Luther’s most jarring words concerning the law are contained in How Christians Should Regard Moses (1525) and the Lectures on Galatians (1531/5). There, Luther exhorts us to have nothing to do with the law. One must learn to expel the law from the conscience because the Christian is no longer under the law, but under grace (Rom 6:14-15). Of course, as Luther later says in the Antinomian Disputations in the 1530s, people remain under the law according to the flesh because of the continued presence of sin. The simul shows that the law ends for faith but remains for the flesh and its discipline. All this culminates with the sixth article of the Formula of Concord, which reiterates Luther’s teaching on the law in the Christian life.
In modern times, Lutherans have gravitated to Luther’s teaching of law and gospel as the hallmark of Lutheran theology, the charter of evangelical pastoral care, and the limit which guides theological reflection. Lutherans in America have been preoccupied with the distinction ever since C. F. W. Walther’s beloved lecture series was published.More recently, the work of Gerhard Forde (1927–2005) has critiqued Lutheran orthodoxy’s doctrine of the eternal law and its corresponding third use. Perhaps, Forde contends, the distinction of law and gospel was obscured by later Lutheran dogmatics – leaving it for the confessional revival and the advent of modern Luther studies to rediscover its significance for Lutheran theology. For this contention, Forde has been charged with either outright antinomianism, or some variety of soft–antinomianism.
Yet Forde’s theology isn’t the only instance in which twentieth-century Lutherans revisited the third use. Werner Elert and Gerhard Ebeling both contested the third use based on fresh readings of Luther. But in the context of ecclesial and theological history, Forde and the circle surrounding him produced an anomaly: near-unanimous opposition to revised norms of sexual ethics. If there is a limit to the law in faith, then what could possibly authorize Christians to bind believers to scriptural prohibitions of homosexuality? Lutherans of the former Synodical Conference have found this especially perplexing. Those carrying on that heritage have often regarded the third use as an indispensable bulwark against changing norms for marriage and sexuality. Rejection of the third use is inherently antinomian. If so, the charge applied to Forde fits the preponderance of the evidence.
But this interpretation of the fact pattern hits a snag when it comes to the position of Forde himself on the issue of human sexuality – to say nothing of his students and colleagues who have, by and large, concurred with him on that issue. Neither the laity nor the clergy can legitimately claim freedom for alternative arrangements for marriage and sexuality. When Forde himself writes about the issue of sexuality, he always defends the historic position of the church that homosexual behavior is prohibited by scripture and the natural law. Christians – ordained and lay – are expected to adhere to this standard.
One might argue that Forde’s own socialization prior to the sexual revolution of the 1960s prevented him from realizing the implications of his own theological commitments. But this too runs aground because of the fact that younger admirers and exponents of his work on law and gospel usually concur with him that scripture prohibits homosexuality, and that this proscription norms church life today.
The merits of Forde’s doctrine of the law have been debated ad nauseam. My aim isn’t to offer yet another defense of his position. Instead, I’ll take up the specific case of sexual ethics. It’s worth exploring why the Forde circle – despite having been incubated in The American Lutheran Church (TALC) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) – declined to go along with the revision of sexual norms now pervasive in the ELCA. Today, most of Forde’s intellectual descendants have moved into the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) and Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC).
A point of contrast is worth observing. Despite superficial similarities between the theology of the Forde circle and those who left the Lutheran Church––Missouri Synod (LCMS) during the Seminex controversy of the 1970s, these two groups responded to the challenge of human sexuality differently. Members of the Seminex contingent were among the first and most enthusiastic advocates for affirmation of homosexual identity and behavior in the ELCA.
Theologians like Edward H. Schroeder appealed to Luther’s distinction of law and gospel: since the law isn’t the gospel, it can’t divide the church. Nor can the law obligate Christians to observe a particular form of life, like fidelity within traditional marriage and chastity outside it – as the church has always taught. Christians are bound only to an evangelical law of love, which either permits or mandates affirmation of homosexuality. The theologians and pastors of Seminex claimed to be faithfully implementing Elert’s theology when they advocated for various social justice causes and eventually the rejection of traditional marriage, all this despite Elert’s socially conservative, right-wing monarchism. It’s very strange that Elert’s rejection of the third use can only be held responsible for justifying leftist political causes, but never right-wing ones.
Nevertheless, it’s crucial to acknowledge that Forde himself never advanced a second use of the gospel or a theory of evangelical imperatives like the “promising tradition” embodied in the Seminex Elertians. The paranetic sections of the epistles apply the law: therein the Holy Spirit instructs, disciplines, restrains, and accuses as he wills. When Forde treats sexuality, he recurs to the civil use of the law and the public estate of marriage. Since the law always accuses, like Melanchthon teaches in the Apology, the church continually preaches the law to mortify the flesh. This is the alien work of God and the proper work of the law: to bring sinners to Christ that they might be made alive in the hearing of the gospel.
