Category Archives: Martin Luther

Martin Luther’s Centraldogma, ‘Faith Alone’ by Barth

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Martin Luther preaches in the pulpit, pointing to the crucified Jesus. Among the audience, are his wife Katherina von Bora with the little son and Lucas Cranach the Elder. Woodcut engraving after a painting from the predella (bottom of the altarpiece) of a triptychon (1547) in the church at Wittenberg by Lucas Cranach the Younger (German painter, 1515 – 1586), published in 1881.

Is there a centraldogma for the Protestant Reformation? It depends on what angle we attempt to answer that question by. For Martin Luther, per Barth’s lights et alia, the foundation for his reformational work was the doctrine of justification (sola fide). For Luther, according to Barth, this was the great differentiator between what became Protestantism versus the Latin Catholic church’s position on justification; which would entail a cooperative matrix in the God-human relation (gratia infusa). After Luther read the Greek New Testament for himself, he realized the synergistic salvation that Roma propounded was contradicted by the perspicacious teaching of Scripture alone. Barth offers some rich insight on how he sees this centraldogma operative for Luther:

It was again Luther, above all others, who obviously regarded and described the doctrine of justification as the Word of the Gospel. To him it was not merely the decisive point, the hub, as it were, of the whole of Evangelical theology in controversy with the Romanists. It was this, in the sense of the Schmalkaldic Articles of 1537 (Bek.-Schr. der ev.-luth. Kirche, 415 f.)—in which it is called the first and principial article in this special sense: “In relation to this article we cannot doubt or yield an inch, though heaven and earth or all things passing may fall . . . . On this article stands all that we teach and live against the Papacy, the devil and the devil prevail against us.” The fact that Luther linked together the Papacy, the devil and the world shows us, however, that Luther was not thinking merely in terms of the polemic against Rome. In the praefatio to the 1535 Galatians we are told immediately before the passage quoted earlier: That one article reigns in my heart, namely the article of faith in Christ, by which, in which, and through which all my theological reflections flow back and forth by day and by night. If the doctrine is flourishing, then will flourish all good things, religion, true worship, the glory of God, and assured knowledge of all conditions and matters (l.c., 39). Then in the argumentum of the same commentary we read (l.c., 48, 28): If the article of justification is lost, then the whole of Christian doctrine is lost at the same time. And on Gal. 1.3 (l.c., 72, 20): If the article of justification lies in ruins, then all lies in ruins. Therefore, it is necessary that we sharpen it (in the manner in which Moses spoke of the Law) and cram it in. For it cannot be understood and held enough or too much. According to Luther’s exposition of Gal. 2.20 (l.c., 296, 23) this article and this article alone has the power to refute all sects, anabaptists and sacramentarians, etc., seeing that they are all at error in relation to it. Moreover, it is by the position on justification that Christianity is distinguished from all other religions: For only Christians believe this doctrine and are righteous not because of what they themselves do, but because they receive the works of another, that is, the passion of Christ (Schol. on Is. 53.2f., 1534, W.A. 25, 329, 15; 330, 8). And in the same context (l.c., 332): this doctrine is the basis of the New Testament, from which, as from an open fountain, all the treasures of the divine wisdom flow. Similarly in 1537 Luther could open a disputation (W.A. 39.1, 205, 2) with the words: The article of justification is master and emperor, Lord, ruler and judge over all kinds of doctrines, and it preserves and steers all the church’s doctrine. If it does not know and consider this article, the human reason is defenceless against the vainest errors. But a mind which is strengthened by it will stand against all their assaults. The dominating role which Luther assigned to the matter in his own sermons and other works corresponds to these declarations of principle. The well-known description of the doctrine as the article by which the church stands or falls does not seem to derive from Luther himself, but it is an exact statement of his view. He found in it the one point which involved the whole.[1]

As Barth has illustrated, rather definitively, Luther saw the doctrine of justification as the watershed locus of all that mattered for the Church of Jesus Christ. For, if the Church gets the Gospel wrong, then what type of Church is one left with?

Once this spark lit on fire Luther’s affections his reformation was underway. It wasn’t the 95 theses on the Wittenberg church’s door that was motivating Luther—that is on the matter of the indulgences, per se, even as that was directly relatable to this matter—it went into the theoanthropological roots of the teaching of the New Testament itself. What was required for humanity to be justified before God? What in fact, were the fundamental entailments of the Gospel? Was it what the Latin church had taught Luther the Augustinian monk; the gratia infusa way? Or was it instead the iustitia aliena (alien righteousness) of Jesus Christ which when the would-be believer comes into union with Christ, by faith alone and grace alone (sola fide sola gratia), all of these benefits of Christ’s person and work become theirs? For Luther, and for the other reformers, it was clearly the latter; it was solo Christo (Christ alone). Soli Deo Gloria

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1 §61 [521–22] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 8–9.

