Jenson on Preaching 6: "Never Mind, God Loves You Anyway"

Steinbeck, Luther, and 6 Ways to Use Law in Preaching

John Steinbeck once quipped that every novelist really has one book in them, and the rest of their career is variations on it.¹ The same is more or less true of preachers. Most of us develop, early on, a sermon we know how to give. Whether or not we preach it every week, it remains our default mode.

Jenson says that the entire Lutheran tradition essentially has one sermon:

The text is read. The preacher acknowledges its demands, or its strangeness, or its difficulty. But whatever the text seems to require of the hearer, whatever standard it sets or inadequacy it reveals, the sermon lands in the same place. You haven’t met it. You won’t. But never mind, God loves you anyway.

Jenson is not saying this is wrong. But he argues that this version of the gospel is “usually the least appropriate thing to say,” (Ha!)—and that the fact that Lutherans say it from every text, in every season, to every congregation, is what he calls the “centuries-besetting curse of Lutheran exegesis and preaching.”²

For what it’s worth, this isn’t a distinctly Lutheran failure. I was first trained to preach using John Stott’s Between Two Worlds, and the pattern it teaches is essentially the same: expound the text, identify the human need or failure, announce the grace. This way of connecting law and gospel runs deep, across traditions. And maybe especially in those American traditions shaped by revivalist evangelistic preaching (think: anxious bench).

What is Law?

This series has been focused on “gospel,” because that’s where Jenson spends most of his energy and because preaching is, at its heart, a gospel proclamation. But in Jenson’s Lutheran tradition, “gospel” is only one of two kinds of address. The other is Law. And you can’t understand why preaching only the “never mind” sermon is a problem without understanding what Law means here.

Law, in the Lutheran sense, is not the Mosaic code. It is not ethical instruction or moral obligation. Law is any word that poses the final future as something that may not be yours—any address that makes the future conditional. Law opens a gap between the hearer and what Jenson calls “the Fulfillment.”

The Lutheran Reformation insisted that every sermon must do both law and gospel. Preaching needs to address the hearer’s existential situation in both modes of speech: opening the final future as genuinely at stake, and announcing it as God’s unconditional gift in Christ. Confrontation and promise. Or Threat and Fulfillment to use Jenson’s language.

Jenson’s innovation is that these elements can’t really be sequential. This is—like so many other key points in this series—deeply connected to his Christology. As he puts it,³

“In that the content of every text is Jesus; the crucified and risen one, every text as active address crucifies and raises, opens the future as threat and opens it as fulfillment, is law and is gospel.”

For Jenson, Law and gospel are two dimensions of the same address. The confrontation and the promise arrive together. I think this point-in-passing is already stunning and worthy of our reflection. The low-hanging takeaway is that preachers don’t have to stir the audience into anxious hysterics by expounding the horrors of their sin and the danger of God’s wrath before they deliver “the good news.” The Gospel rightly (“livingly”) spoken meets people in their preexisting fears and inhibitions and announces freedom and hope.

But there’s another deeper point Jenson is making connected to hermeneutics: for Jenson, there aren’t “Law texts” and “Gospel texts.” If we read the scriptures christologically, we’ll encounter speech about the future that might have been conditional and uncertain, but is not, because Jesus is Lord. The crucified-and-risen Jesus is present at every turn, the risen Jesus securing what the crucifixion makes appear uncertain: our place with God, God’s triumph over evil, hope for life and love. To separate law and gospel into two distinct moments is, in effect, to treat the crucified and risen Christ as though he were two different persons.

Ok, so law and gospel are two dimensions of the same proclamation. Which raises the practical question: if preachers can’t rely on sequence, what does law speech actually look like? How does it affect Gospel proclamation (preaching)? How, in other words, do we use Law in preaching? Jenson argues that—even though most only know one—law can take many different forms. He maps six.⁴

6 Ways to Use Law in Preaching

The first is the most common: you do not deserve the Fulfillment. This is the Lutheran default, the sermon that begins with your inadequacy and ends with grace. If your tradition is like mine, this is probably the version you’ve heard most.

