Lecture 8.docx

I talked yesterday about the Babylonian captivity of the church, one of the three great treaties of 1520. And just, I would say, an excellent way to get into Luther and to have a good, solid grasp both theologically and historically of where he\'s coming from and his significance is to read the...

I talked yesterday about the Babylonian captivity of the church, one of the three great treaties of 1520. And just, I would say, an excellent way to get into Luther and to have a good, solid grasp both theologically and historically of where he\'s coming from and his significance is to read the so-called three great treaties of 1520. The Babylonian captivity of the church, the freedom of the Christian man, and the appeal to the German nobility. They do represent in some ways a comprehensive manifesto for how Luther visualizes the Reformation at that particular moment in time. Now Luther will live for another 25, 26 years. There are modifications that come in to his thinking, not least we were talking yesterday about the eschatological expectation that he had that Jesus was about to return. As the Reformation rumbles on and on and it becomes clear that he\'s got a sort of plan for the long haul and not just for the immediate future. Luther does modify his thinking in many ways, but the foundations of his thinking I think really remain pretty much the same. And if you\'ve read those, the works of 1520, you\'ve got a pretty solid introduction to Luther\'s thinking on the sacraments, his thinking on justification, on ethics, and his thinking on church-state issues. So I would recommend if you don\'t have time to read anything else by Luther and you don\'t own any other text by Martin Luther, those three are worth getting hold of and looking at. I think you can probably download them off the internet. There\'s probably an out of copyright translation available. You can certainly buy them fairly cheaply in one of the numerous compendia of Luther\'s works that are available. Second treatise though I want to look at this morning is the freedom of the Christian man. Ethics of course is a perennially important topic for Christians. If we were to move to the present day for a moment, I think ethics is one of the areas where Protestantism is at its weakest at the moment. I really do think that ethical thinking is, we lag way behind. Even the Roman Catholic Church, some of the best ethical stuff from a broadly Christian perspective is actually stuff that you\'ll find written by Roman Catholics. For example, Robert George at the University of Princeton, Princeton University, done some excellent stuff on things like gay marriage that you\'ll be hard-pressed to find a Protestant writing at that kind of level. One of the reasons I think is that ethical challenges have become a whole lot more complicated in the last 20, 30 years. We tend to think in Christian terms, yes we think in generalities a lot of the time. We know that the human problem is sin, but we also live in an era now where even Christians ask questions to which the answers are not entirely obvious. I\'m not necessarily here thinking about sexual morality. I think the issue of homosexuality is a relatively straightforward one. If you were to think for example of surrogacy, some of the issues surrounding human fertility, if one of my congregants walked into my, well I don\'t have an office, we meet in a converted bowling alley, but let\'s say one of them grabs me as we\'re leaving the bowling alley on a Sunday morning and says, my neighbor, my lovely neighbor and her husband can\'t have children. They\'re desperate to have children and they need to find somebody to provide a womb, a surrogate womb for the child. Can I do that? I\'d have to put my hand on my heart at this point and say, I don\'t know how to answer that question. I don\'t know how to answer that question. The question is not arising out of the person denying biblical authority in any way. They\'re asking the question because they want to do something that is consistent with Christian teaching, but that kind of question is very complicated. Not only do I not know how to answer it, I\'d almost be struggling to know where to look to start thinking about how to answer it. One of the obvious pluses I think of, well of being a Presbyterian or at least being part of some sort of pastoral fellowship, I\'m guessing for Baptists you\'re often members of pastoral fellowships, is my first instinct would be email my pastoral friends and find out, have they ever faced this question before? How did they answer it? What were the pluses, the minuses? What were the outcome? All of this is to say that the ethics today has become really quite complicated in many ways. And when we look at Luther, the freedom of the Christian man, Luther gives in 1520 a pretty straightforward answer to the question of Christian ethics, which I think even within his own day and generation proved to be somewhat inadequate. So as we look at Luther\'s freedom of the Christian man, I think it\'s not only helpful as a historical text, but we must remember that Luther\'s thinking doesn\'t end in 1520, and in actual fact his arguments of 1520 need some elaboration as he himself discovers in the late 1520s when life proves to be a little bit more complicated than he imagined it would be when he wrote The Freedom of the Christian Man. So bear that in mind. It is an important treatise. It\'s an attempt to grapple with Christian ethics and say that if students come up to me today