LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Brock University

60 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW IX
For in them you do not find many miracles of Christ described, but you
do find depicted in masterly fashion how faith in Christ overcomes sin,
death, and hell, and gives life, righteousness, and salvation. This is the
real nature of the gospel, as you have heard.
His reason is thus a practical one: these are the books of the New Testament
which most clearly describe the way of salvation for the beginner. In
particular, they explain how the words and works of Christ relate to our own
faith:
If I had to do without one or the other—either the works or the preaching
of Christ—I would rather do without the works than without his
preaching. For the works do not help me, but the words give life, as he
himself says [John 6:63]. Now John writes very little about the works of
Christ, but very much about his preaching, while the other evangelists
write much about his works and little about his preaching. Therefore
John’s Gospel is the one fine, true, and chief gospel, and is far, far to be
preferred over the other three and placed high above them. So too, the
epistles of St. Paul and St. Peter far surpass the other three gospels,
Matthew, Mark, and Luke. 29
It would be a serious mistake to isolate from its context the statement,
“the works do not help me, but the words give life”, and conclude that the
factuality of the New Testament events is unimportant, and that all that is
important is the spiritual truths that they convey. That would be a
falsification of Luther’s words. He himself has set the context: “If I had to
do without one or the other”.
The principle to which Luther is here alluding is a very important one.
Under the influence of dialectical theology in the twentieth century, we have
seen theologians advancing the thesis that Scripture is not God’s Word, but
simply a record, medium, or witness of God’s Word. The implication is that
God merely acts, but that it is the task of the theologian to interpret for his
own generation the meaning of those acts of God. A further implication is
that this meaning may validly vary from one generation to another and from
one person to another.
Against this whole line of thinking, Luther asserts the thesis that, in a
pinch, it is more important for the Christian to have Christ’s interpretation of
His acts than to have the apostles’ descriptions of those acts. The validity of
Luther’s argument here may easily be ascertained by several simple tests. In
the first place, have a look at the exposition of Luther’s Small Catechism in
the LC–MS synodical catechism, and analyse where most of the proof-texts
come from: the synoptic Gospels, or the Epistles of St Paul
29 AE 35:362.