage in our development, would regard that nine-month period as the whole meaning of life beyond which there is nothing more. By now we know better.

But let us say, by way of illustration, that during our pre-natal life we had the capacity to think, to hope or not hope, and so on. And let us add that while in our mother’s womb we got word that another life lay before us, a life that might last the incredibly long time of eighty or ninety years. The new world we would someday enter would contain light in which we could see things and vast reaches of space in which we could move around. It would contain towering skyscrapers, majestic mountains, queerlooking quadrupeds called animals, large plants called trees, four-wheeled vehicles traveling at shocking speeds. Someday, we were assured, we would be able to do such impossible things as walk and talk. What’s more, we wouldn’t be alone in this world; there would be millions of other creatures similar to our self, and where could there possibly be room for them all? Yet strangest of all would be the mode of entering this new world, a rather perilous process called birth, involving pain, danger, doctors, and hospitals, a process we would never guess could thrust us into such a beautiful life as we live at present.

Now what reaction might an unborn child have toward this talk of another and more abundant life, assuming that an unborn child can have reactions? In spite of the fact that she couldn’t possibly understand what earthly life would be like, she could still believe in it and look forward to it. Doing so would make her nine-month existence much more pleasant. Or she could be a realist and assume that the darkness and cramped quarters she lives in are the whole meaning of life and that beyond that dreaded process called birth there is no more. All this talk about another life is wishful thinking, and one might better make the most of what she has got.

Then comes the day—the day of birth. It turns out true, after all, gloriously true!

There is another life. You can live eighty or ninety years. There are such things as light and space and skyscrapers and mountains and animals and plants and fast-moving vehicles. You can walk and talk. And this dreaded process called birth, in spite of appearances, turns out, after all, to be the gateway to this new and wonderful world.

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sure you begin to see what we’re after this morning. Our present life is not I’m the climax of life; it is but a phase in our journey. In relation to the heavenly life, we might call it a pre-natal stage. We have it on good word—God’s word— that there is another life, another world, ahead of us called heaven. In it we shall live unbelievably long—forever! It is a world without space or time. Angels will share its mansions with us. We shall behold the face of God. We shall see him as he is. In fact, we shall be like him. All the ills and inconveniences of this present life, chief of which is sin, will have vanished. In the words of John Donne:

For when our Soule enjoyes this her third birth, (Creation gave her one, a second, grace,) Heaven is as neare, and present to her face, As colours are, and objects, in a roome Where darknesse was before, when Tapers come.

Strangest of all, the mode of entering this world is a dreaded and painful process called death, a process involving undertakers, caskets, tombstones, and bodily decay, a process we would never guess could thrust us into such a beautiful life as the heavenly existence is. Best of all, no part is left behind to disintegrate. The capsule of the second phase, the body, is recovered and restored; there is a resurrection.

Obviously, we can’t conceive of this life, no more than an unborn child can imagine life on earth. But we can believe in it and hope for it. We can join the Apostle John in saying, “Beloved, now are we the children of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.”

Francis C. Rossow

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BOOK REVIEWS

COncordia Journal

DANGEROUS CALLING: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry. By Paul David Tripp.

Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012. 227 pages. Hardcover. $22.99.

BLESSED ARE THE BALANCED: A Seminarian’s Guide to Following Jesus in the Academy. By Paul E. Pettit and R. Todd Mangum. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2014. 137 pages.

Softcover. $13.99.

Taken together these two books present challenges and opportunities galore for thoughtful and reflective change in the formation of pastors (read: in our educational institutions and in our seminaries) and in the continuing work and ongoing growth of pastors (read: in our ongoing pastoral development) as well.

They are useful reading for church workers and leaders in general, but this review will focus on the pastoral side of things.

First, be prepared to be challenged.

There is strong stuff here. Neither of these books is for the weak-hearted. It is important not to let the challenges cause the reader to turn away or construct a barrier to them. It is critical to receive and understand the challenges in the context of authors who want to enhance the witness to Jesus that pastors are able to give.

Second, think behaviorally and personally. Offered in each of these books are practical encouragements and suggestions.

Each book offers a number of things to first consider and then do. It is not enough to think about these books; it will be important to do some of what is suggested.

Third, these books have an agenda and flaws. Welcome to a fallen and imperfect world. The reader would do Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

well to draw from each of them their positive helps and not let the perceived agenda or flaws create a “throw everything out” response. In other words, stay open to the challenges and opportunities that are offered.