A Theology of the Cross Contra Metaphysics

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What role should metaphysics play towards developing a Christian theology? How many speculations added together equal a composite picture of a simple God? If God’s face (prosopon) is in the cradle of the philosophers; if their respective machinations and categories become the womb within which the Theanthropos (Godman) is gestated; how might we be sure that we are in fact encountering the living God at all; that is, in the face of Jesus Christ? Can the metaphysics, torn out of the vestiges of the created order, be deployed in an effort to grammarize God in intelligible ways for us? Or maybe there is a better way; an “evangelized metaphysic?”

Conversely, the Christian doesn’t come to the faith of a metaphysical actual being of pure act (actus purus); a monad, as it were. The Christian, the non-Christian on the street is encountered by the man cloaked in the veil of the flesh of a despised man; a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. This doesn’t cohere well with a God of the Metaphysics. But the so-called ‘Great Tradition’ says that the metaphysical god is the only God that might give us the goods in regard to having a point of intelligible and meaningful contact with Godness. Is this so? The Dominical teaching and life of Jesus Christ deposited for us in the New Testament says otherwise, I would contend; and so, would, Dr. Martin (Luther). Note Jaroslav Pelikan’s thinking with reference to Luther’s theologia crucis:

The Theology of the Cross

Although Luther himself never wrote a full-length exposition of his entire theology and, even when he undertook “to confess [his] faith before God and all the world, point by point,” did not present a system so much as a series of statements, he did find a term to characterize his system of thought. Contrasting, the theologian falsely so called, “who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things that have actually happened,” with the authentic theologian, “who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross,” he labeled the first system “a theology of glory” and the second “a theology of the cross,” or, in the phrase of Hugh Latimer, “that religion that has the cross annexed to it.”

 At the basis of the theology of the cross was the proposition that “God can be found only in suffering and the cross,” so that “he who does not know Christ does not know God hidden in suffering.” In a similar vein the early Melanchthon declared that “to know Christ is to know his benefits.” The polemical target of both these propositions was a theological method that the authors attributed to scholasticism, which treated the truths of the Christian faith as objects of intellectual curiosity without reference to the cross and the benefits of Christ. Specifically, the dogmas of the Trinity and the person of Christ were not an exercise in logical inquiry or metaphysical speculation. Luther ridiculed the scholastics for investigating the relation between the two natures of Christ and branded such investigation as “sophistic.” “What difference does that make to me?” he continued. “That he is man and God by nature, that he has for his own self; but that he has exercised his office and poured out his love, becoming my Savior and Redeemer—that happens for my consolation and benefit.” For, as Luther said in a sermon on 1525, Christ was not called “Christ” because he had two natures, but because of his office as Savior. And Melanchthon attacked the scholastics for “obscuring the glory and the benefits of Christ” despite the formal correctness of their doctrine about the person of Christ.[1]

Far from having a diminished view of Christ’s person, christologically, Luther had an elevated view in the sense that he understood that the value of Christ for the world, the primacy of Christ for all of life, was that He was God for us in the very face of a man. It is here, in the kerygma (the announcement of the Good News) where the wisdom and knowledge of God is on display for all of humanity; for whomever will. This knowledge of God is not an abstract, speculative foment by which the theologian reasons their way back to the Actual Infinite. Nein, for Luther, the Christian God is fulsome for the ‘beggars all.’

In light of the above, would you continue to maintain that the God of the metaphysicians is really the God Self-revealed for the world in Jesus Christ? Or would you agree with me that some abstractions, with reference to truly knowing God, only lead us full circle back to the prying imaginations of sinful man; into things that such imaginations have no real access to?

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine: Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300—1700), Volume 4 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 155–56.

The Early Aristotelianization of Reformed and Lutheran Theology

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Barth on the stillbirth of the Protestant Reformation. He underscores a reality that I have been, we have been writing about for years, in regard to the scholasticism Reformed and Lutheran. That is to note, the reception of the Aristotelian mantle that had, ironically, brought to formation the very Church, and her doctrina, that Luther was seeking to reform. Unfortunately, very early on in the second and third generation reformers (on both the Reformed and Lutheran sides) imbibed the theological categories that had originally led to the status of the Roman Church that Luther and others believed needed to be reformed from within.

