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First Use of the Law in Congregational Life - By James Bachmann
This essay follows up on some issues in my first essay, “The Pastor’s
Call and the Pastor’s Contract.” That essay provides the relevant
background for this essay.
Tony Z responded to the original Pastor’s Call/Contract article by
asking, “Could you please expand a bit on what you term ‘the law
oriented techniques for community building,’ with some examples,
including discussion of the first use of the law in this regard?”
First Use of the Law in Congregational Life
James Bachman
Christ College School of Theology
Concordia University Irvine
The Old Adam goes to Church
I have sometimes joked that we fulltime church workers chose this line of work as the only reliable way to be paid for going to church. More seriously, honesty requires acknowledgement that we pastors don’t always fulfill our tasks as a free response to the grace of God in Christ. Sometimes, the Old Adam in us gets motivated by typical first use of the law incentives. We are earning a salary; our work is being evaluated both formally and informally by the congregation, etc.
I think we Lutherans rightly shy away from having people try to sort out their inner motivations for their life in the congregation. We know that sinner/saints are likely a messy mix of Old Adam response to law inducements and New Adam life in Christ.
But while necessity has caused us to think through good first use structures for overseeing the work of congregational pastors and staff, we have not thought through carefully how to provide our parishioners with Old Adam inducements to work alongside New Adam response.
First Use Inducements
A generation ago most Lutheran colleges had chapel attendance policies that provided some first use motivation for the Old Adam. We rightly worry about mixing Law and Gospel with such inducements. Lutheran theologian, Leif Grane, puts his finger on the problem. In The Augsburg Confession: A Commentary, he writes, "When a sinful person is confronted by the law, that person will always attempt to take possession of it as a tool with which to acquire righteousness. Thus, from a Lutheran perspective, Trent's [Roman Catholic] notion of a cooperation between grace and humanity is from the outset nothing else than an invitation to use the law for self-serving ends which rob God of his glory" (67).
We rightly worry about the Old Adam’s perversity, but we are naïve if we decide to treat congregation members as though they are always and only living out the new life in Christ. The Lutheran simul justus et peccator sinner/saint insight tells us otherwise.
Now, God has taken steps to deal with our sinfulness, most notably in bringing about the death of the Old Adam through Baptism and a daily return to our Baptism. But while the Old Adam still clings to us, God also employs first use law to govern everyday society, including social organizations like a typical congregation. We Lutherans know to make a distinction between theological use (second use) of the Law to bring us to Christ and “first use” that God uses to keep order among sinful humans.
My argument is that we need to be more clear sighted concerning the need for first use also in the congregation, despite the fact that the congregation is the central place where the Old Adam is being done away. In so far as the Old Adam still clings to believers, God’s first use law will be relevant to managing our human relationships in our congregations. We are not very focused in thinking about how first use law helps sinner/saints contribute to the building of a strong human institution (congregation) in the midst of which the Gospel proclamation can be made.
First Use Motivations in the Past and the Present
In my first essay I talk about the “hidden hand of ethnic social solidarity.” If you have ever experienced a tightly knit social community, you will have seen that a number of expectations are effectively laid upon members of the community and enforced in a variety of formal and informal “first use” ways. The Old Adam doesn’t “freely” go to hear the Gospel, but a variety of inducements, both negative and positive, can persuade the Old Adam that he ought to be “religious.” In a tightly knit social community, believers tend to have law oriented reasons for regular participation in the congregation, reasons that supplement the free response of the new person in Christ.
As I explain in the first essay, we no longer have the “hidden hands” to provide first use discipline for the Old Adam. And we Lutherans have not yet done a good job of analyzing the necessity for law inducements in the building of the human institution that is a typical congregation. In the past we could afford not to analyze how law keeps coercing the Old Adam back toward the Font and the Proclamation. We could afford not to because family habits, family inducements, and community inducements did much of the job for us, and pastors didn’t have to think so much about it.
But if it is the case that today’s pastor is a key human community builder and sustainer in the congregation, then we owe him much more help than we are currently giving in thinking through the right application of law inducements to keep the Old Adam in the neighborhood of God’s two-edged sword. We also owe it to our parishioners to provide “first use” inducements to work alongside free response to the Gospel. I think it was Joseph Sittler who somewhere thanked God for all the little fences that kept his feet on the right path.
Examples
You ask for examples, and this gets complicated because both the Old and the New Adam are listening to our words. Let’s say we draw our hearers’ attention to the Letter to the Hebrews, 10:24: “And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” The Old Adam in each of us will, as Grane says, attempt to take possession of these words “as a tool with which to acquire righteousness.” The Old Adam will seek self-serving ways to come to terms with the advice. Meanwhile, the New person in Christ will simply be loving and doing and meeting and encouraging, because where else could I possibly want to be?
We rightly try to keep people focused on their new life in Christ, but we need also to notice that on some days people show up and do good deeds and keep the community going for Old Adam law oriented reasons. And, somehow, we need to make use of these first use law motivations ultimately for the sake of the Gospel work.
St. Paul provides us an excellent and complicated example in 2 Cor 8-9. In Chapter 8 the appeal seems mainly to be to the new person in Christ. Paul writes, “I do not say this as a command, but I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others. 9 For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. 10 And in this matter I am giving my advice: it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something— 11 now finish doing it, so that your eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means.”
