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from the district pastor ...

Rev. Mark Jamison

The first section of the Augsburg Lutheran District’s main teaching document, “Our Declaration” is entitled The Trinity: Our Great Heritage. What it states is that getting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity right, and using the proper Trinitarian language of calling on God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, does not guarantee that people will clearly know who God is. If that were not true there never would have been a Reformation in the first place. You don’t really know who God is unless you know God is revealed in the Gospel. That is because it is only in the Gospel where God’s love for sinners is revealed. If people do not know of this love their knowledge of God is incomplete and distorted. Of course any analogies to human experience when it comes to God’s love are incomplete and limited. Nevertheless, let me use the illustration of family life. If people outside my family had observed my parents losing their temper and patience with me when I was growing up, they would not have clearly understood the depths of my parents’ love for me. They would have missed my father exhausting himself by helping me move 1000 miles to my seminary internship site, putting our newborn son and my wife on the plane, paying for the airline tickets because I couldn’t, and then caravanning with us back to Minnesota at the end of the internship. They would have missed my mother taking years off her life by ignoring medical advice given to protect her from her damaged heart, going back to school to get certified as a public school teacher, and finding employment at an elementary school so that her two sons could get a college education.

God’s love, however, does not come to us through the demands of the laws in the Bible. God’s love is made known in the specific, concrete content and expression known as the Gospel. For sinners, to hear the unconditional declaration of forgiveness God in Christ is a more convincing way for them to know God’s love than to hear Christ’s accusing words that if you lust in the heart you already have committed adultery. But the distinction between law and Gospel must be made to ensure the Gospel is not lost or obscured. Again, referring back to family experience, if I had only heard the words of discipline and punishment growing up, and never saw my parents acts of sacrifice, I would have had great difficulty in believing they love me and knowing their love. Without the distinction of law and Gospel, then, knowledge of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is deficient.

The starting point though for distinguishing between law and Gospel is the cross. Next month’s article will deal with that. But this distinction is especially crucial now since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Obviously, that attack has been a terrible cross to bear for many in our nation and world. It may lead to more crosses for our nation to bear. People are asking where was God on that awful day, and what is God up to now at this time in history? That is another way of asking to know God. Whatever God was or wasn’t doing by allowing the attack, any knowledge of God people get by only looking at the event itself, or hearing the pronouncements of religious personalities about God’s intentions for the world and our country, will not be true knowledge of God and the love of God. The Cross, for Lutherans, is not only the starting point for knowing God, it is God’s megaphone or loud speaker to the world.

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