Law and Gospel in

Luther's Hermeneutic
G E R H A R D O. F O R D E
Professor of Systematic Theology
Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary

Law and gospel, as Luther understood them, are

more a matter of modes of speech and ways of
preaching than of difference in content between
Old and New Testaments.

L E T US B E G I N in p r o p e r h e r m e n e u t i c a l fashion w i t h a text. It is t a k e n
f r o m L u t h e r ' s L e c t u r e s o n R o m a n s w h e r e h e is c o m m e n t i n g o n R o m a n s
7 : 5 - 6 a n d s t r u g g l i n g w i t h t h e q u e s t i o n of t h e "oldness of t h e l e t t e r " or " l a w : "

T h e real difference between the old and the new law [read: gospel] is this: T h e old law
says to those who are proud in their own righteousness: You must have Christ and his
spirit; the new law says to those who humbly recognize that they lack all righteousness
and who seek Christ: Behold, here is Christ and his spirit! They therefore, that inter-
pret the gospel as something else than "good news," do not understand the gospel. Pre-
cisely this must be said of those who have turned the gospel into a law rather than in-
terpret it as grace, and who set Christ before us as a Moses. 1

T h e t e x t v i r t u a l l y says it all, sets t h e a g e n d a , a n d d i c t a t e s t h e thesis for this

a r t i c l e . T h e difference b e t w e e n " o l d l a w " a n d " n e w l a w ( g o s p e l ) " is a differ-
e n c e in speaking, t h e m o o d of t h e a d d r e s s d i r e c t e d to p e o p l e in differing states
of m i n d o r " c o n s c i e n c e . " T h e difference, t h a t is to say, does n o t a p p e a r in
w h a t is s p o k e n about. B o t h t h e o l d law a n d t h e n e w s p e a k about " C h r i s t a n d

1. Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, Wilhelm Pauck, ed. and trans. LCC, XV
(Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1961), 199.

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 Law and Gospel in Luther's Hermeneutic
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his spirit." T h e old law, however, speaks about Christ and his spirit in the im-
perative mood: "You must have. . . . " T h e new, the gospel, speaks in what
could only be called a declarative mood: "Behold, here is Christ and his
spirit!" I say "declarative" because it seems to me that "indicative" is too am-
biguous to designate the precise kind of speaking involved here: the actual
present tense giving of what is spoken about in the speaking itself, the "here it
is." T h e difference between the old and the new, therefore, is a difference in
preaching, a difference in how we speak to one another and on what authority
we do so.
But there is more. Our text goes on to make the claim that such realization
is absolutely crucial for the problem of interpretation, for what we today have
come to call hermeneutics. Those who do not understand this difference in
speaking do not understand the gospel, that is, they do not understand the
biblical text with which they are dealing. If they "interpret" the gospel as
something other than good news, that is, as something other than the declar-
ing of the "here it is," they are operating with a false hermeneutic and simply
relapse into the "oldness of the letter," turn gospel into law, Christ into Moses.
In other words, if one does not know what preaching is, does not know about
this difference between old and new, one cannot interpret the text aright.
Conversely, if one does not interpret aright, one cannot preach aright. Her-
meneutics and preaching go hand in glove.
This leads me to the thesis I want to suggest for this article: for Luther
proper preaching is the solution to the problem of interpretation. Unless the
interpretation issues in proper preaching, the interpretation has gone awry.
T h a t is the Sitz im Leben of the proper distinction between law and gospel in
Luther's "hermeneutics." If no such distinction is made, we remain stuck with
just law, with the "dead letter." Interpretation is then a dead-end street. T h a t
is why Luther in the paragraphs preceding the text with which we began said
these famous words:
Great scholars who read much and abound in many books are not the best Christians.
For all their books and their learning are "letter" and the soul's death. But people who
do from a free and ready heart what the scholars read in books and teach others to
do —they are the best Christians. But they cannot act from a free and ready heart un-
less they have love through the Holy Spirit. We must therefore dread it when, in our
time, through the making of many books, people become learned scholars who do not
know at all what it means to be a Christian (p. 198).
T h e point is that interpretation as a kind of isolated exercise, an end in itself,
is a "dead end," the "soul's death." T h e assumption in Luther's day seems to
have been that one could arrive by interpretation at the "true meaning" of the
text (or at least an approximation thereof), that the move from "letter" to