and say, you know, what area should I really be thinking about and trying to work on, I think ethics has got to be one of the pressing issues of the present day because so much of what we\'ve assumed is true is now being challenged and we need to have good arguments to respond to those challenges. And so many new questions are now being asked that I think Christian ethics really has come to the center. And I recommend if you don\'t subscribe to it, this is just me not as professor but me as friend speaking, if you don\'t subscribe to the daily briefings from public discourse, do so. Public discourse is the online magazine essentially of the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton, which is a---it\'s not a specifically Christian think tank, but many of the people who write to it would be Christians of one kind or another. It\'s a sort of Robert George baby. They send out an email every morning with an article, a 2,000-word article. Many of them deal with ethical issues that are coming up in contemporary society. Don\'t always agree with the arguments and the analysis, but it\'s an excellent way of keeping yourself in touch with the kind of stuff that\'s going on ethically. This didn\'t come up through public discourse, but just an example of how ethical questions are coming up that never come up before. The EU, which praise the Lord, my home nation is withdrawing from, it\'s going to take time, but we are going to withdraw from it, is now discussing a charter of rights relative to robots. Fascinating. Fascinating. Sounds crazy, but then to some extent it sort of makes sense. If we\'re dealing with artificial intelligence, you can see that, well, maybe this is not quite as crazy as it seems. Do robots have souls? No, they don\'t, but one can imagine somebody\'s going to ask that question at some point. Anyway, back to Luther. Luther knows that what he\'s doing reformationally, it isn\'t just an ivory tower thing. It\'s never been just an ivory tower thing for Luther. It\'s always going to have an immediate impact for the ordinary people in his congregation. That\'s why he writes the Babylonian captivity of the church. The reason that he writes that, of course, is communion in one kind versus communion in two kinds. There\'s nothing really more basic to the Christian life than baptism, the Lord\'s Supper, and the preaching of the Word. Reformation is going to affect all three, particularly in terms of practice, obviously going to affect preaching of the Word and the Lord\'s Supper. So these are treaties that he\'s writing, not because he\'s an ivory tower theologian juggling nice ideas around. This impacts his people. This impacts the priests. Oh, and by the way, when you think about the reformation, don\'t think about the reformation carrying all before it. Think about the reformation as analogous to Europe in 1989 when the wall comes down. Yes, the top guys disappear. Erich Honecker\'s gone. Egon Krentz is swept away. The Czoczewski\'s are executed. But just think about Eastern Europe in 1989. An awful lot of communist functionaries had to stay in place because you simply cannot remove an entire bureaucracy and replace it 24 hours later without the world plunging into total chaos. The reformation is analogous to that. When you look at the reformation in Germany, who are the Lutheran pastors of the early 1520s? Guess what? Most of them were the Catholic priests of 10 years previously because it takes time to train men to fill these positions. And guess what? Most Catholic priests in the late 15th, early 16th century, probably the things that would have distinguished Catholics and Protestants weren\'t that important to them anyway. So they\'re able to switch sides sometimes with disturbing regularity as the political ethos switched from side to side. The issue is educating the men you\'ve got there, making sure that the men who are in place who think one way now understand why they should think another way. Or the men who are there who can\'t preach Protestantism for Toffee provide them with homilies that they can read in church so there\'s something Protestant going out there. So when Luther\'s writing these treaties, he\'s not writing for the sort of, you know, the massed army of the riders of Rohan are about to come over the sort of horizon and sweep the orcs and the Uruk-hai away. He\'s actually writing mainly for the orcs and the Uruk-hai to turn them into the riders of Rohan essentially. That\'s how it works. That\'s how practically speaking it operates. And one of the things I love about the reformation is this, that there are points when the Reformers, all of them, have to be pragmatic. And that\'s a great encouragement as a pastor, that there are times when one just has to be pragmatic. I used to use the image of, you know, there was a moment when Lincoln had to suspend the Constitution. But then I realized there were a lot of real strict constitutionalists generally in the classes that I was teaching, so I didn\'t use that analogy anymore. But Calvin, for example, Calvin thinks that the civil magistrate should not interfere in the discipline of the church. Every time it is useful for Calvin to get a quick result by bringing the civil magistrate into the discipline of the church, he does it. He does it. And there\'s a sense in which these guys, there\'s what they want to do ideally and the where they need to, they know they need to get to. At the end of the day, they will get there even if they have to break a few of their own