Two Words That Make Us Whole
Jonathan A. Linebaugh on the necessity of distinguishing law and gospel.
Everyone’s favorite German reformer is famous for saying many things, chief among them being his assertion that “the highest art in Christendom” is the distinction between God’s law and God’s gospel.1 This fundamental paradigm is the touchstone of much, if not all, of Luther’s doctrinal breakthrough. The more he became steeped in the Word, the more he unearthed these two words as the bedrock of God’s revelation of redemption to and for sinners. Through the law, humanity is made blisteringly aware of its capacity for sin and sedition, and the need for a Savior. No one’s effort, no matter how religious or law-abiding, can facilitate pardon or earn favor. God’s law remains as uncompromising as ever, showcasing the standard but never imparting the ability to live up to it.
The word of God’s gospel, however, is the announcement that the law’s standard has been fulfilled in the person of Jesus. Through his death and resurrection, every demand has been met, which means that the righteousness that affords bereft sinners peace and pardon with the Father is realized in and through Christ and offered to them in sheer grace. One is made right through a word of promise, a word of grace, which is the gospel of Christ crucified for our sins and risen again for our justification. The point is, though, that both of these words — law and gospel — are necessary to understand the scope of our need and the profuse gift of God himself by which that need is satisfied. “The Law makes demands of us and terrifies us,” Luther says. “The Gospel gives to us, and consoles.”2 Critically, the church and those who’ve been called to lead it are endowed with the responsibility of distinguishing these words, making sure they aren’t confused.
Conflating God’s law with God’s gospel opens more than a can of worms. It leads to devastating systems of legalism, pietism, and a whole host of other nasty “-isms” that work something like gangrene in the lives of Jesus’s followers. When the law is proclaimed like gospel, folks are left supposing they can and/or have to earn the favor of God by doing more and trying harder. However, when the gospel sounds like the law, Christ’s offer of forgiveness gets twisted into another demand, leaving restless sinners wondering if they’ve done enough, repented enough, or believed enough to make it so. Consequently, discernment is vital when it comes to making a proper distinction between these two words. Even so, the law-gospel distinction isn’t wholly or entirely a hermeneutical construct. Although it may start there, discerning between the law and the gospel is a homiletical framework that necessarily spills into and informs the liturgical moment when the church is assembled to hear God’s words proclaimed for them.
In a recent interview for the Law & Gospel issue of The Mockingbird magazine, editor CJ Green was afforded the opportunity to interview author and theologian Jonathan (“Jono”) A. Linebaugh, whose latest book, The Well That Washes What It Shows: An Invitation to Holy Scripture, releases this fall. CJ’s opening question sets Jono up to eloquently dispel a common misconception when it comes to this distinction:
The distinction between the law and the gospel is, at bedrock, a description of what God does through God’s word, and therefore also what God’s human creatures experience as they are addressed by God, who moves them from fear and hiding to honesty and hope. It’s inaccurate to construe this distinction as first or fundamentally something we do as interpreters of God’s word and/or something we are in control of as ministers of God’s word.
We might think the distinction between law and gospel invites an indexing approach to scripture in which we read and label each passage as either law or gospel. One version of this misunderstanding is to correlate the distinction between law and gospel with the Old and New Testaments. But as Philip Melanchthon put it, “The gospel is scattered, and the promises are sprinkled throughout all the books of both the Old and New Testaments.” And similarly, the “law is also scattered in all the books of both the Old and New Testaments.” Or, as ministers, we might think the intention of our words is sufficient to determine their effect (and also forget to listen to the perhaps unspoken but still heard “I’ll love you if” operative in hurting human hearts).
Both of these are inversions of the distinction between law and gospel, because they focus on the activity of the creature rather than God — who creates, diagnoses, and redeems by speaking . . . A common confusion, in other words, is assuming God’s word is dead and needs our interpretive action to revive it. It is, rather, we who are “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), and it is God who speaks and acts at the grave: a word that diagnoses the dead and seals the tomb; a word that gives the risen Jesus and so rolls away the stone.
It is one thing, therefore, to identify what these words — law and gospel — say. (The law describes reality that runs with the grain of what God created and calls good. The gospel tells the story of Jesus and makes a promise to those Jesus lived, died, and rose for.) It is also necessary, however, to describe what these words do . . . It is God who is acting: a word that unearths human wrong, weakness, and woundedness so that another word — the gospel — might speak mercy, forgiveness, and freedom. The gospel is not only about Jesus. The gospel gives Jesus at the site of concrete and actual need, and thereby redeems, resurrects, and forever loves.
I am by no means an expert in this field, but I have benefited immensely from instilling both my hermeneutical and homiletical framework with this distinction fervently in mind. What’s more, perceiving the assembly of the saints as an inherently law-gospel moment imbues the gathering of the church with “all joy and peace in believing” (Rom. 15:13). Apart from this, we are left to wallow and grasp after false securities and/or methods of making ourselves holy. Without this law-gospel distinction, “neither the Law nor the Gospel can be understood,” Luther asserts, “and consciences must perish in blindness and error.”3 For filthy, rotten scoundrels like you and me, there is only one message that washes us clean and makes us whole. It is God’s words to us (1 Sam. 2:6; Jer. 1:10; 2 Cor. 3:6) — words that break down and build up; that kill and make alive.
Grace and peace.
Martin Luther, “The Distinction Between the Law and the Gospel,” translated by Williard L. Burce, Concordia Journal 18 (1992): 153.
Luther, 162.
Luther, 154.
In my battles with those who overemphasize law, they imply or say out loud that the Gospel of Jesus is His divine enabling to go back now and fulfill Torah. Every bit.