Without the Shedding of Blood - New Book by David P. Scaer
Ad Crucem is privileged to publish Professor David P. Scaer's latest book
For over half a century, Rev. Dr. David P. Scaer has probed the organs of Lutheran doctrine and praxis as a master theological surgeon ready to excise malignant growths before they kill body and soul. Accordingly, it is a high honor for Ad Crucem to publish this venerable teacher of the Church’s forthcoming book, Without the Shedding of Blood, which was released on May 1, 2024
The ~125,000-word, 298-page book is a compilation of selected articles by Prof. Scaer, initially published in Concordia Theological Quarterly (CTQ) over five decades, with an additional essay previously unpublished. Rev. Dr. Ron Garwood (former chair of the CTSFW Board of Regents and former district president of Wyoming) adds a warm endorsement, Pastor Ben Ball provides a comforting preface, and Rev. Dr. Daniel Preus (most recently interim President of CSL) contributes an incisive introduction, making this an essential volume for any library.
Without the Shedding of Blood is a timely and much-needed continued defense of our orthodox, confessional, Lutheran teachings on atonement, sanctification, the third use of the Law, and the Law of God generally. The book doubles as a valuable catalog of the allure of novel doctrines, especially antinomianism, among some Lutheran sectarians.
It could not be more appropriate to release the book immediately following The Festival of the Resurrection of Our Lord so that readers may all the more appreciate and dwell on the atonement.
Design
The book jacket (pictured above), designed by Lutheran artist and Ad Crucem collaborator Sam Novak, is so handsome that we are also making it available as a poster in three sizes to help defray project costs:
32 x 40 inches, giclée, on canvas, matte paper, or glossy photo paper, $58.00 (including shipping to the lower 48 US states).
16 x 20 inches, giclée, on canvas, matte paper, or glossy photo paper, $24.00 (including shipping to the lower 48 US states).
8 x 10 inches, giclée, giclée, on canvas, matte paper, or glossy photo paper, $16.00 (including shipping to the lower 48 US states).
Publishing Model
As with Rev. Dr. Adam Koontz’s Family Bible Commentary, Ad Crucem continues experimenting with its publishing model and how best to serve the visible Church. The author, contributors, and editors donated their free labor, time, and intellectual output. Ad Crucem has absorbed 100% of the upfront publication preparation costs (artwork, layout, final editing and proofing, and printer liaison).
Thanks to radically reduced profit requirements and expectations, the book will be available at near cost, ensuring it is well within the reach of all seminarians and pastors.
Ad Crucem hopes to recover its expenses via fractional book sale royalties within three years, perhaps a little sooner through additional tips and poster sales. Any goal acceleration will enable Ad Crucem to bring forward a pending book project where the authors will need compensation for their talents and time.
Watershed Years
Without the Shedding of Blood opens shortly before the LCMS’s modernist controversy, which climaxed with the 1974 insurgency at St. Louis Seminary and the subsequent cancer of Seminex and its ELCA metastasis. Starting in 1972, Professor Scaer traces those developments and subsequent events when CTQ was still The Springfielder. He affords us a center-aisle front-row seat to a turbulent and formative period in the Synod’s history, which is why half the content dates from 1972-1978.
God saw fit to enable the LCMS to resist the Higher Criticism revenant. Still, too many familiar spirits were tolerated to remain resident to oppress, destabilize, and desensitize the host after Seminex. The second half of the essays, written and published in the present century, beginning in 2005, address those latter-day Seminex-adjacent hauntings.
What starts in the ivory towers as experiments dropping doctrinal microbes into Petri dishes soon enough develops chronic spiritual disease in the pews. Justification by faith alone has become a dime store vaccine for some factions; spiritual gene editing to innoculate the conscience against what is commanded by the Law, which Jesus came to fulfill rather than abolish1.
Antinomianism
Antinomianism — the sinister notion that Justification by faith releases Christians from the Law — is not some dusty academic abstraction or fringe movement that can be dismissed. It is a compelling construction that molds Radical Lutherans on the full spectrum from hard to soft libertinism and is a potent intoxicant for Synergist converts. They substantially influence Synods, seminaries, congregations, and para-church organizations as a cohort.
Antinomianism has a distinct lineage. It originated in Europe and has since become virulent among Lutheran congregations worldwide, strongly swayed by theologian Werner Elert and his network of disciples active in America. The book helps readers understand its origins, development, dissemination, and threat.
In the mid-twentieth century, European theologians boosted antinomianism with clever gain-of-function deceits that virtually subordinated Scripture to the Confessions by making everything subject to a test, “Is it the Gospel?”. The fruit is insouciance about sanctification - an indifference and resistance to the third use of the Law (the Scriptural guides and prescriptions for Christians to live as those buried with Christ in baptism and raised to new life in Him).
Because of this, and riffing off Karl Barth’s deviant ethics and eccentric dogmas, theologian Gerhard Forde spoke his infamous aphorism, “The answer to the question ‘why doesn’t God just forgive sins’ is, he does!”
Forde’s intellectual and spiritual heir among contemporary Lutherans, Steven Paulson, has departed so far as to blaspheme, “Jesus could not seem to stop himself once this sin began rolling downhill, not only did he confess our sins as his (and believed it), but he proceeded to take on every single sin ever committed in the world: “I have committed the sins of the world” (“Ego commisi peccata mundi”).”2
For Forde and his acolytes, the forgiveness of sins (and everything that precedes and follows from that forgiveness) happens in the mind of God as a unilateral decision sans any necessity for propitiation. Thus, the atonement becomes little more than a cosmic melodrama staged by God for our feeble minds, even as he forgives sins axiomatically. This formulation is a startling contradiction to Hebrews 9:7-22, which teaches that there is no forgiveness without the shed blood of Christ. Nothing else will produce cleansed consciences, yet Forde and friends have determined to bypass the atonement and surmount it with a crude facsimile of Justification reduced to accomplishments of preaching.
The Radicals depose Christian piety and virtue as obstacles to the Gospel (deliberately conflating it with Pietism). In this scheme, regeneration has no pairing with sanctification. Hearers are browbeaten to believe they are incapable of suppressing the Old Adam. Thus, the New Man is granted a license to consider sins as inevitable and tolerable, and the preacher’s default position is that his parishioners’ wills are always bound; i.e., they are not Christians.
Preaching “categorically” is the ultimate secret knowledge in the hands of the caste of Fordeian priests.
Primacy of the Atonement
God has always preserved His Word and the knowledge of the actual saving Gospel in His Holy Church. He does not need our help for Christ Jesus to remain in control and preserve His Church and His elect until Judgment Day. Nevertheless, as confident possessors of salvation, we must be vigilant against efforts to obscure His truth, keeping the faith undefiled and unhesitatingly delivering it fully refined to the coming generations.
As Lutherans, we are the content and privileged inheritors of orthodoxy, that pure and simple Faith in Christ that He established. Our clear proclamation must be cherished, nurtured, and preserved in defense of the most robust assurance of the forgiveness of sins.
Whether you are familiar with the subject matter and the period or need an introduction, you will greatly benefit from reading and keeping a copy of this book on your shelf and sharing it with others. We also pray this book will improve your understanding of the harmful impacts of antinomianism. May it return us to a Scriptural disposition on the third use of the Law and sanctification.
The book’s triumph is its liberating immunization against the disorders it records. Scripture’s clarity concerning sin and grace and the nature of God and man is available to all as a life-giving infusion in this jaded age. Let’s reassert the primacy of the atonement in our hearts and churches.
Dr. Scaer reminds anyone who listens, “It all hangs together.”