Tripp’s book is simply an all-out invitation to pastors in their work and to seminaries in their formation process to think through those processes. Here is a sample from Tripp’s third chapter “Big Theological Brains and Heart Disease”: Have we accomplished our training task if we produce generations of graduates who have big theological brains but tragically diseased hearts? Must we not hold together theological training and personal transformation? I am convinced that the crisis of pastoral culture often begins in the seminary class. It begins with a distant, impersonal, information-based handling of the Word of God. It begins with pastors who, in their seminary years, became quite comfortable with holding God’s Word distant from their own hearts. It begins with classrooms that are academic without being pastoral. It begins with brains becoming more important than hearts. It begins with test scores being more important than character. . . . Academized Christianity, which is not consistently connected to the heart and puts its hope in knowledge and skill, can actually make students dangerous. It arms them with powerful knowledge and

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that can make the students skills think that they are more mature and godly than they actually are.

It arms students with weapons of spiritual warfare that if not used with humility and grace will harm the people they are meant to help. (Tripp, 52‒54)

And from his fourth chapter “More than Knowledge and Skill”: You see, it is absolutely vital to remember that a pastor’s ministry is never just shaped by his knowledge, experience, and skill. It is always also shaped by the true condition of his heart. In fact, if his heart is not in the right place, all of the knowledge and skill can actually function to make him dangerous. (Tripp, 62) With this foundational point Tripp’s entire book unfolds with plentiful examples and suggestions. Some of these examples are from Tripp’s own personal narrative; others are from the narratives of others. All in all, they are powerful examples of what he calls “heart disease” as well as significant pointers toward a healthier heart. It was hard at times to remember that Tripp does acknowledge that balancing knowledge, experience, skill, and heart is vital and holistically important, because he is such an advocate for the personal spiritual life of the pastor. But it is clear that it is a balance he seeks. “Here’s the bottom line: do we live as though we really do think of ourselves, who have been called to pastor others, as people in need of pastoring? Do we?”

(Tripp, 212). Well, do we? Do I? Not so much. The challenge is there.

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Towards the end of the book Tripp hits what could be too much of an individualistic note: You have one—and only one— place to look for your rest, motivation, and hope. You cannot search for these things in yourself, in the people you serve, in the leaders who serve with you, or in your ministry success. You and I must preach an ancient gospel of grace to ourselves with fresh application and enthusiasm day after ministry day. (Tripp, 222) True enough, but we surely also need people around us, fellow members of the community which is the body of Christ, to both preach and be that “ancient gospel of grace” to us.

Bottom line: get the book, read it, and talk about it deeply with others. This is a wonderful book for deeper discussion in small groups of pastors, but it is very useful for anyone.

Pettit and Mangum’s book focuses specifically on a seminarian’s spiritual life while at the “academy.” There are echoes of Tripp. Here is a sample from their chapter “Avoiding Spiritual Frostbite”: Sharp reasoning skill is encouraged and honed by Scripture itself. Yet sharp thinking is no substitute for depth of character.

The two are not equal in value; it is better to be a person submissive of spirit and soft of heart to the Lord’s will than simply smart.

Solomon himself ended up finding this out the hard way. Nor are the two mutually exclusive.

In fact a person of character who

has discernment, including also incisive, keen reasoning ability, is a person of ideal leadership quality. . . . [But] as you develop skills of reasoning, you grow accustomed to being right. As you cultivate the ability to persuade, using sound logic and articulate rhetoric, you grow accustomed to having your views accepted, adopted, and implemented.

Frankly, this could put you in a dangerous frame of mind. (Pettit and Mangum, 96‒97)

The balance that Pettit and Mangum seek is between what they identify as “Christian maturity” and “higher education.” Imbalance occurs when there is little interest in learning about the content of the faith; imbalance also occurs when there is little personal spiritual application in what is being learned. This book is about the development of attitudes and behaviors that work toward the balance of these two sides of what Pettit and Mangum describe as a teeter-totter.

Their practical suggestions are creative and challenging. Their “Practice of Spiritual Disciplines” section in the chapter “Disciplining Heart of Head” is a great list of twenty-two spiritual disciplines as well as their list of fourteen “Academic Disciplines” in the same chapter.

In this book the seminarian will be challenged in specific and direct ways that are crucial. It is clear that one major spiritual challenge for seminarians is, as they learn more about God (i.e., develop their knowledge), that they also intentionally stay connected to activities and to people that help them, as the authors would say, “become spiritually mature” as

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they consider passages offering metaphors of growth (Eph 4:12‒14), good fruit (Mt 7:16‒18, 20), and walking in the light (Eph 5:8).

This book is good reading for all of us. The bottom line: get the book, read it, and talk about it deeply with others.

These two books, taken together, focus on what many, including this reviewer, believe is one of the essential ministry challenges of our time: growing Christian leaders who are as holistically healthy in spirit, mind, and body as possible in a fallen world.

