ABSTRACT
From its inception Lutheran theology has been troubled by a “heresy” of its own making. “Antinomianism” broke out as an issue in the 1520s and again in the 1530s, and indeed plagued the Lutheran Reformation churches through the rest of the century. In the twentieth century, Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously tagged the temptation to antinomianism with the title “cheap grace.” But the problem runs even deeper. Luther’s view of the abiding validity “of the Law” is derived from Augustine’s teaching on the double love commandment, the ordo caritatis. Recognizing this dependence on Augustine’s hierarchical ordering of love undermines readings of Luther’s theology of the Law that would “secularize” the love commandment by depriving the Creator of His status as the primary object of the Christian’s love (“whom we are to fear, love and trust above all”), and hence the standard according to which all creatures are to be loved, namely, in and under God. The enormous difficulty that results from this analysis for all attempts to modernize Luther is that religious freedom has definite limits for Luther. This is the real problem, which remains unsolved.
