The Jesus and The Gospel We Obscure

A pattern of therapeutic self-justification has embedded itself across Lutheran institutions and filtered into the lives of the laity via lazy quasi-theological clichés.

The Rev. Dr. David Scaer has named the curse of Lutheran clichés that have entombed a significant portion of the Missouri Synod in dull orthodoxy and formula-driven preaching and teaching. Gospel declarations function as Gospel only for the one who has first been brought to contrition and repentance under the Law. That is not a Lutheran peculiarity imposed on Scripture but the received Scriptural instruction: the Law kills so that the Gospel can make alive (2 Cor. 3:6); the wound is inflicted before it is bandaged (Hos. 6:1); the old man must be drowned before the new man can rise (Rom. 6:3–4). When that sequence is bypassed, not as a mechanical formula but as a received Scriptural injunction, then the Gospel becomes something else entirely: a better self-concept, identity therapy robed with Lutheran vocabulary, and sins reframed for this life rather than truly resolved for eternity in, with, and for Christ Jesus.

The Clichés: A Short Field Guide

What follows is a small but reasonably representative catalog of the clichés in common circulation among Lutherans.

Cliché No. 1: Baptismal Core

“Remember your baptism. You are a child of God. That is the core of who you are.”

Every presenting problem is answered by directing the person to their baptismal identity, with the implicit logic that the identity can outcompete the sin. However, this is not how baptism functions in Lutheran theology. St. Paul describes baptism as burial and resurrection with Christ, the death of the old self so that the body of sin might be destroyed (Rom. 6:3–7). The Small Catechism’s explanation of Baptism names its daily significance as “the old Adam in us should, by daily contrition and repentance, be drowned and die with all sins and evil lusts, and, again, a new man daily come forth and arise.” The old Adam must be drowned daily, which requires the Law to hold him under, before the new man rises in the Gospel. Invoking baptismal identity without the drowning is the resurrection without the cross, which Dr. Scaer warned about so powerfully.

Cliché No. 2: The Identity Experiment Excuse

“Teenagers try on different identities. …None of these is the core of who you are.”

The presenting behavior is placed in the same class as aesthetic subculture experimentation. It is already devoid of any moral and spiritual implications before baptismal identity is invoked. However, Scripture does not recognize a developmental category that excuses behavior from moral judgement and pastoral discipline. St. Paul names the works of the flesh with precision (Gal. 5:19–21) and warns that those who practice them will not inherit the kingdom of God. That is not presented by the Apostle as abstract doctrinal information, but as a requirement of applying the Law to a raw conscience. By avoiding application and discipline, our sins are dissolved into a phase of life, which means the Gospel has nothing to forgive, and only a better identity is on offer to the person, removing any need for confession and absolution.

Cliché No. 3: The Permission-Seeking Pastor

“Would it be all right if I shared, from my perspective as a Christian, what God’s Word has to say about this?”

Taught explicitly as wisdom in pastoral formation contexts, this formula asks for permission before introducing theological categories, protecting any personal relationship from the risk of fallout from the Law’s confrontation. However, the Law does not require an invitation. St. Paul charges Timothy to preach the word “in season and out of season,” to reprove, rebuke, and exhort (2 Tim. 4:2). The Old Testament is replete with examples of God’s holy prophets not waiting on the likes of David or Jezebel for permission to offer God’s Word as a conversational menu that they were welcome to decline or accept. The pastor who asks permission to speak God’s Word has already conceded that God’s Word is negotiable.

Cliché No. 4: First Build a Relationship

“You don’t want to start right off by saying, ‘That’s sin, you need to repent.’ That’s not effective. You need to build a relationship first.”

Pastoral wisdom developed by our therapeutic culture has a lot to say about the relationship timing before staging an “intervention”, but the Bible is no respecter of Freudian folderol. To wait for a relationship to be in the right place does two things: it denies that a person could die unregenerate in the very next minute, and it refuses to bring the sinner to the knowledge of sin (Rom. 3:20) and to the end of his own resources because there is a fear of being branded a mean accuser. John the Baptist did not build rapport before calling the Pharisees a brood of vipers (Matt. 3:7–8). Likewise, Jesus did not warm the young ruler’s relational temperature before naming the commandments he had broken (Mark 10:17–22). Any pastoral winsomeness organized around protecting a relationship from the Law’s accusatory function has suppressed, if not denied, the Law. Where the Law is suppressed, the Gospel cannot function as Gospel.

