C.F.W. Walther’s on Properly Distinguishing Law and Gospel

Thesis 1 Third Evening Lecture

It is easy to lose your way when you are taking a narrow and rarely traveled path through a dense forest. Without intending to do so and without being aware of it, you might make a wrong turn to the right or left. It is just as easy to lose the narrow way of pure doctrine, which likewise is traveled by few people and leads through a dense forest of false teachings. You may land either in the bog of fanaticism or in the ravine of rationalism. This cannot be taken lightly. False doctrine is poison to the soul. If people at a large banquet drink from wine glasses in which arsenic has been added, they can drink physical death from their wine glasses. In the same way, an entire audience can be subject to spiritual and eternal death when they listen to a sermon to which the poison of false doctrine has been added. People can be deprived of their soul’s salvation by a single false comfort or single false rebuke administered to them. [And this a]ll the more [true because of] the fact that we are by nature more attracted to the glaring light of human reason than God’s truth.

Thus you can gather how foolish it is—in fact, how terribly deceived so many people obviously are—when they ridicule pure doctrine and say to us, “Enough with your ‘Pure doctrine, pure doctrine’! That can lead only to dead orthodoxy. Focus on pure living instead. That way you will plant the seeds of righteous Christianity.” That would be like saying to a farmer, “Stop fretting about good seed! Be  concerned with good fruit instead.”

On the contrary, if you are concerned about good fruit, you will also be concerned about good seed. In the same way, if you are concerned about pure doctrine, you will at the same time also be concerned about genuine Christianity and a sincere Christian life.

From the CPH Law And Gospel Readers Edition, pg. 24-25.