I am reminded of a story about Dr. Franz Pieper (former president of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and former president of Concordia Seminary) told to me by my vicarage supervisor, Dr. Theodore Nickel, himself a Pieper devotee and former vice-president of the LCMS. Dr. Nickel related that toward the end of his lectures on systematic theology Dr. Pieper would stop and encourage a discussion by asking: “Now, boys, what does all this mean in your life?” No question that Tripp, Pettit, and Mangum would like that, as I do.

I am also reminded of a comment in one of Dr. J. H. C. Fritz’s books, Pastoral Theology. Fritz, the academic dean at Concordia Seminary for twenty years (1920‒1940), suggested that the pastor needed to learn how to read three books: scripture, flock, and self. I think Tripp, Pettit, and Mangum would approve as long as they are read in a balanced way.

These two books are calls for the integration of head and heart, and of knowledge and practice. These books are calls for the development of spiritual character in our pastors that goes far beyond knowing correct doctrine. But 277

they do more than offer a call for such things. They offer practical steps that we all can take. They are steps a seminary can and should take to raise up pastors for the church; these are steps a pastor can and should take to help grow, bear good fruit, and walk in the light as the Holy Spirit beckons and energizes. There are even steps that congregational leaders can and should take to support the pastor. Bottom line: get the books, read the books, and in small venues talk more deeply about them.

Bruce M. Hartung GOSPEL HANDLES: Old Testament Lessons. By Francis Rossow. St. Louis, Concordia Publishing House, 2014. 208 pages. Paper. $31.99.

“Rev” has done it again. Those familiar with the gospel-handle methodology of Dr. Francis “Rev” Rossow, professor emeritus of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, hardly need a review of his latest work, Gospel Handles: Old Testament Lessons. However, for the uninitiated, a “gospel handle” is a strategy for proclaiming the gospel from texts that contain little or no gospel. The “handle” uses language or images from the text as a bridge to gospel found elsewhere in Scripture with similar or identical language to that of the text. Properly administered, a gospel handle is faithful to the text while providing a smooth yet, for the hearer, unexpected transition to the gospel.

The fundamental assumption underlying each handle is that the entire Scriptures are “they that bear witness about [Christ]” (Jn 5:39). In a theological climate in which preaching is often biblical but not Christ-centered, this little vol278

ume provides an excellent reminder and encouragement for the preacher in “developing a gospel mind-set in the approach to any and every biblical text regardless of its gospel content; the hearer perceiving the Scriptures as a unified witness to Christ rather than a religious scrapbook of maxims, morals, proverbs, parables, prophecies, stories, and events” (10).

Every preacher suffers through creative dry spells. This book serves as a refreshing tonic for such times not only because it provides excellent material that can be imported directly into a sermon, but even more because it provides an ongoing strategy for creativity. But it is not unfettered creativity—we’ve all heard or perhaps (true confessions!) even delivered such monstrosities. It is creativity on a leash; refreshing, even arresting, expressions of the gospel that are properly respectful of the text.

The layout of the book is simple and easy to use. From the Pentateuch through the Minor Prophets, selected Old Testament texts from the Three-Year Lectionary are explored in terms of the gospel actually present in the text, if any, plus at least one example of “bonus” gospel via a gospel handle. The one thing the book lacks is an index of the texts that are “handled,” but it doesn’t take long to flip through each section to see if the particular text you are studying is treated.

The obvious use for the book is as a reference tool for sermon preparation, serving much like a commentary.

Stylistically, however, it has a strong devotional character. The preacher may well lose himself in reading far beyond the assigned text because, well, it is simply fun to read. Take this example from the story of Naaman the Syrian in 2

Kings, in which the author comments on the ordinary, mundane means God consistently uses to deliver his gifts: He chose to get the Good Word out through people, through ministers, who, despite their special vestments and honorable titles, are of the earth earthy: paunchy, sweaty, bumbling, stuttering, and still tempted more than they care to admit by avarice and lust and gluttony and pride. Extroverts and introverts, family men and recluses, culture vultures and clods, sports enthusiasts and bookworms, overweights and underweights, highvoiced and low-voiced, chancel prancers and liturgical bumpkins—these are among the kinds of men God calls and ordains into His holy ministry. (89) The only danger I can see is the temptation to plagiarize. If ever I preach on Isaiah 6, it will be difficult to not “borrow,” at least in part, the author’s delightfully descriptive language: “This pericope is an effective corrective to the distorted contemporary view of God as a cozy, comfortable deity, an ‘Aw-shucks,’ ‘There, there, it’ll be all right’ sort of God, who rocks no boats and hopes that everyone is having a good time. Our God is a God of purity, awe, splendor, and majesty” (109). If and when I do preach this text, I promise to give the proper attestation. Maybe.

Another thing “Rev” has always stressed is brevity. Enough said.

David S. Milz St. John’s Lutheran Church Kimball, Minnesota Concordia Journal/Summer 2015

THEOLOGIAN OF SIN AND GRACE: The Process of Radicalization in the Theology of Matthias Flacius Illyricus. By Luka Ilić. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014. 304 pages. Hardcover $88.00.