So, what is the key part of the argument that rules out a revision of sexual norms? Since the gospel cannot regulate human behavior without being transformed into the law, the law’s content must remain in place. The crucial ingredient is the simul’s eschatology: the law ends, but only for faith, while the law is established (Rom 3:31) in its proper place. The end of the law in faith alone clarifies the law’s proper limit, which is the discipline of earthly life under sin. The empirical reality of the church, the world, and the believing sinner remains that of the old world.
There is no evangelical ethics designed to transform life in the old world by gradually reorienting it to the reality of the kingdom. The eschatology at work in Forde’s theology is at once anti-revolutionary and apocalyptic, invested both in the continuity of life in the old world and the disjunctive nature of life in the new. The new age, as a reality of faith communicated in the creaturely means of word and sacrament, is hidden from sight. To propose a novel ethics grounded in the gospel would mean prematurely transforming the hidden reality of faith into a visible reality. Furthermore, it is entirely speculative to imagine that God will bless homosexual relationships in the new kingdom, since we have no such word from him. And given the content of the Ten Commandments and the shape of the human body created and disciplined here by them, we can anticipate that he will not.
For the time being, Christ establishes the law’s normative status for the old age, which applies to all empirical human relationships. Forde’s eschatology points in the opposite direction of moral revision. Even without a unique third use for Christians, the law in its civil use restrains sexual sin and promotes procreation – which continues to apply to the lives of sinners in the old world. This is the anti-revolutionary pole of Forde’s eschatology. The limit of the law in the gospel establishes its place in the creation captive to sin.
Where Forde’s eschatology negates empirical righteousness in favor of the unseen righteousness of faith, his vision of human social arrangements is surprisingly conservative. Indeed, Forde’s understanding of natural law exposes him to the common criticism that Lutheran social ethics is quietist. The gospel alone rules the conscience apart from the law by faith. But the law regulates the flesh in the age soon to pass away. The law in its civil use rules the old nature captive to sin. The content of the law is given in the Ten Commandments, especially the first, which means that we should have no other gods than the triune God of Israel.
The typical anxiety with Forde’s eschatology is that, without a third use, the church is powerless to oppose secular moral chaos. If secular culture forgets the sixth commandment’s prohibition of adultery (and therefore fornication, homosexuality, and pornography) – which is nonetheless part of the natural law – how will the church respond without a unique ethical message for Christians confused and deceived as to which works please God? Forde’s witness is clear: the church must denounce any effort to attenuate the law to make it easier for modern people to keep. Christ alone removes the law – and therefore accusation – from the conscience. Yet the church must speak clearly when the civil realm and the state fail to execute the power of the sword ordained by God (Rom 13:1–7).
But the church’s vocation is to preach the law unto judgment and the gospel unto eternal life. If Forde is right that the gospel is the law’s only limit, then this indicates the provisional nature of the church’s witness to the law in the face of the secular. If the state has lost sight of the natural law which keeps and preserves life under sin, the position most consistent with Forde’s eschatology is not that the church should capitulate to changing, public norms of sexual behavior. Quite to the contrary, if Forde is right, the present crisis of sexual morality – and secularity generally – invites us to rethink liberalism in the public square.
Perhaps the right use of Forde’s eschatology of law and gospel points not in the direction of antinomianism, Gnosticism, or moralistic therapeutic deism at all. Instead, Forde’s eschatology points in a more controversial direction: toward the recovery of political order shaped by adherence to the natural law given in the Ten Commandments which takes up the power of the sword ordained by God to punish the wrongdoer (Rom 13:4). When the state assumes its divinely given authority to prosecute evil, then the church is free to issue the law as judgment against the sinner and freely give the gospel to its transgressors, no matter how execrable they may be.
To speculate that Forde himself contemplated a postliberal alternative to the secular public square would demand of him far too much. But he does point in this direction by highlighting the importance of the civil use of the law in shaping life in the old world, captive to sin. It’s most plausible to conclude that Forde’s eschatology demands a renewal of the civil realm in obedience to the Ten Commandments. This invites us to consider how the state catechizes moral agents in the public square – and therefore shows the way beyond merely ecclesial disputes over the nature of human sexuality. Only then can we consider the institution of marriage in full: not just as the property of the church, but as a public institution implicated with the state’s exercise of the law in its civil use.