Meanwhile, Jenson names five other forms that are almost entirely unused. Here are all six:

1. You do not deserve the Fulfillment.

2. Your present course will not lead to the Fulfillment.

3. God will withhold the Fulfillment, because… ⁵

4. This is the course that would lead to Fulfillment: law as positive description, the life shaped by its promised end.

5. Simply stating the task of life set by its Fulfillment, leaving hearers to measure themselves against it without editorial comment.

6. Analyzing the structures of life, revealing that life is fulfillable, leaving the hearer in the open space of that recognition.

Each is a different way of naming the distance between where the hearer is and where the promise points. If you only use the first one, all of your sermons will be about guilt and forgiveness. The gospel will land primarily as relief. And that’s ok. That’s what an unconditional promise does to someone carrying guilt. But relief is one thing the gospel does, not the whole of it.

So, the deeper issue isn’t variety for its own sake. It’s that the form of law you preach determines what the gospel can do when it lands. Preached into guilt, it lands as relief. Preached into dread, it lands as hope. Preached into confusion about what a good life looks like, it lands as identity and direction.

These aren’t different gospels—they’re the same unconditional promise heard in different discursive situations.

So… Which Form Is Appropriate?

The reason that Jenson says that the Lutheran default is “usually the least appropriate” is that it answers a question many modern congregations just aren’t actually asking.

The Lutheran gospel language was forged for a specific moment: a culture in which self-righteousness was the presenting condition (or at least Luther’s constant worry). People were anxiously trying to earn their way to God. The sermon needed to break that effort, name it as futile, and announce relief. That was the right word for that congregation.

But that’s not obviously the presenting condition now. Among the people I know, the self-righteous sense that my effort will secure the future is less common than other alternatives: existential dread, or creeping nihilism, self-disgust, or consuming anger. The fear that the future is already collapsing into some impending nightmare, and that nothing I do or believe will stop it. Most of my friends are not people who need to be told they can’t earn the future. They need hope that any future will be good.

For these hearers, the most useful sermon is not the Lutheran form 1. It is preaching that exposes the world’s false promises—the conditional promises of security that politics, ideology, and culture are constantly offering—and proclaims an unconditional promise about Jesus’s good reign. Sentences like “Even when everything is unravelling, Jesus is making all things new.” Or “Not even death can separate us from his love." Or “If the world rejects us—even if those in the church fail us—He has made a place for us with the Father.”⁶

These are just sketches, but each of these implicitly names the law-future and dismisses it in the same breath. Preached into dread rather than guilt, the promise lands not as relief but as hope.

Using Jenson’s Taxonomy

Jenson’s taxonomy is, at one level, a practical homiletical tool. But the deeper point is that a preacher who knows only one form of law speech is limited in the ways that they can deliver the gospel to their congregation. If the gospel is truly a living word that enlivens and enlightens our lives and constitutes the church, it has to speak to our whole existential situation, not merely our guilt. In Jenson’s words, the gospel speaks to and dismisses whatever inhibitions are keeping us from our own humanity.⁷ Preachers need to know our hearers well enough to know what is keeping them from their humanity, and to deliver the law/gospel in a way that frees them into it.

Perhaps employing this taxonomy could help us preach the gospel for all it’s worth. Perhaps our sermons can spur more than relief, but also hope and love and faith and repentance and courage and joy and endurance and all the rest that God has for his people.

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Next week I’ll end this series with a wrap-up of things I’ve realized as I’ve written it. I’m really glad to have spent the time thinking deeply with Jenson about preaching, and I’m actually pretty surprised at some of the takeaways.

More soon,

Chris

1. At least it’s widely attributed to Steinbeck.

2. Robert W. Jenson, The Preacher, the Text, and Certain Dogmas, p. 7.

3. Ibid, 4.

4. Ibid, 7.

5. Jenson doesn’t say much about this one in the essay. But I wish I could ask him about it. It’s clearly modeled on the pronouncements from biblical prophets, and I can see why Jenson includes it as a mode of Law speech. Still, I wonder how he’d frame the relation between this and the unconditionality of the Gospel itself.

6. From my most recent homily.

7. I’m paraphrasing from Story and Promise p. 61 (see the 3rd post in this series)

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