Face to face with the difficulty of both schools, the Reformed no less than the Lutherans, made a formal borrowing at this point from a philosophy and theology which had been re-discovered and re-asserted at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries—the philosophy of Aristotle and the theology of Aquinas. The borrowing consisted in the adoption and introduction of a specific terminology to describe the two partners whose activities are understood and represented in the doctrine of the concursus [accompanying] in terms of a co-operation, the activity of God on the one side and that of the creature on the other. The concept which was adopted and introduced was that of “cause.” For it was by developing the dialectic of this concept that they both effected the differentiation of themselves on the one side and the other, and also decided the difference which already existed at this point within the Evangelical faith itself. This, then, is the controlling concept for the form assumed by Evangelical dogmatics in this and in all kindred topics.[1]

This theological arrangement, ended up thrusting people back upon themselves (as TF Torrance phrases it frequently), by thinking of a God-world relation from within a competitive frame. God above, the great decretal “causer,” and the human below, the striver attempting to meet the conditions of God’s causal-ness (this sounds something like what we see in a Federal or Covenant theology). In this frame we end up with a bilateral, yet asymmetric, relationship between God and humanity, such that God decrees certain things to obtain, whilst the elect of God must discern these things, and again, meet the conditions of the decree; of the covenant of works released through the so-called covenant of grace.

The aforementioned reflects just one example of how this ‘causal’ based relationship gets formulated and expressed. For Barth this would be a theology of the decretum absolutum (absolute decree of predestination, from within a classically construed Reformed theology, in particular). The Lutherans have their own expressions of this type of decretal theology. For a contemporary example see Jordan Cooper’s work.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3 §49 [098] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 97.

The Vultures Have No Knowledge of God’s Kingdom: Living in the Theology of the Cross

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for we walk by faith, not by sight . . .[1]

It is certain that man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ. That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the »invisible« things of God as though they were clearly »perceptible in those things which have actually happened« (Rom. 1:20; cf. 1 Cor 1:21-25), he deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross. A theology of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theology of the cross calls the thing what it actually is. That wisdom which sees the invisible things of God in works as perceived by man is completely puffed up, blinded, and hardened.[2]

Above we have both the Holy Spirit/Apostle Paul and Martin Luther underscoring the same thing. That is, the Christian, in the far country of this world, in this in-between time, doesn’t see, doesn’t endure, doesn’t know, lest it be by seeing the things that are unseen; the things re-created in the blood drenched soil of the cross of Jesus Christ. It is when the seed falls into the ground and dies that new life, a new creation comes into existence. The vision the Christian operates from comes from this new order of the apocalyptic and disruptive reality of God become man in Jesus Christ. The profane has no quarter here. This seems radical, foolish and weak even, but indeed, it is the via crucis. When daily life, even at its deepest possible reality, is understood as the measure and boundary of what and who can be known, all that we end up with is a superficial and immanentist knowledge of things. But the reality of the world, as Barth says, the reality of the external world (i.e., creation) is the inner life of the covenant bonded between God and humanity in the hypostatic union of God the Son with humanity in the visceral and concrete humanity of the man from Nazareth, Jesus Christ. The Christian reads reality from this type of unio mystica (‘mystical union’), which indeed is not of this world, even while being fully and freely for it.

If the Christian misses this most basic insight, then they will be well on their way to living a highly disillusioned life as a Christian. They will attempt to force things into place that are impossible to force, simply because the ultimate ground of reality is in fact a Miracle. And yet, this isn’t an abstract ethereal thing; i.e., as has already been noted, it is grounded in the concrete of God’s life for the world in the flesh and blood humanity of Jesus Christ. This ought to lead the knower into the realization that they sit in a vulnerable place, as if a newborn babe thrown to the side of the road in its mother’s afterbirth, waiting either to be eaten alive by the circling vultures, or instead, to be picked up, dressed in swaddling cloths, put to rest in the manger, and finally ascended to the right hand of the Father. It is indeed this radical. The vultures have no quarter in the kingdom of God.

[1] Holy Spirit and the Apostle Paul, II Corinthians 5.7 (Macedonia: GNT, 55/56 AD).

[2] Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation 1518.

What is Love? Against the Cultural and Psychological Conceptions in the Church

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Helmut Thielicke makes an excellent observation as he engages with the “conscience” as that is distilled in the epistle to the Romans. He notes that there really is no such thing as an autonomous conscience. For Thielicke the conscience, as understood biblically, is either going to be “ridden” by a fallen broken human nature, or it is going to be ridden and shaped by God’s triune life; there is no via media or Swiss neutral ground. And it is within this understanding, which we might say is the Pauline understanding, wherein Thielicke will argue that the point of contact between God and humanity is not resident within a native (to an abstract person’s) conscience, but instead it is only as God in Christ circumscribes our humanity with His; it is only as Christ condemns sin in His body for us that we come to have the capaciousness to know and be for Him.

