What is and is not conditional regarding God and His law.

[J. Dean]

Apparently a professor at Knox Theological Seminary is working through this: God’s conditional and His unconditional Words

I confess to not knowing a great deal about KTS or Mr Linebaugh (I had to do a double take on his last name there), but the article was interesting. Note this phrase coming from the article:

This is why, for Luther, the phrase “the third use of the Law” (i.e. a use of the Law after the gospel and thus unique to Christians) is a category mistake. For him, as suggested above, Law names the divine speech that accuses and kills. Cut off from its conditionality and kicked out of the Christian’s conscience, a commandment is not Law in the theological sense. This does not mean that Luther didn’t think those portions of scripture that we think of as Law should be preached to Christians; he emphatically did (as his disputations against the Antinomians and his expositions of the Ten Commandments in the Catechisms demonstrate). But it does mean that “Law” is a slightly misleading term in this context because Law, for Luther, is defined by its “chief and proper use” which is “to reveal sin” and function as a “Hercules to attack and subdue the monster” of self-righteousness (Galatians 1535).

 

[J. Dean]

That's basically what I figured, Joshua. The 3rd use of the law can be in one sense the trickiest one to apply.

 

[jwright82]

What effect does this article have in the whole debate between Lutherans and Reformed on the law/gospel distinction? Are both sides talking different ways about the same thing then?