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"spirit," old to new, was purely an interpretative move. Having m a d e such a
move one would supposedly unlock what the text h a d to offer. But Luther's
contention is that such interpretation only multiplies more "letter" — letter
upon letter to bury the soul. One is tempted to ask whether, on this score at
least, times have changed much since Luther's day —whether that "dread" at
the making of many books by learned scholars who do not know (or perhaps
even care!) what it means to be a Christian would in any way be abated. Unless
a distinction is m a d e between "law" and "gospel" so that the interpretation is-
sues in a proclamation which gives what the text speaks about, the interpreta-
tion does not reach its goal. Even if such interpretation is "right" in what the
text is about, it is nevertheless wrong in that it gives the impression that that is
the end of the matter. It is wrong in that it does not know what the text is for.
Proper preaching, so our thesis contends, is therefore the goal and the solution
to the problem of interpretation.
The Genesis of the Law/Gospel Distinction: But why is "gospel" such a magic
word? Why is gospel so different from other sets of words? Luther raises the
question himself immediately following his testy remarks about great scholars
not being the best Christians:
When, therefore, the question is raised why the gospel is called the word of the Spirit,
a spiritual teaching, the word of grace and the clarification of the sayings of the old
law and a knowledge that is hidden in mystery, etc., the answer must be that this is
done only because it teaches where and wherefrom we can obtain grace and love,
namely, from Jesus Christ whom the law promised and whom the gospel sets forth.
The law commands that we should have love and that we should havefesus Christ, but
the gospel offers and presents both to us. Hence, it says in Ps. 45:2: "Grace is poured
abroad in thy lips" When, therefore, we do not receive the gospel as gospel, it is noth-
ing but "letter." And it is gospel in the full sense of the word, where it preaches Christ
. . . (pp. 198-99; italics mine).
T h e movement in the passage is again unmistakeable. Gospel is not "letter"
but "spirit" because it gives what law can only demand or (even) promise. Gos-
pel is not another "interpretation;" it is something actually given. Grace, Lu-
ther says, does not "exist" in the mind or in books, nor does it flow so readily
off the end of our pens and pencils; it is "poured abroad in thy lips;" it is
something preached. And unless it is heard as gospel it simply remains "dead
letter."
Now the question is How did Luther arrive at this peculiar kind of talk? For
the most part in our histories of theology we have been led to think that the
distinction between law and gospel is a result of Luther's struggles with the
problem of conscience and guilt. T o find "a gracious God" Luther was driven
to distinguish between God's activity as judge and lawgiver and God's salvific

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 Law and Gospel in Luther's Hermeneutic
Interpretation

