MARTIN LUTHER STATUE IN WORMS, GERMANY/GETTY IMAGES
21st-century North America. If the law/gospel dynamic is an adequate paraphrase of the work of God’s word upon us, then it reorients piety from “my heart” to that of the Chris- tian assembly.
Jacobson: Amen to that. And one final word. The Bible is authoritative only as it is a living word to and for us. The Bible can’t be authoritative sitting on a shelf someplace. It can’t do anything there. Authority is in the encounter. The word of God, be it Christ or proclamation or Scripture, always involves a communication event. To be effective, the word must be interactive—read and preached and heard and studied and struggled with and lived out. Our Lutheran notion of the authority of the Bible is dynamic and living.
understanding of the kind of authority the word of God assumed. As Paul famously says in 1 Corinthians 1:24- 25: “To those who are the called … Christ [is] the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolish- ness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” The birth of the new (Adam) demands the death of the old (Romans 5:18). This is true especially with regard to our ideas of how we are brought to Christ through the word.
Jacobson: Very helpful, particularly your caution about the Lutheran emphasis on law and gospel. This brings us back to the issue of authority. What the Bible does authoritatively is law and gospel us. I like these as verbs. Law and gospel are about what the Bible does to us when we read or hear it. So I hear this passage and I am convicted. I am despairing. I am struck by the needs of my neighbor. I hear who I am, who we are. I hear God’s word as law. Or
I read this passage and I know God’s promise to me, to the world. I experi- ence God’s forgiveness and grace. Christ is for me. I hear who God is. I hear God’s word as gospel. That is, the authority isn’t inside
the text but in our encounter with it as we actually experience the demands and promises of God. These catego- ries are also helpful when translated more broadly. In our encounter with God through the Bible, we might well be renewed, or called into com- munity, or empowered to live into God’s justice and mercy. Centrally, God works faith in us as we encoun- ter and are encountered by the word, not only individually but as a church community.
Does this ring true?
Heen: Yes. I especially like how you bring the body of Christ (church community) into the picture. So often language about one’s relationship to the “Bible” feeds (unconsciously) into the rampant individualism of
Heen: Yes, absolutely. We need always remember that the Bible is God’s authoritative word and does not cotton well to our attempts to use it to legitimate our own religious instincts and ideologies. We all enter into a relationship with the Bible with some sense of what we will find there. Yet God promises (Isaiah 55:11) those notions will evolve. God encounters us through the Bible by the crucified and risen Christ. The Bible is authori- tative, then, to the extent that we are led into an obedience that comes from faith in this Christ (Romans 1:5; 16:26). For me that means that while we are called to live out our discipleship through service to others (Matthew 25:34-40) we are also led to worship the God who engages us so graciously through such a varied means of grace—the Bible, the pro- claimed word, the sacraments of bap- tism and the Lord’s Supper, and even a willing response to our neighbor who, Luther reminds us, is anyone in need. M
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