Law of Love

And our overall work in The Outlaw God is to understand the bondage of the will.

And that means not only Luther's writing titled The Bondage of the Will, but also the works that come from that or lead to it.

And this is one of those, the great lecture of Luther on Psalm 51.

By the way, I was doing a little bit more work on this.

Luther initially wanted to get somebody else to do the main Reformation writing or teaching on Psalm 51.

He was trying to get Bugenhagen to do it.

He was trying to get the local pastors to do it, and he kept saying, I don't have time.

You guys can do it.

And remember, as Luther's going through this, And when he gets into the 1530s and so on, a lot of what the University of Wittenberg was doing, and especially the Lutheran teachers there, Luther Melanchthon and so on, but then all the others in the town of Wittenberg, the pastors and so on, they were really trying to give The evangelical pastors' copies or examples of how to preach, so the apostles, they were also doing commentaries, and they were trying to get commentaries out on every book of the Bible.

And Psalm 51 was one of the main ones, since they knew that this was the primary way to in the liturgy that confession and forgiveness was actually used in the liturgy.

And so they wanted to have this done and done well, and Luther kept thinking, you know, it's too much, I don't have enough time, and so on.

And we can add a little flavor here on the Augsburg Confession.

Luther is stuck at Coburg in a castle that he calls a demon-possessed castle.

Yes.

while the Augsburg Confessions, while the Diet of Augsburg is happening for months and months.

I mean, they were trapped in Augsburg from early April until like August.

They were basically prisoners there.

And same with Luther.

And he does a ton of his commentary on the Psalms work, at least some of the starting of it there while he's trapped awaiting the results of Augsburg.

That's correct.

And so this particular Psalm becomes the primary one for teaching sin, as we have been saying in the last podcast.

and therefore also how it is that you repent of sin, and you are correct to put this more broadly.

It's also correct to put this in relationship to the Augsburg Confession, since we usually say when we're teaching the Augsburg Confession that the fourth article of the Augsburg Confession is the primary one that identifies what the essence of the Lutheran teaching is, which is on justification by faith.

So it's talking about what faith is.

But we also should say that the fifth article, the one following it, regarding how it is that the office of ministry actually delivers the two words that will make repentance happen, despite the fact that the church has tried to get people to repent their whole existence, and they keep failing.