activity in Jesus Christ. T h e distinction between law and gospel is the solution
to the problem of the anxious conscience. While that is no doubt true, it is only
a part —and maybe only a small part at that —of the story. T h e texts we have
quoted from Luther show that the distinction is intimately bound up with —
indeed, is the solution to —the problem of the interpretation of the sacred
text. Ultimately, of course, it would not be possible, for Luther, to divorce the
problem of conscience from the problem of interpretation. Every interpreta-
tion is, in fact, a covert if not an overt soteriology. T h a t is what Luther dis-
covered. Since, however, this is to be an essay on law and gospel in Luther's
"hermeneutics," we propose to concentrate on Luther's understanding of law
and gospel as a solution to the problem of interpretation. This is a story still
not very widely known and helps to avoid some of the pitfalls of earlier ap-
proaches.
As a "solution" to the problem of interpretation, the law/gospel distinction
flows out of the ancient problem of letter versus spirit. This is already appar-
ent in the texts quoted from Luther. T h e Romans lectures represent a stage
in Luther's career where letter/spirit language and law/gospel language are
still generously intermingled. T o understand how and why the problem of let-
ter versus spirit modulated for Luther into law/gospel we have to sketch in
broad and, I fear, oversimple strokes just what the problem seems to be.
T h e antithesis between letter and spirit gained its foothold in Christian cir-
cles largely, no doubt, through Paul's use of it in II Corinthians 3:6: "The let-
ter (written code) kills, but the Spirit gives life." Due to quirks of historical
fate, the passage came to be taken as a kind of hermeneutical key to under-
standing the Scriptures in general, to say nothing of life as a whole. T h e pas-
sage was understood as pointing to a distinction between a purely outward or
"literal" meaning of the text and an inner or "spiritual" and "life-giving"
meaning. T h e hermeneutical task was to find the right method or way to get
from one to the other. It was a question of levels of meaning or content. One
must learn how to get from mere dead letter to life-giving Spirit.
Origen and much of the tradition following him interpreted the antithesis
in a Platonizing sense: the letter "kills" and is "dead" because it is limited to
the sensible world. If one remains stuck with it alone, one may perish in the
land of appearances —or at least one will not become an accomplished
"gnostic." One must pass beyond the sphere of what is perceptible to the senses
to the intelligible world, the world of eternal ideas where there is no death, if
one wants to rise above the level of the mythology of the simple believer. T h e
Platonizing schemes became the justification for "spiritual" exegesis: T h e
mere literal, especially where it was offensive or obscure, was to be raised to
the level of the spiritually edifying by allegory, tropology, and anagoge.

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 Under such auspices, the historically unique could hardly escape coming
under considerable suspicion. The implication was that mere historical truth
was insufficient, at best only a "sign" or surface manifestation of an eternal
truth, a doctrine, or law. The church always insisted, of course, that only lit-
eral truth, not flights of spiritual fancy, could serve as a basis for dogmatic
demonstration. But the method is still thereby intact: even literal truth, it
would seem, is valuable to the degree it is rendered into dogmatic truth. To be
salvific, the "accidental truths of history" must either yield or be translated in-
to "eternal truths of reason," as Lessing was later to put it. The historical ac-
count must finally take the shape of eternal doctrines, laws, or eschatological
verities.
Such a move could only mean profound turmoil for the church on virtually
all levels. It meant constant battle between literal and spiritual senses, as well
as tension between "historical" and "spiritual" modes of life. It meant confu-
sion in the interpretative enterprises of the church. The literal alone was us-
able for dogmatic proof, yet the spiritual alone was supposed to be life-giving!
One was hard pressed to know whether exegesis or dogmatics was the primary
task of theology, or whether they were really the same thing! Furthermore, if
the hermeneutical task is to translate from the literal to the spiritual, the ques-
tion of authority becomes urgent: Whose translation is right? Whose allegory
is correct? The hermeneutic demands an authoritative office to forestall
chaos. Again, one wonders if things have changed much!
It is perhaps fair to say that the Middle Ages marked a more or less steady
move away from the Platonizing of Origen and the excesses of spiritualism to-
wards a more healthy appreciation of the literal, historical text. This move
culminates, just prior to Luther, in the work of interpreters like Nicholas of
Lyra, Faber Stapulensis, and perhaps also in Nominalism with its literalism
and insistence on biblical authority. Welcome as such a move was exegetical-
ly, it only masked and further aggravated the basic hermeneutical problem:
the relationship between the text and the hearer-believer. How does one get
"life-giving" spirit if now the whole "spiritual" world is cut away and one is left
with only bits of historical information and perhaps a few word studies?
Again, the question is not of mere antiquarian import. It is, no doubt, the
modern question: How does a mere literal historical text have any abiding or
"eternal" significance for those who come a couple of thousand years too late?
How does one bridge the time gap if the "spiritual" superstructure is disman-
tled? Reduction to the literal just by erasing the spiritual does not solve the
problem. To put it in more modern dress: historical and "critical" exegesis is
not likely to serve the soul for daily bread. Luther apparently knew that al-
ready when he at first vehemently resisted the literalism and historicism of
scholars like Nicholas of Lyra. There had to be a better way to handle it.

