What is important here is that the Word must be proclaimed as Law and Gospel. To abandon the Law or the Gospel is to lose the Word, and, to lose the Word is to lose everything. Proclamation to the Law alone leads to the despair of hopelessness; proclamation of the Gospel alone leads to the despair of presumption.
The species of Antinominism in the ELCA today is one which fantasizes to live from the Gospel alone. There are reasons, some strong, some very good, as to why this Antinominism has developed:
1) The deceit of the Devil—Satan will gladly allowed the Word to be proclaimed as long as it can be perverted into either Law or Gospel alone, so that the hearer strives to be merely religious rather than faithful.
2) The Standard American Ideology of liberalism deriving from the British Enlightenment, especially via the philosophies of Scottish Common-Sense and John Locke with adulteration by English Romanticism. The British Enlightenment taught that there were inalienable rights locused in the individual; Locke held these to be Life, Liberty, and Property. When, under Influence of English Romanticism, individual Feeling supplanted Reason as the distinguishing essence of Human Nature, the course was set for the modern American idolatry of the sovereign Individual who has intrinsic right to complete self-actualization.
3) The refusal of the Lutheran Churches of Scandinavia to accept the 3rd Usage of the Law—This lead to deriving the Christian’s ethical conduct solely from an “imitatio Christi,” that is, an imitation of Christ. The problem herein is that the “Christ” of such “imitation” is a selective construct, a Christ who is meet to our own projected feelings and emotions, and, is, therefore, usually one-dimensional, i.e. only judging, or only loving, or only accepting, depending upon our personal wants and inadequacies.
4) The failure of the German Lutheran Landeskirchen to oppose Nazism. The moment American tanks entered Dachau, Lutherans were confronted with their failure to institutionally and collectively oppose that which allowed such to happen. In short, the achievement of Personal Righteousness at the expense of Corporate Justice is nothing more than an adornment of the Anti-Christ, no matter how personally pious and “close” to Jesus one might be. American Lutherans were confronted with their own “culpae,” their own faults of silence before racism, particularly as manifested in segregation and in the awkward genocide of this nation’s indigenous peoples, before classism, before economic imperialism, before sexism, and so on. A generation of pastors and theologians came of age vowing penance for these faults, penance which manifested itself as social action as the striving for Justice for all.
5) The conviction that the Faith must justify itself to the Age. Since the late Middle Ages, the absolute authority of the Church has been eroded by the widening conviction that all authority is granted only by the free consent of the governed. The Church can no longer demand a hearing, it must plead for it, and to many, it is a discredited institution whose buildings are but “tombs and monuments” of/to a dead God, that is, to a concept no longer worthy of belief. It is out of this that the cult of meeting my needs has arisen.
6) Christian hope is now proclaimed as for the here and now, primarily. What has arisen out of this is the spiritualizing of materiality and the locating of transcendence in ecstasy. THUS, THE GOSPEL IS PERVERTED INTO A SANCTION FOR THE PURSUIT OF ESTATIC EPERIENCE SO THAT I, A FREE, SOVEREIGN, “SHOULD BE GOD-LIKE” INDIVIDUAL CAN ACHIEVE A DENIAL OF MY FINITE AND TERMINAL PERSONAL EXISTENCE, A “BAD-FAITH’ TRANSENDENCE. Since the Law proclaims that temporally “vanity of vanities, all is vanity’ (cr. Ecc. 1:ff.), the Law must be overthrown: that is the unconscious post-modern mythos of many in “leadership” within the ELCA, and, that is exactly why we have lost the Gospel.
Now, in no way do I mean to imply that the call for justice is to be abandoned, that we retreat into a pietistic fortress of personal righteousness wherein each individual preserves their personal relationship with Jesus with total disregard for Lazarus tossed against their gate, for “as you have done to the least of these, ye have done unto me.” One indeed is to “love the Lord with all heart, mind, soul, and strength” all the while remembering that the “second is its equal,” to wit “to love one’s neighbor as one’s very self.” These two-in-one are not, however, the Gospel but rather the Law. Those issues of Justice to which the Church is obligated to speak cannot be articulated from the Gospel, for it is in truth solely concerned with what God has done for us in Christ Jesus, i.e. our eternal salvation, but from the Law which is all that God expects from us and of us. Thus, for example, one (or the ELCA, for that matter) may legitimately raise issues concerning the current situation in Iraq or Universal Health Care on the bases of the Law, specifically, the 5th. Commandment, but not on the basis of the Gospel or on a “what would Jesus do?” ethos (which is quite different from one of “what did Jesus command?.”) When justice issues are raised from the Law, the debatable positions embrace the spectrum of liberal and conservative, Democrat or Republican, Marxist or Capitalist, and so on. The conclusions are always tentative, subject to change by further insight, changing circumstances, and such. No absolute pronouncement is possible under the aspects of the Law, for all are ultimately exposed by the Law itself as “short of the glory of God.” We sinners can never perfectly comprehend the Law, no matter how clearly it be proclaimed…the fault is not in the Law, but in us. Luther asserted in the Heidelberg Disputation that even our best works, unless feared as mortal sins, are for us mortal sins in the sight of God. Under the Law, not one of us dare presume to speak the very mind of God. Indeed, the task is not to pronounce it, but rather to obey it to the limits of our understanding and strength.
This raises the issue of the nature and use of the Bible. It is deceptively simple: either the world must stand beneath the judgment of Scripture, or Scripture must be subject to the judgment of the World. In this, dwells the fundamental proximal issue. I suspect that many of the “enlightened” leadership of the ELCA operate with the presumption that Scripture must justify itself to the pains and needs of the world. Thus, my want becomes the principle by which I live and move and have my being. The fulfillment of want, “empowerment,” if you will, becomes that which God is to deliver in order to be my God. In short, there is a God…and I am it. This is the worst sort of idolatry. The truth is, having salvation in Christ, I have no other real “needs;” therefore, I am to lose myself in service of my neighbor in obedience to God’s command and forget about self-justification, self-credit, and self-satisfaction: would that our national ELCA recover such Law and, in so doing, receive anew the Gospel!
Pastor Wolff