Law/Gospel and Gnosticism

David Yeago offers a powerful critique of certain construals of the law/gospel distinction in a 1993 article from Pro Ecclesia . He does not doubt that law and gospel must be distinguished, but contends that when the law/gospel distinction becomes the “ultimate structuring horizon of Christian belief.” When the distinction functions in this fashion, theologians operate with a radical contrast between form and freedom; in redeeming us from law, God has redeemed us from any sort of definite structure, whether of life or belief. He sees this tendency taken to extremes in Bultmann and Tillich, so that for the latter the attempt to fix theological formulations in creedal statements or propositions is itself a violation of the “Protestant principle.” In Tillich’s words, “The Protestant principle prohibits the appearance of grace through finite forms from becoming an identification fo grace with finite forms. Such an identification is, according to the Protestant principle, demonic hubris .” To suggest that living the life of grace meanings doing this rather than that is to fall, Tillich believes, into this kind of demonic life under the law; to suggest that Christians must believe this rather than that is hubris of a similar character. (Yeago doesn’t develop the point here, but it’s striking how central sacramental theology is. Tillich’s Protestant principle is overtly a principle of Protestant sacramental theology: “The divine appears through the humanity of the Christ, through the historical weakness of the church, through the finite material of the sacrament.” Luther’s “this man is God” violates the genius of Protestantism; as does the notion that the sacraments are themselves gifts of grace.) Strikingly, Yeago finds similar currents in the strongly conservative Lutheran Werner Elert, who argues that the obedience of Christians is a matter of “sociology” and has nothing to do with the nature of the church, which is defined essentially as the community of sinners. In modern Lutheranism, he charges, the ends of the theological spectrum, the conservative Right and the antinomian Left, embrace.

As Yeago points out, this construal of law/gospel and of the Protestant principle necessarily doubles back on theology proper: “If the saving gift of God through the gospel is deliverance from form, liberation from order an the call for order, then the God of the gospel cannot himself be a God who has ‘taken form’ concretely in history. When the law/gospel distinction is absolutized, it becomes at least plausible to regard the triune God, the God who is conclusively self-bestowed and self-identified in the particular history of Jesus, as the oppressive, hidden God of the law, the God who enslaves and torments the human spirit.” God cannot take form in history at all, by a logic that Yeago unpacks as follows: “if form is enslavement, then a God who took form in history would be an enslaving God. The liberating God must therefore be a formless God, a God at most dialectically related to any particular form, a God who is everywhere and nowhere, whose faceless elusiveness frees us from the tyranny of the particular and ordered and definitive. This is the God whom, we are told, we must not “limit,” that is, whom we must not confess as definitively self-given and self-identified in Jesus Christ. This is the God whom we know only in an endless sequence of throwaway ‘images’ whose utility consists solely in their novelty, their capacity to shake us loose from familiar forms. This is the God with whom we commune only on an endless ‘spiritual journey,’ an infinite quest with no goal and no purpose except sheer ceaseless movement beyond form.” The theology that arises from an absolutization of the law/gospel distinction is gnostic, and Yeago suggests that the pervasive gnosticism of American Christianity is partly due to the misconstrual of this Reformation distinction, which “has at the very least left us easy prey for the gnostic virus, and has perhaps contributed to the development of domestic strains of the disease.”