Law and Gospel confused is possibly one of the most serious hindrances to a good understanding of Scripture. We have seen this as an important error throughout Church history. Feuerhahn lays it out in many of its different manifestations throughout history, detailing the salient features of each different misunderstanding.
There is an overall confusion between Law and Gospel. We could observe that a small child could tell us that the Law is what we must do and the Gospel is what God does for us. But it takes a very serious theologian to rightly and consistently distinguish the two. We are bound in our sinful nature to understand and strive after Law. We want to earn our way. The Gospel is foolishness.
In the medieval period we see an emphasis on love arising. The idea was that love was that which justifies. The opponents to the Augsburg Confession said that "love is the keeping of the Law" (Tappert 127.147, cited in this article on p. 262). But they also considered that the Law would bring justification. In this guise, love is the Law, while faith is the Gospel. The Roman church was asserting salvation by Law rather than Gospel. They had fundamentally confused the two.
In the 16th Century we see confusion of Law and Gospel in Calvinism. Feuerhahn asserts that Calvinism gives particular emphasis to Law, namely identifying it with sanctification, indicating that this is the appropriate starting point of theology. For Luther, the starting point of theology is justification, identified with Gospel. The Calvinist would see preaching of the Law as fundamental to our seeing our right role in society. The Lutheran would see the preaching of the Gospel as fundamental to our seeing our right role in society.
Pietism arises rather quickly wherever a genuine grasp of the Gospel exists. In pietism we typically see a confusion of justification and sanctification. The heirs of the pietists - the Puritans, Methodists, and Pentecostals - shift from talking about the justification accomplished by Christ on the cross to the regeneration we experience as we believe. In Pietism the two are separated, while historically they had always been considered synonymously. This change results in a move to talking about an experiential regeneration which bears fruit, and that fruit ends up being justification. Here again we have an example of being redeemed by the Law rather than the Gospel.
In the Enlightenment we see a confusion of authority. This, like Pietism, continues to be a very common confusion. The distinction drawn here is that of doctrine versus life. The difficulty is frequently phrased in Latin terms. On the one side there is an emphasis on the fides quae creditur - the "faith which is believed." On the other side there is an emphasis on the fides quā creditur - the faith by which something is believed. Historic Christianity has asserted that both a solid confession of faith must exist and that people need to have faith which believes on that confession. The Enlightenment tended to make a dichotomy here. This is where we get people saying that "doctrine divides." When it is your own personal belief which is important, more important than the confession of faith which you and countless others hold, your salvation is ultimately dependent on your own works, your own understanding, your own concept of what it means to be a Christian.
In modern Ecumenism the same problem exists with fides quae and fides qua. I find Feuerhahn's distinction between this and the enlightenment to be a bit unclear. Yet he divides his survey to distinguish among the Enlightenment views, Ecumenical views, and a modern confusion between "external" and "internal" views of faith. Yet it is not clear to me what the distinctions are which Feuerhahn considers important.
So what do you think? Did he label it right?
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Dave Spotts
blogging at http://capnsaltyslongvoyage.blogspot.com and http://alex-kirk.blogspot.com
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Dave Spotts
blogging at http://capnsaltyslongvoyage.blogspot.com and http://alex-kirk.blogspot.com
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