Matthias Flacius Illyricus contributed much to the intellectual progress of early modern Europe and to the development of the theology formed by Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, whose student and colleague he was. Yet Flacius has commanded relatively little attention from scholars compared to his significance in the shaping of modern hermeneutical theory, church history, biblical exegesis, as well as the formulation of the Wittenberg theological legacy. Luka Ilić compensates for this neglect in a substantial way with this meticulously documented biographical study, which traces the “radicalization” of his thought and the ecclesiastical-political efforts driven by his theology. Ilić is able to weave together succinct but penetrating assessments of how Flacius’s public teaching functioned, integrating it into the biographical details in such a way that both the thinker and the thinking come alive for the reader.

Born in Croatia, the author takes seriously the impact of the family life and early environment of the young Italo-Croatian Flacius, including the death of his father while Matthias was quite young, as well as the influence of the lively humanistic learning milieu of his native “Illyria” and the persecution of Evangelicals there throughout his life.

Ilić traces Flacius’s trek into Germanspeaking lands, as he began building the networks of influential intellectuals, political figures, and theologians 279

that served him well throughout his life, with short stays in Augsburg, Basel, and Tübingen. He arrived at his goal, Wittenberg, in 1541, performed impressively as a student, experienced the power of Luther’s pastoral care as the young foreigner underwent a spiritual crisis akin to Luther’s own Anfechtungen, and finally won appointment as the university’s instructor in Hebrew.

This world collapsed as Flacius felt betrayed by Melanchthon’s attempt to save Lutheran pulpits for Lutheran preachers by aiding in the composition of the Leipzig Proposal or “Interim” of 1548; Melanchthon felt betrayed by Flacius’s lack of understanding for, and bitter critique of, his best efforts to preserve Lutheran preaching in that political move.

The two descended into an ever more rancorous bitterness that led to the formation of parties within the Wittenberg circle which shaped a generation of Luther’s and Melanchthon’s followers. Ilić traces the first stage in Flacius’s radicalization as he was propelled into leadership of the Gnesio-Lutheran movement that centered primarily in Magdeburg. Flacius contributed many brief treatises to the critique of the “Adiaphorists” of the Leipzig Proposal as well as Georg Major’s insistence that good works are necessary for salvation and interpretations of the role of the human will in conversion or repentance that seemed to him and his comrades to diminish God’s grace.

Flacius’s call to the University of Jena and the superintendency of the churches of ducal Saxony in1557 led him to the highest point of his personal power and influence and into a cauldron that ended less than five years later with his being sent into exile. This relatively non-

280

productive period for the writer Flacius radicalized his temperament and his theological position more deeply. That process continued into the third stage of his life, his last thirteen years, from 1562 to his death in 1575, years spent wandering without a fixed position. Ilić demonstrates how Flacius’s chief concern, defending God’s unconditional grace in Christ through the assertion of his definition of original sin as the substance of the fallen human creature, grew sharper and sharper over the years, alienating not only those who had earlier opposed him but also former friends.

Ilić’s summaries of Flacius’s arguments for his defense of the substantial nature of original sin in the sinner clarify for readers precisely how Flacius constructed his argument out of Luther’s thinking. Ilić also concisely sketches Flacius’s positions on good works, the freedom of the will, and the true presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Lord’s Supper, a topic to which Flacius returned in successive local controversies over the sacrament but which has won little attention from modern scholarship.

Ilić has provided English-language readers a clear and sober analysis of the course of this turbulent life and the greater dimensions of Flacius’s thinking while pointing out the many contributions of the man that need further exploration.

This volume is a must for anyone seeking an understanding of the transition from the Wittenberg Reformation to seventeenth-century Lutheran theology as well as the developments in hermeneutics, history, and biblical exegesis shaped by this unique figure, Matthias Flacius, the Illyrian.

Robert Kolb

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A BIBLICAL, LUTHERAN VIEW OF HIGHER EDUCATION THAT’S ROOTED IN THE INTERACTION OF FAITH

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cph.org/christianuniversity ThisLEARNING is an extremely illuminating book that will be of great help to our universities AND and to the LCMS as a whole. At a time when synodical universities are struggling with “Lutheran Identity,” this book serves as a template for faculty, administrators, boards, and students for how that can be achieved and for how that identity can help colleges to be truly excellent at every level.

—Gene Edward Veith, PhD, Professor of Literature, Patrick Henry College

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Summer 2015 volume 41 | number 3

Summer 2015 volume 41 | number 3

Word Alive! Connections and Conversations The New Obedience: An Exegetical Glance at Article VI of the Augsburg Confession Pietism on the American Landscape Sanctification