rules on the way. And I think that\'s very helpful as a pastor because there are times, and even in our small worlds when, you know, there are two big issues that need to be dealt with, but you can only deal with one at a time. So you have to set the one aside and go after the other. The Reformers were not the principled spotless figures of legend, with the possible exception of John Knox, and it generally didn\'t go well for him. Most of the Reformers had this rather delightful flexibility that meant they were able to, they were able to work within and where they were as well as try to change that for the better. So Luther\'s writing here, he knows that he\'s got to start laying out what his theology is doing is not just tinkering around with some of the abstract points of doctrine, but what he\'s really calling for is a total overhaul of the Christian faith. And ethics has to be set upon a different foundation in many ways. And that\'s what he\'s doing in the freedom of the Christian man. It famously begins, of course, with his letter, an open letter to Leo X, who is the pope. And I used to think that that letter was disingenuous and that actually Luther was really gunning for the pope all along. I become persuaded that I was wrong on that. I actually think the letter probably does represent in print pretty much the last attempt by Luther to sort of get the pope on side for his reformation campaign. Again, it\'s only 1520. It\'s just two and a bit years since he nailed the 95 Theses, the Castle Law at Wittenberg. It\'s very tempting for us to start at the end and then read a lot of stuff back into the early period. I actually think in 1520, it probably isn\'t clear to Luther quite at this point that there is no hope. So the open letter, it\'s worth reading, and Luther says in it, I freely vow that I have, to my knowledge, spoken only good and honorable words concerning you whenever I have thought of you. I think that\'s a bit disingenuous. And of course, he justifies that by making a distinction between the person of this particular pope and his attacks on the authority of the papacy. I\'m not attacking Dr. MacArthur, but I\'m just going to trash the presidency of the master seminary. I doubt that Dr. MacArthur is going to find that a particularly persuasive distinction. And certainly many of the people, not that I\'m ever going to do that, please again, don\'t tweet that out there. That looks really bad in 140 characters. People listening aren\'t going to make that distinction either. So I think there is some level of disingenuousness in Luther\'s approach, but he\'s really, I think, trying to make a last ecumenical attempt to bring the sides together. The other thing to notice, I mentioned this yesterday, is the language of liberty that pervades the treatise. Luther is part of this linguistic revolution that\'s taking place in Germany. The German-speaking land\'s about this time when the language of political radicalism is moving away from justice and towards liberty or freedom. I think essentially it\'s saying the same thing, but the rhetoric is different. So Luther is using language that resonates with ordinary people. And that\'s part of Luther\'s secret, of course. Luther is a theologian who is engaging to read. He uses dramatic language, uses dramatic images. In his own day and time, he was able to use the language of ordinary people in order to connect with them. It starts, the treatise, with this apparently paradoxical statement. A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all and subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. It\'s a classic Luther way of writing. Throughout his life, he loves oppositions. He loves apparent paradoxes. At the heart of it, of course, is the law gospel paradox. The law says, do this and it can never be done. The gospel says, it has already been done for you. That paradox lies at the heart of Luther\'s thinking. The cross, of course, has a paradoxical quality to it for Luther. That God\'s hiddenness is his revelation. You think about Luther at the Heidelberg Disputation, when he\'s really saying that God has revealed himself in the flesh of Christ. Well, one way of expressing that is saying God has revealed himself in his hiddenness. It is the fact that God hides himself at that point under the form of broken, finite human flesh and blood that actually reveals something about him. God\'s act of hiding himself is his act of revealing himself. One and the same phenomenon is both. And of course, that plays into Paul\'s thinking, Luther\'s playing off Paul\'s thinking in 1 Corinthians 1. The cross is hidden to those who are perishing. It is revealed to those who are being saved, but it\'s one and the same cross. It\'s one and the same cross. And Luther wants to press that and say, what is revealed about God there is the fact that he is hidden from the eyes of human reason. So we come to this paradox then, and if we\'re not familiar with anything Luther says, it would certainly grab your attention as that seems to be incoherent. Perfectly free, Lord of all, subject to none. Perfectly dutiful, servant of all, subject to all. It\'s meaningless. Luther seems to contradict the first sentence in the second. But we know that theological language is to be refracted through God\'s action on the cross. And therefore, when we think of lordship, how is lordship to be understood when refracted through the cross? Lordship is not to be thought of in a way analogous to human lordship, where the Lord of the manna