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ONE WHOM CHRIST REPENTED: IN MEMORY of REV. DR. JAMES A. NESTINGEN
Marney Fritts
As Jim Nestingen has said, “preaching repentance is a problem.” The sinner in us is either convinced that it is my part of the bargain that I bring to the relationship with God, or that repentance is what other people, if they want to be saved, really need to get serious about. Often enough, repentance is taken up as a discipline during certain times of the liturgical year. Faith goes to work on itself, making repentance a kind of job jar, yet the old sinner can never quite seem to get the work done. The sinner is convinced that repentance is an expectation that, with some discipline and true devotion, he can accomplish. Dr. Nestingen called this the standard account of repentance.
Zachary's Baptism
Jim Nestingen’s teaching of repentance and faith, however, broke out of this garden variety telling of repentance, i.e., “Once I was a rotten sinner, but I found Jesus and I am dedicating my life to him.” In the standard account of repentance, the “I” is in control. But Luther and Lutherans understand the scriptures to be saying something quite different when it comes to repentance. So, when a preacher comes with the word in his/her mouth, the law which accuses and the gospel which raises, the power and the strength of the Holy Spirit is needed to stand against the hearers who are working on themselves. And in order for a sinner to receive this word of repentance, it is the work of the Holy Spirit alone to repent active, inveterate sinners to Christ. First, through the Law which drowns and kills the old Adam and, second, through the gospel which raises up an entirely new creature of faith. In so doing, God repents the sinner to himself, wresting us from the grip of our own sin and death and securing us in the grip of the risen Christ. This is what the Augsburg Confession Article XII means when it uses the passive word for repentance (convertuntur), being “brought to repentance.” The Apology describes these two parts of repentance, the drowning of the old and the raising of the new, as contrition and faith. We see this, for example, when Christ repents the woman at the well and she comes to faith in him (John 4:4-42).
Jim and Oswald Bayer
Dr. Nestingen was renowned for his teaching of Luther’s Small Catechism. Listening to him open up the depth and wonder of such a small book was like walking into a closet wardrobe only to step out into a vast wonder land of law and gospel distinction. He lived in the catechism just as he lived in his Norwegian kofte. He was constantly massaging Luther’s words—the words working on him—and just like the author, Jim was a lifelong pastor and teacher. Nevertheless, he never mastered the catechism and remained a student of it as long as he lived. But one of his best teachings from the Small Catechism was that on repentance.
When it came to teaching repentance, Jim was hands down the best there was. His numerous stories of hearing people’s confessions, whether on an airplane, in his old office at Luther Seminary, during his infamous internship, or at his congregation in Coquille, Oregon, he was able to identify and teach the working of the law on the conscience and the way in which delivering the goods sets a person free. He had a steel trap of an ear when he heard people’s stories and unwitting confessions. He could hear the creature bound in the burden of sin, with heartache, or in the depths of despair. And at just the right moment, he would spring a sinner free from the depths of hell. With tears welling up in his own eyes, he would lay a hand on the head of the one in whom God was working repentance, and in a quiet brogue announce, “I have heard your confession. But I have a word from Christ Jesus for you. He has taken your heavy burden from you, crucified it in his own body, and remembers it no more. On account of Christ Jesus, I declare unto you the forgiveness of your sin. Isn’t that just great?!” And right then and there, a new creature was made. Faith was raised out of the depths of despair. Christ, through the deep brogue of a Norwegian preacher’s kid, repented a sinner of his own redeeming to himself once more.
Jim would expound on the daily drowning of the old sinful self with all of its evil deeds and desires and the raising of a new self that arises with Christ and his righteousness. It was at these times when he opened up the work of the Holy Spirit, not the old self, in repentance. To be sure, when Jesus says, “repent and believe for the kingdom of God is at hand,” he is not giving the old Adam an erector set. He calls us to repentance, pulling us and delivering us from ourselves. This is, of course, precisely what the confessions say, reflecting Scripture: we are brought (passive) to repentance (convertuntur). In repentance, God is the active one, the sinner is the passive recipient. We are ones done unto by the Almighty God who has come into the world to save sinners, not to assist those who are working on themselves. He has come to put the old sinner to death through his law so that he may raise a new creature of faith, free from law, for whom the law has been silenced.
Repentance is worked in the sinner by the work of the law in our lives, drowning us in the daily, down and dirty activity of our vocations: getting up in the middle of the night to care for and bathe the child who is ill; going to a job, day after day, that may be sucking the life out of you or may be a source of joy for you; cleaning the toilets. In our vocations the old sinner is brought down to earth, brought low, and used up for the sake of the neighbor, whether he wants to or not. But this is only one level where God works repentance in us.