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Interpretation

Yet Luther also apparently realized there was no way back. The folly of the
old method had been to think that "life-giving Spirit" was a level of meaning
that could be gotten at by interpretation. But interpretation does not yield
spirit, it only yields more letter. Even if the Holy Spirit himself, in the Scrip-
tures, inspires an interpretation beyond the original literal or historical mean-
ing, that is still only more letter.2 Interpretation does not give life. As a matter
of fact, "spirit" in the biblical sense, for Luther, has nothing to do with pene-
tration into the "intelligible world" at all. In his argument with Emser Luther
makes this quite explicit! "Likewise, even though the things described in Scrip-
ture mean something further, Scripture should not therefore have a twofold
meaning. Instead it should retain the one meaning to which the words refer"
(p. 179). Again, to Emser: "You will not find a single letter in the whole Bible
that agrees with what you, along with Origen and Jerome, call the 'spiritual
meaning. . . .' Some people, out of ignorance, therefore attributed a fourfold
meaning to Scripture: the literal, the allegorical, the anagogical, and the
tropological. But there is no basis for it" (pp. 180-81). For Luther interpreta-
tion cannot mean intellectual flight into the intelligible world of eternal ideas.
But that only makes the problem more pressing—it is not a solution, as the
modern world has mistakenly assumed. Where does one turn when the intelli-
gible world has been dismantled? That is now the question.
To get at this question one has to penetrate more deeply into the matter and
engage some of the root theological and anthropological issues. The basic
problem with the hermeneutic which tried to move from letter to spirit via
interpretation was not its fancifulness, its imaginativeness, its allegorical ex-
cesses, or any such, but its theological and anthropological presuppositions.
The method made the whopping assumption that the move proposed was to
some degree possible for the human "spirit" and that language has the function
of assisting in such a move. Now, it really makes little difference what sort of a
move one conceives it to be as long as that is the fundamental presupposition.
One could be a Platonizer like Origen and his followers or a modern Heils-
geschichtler moving from the historical "facts" to the "divine plan" (the Geist
of the whole); the move is basically the same. "Spirit" means the intelligibility
one arrives at by the interpretative process. The anthropological presupposi-
tion accompanying such moves is that human spirit as "rational" and "free"
can —indeed, must —make the move from letter to "spirit" if there is to be
salvation. The text is the jumping-off place, the exercise ground, the symbolic
"map," for the human spirit and its flight, the material upon which it works in
its freedom.
The root problem had already come to light, as one might expect, in the ar-