Thielicke writes:

We see here at the same time the consequences of Roman Catholic anthropology, which we have already discussed in some detail in connection with the doctrine of the imago Dei. If the human person is not understood in relationship, but instead is given ontic autonomy as the bearer of demonstrable components of nature and of ontic substances of grace, then loving with one’s whole heart can no longer be understood personally in terms of existence in fellowship with God. It has to be understood instead as the ontically demonstrable content of the heart, as a psychodynamic state of being filled with loving impulses. The ontology of man leads at once to psychology, and indeed to a theological-speculative kind of psychology. Once we enter upon this path, we cannot avoid the conclusion that in terms of psychical structure man’s “infirmity”—i.e., the fact that soul is necessarily filled with shifting contents, with varied impressions and desires as well as with tasks and duties which claim our attention and devotion—man’s “infirmity” is completely incompatible with his being totally filled with love for God. Love for God as a psychical “content” then enters at once into competition with other potential contents of the soul. In any case love’s claim to be total is wholly illusory—until these competing contents of the psyche are eliminated in the uninterrupted and undeflected vision of God in the life to come. Thus the command to love loses its unconditional character the moment we enter the ontological-psychological plane of thought. For on that level it is no longer possible to grasp the personal category of love.

It is precisely at this point that we can find help in the formulation of Luther whereby the subject of faith—in this context we may with equal propriety say: the subject of love—is a “mathematical point” [punctum mathematicum]. Luther uses this extreme formulation to combat the fatal psychologizing of faith and love. He refuses to regard the subject of faith and love as merely an extended psychical tract filled with diverse forces and aspirations. There is thus no place for such questions as whether we are supposed to believe or to love at every single moment of our lives, or how such permanence is to be understood psychologically. Faith and love are characterized by their object, not by the psychical accomplishment of believing and loving. I confess him who loved me, and I believe in him who has given me his promises.

Thus the life of piety has as its goal not that all our time should be filled up with “conscious” faith and love, i.e., with conscious acts of believing and loving, so that everything else is dismissed from our minds as we move to at least approximate that total filling of the psyche. On the contrary, Luther recommends periods of prayer and devotion merely as “signs” that my time is under God, not as devices for filling up my time—at least partially—with thoughts of love and faith. The object of my faith , God’s love and righteousness, is still effectively present even when I “feel” nothing, even when I am “empty” or terrorized by doubt.[1]

As Thielicke presciently identifies (along with Luther): as the root goes, so goes the tree. If the root is rotten, the tree will be rotten. If the root is healthy and vibrant, the tree will be healthy and vibrant. You will notice that Thielicke is really critiquing the Roman Aristotelian (and insofar as that is picked up in Post Reformed and Lutheran orthodox theology) categories of thinking of grace in terms of habitus (disposition and its habituizing), and as substance and qualities. In other words, he is critiquing the Thomist synthesis wherein grace becomes its own independent substance resident in an abstract self-possessing humanity. He is rightfully arguing that when such categories are deployed, in regard to thinking about an ostensible notion of God’s grace, that the person under such notion-izing is flittering about in an inward curved movement of the soul upon the soul in a striving attempt to make their innards, their ‘feelings’ somehow correspond with what they speculate, what they perceive to be God’s love, God’s affection, God’s feeling. But according to Thielicke, to use a Torrancean (TFT) phrase, “this is only to throw the person back upon themselves.”

What Thielicke is offering as the alternative to the aforementioned is the biblical reality wherein humanity, and its conscience therein, is understood to be grounded in an alien conscience; but one that has been brought into union with us, insofar that God in Christ has brought us into union with Him, and His vicarious humanity for us. The problem that Thielicke vis-à-vis Luther is identifying is that the human propensity is to constantly think itself as the prius to all else; so the ‘turn to the subject’ that modernity has sophisticated for human consumption.

There are multiples of implications to all of the aforementioned, particularly as we think about the state of the Christian church in the West (and elsewhere). We can immediately see the effects of what happens when the church ingests a psychologized self wherein people, Christians in their spirituality, are reduced to performing for themselves and others. When genuinely triune love is not what constrains us, as that is truly actualized for us in Christ, then all that we ultimately have is a love within the ‘accidents’ of our being that we can strive to produce and express in “sacrosanct” efforts to demonstrate that while we were yet sinners we died for Christ’s sake. That is to say, as Thielicke has: that when love is thought of in philosophical rather than personalist terms what we necessarily end up with is a self-driven and cultivated notion of love that is not necessarily at the core of our beings coram Deo (before God).

