Not by Slogans Alone

A Lutheran veteran of church politics, which always have a Clausewitzian dimension (“war by other means”), as well as a long-time seminary professor and one of America’s most accomplished theologians, Robert Jenson has a great deal of experience with slogans gone wrong. Nobody is better qualified to set things straight, which he does in Lutheran Slogans: Use and Abuse , a wonderful, pithy new book that should be assigned reading for all Lutheran pastors.

The problem with slogans is that they are so darned handy that they take on lives of their own, and “in that free-floating currency they are then available to be wielded to various ends, often antithetical to their original service and without awareness that this is happening.” Thus “God is love,” a fundamental Christian truth that easily becomes a truism and then gets reversed, yielding the flower-power slogan “love is God.”

Luther’s theological and rhetorical genius makes Lutherans especially susceptible. “Justification by faith, not by works” was originally coined to ensure that preaching and teaching focused on the fact that our salvation turns on the work of God in Christ and not on our own efforts. This is good news, because God has the power to overcome the power of sin in a final and decisive way, while we very clearly do not. As Jenson points out, however, the slogan easily gets abused, and indeed it was in Luther’s own lifetime”and much to his dismay. “Not by” becomes “without,” which is a little change with big consequences, with liberal Lutherans now telling us that it doesn’t really matter what we do because God’s love is all-inclusive.

“The priesthood of all believers” can become a rationale for denying that ordination to the ministry has any sacramental significance or for claiming the personal authority to revise Christian doctrines. “Preach the gospel and not the law” easily becomes a general principle, which, as I discuss in this issue, in my essay on Judaism’s lessons for Christians, encourages some modern theologians to turn the Nicene Creed and the canon of Scripture”indeed the concept of orthodoxy itself”into the “law” that “kills” as distinct from the antinomian gospel that supposedly gives life.

Jenson treats the notorious Lutheran simul iustus et peccator (we are simultaneously justified and sinful), a formula that when abused also encourages an antinomian sensibility. He tackles the tendency to turn Luther’s “theology of the cross” into a critical principle that insists that all straightforward affirmations of doctrine deny the contradiction of the cross. And of course there are the sola formulations (to this day Lutherans like the pithy Latin phrases rather than their preposition-clotted English equivalents): sola gratia, sola fide, sola scriptura . The last has fueled generations of Protestant criticisms of Protestantism, as Bible-church Christians denounced their creed- and synod-burdened brethren.

“No discourse that continues across a palpable period of time,” Jenson writes, “can do without slogans.” We can’t hold everything in our heads, which is why we need summaries and shortcuts. Abuse or no abuse, we’re stuck with slogans, and Lutherans are stuck with Lutheran slogans. And Baptists with Baptist slogans, Catholics with Catholic slogans.

The way to guard against abuse, Jenson argues, is to remember that theological slogans express in short, memorable form “the biblical narrative and its eschatological wholeness.” They point or gesture to the fullness of the truth of Christ. They were coined as shortcuts to the rich witness of Scripture and the ongoing life of the Church, the body of Christ. And that’s how we should use them.