2. Luther's Works, Vol. 39 (American ed., Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1961), pp. 177-81.

245
gument between Augustine and the Pelagians. Augustine already saw that the
Pelagian position went hand in hand with a certain attitude towards the sacred
text. If "the letter kills" means that the text is somehow inadequate or obscure
and has to be translated into "life-giving spirit," then one's relationship to the
text could only be a Pelagian one. T h e text does not change or transform the
hearer, rather the hearer changes the text into the hearer's own story. T h a t is
the "secret" of allegory. Furthermore, the inner motive of the method is
thereby revealed: it is ultimately a defense mechanism against the text. Thus
Augustine saw that the only way to close the door on this Pelagianizing rela-
tion to the text was to insist that the "letter which kills" should not be taken to
refer to the inadequacy or obscurity of the letter, but rather to the law, the
written code, which kills by its accusing voice. 3 When such a move is made,
the way is opened for the text to call the hearer to account, to begin to change
the hearer, not vice versa. Furthermore, only then could one begin to grasp
what the life-giving spirit might be: the "making alive" that the text itself
delivers.
Augustine's insight at this point was not, it seems, taken up or made much
of by the later tradition. So the problem festered until it came to a head again
in the exegetical and spiritual struggles of the young Luther. Luther saw with
unparalleled clarity that the traditional method was a defense mechanism
against the text and that it only delivered more "letter" and ultimately "the
soul's death." The spiritual flight prescribed was simply law, not spirit; it was
not only unscriptural but existentially destructive.
Now we can go back to our question about what to do once the "intelligible"
world has been disqualified as life-giving spirit. Again to make a long story
short, we can say that Luther's move was simple and yet far reaching in its im-
plications. He took the II Corinthians 3:6 passage to mean just what it says,
literaliterl "The letter kills, but the spirit gives life." W h a t the passage de-
scribes is not an attribute of the text but an activity. T h e "letter," the written
code, the literal history attacks and kills but the spirit gives life. Indeed, only
when the text does that "killing" does it become life-giving. Only when the text
works on us does the Spirit who inspired that text begin to change and trans-
form us.
T h e "letter" is not, therefore, something obscure, weak, or insufficient. It is
not "dead" because it belongs only to the sensible world. If it "kills" it can by
no means be taken lightly or short-circuited by interpretation. T h e "letter,"
the whole long history of God's struggle with his people culminating in the
cross, spells in the first instance but one thing for sinners: death. T h e herme-
neutic takes the form of the cross: the literal history kills the old, lays it to rest;

3. Augustine, On the Spirit and the Letter IV, VI.

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 Law and Gospel in Luther's Hermeneutic
Interpretation

the Spirit can then raise up the new by faith alone. T h e text is not a jumping -
off place for flights of spiritual fancy, rather it cuts off all such flight: it kills.
Therefore, the Holy Scriptures are not reduced to bits of historical informa-
tion or word studies. It is the Word of God, the sword of the Spirit, which does
what it says. T h e Spirit is not some upper or inner level of meaning which one
reaches by interpretation or perhaps by appropriate spiritual exercises. T h e
Spirit is not a hidden agenda. T h e Spirit is the Holy Spirit of God who comes
precisely in and through the letter, the history, the text, the proclamation of
it, to kill and to make alive. With that the hermeneutical foundation for Lu-
ther's understanding and use of law and gospel is laid. T h e literal and histor-
ical sense is the only legitimate meaning. Beyond that, however, it is a ques-
tion of what the words do, how they function in actuality. T h e Word of God is
active and living. It does just exactly what it says.
Even with that foundation the building is not yet complete. We are still only
describing what the Word does. We are still merely interpreting, lecturing
about the Word. If we were to complete the move here suggested, we could
only take the Word and do it, do what it says it does. Otherwise, for all our
talk about the "living" Word, it just remains interpretation, the soul's death.
Luther was supremely aware of that. One cannot interpret one's way out of
death. Thus the final move, and the final solution to the problem left by inter-
pretation, has to be the move to preaching. This entails, for Luther, the tran-
sition from talk about letter and spirit to the preaching of law and gospel.
This transition comes to its sharpest focus in the debate with Emser. T h e refer-
ence to II Corinthians 3:6 is precise and explicit:
In this passage, St. Pc ul does not write one iota about these two meanings, only about
two kinds oí preaching or preaching offices. One is that of the Old Testament, the
other is that of the New Testament. . . . The Old Testament preaches the letter, the
New preaches the Spirit.

The letter is nothing but divine law or commandment which was given in the Old
Testament through Moses and preached and taught through Aaron's priesthood. . . .
But the Spirit, the divine grace, grants strength and power to the heart; indeed, he
creates a new man who takes pleasure [in obeying] God's commandments and who
does everything he should do with joy.
This Spirit can never be contained in any letter. It cannot be written like the law,
with ink, on stone, or in books. Instead, it is inscribed only in the heart, and it is a liv-
ing writing of the Holy Spirit, without [the aid of] any means.

