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The new book, The Essential Forde, is pseudo-Forde (5)
“God and the scriptures are two different things, as different as Creator and creature,” wrote Luther in his response to Erasmus. Luther dared to stress the distance: two different things—like Creator and creature. This assertion distinguishes Luther from the biblicism of his day and ours. The implications of this assertion are developed in Luther’s thesis on the clarity of scripture.
Seventeenth century Lutheran orthodoxy mistook this thesis as a claim to scriptural inerrancy. The twentieth century Luther renaissance rediscovered the proper understanding of this thesis. Forde’s theology, what he called post-liberal Lutheranism, is representative of this rediscovery and its importance. He held that there could be no compromise between inerrancy and the law/gospel method. The stakes could not be higher: “We are fighting for the restoration of the gospel.”
The new book, The Essential Forde, is silent about Forde’s lifelong battles against inerrancy. Yet his Lutheran Quarterly editors, Steven Paulson and Mark Mattes, imply that they share with Forde a common view of the clarity and proper use of scripture, even as they promote inerrancy, law as an eternal moral order, and a third use of the law, as the following chart shows:
The new book, The Essential Forde, is pseudo-Forde (4)
“I think it is safe to say the major conflict in our church today is a clash in precisely this area,” wrote Gerhard Forde in 1964. “The area” was the conflict over how the authority of the Word of God is established. By the method of verbal inerrancy or by the law-gospel method?
The new book, The Essential Forde, is pseudo-Forde (3)
The Essential Forde includes four chapters of Forde’s doctoral dissertation, The Law-Gospel Debate. While there is nothing wrong with presenting his work on the history of the law-gospel debate in the nineteenth century, Forde’s dissertation is about the theology of others, not his own theology. Moreover, dissertations are written for specialists, hardly the kind of material suited “to introduce Forde to a new generation of pastors, theologians, and church leaders who do not know him directly,” as Steven Paulson writes of the editors’ purpose.