In the opening verses of Chapter 9, however, St. Paul does seem willing to appeal to more self-serving Old Adam motivations—“if some Macedonians come with me and find that you are not ready, we would be humiliated—to say nothing of you—in this undertaking.”
I realize that the new person in Christ can hear this in the right way, but the Old Adam also gets a message. In our stewardship campaigns, can we be as wily as Paul in providing first use motivations along with appeal to the new life in Christ?
Here’s a different and contemporary example: Many congregations have made good use of small group dynamics in helping strengthen people’s ties to the congregation. Small group dynamics in the congregation will no doubt provide people opportunities to show free response to the Gospel. But on Old Adam days, these same dynamics give people motivation to keep pitching in despite where their sinfulness might otherwise take them.
Lutheran Distinctives
Non Lutheran Christian communities often more easily accommodate first use inducements, because they mingle Law with Gospel. Herman Sasse captures well how the Reformed solve some of our problems: He writes that both Lutherans and Reformed
wish to distinguish the Gospel from the Law and yet indicate the relation which subsists between them. Both acknowledge that the chief article of the Christian faith is the forgiveness of sins: the Lutherans consider it the whole content of the Gospel, while the Reformed consider it the principal content of the Gospel. Both know that Christ preached the Law as well as the Gospel, even as the Old Testament contains the Gospel as well as the Law. Both know that the church must proclaim the whole Word of God, both the Law and the Gospel. The difference lies in the fact that the Reformed believe that both Law and Gospel are parts of Christ’s real work, and consequently are essential functions of the church; the Lutheran Church, on the other hand, teaches that the preaching of the Law is the “strange,” and the preaching of the Gospel is the “real,” work of Christ, and that accordingly, although the church must also preach the Law—how else could it proclaim the Gospel?—the only thing which is essential to its nature as the church of Christ is that it is the place, the only place in all the world, in which the blessed tidings of the forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake are heard. (Here We Stand: The Nature and Character of the Lutheran Faith, trans. Theodore G. Tappert (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), 121).
We are familiar with how much more easy it is for Reformed brothers and sisters to do a Law/Gospel/Law sequence in the congregation. And, in the quote near the beginning of this essay, Leif Grane reminded us that Roman Catholic “cooperation between grace and humanity” opens the door for the Old Adam to pursue his own religious agenda. Yes, we join Grane and Sasse in constant warnings that whenever the Law stands “on the same footing” with the Gospel in the congregation there is hell to pay (Sasse, 137).
But I think that our sinner/saint theological understanding can help us find our own distinctive way of grasping how God continues to first use law also in the congregation. Because the old sinful self continues to cling to us in this life, first use of law is a legitimate tool for cajoling and coercing the Old Adam back into the vicinity of the Font and the Proclamation.
When the CTCR and I were working on human care issues in the congregation, we came to the following way of trying to think about our complex work in the congregations.
As part of its proclamation, however, the church does also intentionally speak of the works that characterize the lives of believers. Our justification before God is without works by faith, but “good works should be done because God has commanded them and in order to exercise our faith, to give testimony, and to render thanks” (Ap IV, 189). The Formula of Concord advises that “it is just as necessary to exhort people to Christian discipline and good works, and to remind them how necessary it is that they exercise themselves in good works as an evidence of their faith and their gratitude toward God, as it is to warn against mingling good works in the article of justification” (FC Ep, V, 18). . . . Believers also struggle daily with the Old Adam, and the preaching of the Law alerts us to the pernicious effects of the Old Adam’s struggle against faith. “In this life Christians are not renewed perfectly and completely. For although their sins are covered up through the perfect obedience of Christ, so that they are not reckoned to believers for damnation, and although the Holy Spirit has begun the mortification of the Old Adam and their renewal in the spirit of their minds, nevertheless the Old Adam still clings to their nature and to all its internal and external powers . . . . Hence, because of the desires of the flesh the truly believing, elect, and reborn children of God require in this life not only the daily preaching and admonition, warning and threatening of the law, but frequently the punishment of the law as well, to egg them on so that they follow the Spirit of God, . . . .” (FC SD, VI, 7–9). (CTCR Report, Faith Active in Love, 1999, 15-16.
So, how do we craft messages and practices that motivate sinners who still have the Old Adam clinging while we above all work toward the daily drowning of the Old Adam? If we can achieve a theologically sound perspective on first use of law in the congregation, then we may have much that we can learn from sociologists, psychologists, business leaders, etc., concerning the best ways to “egg on” ourselves and our members to “follow the Spirit of God.”
My goal has been to provoke dialog about this contemporary problem in our congregations, a problem that is especially difficult for Lutherans precisely because we have such a clear grasp of the Gospel.
[Some may notice that the use of Article Six of the Formula of Concord suggests that I am confusing third use of the law with first use. I recognize this problem, and it could quickly become the subject of another essay. Lutherans have always struggled to grasp what they mean by third use. Some Lutherans say third use is simply second use applied to the Old Adam in the believers, and FC VI provides evidence to support this claim. I suppose I am exploring whether third use also involves something like first use applied to the Old Adam in the believers.]
Written By: host
Date Posted: 5/11/2007
Number of Views: 2603
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