exerts coercive power over the peasants who live on his estate. Lordship is to be understood through the logic of the cross. In other words, how is lordship demonstrated? It is demonstrated through servanthood. So Luther\'s paradox at the start, it grabs the attention and it pushes our minds back to the theology of the cross. This goes to something I said yesterday about Luther may not write systematic theology, but he\'s actually quite consistent as a theologian. Here he is bringing to bear the theology of the cross on the issue of Christian behavior. How is it that a Christian is Lord of all? Well Luther would say, well, he\'s Lord of all by serving all. Well, where does freedom come into this? Well, freedom comes into this because Christ has done it all for you. You are therefore free not to have to work for yourself, but to do your works for others. Luther is coming from a world, of course, where justification and good works are intimately connected. And those good works were by and large conceived of as what we right now call holy works, pilgrimages, penance, rosaries, Hail Marys, these kind of things. Luther is wanting to break, and we\'ll see this even more with the letter to the German nobility, Luther wants to break open the whole idea of what constitutes a good work and completely revise it. And that\'s what he\'s starting to do here in the freedom of the Christian man. Good works will become mundane works in Luther\'s universe. You\'re not justified by going on pilgrimage, but because you are justified, your works flow out from yourself to your neighbor in acts of mercy and charitably. What is the foundation of this Christian life for Luther? The Word of God, the Word of God preached. One thing and one thing only is necessary, he says, for Christian life, righteousness and freedom. That one thing is the most holy word of God, the gospel of Christ. To preach Christ, he says, means to feed the soul, to make it righteous, to set it free and to save it, provided it believes the preaching. Faith alone is the saving and efficacious use of the Word of God. What is the beginning of the Christian life for Luther? It\'s the proclamation of the Word and the grasping of that Word by faith. Just again as a sidebar, remember, I think I talked in the first class about social and economic conditions shaping the way we think of the Christian life. Luther lives in an era of high illiteracy. Literacy rates will be starting to rise, but the majority of Christians then, as indeed throughout history, cannot read, could not read. That automatically means that the Christian life is going to be conceived of in more corporate terms than might otherwise be the case. Where do people get access to the Word of God? For most of them, it is only in church. It is only when the Word of God is read that they hear the Word of God. It is only when the Word of God is preached that they encounter the Word of God. So Luther here is working. There\'s some criticism of Luther as being sort of radically individualist in his understanding of Christianity. If you think of Luther\'s theology in its context, it has to be thought of corporately because the declaration of the Word of God and the grasping of the Word of God by faith is, more than anything else, a corporate activity for Luther. It\'s interesting when Peter the barber says to him, you know, I\'m struggling with prayer. What should I do? One of the things Luther says to him is, get to church. Hear the Psalms being read and sung. Hear the Word of God being proclaimed. Luther has a naturally corporate way of thinking about the Christian faith. So when we read him here, don\'t think about him. He\'s not developing here a radically individualistic view of the Christian life because the individual cannot be detached from Luther from the corporate gathering of the church for material reasons. He doesn\'t have a Bible, can\'t read anyway, needs to be there. This can only happen in the corporate gathering of the church. Used to be I don\'t get so much these days because I now have my office right down in the basement of the library at Westminster where nobody goes. I\'m right next to the boiler room. The only reason to come to my office is to find me. Nobody just wanders past and knocks on the door randomly. When I was dean, I used to see students quite a bit with problems they\'d got. Some of them would be struggling with their faith. The first question I would always ask, well, there are two questions I generally ask when somebody comes to me depressed or struggling with their faith. One of them is, have you seen a doctor? Because often there are physical dimensions to how people are feeling. And two, how\'s church going? And if a student said to me, you know, well, I\'ve been to church for six weeks, I answered, well, I didn\'t do that. You know, if you\'re not going to go to the one place where actually these problems might be solved, there\'s no point coming to me. Go away, go to church for six weeks, and if you\'ve still got a problem, come back and see me kind of thing. I mean, to me that\'s the equivalent of somebody going to the doctor and saying, you know, my leg\'s playing up again, and you\'re saying, the doctor\'s saying to them, well, have you been taking those pills I gave you to bring your blood pressure down or something? And they say, no, I gave up six weeks ago. The doctor\'s not going to give them any sympathy at that point and help them in any other way. He\'s going to tell them to go away and get back on the