These then are the two ways of preaching: the priests, preachers, and sermons of the
Old Testament deal with no more than the law of God. The Spirit and grace are not
yet openly preached. But in the New Testament only Spirit and grace, given to us

247
through Christ, are preached. For the New Testament preaching is but an offering
and presentation of Christ, through the sheer mercy of God, to all men. This is done in
such a way that all who believe in him will receive God's grace and the Holy Spirit,
whereby all sins are forgiven, all laws fulfilled, and they become God's children and
are eternally blessed. Thus St. Paul here calls the New Testament preaching the "min-
istry of the Spirit," that is, the office of preaching whereby God's Spirit and grace are
offered and put before all those who are burdened by the law, who are killed, and who
are greedy for grace. He calls this law a "ministry of the letter," that is, the office of
preaching whereby no more is given than the letter or law. No life flows from it, the
law is not fulfilled by it, and man can never satisfy it. That is why it remains letter, and
in the letter it can do no more than kill man, that is, show him what he should do and
yet cannot do. Thus he recognizes that he is dead and without grace before God and
that he does not fulfil the commandment, which, however, he should fulfil.
From this it is now clear that the words of the apostle, "The letter kills, but the Spirit
gives life," could be said in other words: "The law kills, but the grace of God gives
life."4
Such passages from Luther raise hackles, of course, due to current hassles
about the relation between the Testaments. We shall say something about that
a bit later. For now, the point is that to complete the move from mere talking
about to doing, one must arrive at the preaching and, indeed, distinguish be-
tween kinds of preaching: law preaching and gospel preaching. Without such
distinction, Spirit is never given, grace never actually delivered. Luther saw,
of course, what the tradition had overlooked: II Corinthians 3:6 is about min-
istry and preaching, not about interpretation! One must do what the passage
says, not merely talk about it!
There is yet more. Not only must the distinction be m a d e so that grace and
Spirit are actually given, actually preached, but also so that the law will ac-
tually be preached in all its clarity and brilliance. (This, incidentally, is the
beginning of an answer to the charge that the distinction is detrimental to the
"Old" Testament.)
. . . just as not all men accept the life of the Spirit —indeed, the majority let this
Spirit's servants present and preach this rich grace in vain, and do not believe the
gospel —so too, not everyone takes up the ministry of the letter or the preaching of the
law. They do not want to let themselves be killed; that is, they do not understand God's
law, and they go on without receiving either the letter or the Spirit. But let us set forth
goat Emser's blind mind even more clearly: he thinks the letter should be avoided and
the death of the letter escaped (p. 184).
Luther goes on to point out that Paul's insistence was that one cannot avoid
the letter or the law, indeed, that one must preach to make the letter clear and
to "lift the veil" from the face of Moses to make it clear that the works of all
4. Luther's Works, p p . 182, 183.

