Pastor Dave Monge—God rest him—was one of those rare souls whose laughter could thaw a Minnesota February. A dear friend of Jim Nestingen and, by some undeserved mercy, mine as well, Dave carried the gospel the way some men carry a light into a storm: steady, unpretentious, and absolutely unwilling to let anyone wander back into the darkness of their own religious illusions. We met weekly—two pastors, a pot of coffee, and whatever texts the lectionary had the nerve to throw at us. These sessions were equal parts exegesis, confession, and comedy. Jim’s presence was usually hovering in the room, too, laughing at us for trying to improve upon what had already been given.

 

I remember one October morning in particular. We had been circling the old rallying cry—Scripture alone—with the kind of earnestness pastors mistake for virtue. And just as I launched into some question about textual authority, Dave leaned back in his chair, gave me that sideways grin of his, and said, “You know, Luther wasn’t fighting for the ink on the paper. He was fighting for the God who won’t sit still, for the freedom of God.” It hit the table like a theological axe. In one sentence, he exposed what many have quietly turned sola Scriptura into: not a cry of freedom, but a strategy for putting God under management. 

 

It is one of the great ironies of Christian history that the rallying cry “Scripture alone”—originally a dynamite charge placed under the foundations of religious control—has been repurposed into the mortar for rebuilding the very control it was meant to level. Gerhard Forde used to say that biggest enemy of the gospel was not bad people but good religion.

 

The reformer’s appeal to Scripture was a cry of revolt, a desperate insistence that the living God could break into human affairs without first applying for permission from councils, popes, or theological committees. It was an appeal to a Word that unsettles, judges, and—crucially—liberates. 

 

But in the hands of many of today’s doctrinal gatekeepers, it has become a bureaucratic slogan: the divine stamp of approval on a system that no longer expects the text to speak, only to confirm.

They will declare the perennial insistence, with its usual blend of solemnity and theological paperwork, that God must be safely bolted to the floor with doctrinal brackets, lest the Almighty wobble and give the faithful vertigo. But these objections do what they always do: mistake the scaffolding for the building, the map for the landscape, the recipe card for the meal.

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Observe the argument. It runs something like this:
“God bound Himself to Scripture, therefore Scripture must be bound to our systems, and our systems must be insulated from any suggestion that they’ve become the idols Luther warned about.”
This is theology as fire code: rules written to ensure no one accidentally enjoys the freedom of the gospel without proper bureaucratic supervision.

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But this is precisely the disease Paul diagnosed and Luther risked his life to expose. The moment you insist that God must be made certain through doctrinal control, you reveal the anxiety that drives the whole project. You want a God who behaves. A God who colors inside the lines. A God who will not—under any circumstances—show up and speak without consulting the bylaws first.

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And one might have thought—after two millennia of schism, inquisition, sect, synod, council, confession, counter-confession, and endless ecclesial replication—that this fantasy would have collapsed under its own weight long ago. The sheer spectacle of Christianity fractured into thousands of churches, each claiming exclusive fidelity to “what Scripture really says,” should have exposed the conceit for what it is: not submission to revelation, but a competition for divine authorization. If God were as securely fastened to doctrinal machinery as advertised, would the result be this cacophony of certainties? The noise itself is the evidence. Certainty multiplies when God is no longer trusted to do His own work.

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The entire argument is a defense of a more sophisticated form of enthusiasm—confidence in our ability to protect God from freedom. The very thing Luther fought is now the thing being defended in Luther’s name—quite a trick, really.

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The problem isn’t doctrine; the problem is when doctrine becomes the last fortress of the old Adam. You can tell that fortress is cracking when its defenders become indignant at the suggestion that God might slip the leash.

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And of course, on cue, come the shrill warnings of antinomianism—as if the moment grace is allowed to roll freely, the entire moral universe will topple over. 

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This is the standing superstition of anxious religion: that unless the training wheels of the law are permanently bolted to the bicycle—bright, clattering, and impossible to ignore—people will collapse in a heap of vice. It is a doctrine of moral infantilism, insisting that adults must forever pedal in circles under watchful eyes, never trusted to ride, much less be free to choose a direction.

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The irony, of course, is that training wheels do not teach balance; they prevent it. And so the faithful are kept wobbling indefinitely, congratulated for their caution, while being quietly told they are incapable of moving forward without falling apart.

 

The gospel does not abolish the law; it simply removes the training wheels. The bicycle remains, the road remains, and gravity remains—but the pretense that balance can be outsourced does not. The law is relieved of its role as a wobbling prosthesis for moral confidence, no longer allowed to prop up riders who confuse external supports with actual movement.

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Grace does not invite anarchy; it ends infantilization. It exposes the rather humiliating truth that the training wheels were never what kept us upright in the first place. They merely kept us from noticing how little we understood about balance, motion, or trust - faith. And so, the fear persists: not that we will crash without them, but that we will finally have to admit we were never riding under our own power at all.

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I shouldn’t have to say it, but experience teaches otherwise. I am not attacking doctrine; I am attacking doctrine as a hiding place. I am not rejecting Scripture; I am rejecting Scripture as a containment strategy. That distinction is present throughout what I have written. The people who most need to hear it will pretend it isn’t. They always do.

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And so, the final word that remains is the only word that cuts through both self-righteousness and doctrinal anxiety: You are forgiven. Not because the system guarantees it, not because the bylaws permit it, but because the crucified and risen Christ is not waiting for us to do a theological background check before being merciful.

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And if that unsettles you—if forgiveness without procedural safeguards strikes you as irresponsible—that discomfort is not an argument against the gospel. It is the evidence of what the gospel is up against. 

 

So, let’s name the tragedy plainly. A God who requires authorization before showing mercy is not sovereign in His freedom; He has been subcontracted to the anxiety of His own defenders.