medication. And probably the insurance company aren\'t going to be very happy if something bad happens to that person, and they haven\'t been following the instructions. So Luther here naturally thinks in a corporate way. Remember that when you\'re reading Luther, don\'t transpose this into modern evangelical individual, one man in his Bible kind of categories. It doesn\'t apply to Luther. Luther\'s thinking of Christians in the church. He goes on, he gives a beautiful analogy of what happens or a beautiful way of thinking about what happens when the Christian grabs the word by faith. He says this, Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them, and sins, death, and damnation will be Christ\'s, while grace, life, and salvation will be the souls. For if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his brides, and bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers? I think here we\'re really beginning to see justification by faith emerging in Luther\'s thinking here more clearly than it\'s done before. The idea, he\'s playing off Paul\'s analogy of human marriage to the marriage between the Lamb and the Church, Christ and the Church in Ephesians. And notice this one thing though. Protestants often talk about forensic justification. Forensic, of course, means law court, language of the law court. Strictly speaking, Luther does not develop the doctrine of forensic justification. The language of the law court is not his favorite language for justification. It\'s marriage. Now, there is a certain legal dimension to marriage, of course, but I don\'t think that\'s what\'s uppermost in Luther\'s mind. It is Melanchthon, his brilliant professor of Greek, who brings justification, brings sort of forensic language into play on justification on the Protestant side. So strictly speaking, we might say Luther doesn\'t hold to a forensic understanding of justification. There is a letter, I think it\'s from the late 1520s, maybe the late 1530s. There\'s a letter that Melanchthon writes to a Lutheran theologian called Johannes Brents. Johannes Brents, where Melanchthon outlines and describes his view of justification using the language of the law court. There is a sort of postscript in this letter written in Luther\'s hand. Luther adds a little bit to the letter where he says, although Melanchthon\'s favored language is the judicial forensic language and mine is marital language, there is no substantial difference between us. In saying that Luther does not develop a doctrine of forensic justification, don\'t take me as trying to drive a major wedge between Luther and later Lutheranism and Reform theology. It is just that Luther\'s favored language for justification is that of marriage, not the law court. And I think we would certainly want to say that is a perfectly legitimate strand of biblical thinking. It\'s interesting that Luther writes about marriage in such a sensitive way before he was married. Somebody sent me something recently on the abortion issue, abortion and miscarriage. There was a paragraph in it describing how a woman thinks about the baby growing inside of her, sort of from the moment of conception. My wife had had a miscarriage many years ago and I read it to her and she said, that\'s brilliant. That\'s brilliant, she said. That\'s exactly how it feels. Who wrote it? And I said, well, you better sit down. John Paul II, it was in one of the statements the Catholic Church had made on marriage. But I was thinking, so how does this guy who never got married and he\'s not a woman, how does he write with such sensitivity on this? And I remember thinking about Luther, well, Luther\'s the same. He does get married. But actually Luther writes with remarkable sensitivity about marriage before he experiences it. It shows that, you know, if you think hard enough about things, you know, guys can be sensitive I guess. Not if you\'re British by and large. Those of you with Italian connections will appreciate this. In 2009 when I was in Italy, Italy had just been knocked off the top spot in the annual poll of the most romantic men in Europe. The Italians had just been beaten into second place by the Spanish. And it was like a national disaster. And yet year after year, the English and the Germans are competing for the bottom spot. And we too wear as a badge of pride, you know. We\'re upset when the Germans, when the Germans get the bottom spot, that\'s a real bummer for us, you know. We want to be there. So Luther uses this analogy. And it\'s what we call the joyful exchange. Luther will use the language and say it\'s a joyful exchange. What happens when you grasp Christ by faith? It\'s like, you know, the nearest analogy I could think of perhaps, other analogy in Scripture would be, remember the woman with the flow of blood in Mark? And of course she\'s unclean. And she reaches out to Christ and touches him. And he says, who touched me? And the disciples say, a lot of people touching you. Everybody\'s pressing in. He said, no, no, who touched me? He knows that something unclean has touched him. And his cleanness flows out of him and makes the woman clean. And for Luther, faith is like that. Faith is what allows you to grasp Christ so that his cleanness flows into you even as your dirtiness flows into him and is dealt with thereby. So that\'s it. Let me read it again because it\'s such a great statement. Christ is full of grace, life and salvation. The soul is full of sins, death and damnation. Let faith come between them. And sins, death and