Prima Thiel: Bob Thiel Puts His Law Above Paul, Then Blames Luther for Adding a Word

Bob Thiel's current article on Martin Luther is not a history lesson. It is a law-keeping brief. The target is not Wittenberg in 1522. The target is anyone who believes Paul meant what he wrote: a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Strip away the footnotes and the Catholic quotations, and what remains is the old Armstrongist move. Discredit the Reformers, borrow a Roman Catholic stick to beat them with, then smuggle Sabbaths, holy days, and tithes back in as the real gospel. The New Covenant is the thing he cannot stand. Luther is only the prop.

Thiel's showpiece is Romans 3:28. Paul wrote that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law. Luther's German Bible reads that a man is justified without the works of the law, through faith alone. The word allein is not in the Greek. Thiel treats that as a confession of fraud, then quotes Luther's blunt line that he knew the word was not there and would have it so.

Luther said that. He said it in the Open Letter on Translating in 1530, and he said it with contempt for critics who could count letters and could not read a sentence. His point was German idiom. When German affirms one thing and denies another, it often supplies allein so the denial lands. "The farmer brings grain and no money" is weaker, in his ear, than "the farmer brings grain alone and no money." He was translating χωρὶς ἔργων νόμου, "apart from works of the law," into speech a Saxon could hear. He was not inventing a doctrine the verse did not already carry.

The exclusive force is Paul's. Romans 3:21-28, Romans 4:4-5, Galatians 2:16, Galatians 3:10-14, and Ephesians 2:8-9 all say the same thing: the ground of justification is not the sinner's law-keeping. Faith receives a righteousness that is not its own. Adding "alone" in German made that exclusion audible. It did not create it. Catholic translators and commentators have long conceded that Paul's contrast is exclusive even when they reject the Protestant system built on it. Thiel needs the inserted adverb to be the whole doctrine, because if the doctrine is already in χωρὶς, his article collapses.

Calling this Marcionism is a smear, not an argument. Marcion threw out the Old Testament and rewrote Luke. Luther translated the Old Testament, preached it, and held that the law still kills and still guides. Those are not the same project.

The other crowd-pleaser is the August 1, 1521 letter from the Wartburg to Philip Melanchthon. Thiel cuts it down to a license: sin boldly, even fornication or murder a thousand times a day, and faith will cover it. Then he drops Hebrews 10:26-27 on the table as if Luther had never read it. "Sin boldly" was a letter to a scrupulous friend.

Read the paragraph he will not quote. Luther tells Melanchthon to preach real mercy, not imaginary mercy. God does not save imaginary sinners. Be a sinner and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger. This life is not the place where justice dwells. No sin can separate us from the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. Do you think that Lamb paid a small price?

That is pastoral hyperbole to a man eaten by scruples, written in Latin, in private. It is the same move as Paul in Romans 5:20: where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more. It is not an invitation to kill the neighbors. Luther spent the rest of his career insisting that faith that does not produce works is dead, and that the Christian is bound to the neighbor. Antinomian license was not his program. Thiel's excerpt is the excerpt Catholic polemicists have used since the sixteenth century. He borrowed it because it serves the same purpose for him that it served for them: make grace sound like permission, then sell law as the cure.

Hebrews 10:26-27 does not say what he needs it to say. Willful sin after receiving the knowledge of the truth, in that chapter, is apostasy from the sacrifice of Christ back to a system that cannot save. It is trampling the Son of God and treating the blood of the covenant as common. It is not "you missed a Sabbath" or "you did not send a tithe to Wadsworth or Arroyo Grande." Using it as a club against justification by faith is the oldest confusion in this argument: mixing the ground of acceptance with the fruit of a new life.

James is not the trump card he thinks it is. Thiel is right that Luther spoke harshly of James, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation, and that the 1522 preface called James an epistle of straw beside John, Paul, and 1 Peter. He is wrong about what that proves.

Luther did not cut James out of the Bible. He printed it, argued with it, and said he would not stop anyone else from ranking it higher. The "straw" line was dropped from the general preface after 1537. His complaint was that James, as he read it, did not preach Christ with the clarity of Romans. That was a bad judgment. It was not a secret amendment of the canon, and it is not a reason to hand the New Testament back to a sabbath-keeping sect.

