C.F.W. Walther’s Masterpiece: The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel (25 theses, treated in 39 evening lectures, transcribed from student notes)

C.F.W. Walther was the eighth of twelve children born into a family whose father, grandfather and great-grandfather were Lutheran pastors. Nonetheless, by the time he was old enough to attend the university, Walther had little grasp of the Biblical faith. Looking back on this point in his life, Walther taught in his fifteenth evening lecture: “When I entered the university I did not know the Ten Commandments by heart and could not recite the list of the books in the Bible. My knowledge of the Bible was pitiful, and I had not an inkling of faith. However, I had an older brother, who…introduced me to [a] circle of Christian students. I had no premonition of the fate I was approaching…I liked the manner of these students exceedingly well….At first, then, it was not the Word of God that attracted me. But I began to like the company of these Christian students so much that I gladly attended even their prayer-meetings.”
It is noteworthy that Walther wrote: “I had no premonition of the fate I was approaching….” His fate was to be led by that group of students and their associates down the path that eventually led him to understand the great importance of recognizing within the Bible what is Law and what is Gospel, along with the urgency of using these two categories of Scripture properly.
In the ninth of twenty-five total theses, Walther wrote: “The Word of God is not rightly divided when sinners who have been struck down and terrified by the Law are directed, not to the Word and the Sacraments, but to their own prayers and wrest lings with God, in order that they may win their way into a state of grace; in other words, when they are told to keep on praying and struggling until they feel that God has received them into grace.”
This is exactly what Walther’s older brother and friends were trying to teach Walther. For a brief time after believing in Jesus, Walther had been filled with joy from believing his sins were washed away by Christ. But the students in that group were infected with pietism, that is, a perversion of Christianity that directs the Christian to look to his own personal holiness for assurance of faith, rather than taking God at His Word simply because God is faithful and unchanging.
The more Walther listened to this group, and the more he read of writings recommended by them, the more he became convinced that he had not—and probably could not—do enough to ever be considered a true Christian. But at first, this was not a good position for Walther to be in, for the implication—if not the bare, outward teaching of these people—was that they and Walther actually could do enough to please God and at the same time make themselves feel certain of having forgiveness and eternal life.
This illustrates why Walther would go to such great lengths, such as these 39 lectures, to help assure that his ministerial students would not become the kind of pastors who preached and taught their listeners straight to hopelessness and hell, as Walther’s own brother and friends had almost done to him.
A student of Dr. Walther, the Rev. Julius A. Friedrich, wrote an article about Walther in 1955, in which he concluded: “What can we do to understand Walther as he really was? My advice is: Study Walther’s book Law and Gospel. May the Lord fill you … with the enthusiasm, the love, and the beauty of the faith that Walther taught us.”
Publishing limitations prevent us from mining the great riches of The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel. But it is no overstatement to write that every Christian could benefit from reading this great classic of Biblical theology. An English translation based on an 1897 German edition has been printed for decades by the Concordia Publishing House of the LC–MS. One can also find this edition on the internet at no cost at: http://www.lutherantheology.com/uploads/works/walther/LG/. More recently, they have published a new translation in a “reader’s edition” that sprinkles historical commentary onto the pages of the actual text.
Paul Zager is pastor of Holton Lutheran Church in Holton, Michigan.