damnation will be Christ\'s, while grace, life and salvation will be the soul\'s. For if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his bride\'s and bestow upon her the things that are his. If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his? And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers? From the freedom of the Christian manual, I do not have a page reference, unfortunately. I would have taken it from the John Dillenberger collection, Martin Luther. But if you\'ve got the freedom of the Christian manual, you\'ll find it. I would suggest Christ, grace, salvation. If you search for those in close proximity, you\'ll find it. So preaching then becomes signaling important because for Luther that burning question is where do I find a gracious God? You find him in Christ. Where do I find Christ? In the word proclaimed. Where do I grasp Christ? Where do I find myself united to Christ as the bride is united to the bridegroom in the preaching of God\'s word grasped by faith? To preach Christ, Luther says, means to feed the soul, to make it righteous, to set it free and to save it, provided it believes the preaching. Faith alone is the saving and efficacious use of the word of God. Again, it goes back to what I was saying yesterday about preaching. For Luther, preaching is not simply explaining the Bible. Preaching is making the soul clean, presenting people with Christ, confronting people with Christ that when they grasp him by faith, they are made clean. This means that Christians then, to sort of bring this on ethically, Christians then, clothed in the righteousness of Christ before God, are made kings and priests. You probably heard of the general priesthood of all believers as a Lutheran doctrine, Reformation doctrine which kind of vanishes after 1525 because it becomes a bit problematic for reasons we should see after 1525. But Luther also believed in the general kingship of all believers as well because united to Christ, we\'re not only united to him as a priest, we\'re united to him as king and therefore, therefore we rule as Christ rules. What does that mean? The rule of the Christian is cross-shaped. The king goes to the cross. Luther says this. This actually is from page 64 of the Dilleberger edition of Martin Luther, one of the old collections of his writings. The power of Christians of which we speak is spiritual. It rules in the midst of enemies and is powerful in the midst of oppression. This means nothing else than that, quote, power is made perfect in weakness. Good Pauline cross-type reference there. And that in all things, I can find profit towards salvation so that the cross and death itself are compelled to serve me and to work together with me for my salvation. This is a splendid privilege and hard to attain, a truly omnipotent power, a spiritual dominion in which there is nothing so good and nothing so evil, but it shall work together for good to me if only I believe. Yes, since faith alone survives for salvation, I need nothing except faith exercising the power and dominion of its own liberty. This is the inestimable power and liberty of Christians. What is the freedom of the Christian man? The freedom of the Christian man is this. Nothing that comes his way can prevent his salvation. Everything that comes his way will be made to subserve his salvation ultimately, even death itself. What is death? Death for the Christian is the gateway to paradise for Luther. So even death itself must be made to serve the greater purpose of salvation. So Christian power for Luther is not to be conceived of in worldly terms. It\'s to be conceived of in cross-shaped terms. Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom. What an insight the second thief has. All of the other temptations that day on the cross conceive of Christ as only being able to demonstrate his kingship in earthly terms, coming down from the cross and avoiding death. The second thief understands that Christ\'s kingdom is not inaugurated by getting away from death. It\'s inaugurated by going through death. That provides the basic paradigm for Luther\'s understanding of Christian freedom. But human beings, Luther knows, are still in the flesh. We\'re not yet in paradise. We live in this earthly world by becoming a Christian. By being a Christian, one does not cease to be a citizen of this world. The city of man continues to be the place where we physically live day by day. And therefore, Luther regards Christians as under an ethical obligation to do good works, not for their own salvation, but for the benefit of their neighbor and of society. Luther sees Christian works to be done analogous to those of Adam before the fall. Why was Adam to obey God before the fall, according to Luther? Simply because he was God\'s creature placed on earth to do these things. Works are to be done analogous to Adam before the fall, and they\'re to be done for our fellow humans. Christ is the perfect example. None of his work was done for his own benefit. He was the eternal Son of God. He is the eternal Son of God. Everything that he did was done for others. And this, I think, is where Luther\'s ethics are both revolutionary and inadequate. The ethical motivation for Luther is you know that God has saved you in Christ, and therefore you are free to work for others. And that really turns medieval ethics on its head. And one of the reasons why the church in the Middle Ages, and indeed the Catholic church today, denies the normal possibility of assurance of salvation. You