ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 71 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> I understand what you are saying. And I know that it is correct. But such concepts are difficult for people to fully comprehend. For instance, if salvation is completely accomplished by God outside of us, why should we do good works? What compels us to do so? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, this is sometimes called the lazy argument. Because the doctrine of justification can be heard by some people as an excuse not to do good works. Now, I would immediately point out that if someone responds to you in this way, that "Well, if what you're saying is true, why should I do good works at all?" then you can at least take comfort in the fact that you have, in fact, presented the Gospel clearly. Because if nothing else, the people have actually understood that Christ does it all. Now, I should also point out that St. Paul had exactly the same problem. The same objection he is forced to raise two times in Chapter 6 of Romans. So for example let me take the first case. This is in Romans 6:1 to 4. Paul has just finished saying that our righteousness comes from Christ. And then he brings up this objection: "What shall we say then? Shall we go on sinning that grace may increase?" See, notice this is exactly the objection you raised, Eric, is that "Well, why should I do good works?" So I think Paul's answer can really help us here. Paul says, "By no means. We died to sin. How can we live in it any longer? Or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were there buried with him for baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we, too, may live a new life." So how does that help? I mean, in some ways it seems like kind of a non-answer. Paul doesn't really give you I think a bullet proof reason why now you need to do good works. He sort of brushes it off. He says, "By no means. We died to sin. How can we live in any longer?" "Well, I want to keep living in sin." Well, he doesn't really have an answer to that. And I think that the fact that there's not a bullet proof answer is instructive. And that's that the problem here is that the question is wrong. That the question has presuppositions that Paul is not willing to buy into. Namely, he is not willing to buy into the idea that sin is fun and we ought to try to do as much of it as possible. You can see that I think even more clearly in his second example. This is a few verses down in Romans 6 starting in 15. He says, "What then shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means. Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey? Whether you are slaves to sin which leads to death or to obedience which leads to righteousness." So in this passage, Paul equates sinning with slavery. And I think maybe that -- that might get us somewhere here. Because I think that starts to unmask the problematic presuppositions behind the question. Because really what the objector is assuming is that sin is desirable. And so if you -- if you assume that sin is desirable, then naturally you're going to want to figure out "Well, how much of it can I get away with?" Or I guess the way it's put in this case is "Well, if salvation is completely from Christ, then maybe we can sin all we want because it has no bearing on salvation." But, in fact, that is a view of sin that's actually untrue. And that's what Paul is getting at when he compares it to slavery. And I think that sometimes we can set traps for ourselves, depending on how we describe sin. For instance, if you describe sin as "Well, we know we shouldn't sin but we do it anyway," well, that's a really anemic definition of sin or anemic description of sin. And it sort of allows people to believe that sin is desirable. When, in fact, I think the more scriptural view of sin is that sin is viscerally horrifying. That it is enslaving. That it controls your life. And that if you describe sin as slavery, if you describe it in ways that are repugnant, then I think when people hear that we are freed from sin, they are not going to be so tempted to think "Oh, well, how can I go back to that?" I mean, it would be sort of like saying, "Can I go drink some more poison so I can get my stomach pumped again?" I mean, it doesn't make sense to want to return to sin if you truly recognize what sin is. And if you truly believe that it is enslaving and repugnant. So I guess I would encourage you in your preaching and Bible class to consider how you describe sin. And are you willing to let people believe that sin is desirable? Because that is the lie. That is, in fact, what Satan will want to do. Is he'll want to say, "Well, that poison really tastes good, so yeah, you do want to have some and you can always get your stomach pumped again." But you need to show them that no, it is poison. That it harms you -- it not only condemns before God but it also can control your life. And you need to make that clear to people. Now, I would like to give you another example of when this same objection was raised. And here we return to the case of St. Augustine. Because even though as we said before, St. Augustine does not share Luther's view of grace as favor daie, he does think that God does it all in salvation, he teaches a divine Monergism. So he is just as susceptible to the lazy argument as St. Paul is. And, in fact, it happened. Augustine has a treatise called "Unrebuking and Grace." It's kind of an odd name for a treatise. What does rebuking and grace have to do with each other? But it makes sense if you understand the context. The thing that prompted Augustine to write this treatise is there was a certain monk who on hearing that salvation was completely by grace told his abbot, "You should not rebuke me. All you should do is pray for me. Because if you rebuke me, it's not going to do any good because I can't make any decisions on my own. It's all by grace. So your rebuking me won't do me any good at all." It's the lazy argument. If it's all by grace, why should I have to do anything? Leave me alone. Get off my case. Augustine's answer to this is God uses that rebuke to heal you. God is like a physician. And that when the abbot rebuked the monk, that was God's way of dealing with the monk and God's way of doing the monk good. Sort of like -- well, Augustine's comparison is that of a physician doing surgery on someone. So that again helps us I think in our context if we encounter the lazy argument, the thing to do is not so much give them all the right answers. That would be sort of like a physician giving the patient the instructions about how to do the surgery. That would be -- that would be information, not proclamation, as we said before. That it's not going to do a patient any good to just have all of the info on how you go about doing the surgery. What you need to do is actually do the surgery. So that means that if the person -- and probably this is the case in the lazy argument. I mean, it could be just kind of intellectual curiosity. But if someone is really wanting to go sin, then what they need to hear is the law. They need to hear that sin is not compatible with God's holiness and that if you sin, you can destroy your faith. That's doing the surgery. Not just telling them all the information. But actually doing the surgery. The proclamation. Not just information. So notice here that once again we come to a situation in which there are two answers to a question. And those answers don't necessarily fit together very neatly, either. Because on the one hand how can you tell someone "Well, if you sin, you're going to destroy your faith"? "If you go down that road, that's where that leads." How can you say that and still say salvation is completely by grace. But that's, in fact, what Lutheran theology does. It's two different answers. And you just have to know. And this is the whole goal of theological education, especially for parish pastors, is you need to know how to do that. How to know which one to give to which person. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***