[2. The two Poles: the Law and the Gospel]
One of the ethical questions that most frequently engaged Luther’s attention concerned the relation of Law and Gospel. In reality it touched the foundations of his moral teaching.
His having rightly determined how Law and Gospel stood seemed to him one of his greatest achievements, in fact one of the most important of the revelations made to him from on High. “Whoever is able clearly to distinguish the Law from the Gospel,” he says, “let such a one give thanks to God and know that he is indeed a theologian.”[13] Alluding to the vital importance of Luther’s theory on the Law with its demands and the Gospel with its assurance of salvation, Friedrich Loofs, the historian of dogma, declares: Here “may be perceived the fundamental difference between the Lutheran and the Catholic conception of Christianity,”[14] though he does not fear to hint broadly at the “defects” and “limitations” of Luther’s new discovery; rather he admits quite openly, that some leading aspects of the question “never even revealed themselves clearly” to Luther, but betray a “notable” lack of discernment, and that Luther’s whole conception of the Law contained “much that called for further explanation.”[15]
In order to give here a clearer picture of Luther’s doctrine on this matter than it was possible to do in the earlier passages where his view was touched upon it may be pointed out, that, when, as he so frequently does, he speaks of the Law he means not merely the Old-Testament ceremonial and judicial law, but even the moral law and commands both of the Old Covenant[16] and of the New,[17] in short everything in the nature of a precept binding on the Christian the infringement of which involves him in guilt; he means, as he himself expresses it, “everything ... that speaks to us of our sins and of God’s wrath.”[18]
By the Gospel moreover he understands, not merely the promises contained in the New Testament concerning our salvation, but also those of the Old Covenant; he finds the Gospel everywhere, even previous to Christ: “There is not a book in the Bible,” he says, “which does not contain them both [the Law and the Gospel]. God has thus placed in every instance, side by side, the Law and the promises, for, by the Law, He teaches what we are to do, and, by the promises, how we are to set about it.” In his church-postils where this passage occurs Luther explains more fully what he means by the “promise,” or Gospel, as against the Law: It is the “glad tidings whereby grace and forgiveness of sins is offered. Hence works do not belong to the Gospel, for it is no law, but faith only [is required], for it is simply a promise and an offer of Divine grace. Whoever believes it receives the grace.”[19]
As to the relationship between the Law and the Gospel: Whereas the Law does not express the relation between God and man, the Gospel does. The latter teaches us that we may, nay must, be assured of our salvation previous to any work of ours, in order, that, born anew by such faith, we may be ready to fulfil God’s Will as free, Christian men. The Law, on the other hand, reveals the Will of God, on pedagogic grounds, as the foundation of a system of merit or reward. It is indeed necessary as a negative preparation for faith, but its demands cannot be complied with by the natural man, to say nothing of the fact that it seems to make certainty of salvation, upon which everything depends in our moral life, contingent on the fulfilment of its prescriptions.[20]
From this one can see how inferior to the Gospel is the Law.
The Law speaks of “facere, operari,” of “deeds and works” as essential for salvation. “These words”—so Luther told the students in his Disputations in 1537 on the very eve of the Antinomian controversy—“I should like to see altogether banished from theology; for they imply the notions of merit and duty (“meritum et debitum”), which is beyond toleration. Hence I urge you to refrain from the use of such terms.”[21]
What he here enjoins he had himself striven to keep in view from the earliest days of his struggle against “self-righteousness” and “holiness-by-works.” These he strove to undermine, in the same measure as he exalted original sin and its consequences. Psychologically his attitude in theology towards these questions was based on the renegade monk’s aversion to works and their supposed merit. His chief bugbear is the meritoriousness of any keeping of the Law. For one reason or another he went further and denied even its binding character (“debitum”); caught in the meshes of that pseudo-mystic idealism to which he was early addicted we hear him declaring: the Christian, when he is justified by “faith,” does of his own accord and without the Law everything that is pleasing to God; what is really good is performed without any constraint out of a simple love for what is good. In this wise it was that he reached his insidious thesis, viz. that the believer stands everywhere above the Law and that the Christian knows no Law whatever.[22] In quite general terms he teaches that the Law is in opposition to the Gospel; that it does not vivify but kills; and that its real task is merely to frighten us, to show us what we are unable to do, to reveal sin and “increase it.” The preaching of the Law he here depicts, not as “good and profitable, but as actually harmful,” as “nothing but death and poison.”[23]