Old Adam with a Seminary Degree

I know better. I really do. I’ve read Luther. I’ve taught Romans. I’ve wrestled with Law and Gospel. I’m still learning how to apply theology in real life, not just talk about it. And somehow… I still managed to get myself completely stuck in the Law. What made it worse is that I couldn’t even see it. I knew the theology. It just wasn’t applying to me.

Somewhere along the way, I swam too far out into the deep water of theology and didn’t have a life vest. I was reading Paulson, Walther, Forde, Bonhoeffer—good, heavy, serious theology—and doing it mostly alone. Those are not books you casually skim before bed. They take time. They take digestion. They take conversation. They’re better argued about with peers over coffee or a beer than internalized solo at midnight while you spiral. Instead of letting the Word come from outside of me, I turned theology into a private project. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was trying to swim laps in doctrinally deep water without anyone there to throw me a rope.

The irony is that none of this came from being shallow or careless. It came from being too earnest, too serious, too isolated, and too self-referential. I wasn’t rebelling. I wasn’t doubting God. I wasn’t drifting into some weird theology. I was being religious. And that’s always more dangerous. Old Adam doesn’t need bad theology to mess things up. Give him good theology and a little isolation, and he’ll build a sanctification treadmill out of it.

At some point, I stopped receiving the Word and started grading it. I dissected every worship lyric. Every sermon phrase. Every prayer. I ran everything through my internal theological catalogue to see if it passed inspection. Was this line too synergistic? Too anthropocentric? Too vague? Too emotional? Not precise enough? I wasn’t worshiping anymore. I was auditing. I didn’t raise my hands. I raised objections. I wasn’t singing. I was peer-reviewing. Old Adam became head of the heresy committee and showed up to church with a red pen.

What the Holy Spirit finally made clear to me is that the moment you start policing the Word, instead of being addressed by it, you can’t actually hear God forgiving you. I wasn’t under the Word anymore. I was standing over it. Even when the Gospel was being preached to me, I was filtering it through the question, “Is this said correctly enough for me to receive it?” Which is the most Lutheran form of works-righteousness imaginable.

All of this quietly turned into spiritual-performance anxiety. Am I doing this right? Am I believing the right way? Am I taking God seriously enough? Am I progressing? Am I sanctifying fast enough? Am I legitimate? Am I pleasing Him? I wasn’t trusting Christ to do what only Christ can do. I was trying to work synergistically with God. Trying to manage my sanctification. Trying to prove my legitimacy. Trying to control outcomes. Trying to clean myself up. Trying to please Him so I could finally relax. Which is just works-righteousness wearing a church hoodie.

And honestly, the vocational tension I’ve been living in didn’t help. When someone tells you you’re not qualified to preach or be a pastor, you don’t just shrug that off. You go introspective. You start replaying everything. You start measuring yourself. You start asking whether you really belong, whether you’re legitimate, whether you’re doing this whole Christian thing correctly enough to deserve a calling. Confessionally, I know what we preach, teach, and learn. I’m still being formed by that theology. I’m still learning how to live under the Word, not just talk about it. But when your calling feels like it’s under a microscope and your legitimacy feels conditional, the Law gets loud. Not because anyone is trying to crush you, but because your heart immediately defaults back to performance. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that pressure quietly turned theology into a scoreboard. I wasn’t just trying to be faithful. I was trying to prove that I was qualified. And once theology becomes a résumé instead of a gift, Old Adam has exactly what he needs.

The worst part is that I didn’t feel like I could go to anyone about it, because I couldn’t quite understand what was happening to me. I wasn’t in obvious moral failure. I wasn’t doubting God. I wasn’t rejecting the Gospel. I was just quietly enslaved again. And ashamed of it, because I should have known better. I just couldn’t see it in myself.

Eventually, it got exposed. And it hurt. Because repentance always hurts. It always feels like death. Once this was finally brought to light, and as painful as it was, killing the Old Adam again gave me freedom from the Law I had been living under. I didn’t realize how heavy it all was until it collapsed.

The release when I actually heard the Gospel instead of fighting it gave me the peace that surpasses all understanding. Not the peace of “I figured it out.” The peace of “It’s not on me anymore.” The peace of realizing that I am not in control, that I will not change myself, that Christ is not waiting for me to get my act together, that He already did what needed to be done for me, and that He loves me enough to take the whole impossible project off my shoulders.

And that’s when it hit me: Old Adam is a helluva swimmer! You can drown him in baptism every day, and the dude still comes up gasping for air like he just finished a CrossFit workout! He doesn’t go away. He just gets sneakier. Give him a seminary degree, and he’ll turn good theology into Law, Gospel into a measuring stick, worship into a doctrinal audit, and grace into a self-improvement plan.

Even the right theology, read in isolation, will become Law in the hands of Old Adam, especially when you’re under vocational pressure, when your legitimacy feels conditional, when you’re trying to prove something, and when theology becomes a private project instead of a communal Word. As Gerhard Forde reminds us, theology is for proclamation. It’s meant to be spoken, heard, argued about, confessed, and received from outside of ourselves, not hoarded internally and turned into a self-improvement plan.

As it turns out, the pool is not a good place to be when Adam is treading water next to you.

I didn’t need better lyrics. I didn’t need a more precise sermon. I didn’t need a tighter theological framework. I needed forgiveness. Spoken to me. Without a filter. From outside of me. I needed someone to say, “Stop. You will not change yourself; only He will change your heart. You are not in control. This isn’t on you.”

If this can happen to me, a guy who knows better, it can probably happen to anyone. Not because we don’t know theology. But because theology doesn’t immunize us from the Old Adam. It just gives him a better vocabulary.

Sometimes, the most faithful thing you can do is stop trying to be faithful and let Christ be faithful for you.

And sometimes, the most Lutheran thing you can admit is: I know better. And I still didn’t see it. And Jesus had to pull the drain plug and drown Adam again.

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