Cliché No. 5: “The Gospel Must Predominate”

“We want to make sure the Gospel always predominates. We don’t want to be Law-heavy.”

This statement is widely employed in the LCMS, and it is perhaps the most insidious cliché because it is dressed in Lutheranish vocabulary: the Formula of Concord, Epitome V, does say the Gospel must predominate, but in the specific context of preaching to the already-terrified conscience. “Gospel must predominate” never means the Law is rationed or subject to a word count so that it leaves the scales dipped toward the Gospel. The Gospel can only be proclaimed with full effect to the one whom the Law has already brought to total despair and terror of his attempts at self-justification. Hearing a pastor invoke Gospel predominance as a reason to hesitate to confront sin, or soften the confrontation, upends the distinction the Formula is making, using the Gospel to silence the Law rather than to answer it. Ezekiel’s watchman who does not warn the wicked of their wickedness is held accountable for their blood (Ezek. 33:8).

Cliché No. 6: Reframing Low Self-Esteem

“There are people around us who may have low self-esteem because they feel they’ve fallen short, and just saying, ‘You’re worth something because God created you and Christ died for you,’ can be so powerful.”

When an issue is described as “not thinking of it in terms of sin,” it is reframed as low self-esteem, and the Gospel is deployed as the low-cost, therapeutic shortcut. But Scripture’s diagnostic category is not low self-esteem; it is sin, and a conscience that recognizes it has fallen short of the Glory of God is not malfunctioning, but responding to exactly what the Law intends to produce through natural revelation (Rom. 1:18-23). St. Paul does not tell the Corinthians that godly grief proves their worth; he tells them that godly grief produces repentance leading to salvation (2 Cor. 7:10). “You’re worth something because Christ died for you” is not the Gospel. The Gospel is not that the person is valuable; it is that Christ atoned for every filthy sin, but we don’t know that without a prior accusation of the Law. Otherwise, our sin is just receiving another compliment that will calcify our conscience until we are no longer able to respond to the Law.

Cliché No. 7: Indefinite Accompaniment

“Our role is to walk alongside people in their struggle. We’re not here to judge; we’re here to accompany.”

Accompaniment language is borrowed from progressive pastoral care textbooks, where it carries a specific meaning: presence without any judgment and solidarity without any conditions. Scripture does call Christians to bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2), but in the same passage, St. Paul specifies that those who are spiritual should restore the one caught in a transgression (Gal. 6:1), a restoration that actually requires the naming of the transgression. The pastor who prioritizes accompaniment rather than proclamation never arrives at the destination of Law and Gospel. Jesus did not merely walk alongside the woman taken in adultery; he told her to go and sin no more (John 8:11).

Cliché No. 8: Sanctification Drift

“We don’t want to follow the rules or the instructions. We’re simply living in the Spirit, doing what comes naturally.”

The third use of the Law (obligation, instruction, normative guidance) is displaced by spontaneous Spirit-led action. The argument seems to be that the baptized simply will do the right thing because they are living in grace. But Scripture’s instruction to the baptized is not patience in passivity, but active mortification. St. Paul commands the putting to death of what is earthly in us (Col. 3:5), the laying aside of the old self (Eph. 4:22–24), and the offering of bodies as living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1). These are imperative constructions, also known as active obedience rather than inevitable and unconditional benefits of baptism. A ‘Christian’ life that depends on living in flow is likely to end abruptly and badly (Luke 11:24).

Cliché No. 9: Emotion Naturalization

“God made your emotions. Fear, anxiety, and worry are part of the radar system He built into you. They are informants, not leaders.”