could be assured by a heavenly revelation of salvation, but that only happened to a very few St. Francis, you know, the Super Saints, the kind of people who get canonized. The reason why it was good to keep people in doubt of their salvation was to keep them obedient to the church\'s teaching. The foundation for medieval Catholic ethics was, in some senses, a little bit of uncertainty. Little bit of uncertainty. Now this is where Lutheran ethics, I think, finds itself in complications. On the one hand, yes, I want to affirm that idea that the Christian does works out of their identity in Christ. That seems to me to be the Pauline emphasis. When you look at Paul\'s letters, Paul typically starts with some kind of Christological argument, reinforcing the identity that Christians have in Christ, and then he goes on to build his applications based upon who you are in Christ. The applications tend to be act as who you are. Be in real life who you are in Christ. That seems to be the basics of Paul\'s logic. The thing about Luther, though, is Luther is so concerned about any hint of legalism, any hint of law, that when it comes to the shape of Christian ethics, Luther says, you know, how are our works to be done? What is to shape them? Love. Love. They\'re to be done out of love for your neighbor. That, I think, is a kind of argument that works, you know, that minimal argument works if there are no real ethical debates about what the good is. And there are no real ethical debates about what love is. The problem is, and Luther even finds this in his own day, that simply preaching Christ and then assuming that people are going to go off and do works of love, it assumes two things. One, that people will draw an imperative out of the indicative of Christ. And two, that they will then know how to shape that imperative. Luther has such a fear of applying, say, the Ten Commandments as an ethical norm because he feels that\'s going to make, you know, intrude the law into the gospel, that he tends to accent love. Cut to the present day. Love wins. Problem today, of course, is that we live in a world where there is precious little ethical agreement on what the good is and love has been so disemboweled of any real meaning that it\'s been reduced to a contentless sentiment almost. Love is not getting in somebody else\'s way. Love is enabling somebody else to do exactly what they want to do with the exceptions of serial killers and rapists. Problem line is, consent sort of kicks in at some point. But love is really allowing people to be, do, say, who, whatever they think they are. And this, I think, is where Luther\'s theology becomes problematic for us today because a love-based ethic is not enough. Ethics needs a shape and love is no longer adequate to give it a shape. Think of that, the example I used earlier, let\'s say, one of my congregants comes to me and says, you know, can I allow my womb to be used to carry a baby for my neighbors? Part of me wants to say yes because they love each other and what they desire is good. They desire a child, that\'s a good thing. Who would want to say no to that? But I\'m not sure that that\'s an ethically adequate foundation for answering that question. I\'m not even sure what the answer to that question is, but I am sure that\'s not an ethically adequate foundation for deciding what the correct answer to that question is. Luther\'s fear of the law, I think, leaves his ethics somewhat problematic. And it becomes in Lutheran theology, there is a crisis that occurs really in the 1520s and then again in the 1530s, the so-called antinomian crisis, where certain Lutherans just preach the gospel of free grace. They\'ve even dropped preaching the law and the result is chaos on the ground. Luther sees a bit of this in 1527, 1528 as the reformation is consolidating. The Elector establishes a visitation. Every parish will be visited and the visitation team, there\'ll be two ministers of the gospel, two churchmen and two representatives of the state. To find out what\'s going on in each parish. And word comes back to Luther. When Luther sees the reports, his comment is, we preach the gospel and the people live like pigs. And he then produces his catechisms. The large catechism is not really a catechism as we understand it at all. It\'s a set of really of sermons, catechetically arranged to provide ignorant ministers with something to read to their congregation if they can\'t preach. And the small catechism is this beautiful question and answer catechism, more familiar to us as a catechism, which explains the basics of the Christian faith and actually expounds the Ten Commandments in a way that gives more detail on what the Ten Commandments mean than a simple law gospel dialectic would require. The third use of the law starts to come into Lutheranism. Even though many Lutherans hate that term and they deny it, it really does from the late 1520s. And this is what was so awful about all the Tullian-Travidian stuff that was going on in this sighting of Luther there. Typically, all that was being cited was the Luther of 1520 or before. And secondly, it ignored the problems that Luther himself spotted in the practice of his own theology in the late 1520s. And what better gospel is there for a narcissistic self-absorbed generation than, well, your sin doesn\'t really matter. Jesus has done it all for you. That gets dangerously close to Tetzel kind of stuff, except you haven\'t even got to bother handing over any cash for it. For Luther, the law was