# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1861_S370
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

370 Report on the Law.

...live to righteousness, as St. Paul teaches, Romans 6:2ff, beginning and increasing here on earth, and accomplishing it there. For Christ has earned for us not only Gratiam, grace, but also Donum, the gift of the Holy Spirit, so that we should have not only forgiveness of sins but also a ceasing from sins (John 1:16-17). Now whoever does not cease from sin, but remains in his former evil condition, must have a different Christ from the Antinomians. The true Christ is not there, and even if all the angels cried out, "Christ alone! Christ alone!" he must be condemned along with his new Christ." (Luther's Works, Erlangen Edition XXV, 323, 324; Walch's Edition XVI, 2741, 2742.)

IV. In what relation does the preaching of the Law stand to the preaching of justification through faith?

The short answer to this is threefold:

1. The preaching of justification through faith must be preceded by the preaching of the Law concerning repentance.

2. Justification itself may be taught only from the Gospel, and the preaching of the Law is therefore to be wholly excluded from it.

3. To those who are justified, as such, the Law must not be preached in order to make them godly and fruitful in good works, and it must therefore be laid, not upon the new man, but only upon the old man in them.

1. The preaching of justification through faith must be preceded by the preaching of repentance out of the Law, as it is written: "Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem" (Luke 24:47).

On this Luther writes in his tract "Against the Antinomians" of the year 1539: "They have invented for themselves a new method: that one should first preach grace, and only afterward the revelation of wrath, so that the word 'Law' should never be heard or spoken at all. That is a fine little cat's stool, and it pleases them exceedingly well; and they think they can draw the whole of Scripture in and out with it, and thereby become lux mundi (a light of the world). Such a thing St. Paul must and shall give them, Romans chapter 1. But they do not see how St. Paul teaches in exactly the opposite way: he begins by showing first the wrath of God from heaven, and makes the whole world sinners and guilty before God; and only afterward, once they have become sinners, does he teach them how grace is obtained and how one becomes righteous, as the first three chapters show powerfully and clearly. And it is also a peculiar blindness and folly of theirs that they think the revelation of wrath is something other than the Law — which is simply not possible; for the revelation of wrath is the Law, where it is recognized and felt, as Paul says: Lex iram operatur (the Law works wrath).