Formula Of Concord, Solid Declaration On The Use Of The Law For Christians

And, indeed, if the faithful and elect children of God were perfectly renewed through the indwelling Spirit in this life, so that in their nature and all their powers they were completely free from sin, they would need no law, and therefore no prodding. Instead, they would do in and of themselves, completely voluntarily, without any teaching, admonition, exhortation, or prodding of the law, what they are obligated to do according to God’s will; just as in and of themselves the sun, the moon, and all the stars follow unimpeded the regular course God gave them once and for all, apart from any admonition, exhortation, impulse, coercion, or compulsion. The holy angels perform their obedience completely of their own free will.

Since, however, believers in this life are not perfectly, wholly…[completely or entirely] renewed—even though their sin is completely covered by the perfect obedience of Christ so that this sin is not reckoned to them as damming, even though the killing of the old creature and the renewal of their minds in the Spirit has begun—nevertheless the old creature still continues to hang on in their nature and all of its inward and outward powers. On this subject the apostle wrote, “for I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh” [Rom. 7:18]. And then, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” [Rom. 7:15]. And, “I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin” [Rom. 7:23]. And, “what the flesh desire is opposed to the spirit, and what the spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; where these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want” [Gal. 5:17].

Therefore, in this life, because of these desires of the flesh, the faithful, elect, reborn children of God need not only the law’s daily instruction and admonition, its warning and threatening. Often they also need its punishments, so that they may be incited by them and follow God’s Spirit, as it is written,”it is good for me that I was humbled, so that I might learn your statutes” [Ps. 119:71]. And again, “I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified” [1 Cor. 9:27]. And again, “if you do not have that discipline in which all children share, then you are illegitimate and not his children” [Heb. 12:8]. Similarly, Dr. Luther explained this in great detail in the summer part of the Church Postil, on the epistle for the nineteenth Sunday after Trinity.

Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert, ed. The Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, 6.–96, in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 588–89.


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