Law and Gospel

Luther described scripture as containing two fundamentally different kinds of speech, which he called law and gospel, and argued that a preacher's whole competence rests on telling them apart. Law is every word of scripture that commands, demands or accuses: it tells a person what to do and, more painfully, shows how far short of it they fall. Gospel is every word that simply gives, announcing what God has already done in Christ, without conditions attached. The distinction is not a division of the Bible into an Old Testament of law and a New Testament of gospel; both words run through both testaments, and the Sermon on the Mount can preach law as sharply as the Ten Commandments preach it, while a psalm of confidence in God's mercy can preach gospel as purely as any verse of Paul.

The stakes, in Luther's account, were pastoral before they were theoretical. Preach law without gospel and a congregation is left crushed under demand with no word of rescue. Preach gospel without law and sin is never truly named, so grace is received as a permission rather than a rescue, because the danger it answers was never made real. Rightly dividing the two meant applying law to whoever felt secure in their own righteousness and gospel to whoever had been brought to despair by the law's accusation, a pairing that had to be renewed sermon by sermon rather than settled once for a congregation as a whole.

The distinction did not settle into confessional form without a fight inside the Reformation itself. In the late 1520s and again in the late 1530s, the Wittenberg reformer Johannes Agricola argued that the law had no proper place in preaching to Christians at all, that repentance should be worked by the gospel's kindness alone rather than the law's accusation, since believers under grace were no longer under the law in any sense that mattered for the pulpit. Luther and Melanchthon opposed him sharply, writing against what came to be called the antinomian controversy, on the grounds that a believer remains simultaneously righteous and sinner in this life and so still needs the law's accusation to drive them back to the gospel daily, not merely once at conversion.

The dispute outlived Luther and was addressed formally in the Formula of Concord of 1577, whose fifth article restates the law and gospel distinction as confessional doctrine and whose sixth takes up the disputed question of whether the law has any further use for the regenerate. Lutheran and Reformed confessions diverge at exactly this point: Reformed theology generally affirms a robust third use of the law, guiding the Christian's ongoing obedience, while Lutheran confessional writing accepts a third use in a narrower, more contested key, wary of letting law and gospel blur back into the single conditional message the Reformation had set out to break apart.