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Interpretation

are sin and that there is nothing good in them unless the grace of the Spirit en-
ters into them. What is ruled out thereby is precisely a Pelagianizing relation
to the text:
Those who want to emphasize their good works and boast about free will do not
allow all human works to be sin. They still find something good in nature. . . . They
are the ones who do not want to let Moses' face shine clearly. They put a veil over the
law and do not really look it in the face. . . . They flee the letter and a true under-
standing of it, just as the Jews fled the face of Moses. That is why their mind remains
blind and they never come to the life of the Spirit (p. 185).
Nor are those who are already "of the New Testament" to escape such
preaching:
But even though we are already in the New Testament and should have only the
preaching of the Spirit, since we are still living in flesh and blood, it is necessary to
preach the letter as well, so that people are first killed by the law and all their ar-
rogance is destroyed. Thus they may know themselves and become hungry for the
Spirit and thirsty for grace. . . . These then are the two works of God, praised many
times in Scripture: he kills and gives life, he wounds and heals, he destroys and helps,
he condemns and saves, he humbles and elevates, he disgraces and honors. . . . He
does these works through these two offices, the first through the letter, the second
through the spirit. The letter does not allow anyone to stand before his wrath. The
Spirit does not allow anyone to perish before his grace. Oh, this is such an overwhelm-
ing affair that one could talk about it endlessly (p. 188)!
So we have gotten a glimpse, if only in hurried and sketchy fashion, of the
place of law and gospel in Luther's "hermeneutics," and to some degree, at
least, established our thesis. Knowing the difference between law and gospel
and thus realizing that they have to be preached is the solution, the telos, of
the problem posed by interpretation. Once the spiritualizing superstructure of
the old hermeneutics (should we also say the new hermeneutics?) has been dis-
mantled, the way is open to understand the text in terms of what it does in its
own right. As law (letter which kills) and gospel (spirit which gives life) the
text sets its own agenda. The text gains thereby the "autonomy" interpreters
who know nothing of preaching so vainly seek. When "rightly" applied, the
distinction between law and gospel makes it impossible for us to change the
text into our own story (allegory). Rather the sacred text is at work to change
us, incorporate us into its story: the story with a future, not "the soul's death."
The "killing" function of the law cuts off every "metaphysical" escape, every
defense mechanism against the text, every self-justification, in order to save,
to put us back in time before the God of time, to make us historical beings, to
wait and to hope. "For if we die with him shall we not also be raised with
him?" According to Luther, that is what would have to be preached. Unless it
is so preached, we have not interpreted aright.
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 The Triumph of the Old Testament in the Church? Part of the task of an
essay such as this is to say something about the advantages and disadvantages of
Luther's use of the law/gospel distinction. T h a t , however, is too large a task
for this short article. I hope that by approaching the matter as a problem in
interpretation many of the usual objections may be put aside. It is not arbi-
trary, narrow, parochial, or artificial. Since it takes on basic metaphysical
presuppositions of east and west, its implications are vast and not even yet fully
worked out. Its major disadvantage, no doubt, is its subtlety. If law and gospel
are not "rightly divided," it is a disaster. But that is a topic which could fill
books. There is in all this one question, however, that persistently bothers
scriptural interpreters which may serve as a kind of test case: the question of
the "Old" Testament, the "letter," the "law." Perhaps a brief discussion of this
question can serve by way of evaluating Luther's "hermeneutic."
W h a t Luther did, in essence, was to substitute "old" and "new" (time cate-
gories) for the "below" (letter) and "above" (Spirit) with which the tradition
had worked. T h e result, as we have seen, is that the "Old Testament" is identi-
fied with law or letter, and the "New" with gospel and Spirit. T h e result has
been a great deal of fussing among interpreters, not all of it very well in-
formed, I fear, especially among scholars of the Old Testament. It usually
takes the form of the question, Is there not gospel also in the Old Testament?
Interpreters then undertake to assure us that indeed there is such and that Lu-
ther's hermeneutic is, therefore, mistaken if not " M arcioni te."
It should be apparent from the development of Luther's hermeneutic, how-
ever, that such complaint is beside the point if not retrograde. As we have
seen, Luther was not speaking about collections of books as such but about
preaching offices, publications of the will (Testament) of God. As indicated at
the outset, the difference between "old" and "new" is not in what is spoken
about but in the mood of the address and the function of the address. When
that is not clearly seen, the argument degenerates to the level of wrangling
about the content of various books of the Bible. Old Testament proponents
seek to contend for their rights vis a vis the New by claiming to discover as
much "gospel" content in their books as they can, while New Testament pro-
ponents defend themselves by denying the claims (if they can). T h e result is
disaster. Even if one or the other side "wins" or if they arrive at agreement
a n d / o r compromise, the matter Luther was contending for is simply lost. T h e
entire battle is waged on the level of the "letter," the level of law, because no
one seems to understand what gospel is. In Luther's terms what triumphs,
therefore, is simply the "letter," the law —win, lose, or draw. In that sense
what triumphs is the hermeneutics of the "old law." In spite of persistent com-
plaint about the dominance of the New Testament in Christian theology, the