This is the therapeutic framework’s most sophisticated entry, because it is largely true and, therefore, largely disarming. God did make human emotions, but we can also recognize that they are disordered and dysregulated since the Fall. The problem with the cliche is that it naturalizes every emotional condition or status as a valid response to a fallen world, categorically prior to any examination of whether the condition has a moral component requiring confession and absolution. Scripture, however, does not treat anxiety or depression as categorically morally neutral. Jesus names anxiety about earthly things as a failure of faith and a sign of misplaced lordship (Matt. 6:25–34). St. Paul commands and commends the casting of anxieties on God as an act of trust in His care (Phil. 4:6–7; 1 Pet. 5:7), rather than as the normal functioning of a God-given emotional system. The Holy Spirit is invoked in this cliché as an emotional comfort crutch rather than as the one who convicts of sin, righteousness, and judgment (John 16:8).

Cliché No. 10: Defaulting to Consolation

“God cares for you in all of your troubles and worries. His grace is there in every messy moment. You don’t have to have it all figured out. Cast your cares on him.”

This is the cliché in its most operationally sophisticated form, because it deploys valid Scripture (1 Pet. 5:7) as the closing affirmation of a formation curriculum or pastoral session that has never applied the Law. God’s care is extended to “all of our troubles and worries”, which is not wrong in itself, but which manifests as functional universalism. St. Peter’s command to cast anxieties on God presupposes a conscience that knows what it is casting and why, and that awareness comes only from the Law’s prior work. Moreover, St. Peter frames the casting of anxieties within an explicit call to sobriety and resistance against an adversary who prowls seeking someone to devour (1 Pet. 5:8). The comfort is necessarily addressed to a person who is alert to sin and its consequences, not to one who has been assured that their condition is simply the natural messiness of life. The cliché does the work of absolution without doing the work of Law, and consequently produces not forgiven sinners but comforted sufferers.

Cliché No. 11: Embodied Presence

“Through you, others can meet Jesus and find the God who loves them. I pray that people will see Jesus and meet him in your ministries among your people, and they will find his salvation in their minds and souls and hearts and bodies.”

This formula, if preached to men at the moment they are being commissioned as guardians of apostolic doctrine, represents the embodied-love error at its most consequential. The preacher is stating that people encounter God (and will be saved…) through the loving actions and gracious presence of other Christians.

This is not Lutheran theology. Augsburg Confession Article V is unambiguous: God gives the Holy Spirit, who works faith where and when it pleases him, through the Word and Sacraments as through instruments, not through the ethical quality of the Christian community, nor through the loving presence of believers who win community awards for embodying grace. The Small Catechism’s Third Article says not a word about the visible quality of Christian ministry or the pastor’s winsomeness.

Embodied grace is something that any sufficiently compassionate institution can provide. Indeed, Gift of the Givers, the most respected charity in Africa (started in and operated from South Africa), is credited with bringing many people to Allah through its relief and mercy work.

The preacher who understands his calling as communicating the love of Jesus in tangible and visible forms will never have to stand in the pulpit and say: You are a sinner under the judgment of God and at risk of going to hell this minute. He can always tell himself he is doing the deeper, more Christ-like work by washing feet instead of scolding adulterers. A congregation that receives such a pastor will be well-accompanied, but it may never be absolved.

Cliché No. 12: Comfort Dogs

“Sometimes people don’t need words. They just need presence. That’s what our comfort dogs provide.”

The comfort dog is not a marginal curiosity in contemporary Lutheran ministry but a well-funded competitor to our pastors. Deployed in moments of mass grief, crisis, and trauma, the comfort dog is offered as a form of pastoral care precisely when genuine pastoral care is most urgently needed and most dramatically available. A school shooting, a campus tragedy, or a community disaster are moments when the Law begins its killing work on every conscience in the impact zone. Death becomes undeniable, and the terror of mortality is exactly what the Gospel was given to answer. Comfort dogs pad into these openings and shut them down because a golden retriever’s physiological effects on humans under stress (measurable neurochemical comfort) are the easier option than what the Gospel declares.

