“Whoever thinks that antinomianism is the alternative to legalism should face up to the fact that he also has confused the Law and the Gospel. Tertullian [ca. 160- ca. 225] noted this confusion in Marcion [d. ca. 160]. But we must ask this question: Wouldn’t Marcion be right, if the Gospel’s essence is the forgiveness of sins and Jesus is no law giver? Then we have to give the benefit of doubt to the antinomians of the Reformation era. Weren’t they justified in their program in holding that the law belonged to the civil sphere, that is, the government. They could even quote Luther: “The Decalogue belongs to city hall and not in the pulpit.” They used his characterization of the Law to support their view that there is no other Jesus than a “sweet” Christ. Whenever the Law and the Gospel are separated from each other, wherever the connection between the Law and the Gospel is lost, then what Luther said proves itself to be true: Where either the Law or the Gospel is lost, then the other is also thoroughly destroyed. Every form of antinomianism necessarily destroys the Gospel. Where the preaching of the Law does not work the recognition of sins, how is it possible to experience or understand the forgiveness of sins [Gospel]? Already it was Marcion who no longer understood that redemption meant the forgiveness of sins. If in our time the church neglects the preaching of the Law, the proclamation of the unchanging commands of God to people and nations, then one day the Gospel will inevitably be lost. The contemporary danger of a practical antinomianism is overpowering. How easy it is for the church of an age stridently to forbid the preaching of God’s commandments and to derive the definitive ethic for all human behavior from resources stemming from the world itself, and then to retreat to the gospel, as if the church’s task was proclaiming that God forgives a world which according to its own laws is decaying in sin. No, the forgiveness of sins can only be preached to the penitent. No church can call upon the Reformation and even upon Luther to exempt it from preaching the Law to everyone within the nation and state. Simply for the reason that the reformers were careful in stating that the preaching of the Law consisted in the civil use of the Law, the usus legis elenchticus [the first use law] as well as usus legis in renatis, the application of the Law to the regenerate. The regenerate have come to know that the Gospel is more than and something other than the divine Law, because in the Gospel God is not doing a foreign work, but his own work by which he justifies sinners and makes them alive. Between the Scylla of legalism and Charybis of antinomianism leads a narrow and dangerous path which the church must follow in her ethical thought. Whether she finds the way depends on the purity of her proclamation and on this depends her existence. It is my wish that the World Conference of Churches meeting at Oxford [1937] would be so endowed that churches of Christendom would serve in some way as a light house on this way. Each of the churches must find its own way. They can only find their ways by turning away from the world’s tempting siren calls and in this benighted century to listen to the voice of him who speaks to Christendom the same message which he spoke to the apostles and the reformers and which they believed: “I am the way.” [John 14:6]

Hermann Sasse; Ecumenical Council for Practical Christianity; Law and Gospel (December 1936); Translated by David P. Scaer