The reality of the law as a principle of legal relationship (morally charged human activity resulting in merit or demerit), as opposed to a principle of grace/promise relationship (i.e., protoevangelium, new covenant), applies across cultural and historical situations (Pharisees/Judaizers vs. Ockhamism). As a result, Luther gave expansive definitions of the law throughout his career rooted in the principles he discovered in his biblical exegesis. Much like many in the early and medieval Church, Luther held that God’s commandments given to Israel and the Church expressed his just and holy eternal divine nature. It logically follows that if God is eternal (as Scripture affirms) then his will (which includes the law) must also be eternal. In his Antinomian Disputations of the 1530s, Luther affirmed that “the Decalogue is eternal.”[1] Elsewhere Luther states the same doctrine. The law is: “His [God’s] will and counsel,”[2] it “serves to indicate the will of God,”[3] “commands firmly and forever,”[4] and is “the eternal and immutable judgment of God.”[5] Later Lutheran Scholasticism[6] would follow Luther and express the truth that the law is rooted in God’s eternal nature through the utilization of the Stoic concept of lex aeterna.[7]
Beyond affirming that the law was God’s eternal and immutable will for his creation, in the the Antinomian Disputation of the 1530s Luther also spoke of the law as anything in creation that expresses the condemnation of sin. Part of this formulation was a response to the work of the early Lutheran heretic Johann Agricola. Agricola believed that only a heartfelt love of God could inspire true repentance. Because the gospel, and not the law, inspired fallen humanity’s love for God, it followed that preaching the promise of the gospel to the exclusion of the law should occur. For Agricola, then, the law was good, but only for the use of the civil authority.[8]
Luther countered Agricola’s claims by noting that God’s wrath against humanity deriving from the violation of the law extended to the whole of creation. Therefore, simply excluding certain biblical texts or the word “law” from preaching would do no good. Death, destruction, illness, and all the vicissitudes of the fallen creation preached the law (i.e., the consequences of not following the law) to fallen humans without any explicit word of law from preacher: “Anything that exposes sin, wrath, or death exercises the office of the law . . .”[9] Hence, the preacher achieved nothing by excluding the preaching of the law. Indeed, since God mandates the preaching of both the law and the promise, the preacher would be guilty of dereliction of duty by not preaching the law.[10]
[1] LW 73:112.
[2] LW 9:51
[3] LW 22:143.
[4] WA 5:560. “inaeternum et stabiliter.” Translation my own.
[5] LW 7:275.
[6] See: Gerhard Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate: An Interpretation of Its Historical Development (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1969), 3-11.
[7] Gunnar Skirbekk and Nils Gilje, A History of Western Thought: From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century(London: Routledge, 2001), 94.
[8] See discussion of Agricola’s early position in Timothy Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 84-9. Also see description in F. Bente, Historical Introductions to the Book of Concord (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), 161-9.
[9] LW 73:54.
[10] LW 47:111.
From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).