Love is what it’s all about

This is not Gospel; this is all Law. Even 'love your neighbor' and 'love your God' are LAW. That doesn't get us saved, no matter how hard we try at it. Faith in Jesus isn't about our love of God and neighbor. It's about God's love of us, and what is done in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Gospel is that we are forgiven despite defiantly refusing to love God and neighbor. From that forgiveness and love God has first shown us, are we able to love God and neighbor.

Hello Peter,

I agree with everything in your post. "Love your neighbor" and "love your God" are law. You lift an often left unmentioned point about our ability to follow God's law as a response to God's freely given "forgiveness and love", and not a means to earn salvation. I would go a step further and say that 'works righteousness' is an evil twisted illusion of God's law. I think the great points you raise would be flushed out more by applying more of our Lutheran confessions.

With that said, God's law is every bit a gift of God's love as the Gospel. We need both law and gospel and both uses of the laws. All law and no gospel yields violence to the soul. No law and all gospel yield cheap grace which starve the soul and fills it with hubris. I would also propose that the experience of God's law needs to proceed hearing the gospel if we are to encounter grace. Luther basically says it is at failing to follow God's law and hitting rock bottom, or what Luther refers to as "anfechtung", that our soul is able to hear and receive the gospel. Before anfechtung the gospel falls on deaf ears. It is not sufficient to wait to receiving gospel whole heartedly before trying to follow the law. Such a spiritual stance avoids unfechtung and in the end up overlooking the comfort of the gospel. It is to this spiritual stance that Luther responds with his theology of "sin boldly". All of this is the theological use of the law.

Jesus in his sparring with the religious elite in the temple may have been trying to convict them with the theological use of the law. I certainly don't see Jesus trying to proclaim the gospel. The souls of elite are not ready for it. They are filled with too much hubris. If Jesus had said "I am the messiah" it would not comfort their soul. It would only confirm their thoughts that Jesus was a heretic and further hide their own sin from their eyes. Jesus loved these people to much to let that happen.

I see Jesus's sparring in the temple as primarily a conversation revolving around, what we would call the civil use of the law, a part of our theology which we actually inherit from Judaism. I think the civil use of the law is often misunderstood or is completely ignored by many of us Lutherans in our hyper-sensitivity to reject works-righteousness. That is a terrible shame because we miss out on a great gift of God's love. This use of the law is like when a parent, out of arms reach of their child, watches their child step onto the road into oncoming traffic. The parent yells, 'Stop!' This word is not spoken in a soft, pleasant manner. It is spoken with the most commanding voice the parent can muster. To the casual observer and maybe even to the child the voice may sound angry but this is not what underlies the voice. In the parent's head he or she is not thinking, "If the child stops I will love it; and if the child does not stop, it has disobeyed me and deserve to die." Nor is the parent thinking, "I hope the child stops, but if the child does not stop that is o.k. too because then the child will learn how much it needs my love." No loving parent in their right mind would be thinking such things. The parent simply loves the child so much the parent does not want to see the child get hurt. God love us so much God simply does not want us to hurt one another or stray from His love.

All of the religious elite's questions were about want they knew best, what we would call the civil use of the law. Yet, they question Jesus, not with love for Jesus in their hearts, but malice fueled with desperation. When Jesus replies with the great commandment, he reminds everyone that God's law is always about love. And in the process, Jesus reveals to everyone in the temple that those who would claim to be experts on the law had actual perverted God’s law in their attacks on Jesus. We do the same thing when try to justify our own paths of sin to God or desire that which is not God’s will.

Peace be with you,
Matt

I think we do still have some disagreement, over the Law and how it is/was used. I think civil (First) use of the Law gets overrated, especially in church. Whenever there's a sermon about ethics or morality, it's usually First Use. First Use is best mostly left out of the church and played out in the secular society for which it is meant. Second Use is how we must encounter the Law in church and in theological discussions, because our business is that of the Gospel, which is addressed to sinners.

Nor do I think the Pharisees have perverted God's Law in their attacks on Jesus. These three parables show God's Law, represented by the upright, righteous Pharisees, Sadducees and lawyers, doing what it does best: ordering society and accusing anyone and everyone threatening that order. Jesus, as the Messiah, is exactly about disrupting that order, and He bears the penalty for doing so: death on a cross, under the Law. Being the Messiah, He overcomes death and lives again. It is through that death and resurrection that we live again and have new life, not through the Law. Incidentally, the cross is also why your parent/traffic metaphor doesn't work very well for me. We're always playing in traffic, and it is Christ who gets hit by the bus getting us out of harm's way after we've ignored our Parent.

There is an impossible tension between God's Law and God's Gospel. For all that the Law is good, it also kills in all three uses. It is only the Gospel that makes alive.