James 2:24 is the verse he wants: a man is justified by works and not by faith alone. Paul and James are not answering the same question. Paul asks what justifies the ungodly before God. His answer is faith in Christ, apart from works of the law. James asks what kind of faith is real when someone claims to have it and will not lift a finger for a brother. His answer is that dead faith does not justify anybody, because it is not faith. Abraham is in both arguments. Paul cites Genesis 15: the ungodly man is counted righteous when he believes. James cites Genesis 22: the man who believed is shown to have believed when he acts. One is the root. The other is the fruit. Thiel needs them to be rivals so he can discard Paul whenever Paul will not support food laws and holy days.

The early church did not resolve this by putting Moses back in charge of Gentiles. Acts 15 already refused that settlement.

The Matthew 3:2 claim, that Luther changed "repent" to "mend," is contested even in Thiel's own paragraph, and he admits he does not know enough German to judge it. The Acts 19:18 claim comes from the same Catholic source, Patrick O'Hare's The Facts About Luther. So does most of the file. Thiel then cites Herman Bernard Kramer, a Roman Catholic priest, to the effect that Protestant Bible translations were deceit and hypocrisy.

That is an extraordinary witness for a man who thinks the Roman church is Babylon. He will take Rome's word when Rome is useful against Luther, and drop it the moment Rome speaks about Sunday, the Trinity, or the mass. This is not suspicion of tradition. It is shopping.

On Luke 10:28 and Matthew 19, Luther's irony is not a denial that Jesus said "do this and live." It is a reading of what happens when a lawyer asks how to inherit eternal life and is handed the law. The law answers the question it was asked. It also exposes the man who asked it. The rich ruler in Matthew 19 walks away. The lawyer in Luke 10 is told to go and do likewise after a story that destroys his boundary around "neighbor." Jesus is not offering commandment-keeping as a competing plan of salvation beside the cross. He is shutting the mouth of self-righteousness. Paul says the same thing in Romans 3:19-20. Thiel reads every "do this" as a COG membership requirement.

The most revealing section is not about Luther at all. Thiel says John 1:14 and Philippians 2:6-7 show that Jesus emptied himself of his divinity on earth, otherwise he could not have been tempted. That is not Luther's error. That is Thiel's.

Philippians 2:7 says he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant and being found in human likeness. The text says what the emptying consisted of: he took, he humbled himself, he became obedient to death. It does not say he ceased to be God. John 1:14 says the Word became flesh. It does not say the Word stopped being the Word. Hebrews 4:15 says he was tempted in every respect as we are, yet without sin. A truly human nature can be tempted. It does not require the Son to park his deity outside Bethlehem.

Historic Christian confession, from the early centuries through Chalcedon, is that he is fully God and fully man in one person. The kenosis theory Thiel is selling, that the Son stripped himself of divinity, leaves you with a savior who is not God during the very years the gospel happened. Luther's incarnational language was an attempt to protect the opposite claim. Thiel uses a quarrel about a German verb to smuggle in a Christology the church rejected long before Ambassador College existed.

The article ends with the claim that no early Christian practiced anything like modern Protestantism. As a description of sixteenth-century institutions, that is trivial. As a doctrinal claim, it is a trick. The question is not whether Polycarp kept a Sunday school roster. The question is whether Gentiles were justified by faith in Christ or by taking on the law of Moses.

Paul already answered it, under apostolic fire, in Galatians. If righteousness comes through the law, Christ died for nothing. The Jerusalem council already refused to put that yoke on Gentile disciples. The New Covenant texts already say the law was a tutor until Christ, that the first covenant is obsolete, and that the Spirit, not the letter, marks the people of God. Thiel's system cannot survive those sentences, so Luther has to be a forger, James has to cancel Paul, and grace has to be redefined as empowered law-keeping.

Luther was a flawed man. His tongue was violent. His judgment on James was poor. His later writing on the Jews is indefensible. None of that puts allein into the Greek, and none of it puts the Sinai covenant back on the conscience of the person who has been crucified with Christ. Thiel is not defending the Bible against a reckless translator. He is defending a works-righteous sect against the apostle who said the law was never given to justify. The New Covenant is the offense. Luther is just the name on the warrant