Rightly Proclaiming the Gospel and Dividing the Laws

I was privileged to know a new Christian as he was stepping into the faith and into the church of God. Sadly, as he was taught by more academically-minded individuals from my church body (the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod), there was a disconnect between the terms he heard them using and the terms he read in his Bible, particularly when they tried to explain what Lutherans call “the proper distinction of law and gospel”. There was miscommunication because the teachers used academic terms with intended meanings that had been refined by centuries of church discourse but which were used differently from the plain senses that my friend saw in Scripture. Both my friend and the teachers were eager to be faithful to God’s Word, but they each failed to recognize that they were using different dialects to do so.

My own attempts at the time to serve as interpreter failed because, as far as my friend could determine, my explanation was only mine and not that of these teachers, and the teachers represented the church, not me. The miscommunication led my friend to reject the whole church body and switch to another denomination entirely, out of a desire to be faithful to God’s Word.

I am always grieved to see miscommunication cause division. Face-to-face attempts at reconciliation failed, so I set out to write the below document, which collects my translation of Lutheran theology into Scriptural language in the same vein as I had tried to communicate to my friend. The purpose of putting it in writing was so that I could have Lutheran pastors review it carefully and affirm that it is indeed what they confess as well, though in a different dialect, and thus restore mutual understanding.

I share this here so others can benefit as well. The goal is not to avoid being technical with language, but rather to use language the way Scripture uses it, as faithfully as possible. In today’s mixed culture especially, God’s Word is often the only common ground left for a shared standard of terminology among Christians. This demands that we better appreciate and translate the terms that Scripture uses.

I have now had multiple LCMS pastors review and verify that this writing is faithful, though unconventional. It may sound strange to some Lutheran ears due to the deviation from our common terminology of “law and gospel”, but I believe it captures the heart and purpose of that distinction. The key for the educated Lutheran reader is to note that the distinction between God’s requirements that we fail to live up to and the free gift of His promises is moved away from distinguishing “law” from “gospel” (so that those terms can instead be used the way Scripture uses them, in what Lutherans typically call their “broad senses”); the distinction is instead made using Scripture’s distinction between the old covenant and the new covenant. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death.” (Rom. 8:2)

I have iterated on this document several times in an attempt to make it as clear and faithful as possible. The document remains lengthy, mostly due to many embedded Scripture passages. I keep these embedded rather than merely cited, because it is God’s Word that must be the basis of our theology, not our explanations of it.