250
 Law and Gospel in Luther's Hermeneutic
Interpretation

question that needs to be put to us today is should we not rather speak of the
triumph of the "Old Testament" — at least in the sense of an "Old Testament"
hermeneutic. But such a "triumph" is a disaster also for the Old Testament it-
self. For when it is confused with such a "gospel," the Old Testament also loses
its bite and is watered down into a generally beneficent and sentimental idea.
T h e "letter," as Luther put it, becomes veiled.
This admittedly audacious claim can be easily illustrated from contempo-
rary interpretative practice. Thinking to do the law (and the Torah) a great
favor, scholars undertake to assure us that the children of Israel did not experi-
ence it as a bane but rather as a great blessing, if not, indeed, really as gospel.
Paul and, following him, people like Luther were simply wrong in that they
did not quite understand that. Such interpretation is, of course, quite beside
the point in the light of Luther's analysis. T h e idea that Israel experienced
T o r a h as blessing is not gospel·, it is only historical information, and —some
would say —debatable information at that. As such it is simply "letter." Like
all such "letter" it only makes matters worse when one makes the move to
preaching. For the only thing one could possibly preach on the basis of such
information is, "If you want to experience T o r a h as blessing you must be a
child of Israel." But how shall I, a Gentile, manage that? Now it is precisely
when we reach that question that we come to the point where the issue has to
be decided as to whether we "take the Old Testament seriously." Either we
have to take it at "face value" and, as Paul well knew, become an Israelite with
all that entails (the whole law) or, if we still want to talk loosely about "the
gospel in the Old Testament," we will have to treat the Old Testament as a
book of general "religious" value available to all and sundry. Either, that is,
we take it for what it says it is: a publication of the will (Testament) of God, a
shocking election of a people which excludes others, or we water it down into a
general religious truth —which is to say, of course, we allegorize it; we turn it
into another story —even if that story turns out to be a finely tuned "biblical"
Heilsgeschichte. T h e reader can be left, I think, to make a decision as to
which of those alternatives "takes the Old Testament seriously." T h e fact that
the Old Testament is treated as a collection of writings containing important
religious and moral "truths" ("the Hebrew way of thinking") is, of course, of
great significance and may indicate something of the "triumph" of the Old
Testament (deservedly) among us. But it is a pyrrhic victory if the Testament
itself, the preaching office, is quietly shunted aside. T h e triumph is at the
same time the demise of the Old Testament.
Luther's great point, of course, is that only a proper distinction between old
and new, letter and spirit, law and gospel as preaching offices will finally lead
one to do justice to both. Unless Paul is right when he claims that Christ is the

251
"end of the law" to those that believe, the "Old Testament" has nothing to do
with me, a Gentile, except insofar as it remains "killing letter." I shall then
have to defend myself against its claims as best I can. T h e usual method is to
interpret it to death, or worse, to become anti-Semitic; that only means "the
soul's death." It all boils down, if I listen to it, to one thing: "You must have
. . . ," just as Luther said. If there is another voice, another preaching office
which can say "Here it is! It is for you! There is no longer Jew nor Greek, bond
nor free, male nor female, all are one in Christ Jesus," then I shall see. T h e
"veil" is removed from that "Old" Testament and I can let it be what it is —
without allegory. Precisely the distinction saves the Old Testament and its
preaching office for the church. T h e distinction does not abolish but estab-
lishes the law. It is only because the "Here it is" can now, because of Christ, be
preached to all that the shocking election of "the few" of old can be affirmed.
So we arrive where we started. It is the preaching of the law and the gospel
that "solves" the problem of interpretation. T h e true art of theology is to know
that and, according to Luther, to learn how to do it. Otherwise, what we do
may only contribute to the soul's death. If we do not preach, we are bound to
misinterpret. If we interpret aright, it must be preached.

252
 ^ s
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