The formula “sometimes people don’t need words” is the most theologically precise inversion in the entire cliché catalog. It explicitly positions the spoken word (ultimately, the Word) as an optional add-on to ‘embodied presence’ rather than as the primary instrument through which the Holy Spirit works faith, comfort, and peace. St. Paul’s account of his own ministry contains no comfort animals: “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). The Small Catechism’s office of the keys delivers forgiveness, life, and salvation through the spoken absolution, not through the quality of the accompanying presence. Jesus does not tell the terrified disciples in the storm to pet something. Instead, he speaks: “Peace, be still” (Mark 4:39). The peace that surpasses all understanding, which Paul promises will guard the hearts and minds of those who bring their anxieties to God, arrives through prayer and petition with thanksgiving (Phil. 4:6–7), not through the stroking of fur.

When dogs, always spoken of disapprovingly in Scripture, have become an investment fund rather than an embarrassing footnote, it reveals a church that has lost confidence in the power of the written and spoken word, substituted therapeutic presence for proclamation, and chosen dopamine over absolution.

The most reliable diagnostic of whether the baptismal identity cliché and others like it are functioning as Lutheran theology or as therapeutic evasion is what might be termed an asymmetry test: would the same method be deployed if the sin carried no cultural sympathy or social-class protection? When sin carries no such protections, is the Law reached for without hesitation?

A pastoral method that weights Law and Gospel differently depending on the cultural temperature of the sin is false doctrine. God’s Law does not have a preferential option for protected classes; it accuses every conscience with equal force and consequence (Rom. 3:19–20) because that is the only condition in which the Gospel is effective.

Therapeutic Formation and Functional Universalism

The clichés documented above all contain something defensible, and that is the trap, because listening is not wrong, compassion is not wrong, and rapport genuinely matters in pastoral relationships. Nevertheless, the cumulative structure is not Lutheran pastoral care but client-centered psychotherapy with Lutheran vocabulary appended at the conclusion. St. Paul does not describe his ministry in terms of relational calibration but in terms of declaration: “knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others” (2 Cor. 5:11); “I did not shrink from declaring to you anything that was profitable, and teaching you... testifying both to Jews and to Greeks of repentance toward God and of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:20–21).

Many of the clichés are functional universalism. They are not an explicit claim that all people will be saved regardless of faith, but the usual application of the clichés renders the Law inert or even inoperative by extending God’s unconditional acceptance as the default and prior condition rather than as the specific response to specific contrition.

A related issue appears in LCMS youth formation materials, where the emphasis seems almost exclusively on identifying with a young person’s struggle with the suffering that external circumstances impose, rather than on the sin that the old Adam generates. The young person is encouraged to endure a broken world, to find God’s presence in the cloud of witnesses surrounding her, and to cast her anxieties on a God who cares for all of them. These are not wrong, but they dominate when repentance, confession, and absolution are only present as peripheral elements in the Christian life.

Two culprits are identifiable: a) the intrusion of mainline civil religion; b) the Lutheran radical grace movement and its systematic hostility to third-use conclusions and applications. Our people are being taught that moralization is legalism, doctrinal confrontation is a failure of compassion and a lack of love, and the pastor’s calling is to be a conduit of unconditional acceptance or relentless bound-will suspicion. They are not taught that unconditional grace is proclaimed to the contrite and not to the comfortable (Luke 4:18; Isa. 61:1).

Conclusion

The clichés documented are, unfortunately, the operational theology of a significant portion of the Synod’s broadest formation culture. They have been in place long enough to have catechized several generations of church workers and lay Lutherans who have been soothed, accompanied, loved, and received only a side-eye view of contrition and repentance.

Those using the clichés are not evil, dishonest, or malicious. However, they are sincere, and that is more dangerous. Jeremiah’s watchmen also meant well when they said “peace, peace” to a people for whom there was no peace (Jer. 6:14). Ezekiel prophesied against the shepherds of Israel in no uncertain terms; we should not imagine there is no similar judgement for our shepherds who would leave the sheep to wallow in their blood guilt (Ezek. 34:1-10).

The preaching office has always been about whether the people entrusted to the pastor’s care are brought, through the killing work of the Law and the raising work of the Gospel, to genuine repentance, genuine faith, and genuine life in Christ, or whether they are sent away with a warm feeling and a falsely salved conscience, still in their sins, still needing a Savior they have not been given occasion to receive (Acts 20: 25:31).

Our denomination's clichés stand in the way of the Lord Jesus himself. The Gospel remains the Gospel only when the Law remains the Law.