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9. A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels (1521)
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71 9 A Brief Instruction onWhat to Look for and Expect in the Gospels (1521) Luther here describes his understanding of the gospel, revealed in the Scriptures:“A story about Christ, God’s and David’s Son, who dies and was raised and is established as Lord.” This gospel message establishes the church and gives Christians their hope. Scripture teaches this wherever human beings are taught to put their trust in (that is,“believe in”) this merciful God. Luther believed that this message was missing in the church of his day. Instead, Christ had been made into a new Moses, a lawgiver, or at best an example. Christ is an example, of course. However, for Luther, Jesus’ role as a model of right living was not the only—or the most important—aspect of his work.The church’s overemphasis on this kind of “law” was a failure to grasp the “higher level” of Christ as gift. Preaching Christ as the Crucified One brings humanity to the true and central message of the gospel—“the overwhelming goodness of God,”or“the great fire of the love of God for us, whereby the heart and conscience become happy, secure and content.” It is a common practice to number the gospels and to name them by books and say that there are four gospels.From this practice stems the fact that no one knows what St.Paul and St.Peter are saying in their epistles, and their teaching is regarded as an addition to the teaching of the gospels, in a vein similar to that of Jerome’s introduction.1 There is, besides, 1. Jerome (ca. 342–420), Eusebius Hieronymus, was the foremost biblical scholar of the ancient church and a friend of St. Augustine. He translated the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into Latin (Vulgate). In the prologue to his comthe still worse practice of regarding the Gospels and epistles as law books in which is supposed to be taught what we are to do and in which the works of Christ are pictured to us as nothing but examples. Now where these two erroneous notions remain in the heart, there neither the Gospels nor the epistles may be read in a profitable or Christian manner, and [people] remain as pagan as ever. One should thus realize that there is only one gospel, but that it is described by many apostles. Every single epistle of Paul and of Peter, as well as the Acts of the Apostles by Luke, is a gospel, even though they do not record all the works and words of Christ, but one is shorter and includes less than another.There is not one of the four major gospels anyway that includes all the words and works of Christ;nor is this necessary.Gospel is and should be nothing else than a discourse or story about Christ, just as happens among men when one writes a book about a king or a prince, telling what he did, said,and suffered in his day.Such a story can be told in various ways; one spins it out, and the other is brief.Thus the gospel is and should be nothing else than a chronicle, a story, a narrative about Christ, telling who he is, what he did, said, and suffered—a subject which one describes briefly, another more fully, one this way, another that way. mentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Jerome writes, “It has been clearly demonstrated [on the basis of Ezekiel 1:5, 10, and Revelation 4:7–8] that only four gospels ought to be acknowledged.” 72 Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings For at its briefest,the gospel is a discourse about Christ, that he is the Son of God and became man for us, that he died and was raised, that he has been established as a Lord over all things.This much St. Paul takes in hand and spins out in his epistles. He bypasses all the miracles and incidents [in Christ’s ministry] which are set forth in the four gospels, yet he includes the whole gospel adequately and abundantly.This may be seen clearly and well in his greeting to the Romans[1:1–4],where he says what the gospel is, and declares,“Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son...