Daniel R. Hyde |

Reformed Catholic Theology

Reformed Thoughts on Law and Gospel

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A good book is supposed to be like a good conversation partner. When you open it up, you enter a dialog and walk away enlightened. As we all know, though, other times a conversation partner can leave you extremely disappointed. Dr. David P. Scaer’s book, Law and Gospel and the Means of Grace is one such disappointing book.[1] Law and Gospel is the eighth in a thirteen volume series through the standard theological loci using the Lutheran Book of Concord as the guide and the substance of explanation. I offer here some Reformed thoughts on Lutheran law and gospel.

Obviously, this series is aimed at the confessional Lutheran ministerium. The theologians and pastors of the various Lutheran synods will “get” this volume. It has as its scope the loci of law and gospel and the means of grace. I’ll focus most of my space on the first half of the book dealing with law and gospel. It goes without saying that these two loci are at the heart of confessional Lutheran theology, liturgy, and piety. Even lay people with the most basic of understanding of their Lutheran neighbor’s faith knows this.

Law and Gospel

In this section Scaer is both enlightening as well as disappointing. A few representative examples will illustrate this Reformed reader’s perspective on the Lutheran doctrine of law and gospel.

Enlightening

First, Dr. Scaer opens with a wonderful paragraph. In it he shows the different uses of the words “law” and “gospel” throughout the Holy Scriptures. The Reformed reader who only reads tweets or at best blogs needs this section! He then moves on to show how these terms are used theologically in Lutheran dogmatics. He particularly focuses on how they’ve been confused throughout the history of the Christian Church.

Disappointing

Yet after several enlightening pages, Scaer says, “Roman Catholic and Reformed theologians do not make these distinctions and claim to find the gospel and the law in each other” (8). On the contrary, sixteenth-century Reformed theologians distinguished the law from the gospel. For example, Zacharius Ursinus’ Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism and Theodore Beza’s The Christian Faith. In fact, they made it a foundational principle of true Christian theology. One wonders if Scaer has read the best of our tradition? Even more disappointing than Scaer’s claim, though, was his lack of evidence. In neither the body or the footnotes of the book does he evidence this claim. This wasn’t only a weak spot in this area of the book, but in dozens of other sections. He constantly reproduces what he understands the Reformed view on any given subject without so much as a citation. The conscientious reader is left thinking that even the best of Lutheran scholarship still continues to attribute to the Reformed positions the Reformed don’t confess. It seems nothing has changed since the days of Calvinist and Lutheran polemic and diatribe in the sixteenth century.

Enlightening

A second enlightening area on law and gospel is his dealing with various law and gospel statements in the Bible. In dealing with the issue of grammatical mood, he makes an extremely helpful point that the imperative mood in Scripture does not automatically make a command “law.” Listen up Reformed para-church fanboys!

Disappointing

Yet, once again, there’s disappointment. Scaer goes on to say the Reformed believer along with the Wesleyan believer “take issues with Luther’s view that even after conversion the Christian remains a sinner” (26). This is certainly not the position the Reformed churches confess in their ecclesiastically adopted confessions. For example in dealing with the doctrine of justification the Heidelberg Catechism speaks in the first person as a Christian saying, “Although my conscience accuse me that I have grievously sinned against all the commandments of God, have never kept any of them, and that I am still prone always to all evil” (Q&A 60). Unlike my criticism above, to support his claim Scaer does give a footnote. Yet once again, the reader is frustrated as Scaer’s representative “Reformed” theologian is Donald Bloesch. The confessionally Reformed reader knows that Dr. Bloesch is a United Church of Christ minister and professor. In fact, what’s so frustrating is that Scaer returns again and again to Bloesch in his footnotes as a representative interlocutor of the Reformed tradition. It feels like taking the time to offer Reformed thoughts on Lutheran law and gospel isn’t reciprocated.

Means of Grace

Enlightening

In the second half of the book Scaer deals with the means of grace. He opens up the Scriptures in an enlightening. He explains how there were sacraments in the Old Testament such as the tree of life. The Reformed believer will open up his Francis Turretin and find this very thing! He also speaks in a way that the Reformed believer can agree. In a wonderful section Scaer says, “‘Word and Sacrament’ is not merely a convenient cliché synonymous with the means of grace but is descriptive of what constitutes the church” (135). In other words, it’s not enough to parrot a cliché, Word and Sacrament is all we’re about!

Disappointing

As with the first half of the book, Scaer once again pulls out every scare tactic. One wonders if he just wants to demean the positions of the Reformed churches. Over and over again he stats what he says the Reformed position is on the means of grace without. Unfortunately, he never references its official catechisms and confessions. Like the first half of the book the disappointment deepens. When Scaer finally does give a footnote, more often than naught he references, among others, Karl Barth, G. R. Beasley-Murray, Stanley Grenz, Wayne Grudem, and Jan Rohls as his interlocutors. These are hardly the main stream of confessional Reformed thought in this century of in any!

Conclusion

By now you can gather that Law and Gospel is a mixed bag of insight and disappointment. Let me offer a concluding Reformed thought on Lutheran law and gospel. Reformed Christians who want to learn more own this loci should turn to time-tested works. Instead of to Scaer’s book. To learn of the law and gospel distinction Scaer doesn’t measure up to C. F. W. Walther’s classic, The Proper Distinction Between the Law and the Gospel. To learn of the doctrine of the means of grace, especially the Lord’s Supper, Scaer cannot match the “second Martin,” Martin Chemnitz’s work, The Lord’s Supper.


[1] David P. Scaer, Law and Gospel and the Means of Grace, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics VIII (St. Louis: The Luther Academy, 2008). This review first appeared in Mid-America Journal of Theology 20 (2009): 235–237.

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