vital. Grace was costly. Free grace was the most costly thing because of the law and because of what Christ had undergone under the law and because of the need for Christians to realize their status before God. Of course, the whole Tullian-Travidian thing crashed and burned. Guess what? He lived like a pig. He lived like a pig. Exactly what Luther said of his own people in 1528. So Luther here is doing something dramatic in the freedom of the Christian man. He\'s turning ethics on his head, but this isn\'t the last word he will say on it. Because even in his own day and generation, when broadly speaking, there\'s a Christian consensus in Christendom on good and bad behavior. What constitutes good and bad behavior, Protestants and Catholics have pretty much agreed on that in the 16th century. Stealing\'s bad. Murder\'s bad. They know this stuff. There\'s a social consensus on these things. Even in that context, though, Luther\'s theology and the foundation of ethics will prove inadequate even in his own framework and have to be developed and enriched in the late 1520s. A couple of quick questions before we take our first break. Yeah. So you were saying that you need more focus on ethics in your day. What would you say about Russell Moore? How is he as an ethical teacher? I\'ve not read much of Russell on ethics. Let me put it this way. What I have read by Russell has been good. I have no reason not to think that he\'s good. I always feel sorry for\... This is not an anti-Baptist crack, but I always feel sorry for somebody who\'s a high-Hegian in a Southern Baptist organization because the Southern Baptist Convention is so vast and so diverse, you\'ve really got to pick, okay, who do I want to fall out with in my own constituency here? I think Russell\'s in a\... He\'s never going to please everybody. A little bit like a Christian in Congress. I think we have to accept these are very complicated positions these people occupy. Sometimes they\'re going to do stuff that appears to us to be bad, but they have no choice because like Calvin, they\'re having to be pragmatic for the greater good at some point. But the stuff I\'ve read by Russell is good. I think that he\'s got some good guys with him at the Religious Liberties Commission. On the issue of ethics and religious freedom, I think that the Southern Baptists and the Roman Catholics are absolutely key from a purely secular political point of view. The OPC is we have 30,000 people. I was on a religious liberty discussion panel with Archbishop Chaput from Philadelphia recently. I made some comment, the OPC with 30,000 people, they don\'t know them. And then the next question goes to Archbishop Chaput and he says, well, you know, I\'ve got a million and a half Catholics in Philadelphia. I\'m thinking, wow, you know, set aside theological issues. Catholicism is vast and important at a cultural and political level as the Southern Baptists are. So I think that in terms of the public debates, the Catholics, it\'s vital for everyone, for all of us, all religious conservatives who value religious freedom. It\'s vital that the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptists have a good showing. And that we support and pray for their guys who are in some tough spots, but doing good work as much as we possibly can. I\'m thinking more of the ground, you know, on the ground, not so much, you know, Russell\'s dealing with big political issues. I\'m thinking of the, you know, the guy, you know, 12 months ago, one of my congregants calls me and says, yeah, I work, one of my co-workers has changed gender. My boss has told me that we now have to use different pronouns. What should I do? And I\'m lucky in that I don\'t buy the pastors have tough jobs, generally speaking. In America, pastors have better jobs than most people because we don\'t have to face that kind of aggravation on a day-to-day basis. And I\'m hesitant to answer that question off the cuff because I don\'t want to give this person an answer, which means they\'re going to lose their job. When I have no stake in the game, I want to think very carefully to make sure that if I have to say to them, well, no, you can\'t obey your boss on that point, that I\'m giving the right answer because the cost for them is going to be catastrophic. And yet it\'s one of those things where I guess if I was asked the question now, my answer would be, I would construct your sentences very carefully so that you use, you\'re able to avoid gender, you know, you\'re able to avoid crossing the line, but also able to keep your job. But those kind of questions are going to come up with remarkable regularity. Everywhere, no pastor is going to be immune from complex questions because our people are being faced with very complicated questions. It doesn\'t matter whether they work on the shop floor in a factory or whether they\'re a top-flight lawyer. They\'re going to be facing really complicated ethical dilemmas. The most straightforward way for a Christian to make good money now and not to have to compromise their faith, I think, is train as a gay divorce lawyer. Because you\'re in divorcing, helping gay couples to divorce, you\'re doing the Lord\'s will, you\'re dividing that which should never have been united in the first place, and you can make good money at it, I\'m sure. So that would be my slightly Jesuitical Presbyterian advice. You know, advise people to become gay divorce lawyers. That\'s the way to go. Do the Lord\'s will and make a lot of money at the same time.