A whole other level is the squatting of the law in the conscience where Christ alone belongs. One of the main reasons Jim was an expert in this teaching of repentance was his deep study of Luther’s singular mastery in capturing the power of the law to accuse the conscience. The law for Luther, was not simply the decalogue. It was not simply a moral code which, if we were just told what to do, and with the aid of grace, would gladly hear and do it. Luther understood quite explicitly and personally that the law demands many good works. It even demands repentance. But he also found in Paul that the law was given to reveal transgressions (Galatians 3:19), not to remove them; and to increase them (Romans 5:20), not to reduce, much less eliminate them. In fact, the law revives sin (Romans 7:7), it does not kill it. Indeed, the law demands what it cannot produce.
The law demands repentance, but it does not give the old Adam in us the power to accomplish it. Nestingen came to understand from Luther that the law’s demand and its power was not only an attack on our wandering eyes (6th commandment) and thieving hands (7th commandment), but that it attacks the higher and hidden parts of the old Adam: the conscience. “For the law is not given in order to justify and vivify or help anything to righteousness (cf. Galatians 3:21). But in order to show sin and work wrath (cf. Romans 3:20; 4:15), that is accuse the conscience.” This addresses the terrors of conscience that come, not only when God exposes our breaking of the 6th commandment, for example, but even from the sound of the rustling of a leaf to put one to flight (Leviticus 26:36). Luther explains further that the office of the law and law itself is, “Whatever shows sin, wrath, and death . . . be it in the Old Testament or in the New Testament. For to reveal sin is nothing else nor can it be anything else than to be law or to be the effect and power of the law in the most proper sense. The law and the showing of sin, or revelation of the wrath, are synonymous terms . . .” The law is not simply a written code, though it can be found on tablets of stone in the ministry of death. But when the law gets loose in relationships, it becomes a crushing power over the conscience, even when there is no apparent moral transgression. In these ways, God is driving us to repentance. This is the beginning of repentance. This beginning of repentance, however, is the coming of the end of the accusing law and the beginning of freedom from the law (Galatians 5:1), new life in Christ alone. Jim could spot a person with a battered and burdened conscience a mile away. He had a bloodhound nose for those in the midst of repentance, even and especially when they did not realize they were being repented. He would always have the words to say, to lift them from their navel gazing, and raise them from the dead. He would give them the absolution so they would be free to be the creatures God had created them to be: human beings who trust Christ alone in all things. Such is the life of faith, but faith in Christ is only possible once the law is brought to an end.
Faith, then, is the flipside of repentance. We are drowned in daily repentance and are raised to dance daily in faith. Repentance and faith overlap in the simul iustus et peccator, just as the old and new kingdom overlap. As Dr. Nestingen always taught, “the gospel overlaps the law; it confirms the accusation of the law.” The relationship between repentance and faith is not a synthesis of the two. It is an eschatological relationship, the pouring of new wine into old wine skins. “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Romans 10:4). An end and an entirely new beginning the world knows not of. The law which works repentance comes to an end when the gospel arrives in Christ Jesus, for you, in the forgiveness of sins. In Christ, God has accomplished what the law could not do. When Christ arrives, he takes us out of the grip of our own hands and the grip of the law’s accusation and puts us into the grip of his own hands. Left to ourselves, the law always accuses (lex semper accusat). But in the grip of the One who has overcome your sin, death, and the devil―the law, and wrath are “emptied or quieted.” Jesus Christ silences the law’s accusation by stuffing its mouth with his sin-pocked, crucified, and dead body, accomplishing what the law demanded but was never given the power to accomplish.
So, repentance finds its end in faith, a free and merry spirit. Through the preaching of the law and the gospel, repentance finds its true end, not in a return to slavery under the law, but in the freedom of faith, life lived in the promises of Christ. At the last, faith finds its end in the resurrection from the dead and life everlasting, seeing God face to face, with all the angels and the saints in heaven. Our dear friend, teacher, pastor, and colleague has been taken entirely out of the grip of his own hands and is no more simul, but pure saint in the grip of Christ Jesus. Jim is one whom Christ has fully and eternally repented to his Heavenly Father. May it be as well with all of us.
Marney Fritts teaches systematic theology for Saint Paul Lutheran Seminary and is the pastor of Tahoma Lutheran Church. She and her husband live with their two children in Maple Valley, WA.
Endnotes:
1James Nestingen, “Preaching Repentance,” in Justification is for Preaching, edited by Virgil Thompson (Pickwick: Eugene, 2012), 230-246.
2Book of Concord, edited by Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 188-191.
3Ibid., 45.
4Only the Decalogue is Eternal, edited and translated by Holger Sonntag (Minneapolis: Cygnus Series Lutheran Press, 2008), 79.
5Ibid., 80.
6Nestingen, “Preaching Repentance,” 234.
