This quick study on Law and Gospel was given at the end of service at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on January 28, 2018. The text of the study is included and you may play the audio of the study here.
Today, we’re going to begin looking at how to practice the art of distinguishing Law and Gospel, and we’re going to base it off of C.F.W. Walther’s seminal work on it, called, of all things, The Proper Distinction of Law and Gospel. Now, this work is unique in that Walther never wrote the book. It was assembled by his students and other pastors after his death. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, if you’ve never heard of Walther, you’re not unique. Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther was one of original immigrants from Saxon Germany that immigrated to the United States. These immigrants, refugees in many ways, were escaping a forced union between Calvinist churches and their Lutheran theology. The King of Prussia wanted everyone to play nice, and so he was forcing the Lutherans to welcome the Calvinists at the Sacrament of the Altar, and vice versa. Some Lutherans of Saxony could endure it no more and emigrated in 1838. This group would ultimately settle in Perry County in Missouri, just south of St. Louis.
Walther, a simple pastor, was thrust into the leadership of the entire group when their bishop, lead pastor and organizer of the emigration, was defrocked after some accusations of inappropriate relationships with women. Walther would eventually lead this group of Germans to evangelize to all the Germans coming off the boats, start a magazine which would eventually become The Lutheran Witness, start the denomination that became our beloved Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, serve as its president, build Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, and serve as its president.
Walther never had desired such a leadership role, but God obviously had other plans in mind. He was a brilliant theologian and a wonderful pastor, comforting an entire immigrant group when their bishop had let them down so completely. The reason he could be both a theologian and a pastor is better demonstrated no where else than in his Law and Gospel. But, like I said, Walther never wrote the book. Instead, in 1884, he saw that his students needed something fun to do on Friday. So, he organized a lecture series for his students in the seminary. Almost every Friday night for over a year, Walther spoke with his students and taught to them the art of distinguishing Law and Gospel. The lectures were so good, that most students took copious notes, and when Walther died, they gathered those notes and Walther’s own and studiously compiled them into the manuscript we have today.
This ability to distinguish or divide Law and Gospel is often known as the Lutheran distinction. If you are able to do this properly and well, you truly are a Lutheran theologian. However, because of the influence of modern philosophies and false doctrines, many had lost the ability. That’s why Walther thought this so important and spent so much time on it. To have this ability makes you able to convict those who were secure in their sins, preaching the Law of God rightly, and to comfort those who were repentant and desired to be forgiven, which is to rightly preach the Gospel. He saw this as the heart of the Christian faith and life. And it really is, because it’s all about how God speaks to us and how we speak to others. We’ll dive into the first section next week.
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