[1] Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Foundations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 342–43.

St. Martin Luther, the Christian Humanist Against the Glory Theologians

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Definitions are important; if for no other reason but to understand what something means. Context provides meaning, and thus definition, for words; whether that is in sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books, so on and so forth. When attempting to understand where a particular theologian lies, as far as classification, within the alternative types of being a theologian, it is important that we get a handle on the definitions used to ascertain that. In the medieval period, generally, a theologian could be classified as a scholastic theologian, or a Christian humanist; or potentially, both, depending on the way someone enters into the reconstruction of said history. There are general markers that broadly characterize a scholastic theologian from a Christian humanist theologian. 1) A scholastic theologian was, methodologically, committed to the dialectical methodology. This methodology entailed a presentation of: a) thesis, b) antithesis, c) synthesis. Beyond its formality, more materially, the scholastic was often an Aristotelian, and later, after Thomas Aquinas’ synthesis of Aristotle with Christian dogmatics, a Thomist. 2) A Christian humanist theologian was typified by an attempt to ad fontes (go back to the sources, behind the layers and accretions of beliefs the scholastics had developed), with a focus on understanding the original biblical languages (so getting beyond Latin); and by way of methodology, the Christian humanist didn’t necessarily attempt to synthesize ideas. The humanist believed, by reference to their set of literary and linguistic and historical tools, that they could arrive at a scenario, when deciding on the validity and soundness of this or that theological loci, that the theologian should be able to say: Yes or No.

The above is the world that Martin Luther, and the magisterial reformers in general, were birthed into. There is argument on whether or not Luther was more scholastic or more humanist in his approach. For my money, Luther, fit more broadly, within the school of the Christian humanists (we could refer to Lorenzo Valla here to underscore the genesis of the humanist way). Some would argue that to drive too hard of a wedge between the scholastics and the humanists in the late medieval and early reformation period, would be to engage in presenting a false dilemma. These folks would prefer that we understand that these “schools” were not as nice and tidy as we might make them today; that there was an organic crossover between the schools, materials, and methods of the two camps. Be that as it may, Brian Gerrish, via Charles Partee’s engagement, believes Luther fits the Christian humanist, or even the biblical humanist classification; as both a theologian and reformer of the Latin church.

Brian A. Gerrish raises “the possibility that perhaps Luther may be, indeed should be, classed with the so-called ‘Biblical Humanists” [sic] A sounder basis for excluding Luther, not from humanism in general, but from the notion of Christian philosophy in particular, is the fact that Luther insists that philosophy and theology should be carefully distinguished. Luther sees philosophy as the theology of the heathens. With this understanding Luther is less interested in studying philosophy with appreciative intent than others.[1]

Theologically, we might suggest that Luther’s infamous theologia crucis (‘theology of the cross’) fits well with the Christian or Biblical humanist orientation. It rejects the philosophical and speculative measures deployed by the theologians of glory, and instead focuses on the concreto of God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; particularly as the character of God is given full magnification in the Son’s “obedience of death, even unto death on the cross.” The theology of the cross, repudiates speculating about a God up yonder, and entrenches itself within the Light of Light of God that is given for the world in God’s life for the world, in the person of God for the world in Jesus Christ.

This type of orientation, as the one we have just ostensibly observed in Luther, is present in someone like John Calvin; and beyond, into the modern period, we see this mood picked up by folks like Karl Barth and Thomas Torrance, respectively. It is this orientation that has drawn me to such theologians. I am, broadly speaking, a proponent of a form of Chrisitan humanism, as described in this post; and as illustrated by a suggestive proposal with reference to St. Martin Luther. So let it be written, so let it be done.

[1] Charles Partee, Calvin and Classical Philosophy (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1977), 12-13.

Luther Against the neo-Thomists and Performance Based Salvations

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Performance based theories of salvation continue to plague the evangelical Protestant landscapes. Whether that be funded by a Reformed background (inclusive of Reformed proper, and Arminianism et al.), or Lutheran (either orthodox, and/or mainstream). When people are offered a notion of God wherein He is understood as a juridical God, one who relates to the world through a covenant of works/grace, or other like frameworks, at which point law-keeping sublimates grace into its image, those under this specter live a life of deep angst, always wondering if they are going to finally measure up (or persevere) unto the final reward: eternal life. What a sad state of affairs; this is not what Martin Luther was aiming toward when he protested against the scholastic theology of his Roman day. Luther internalized, unlike many, in fact, the requirements of a preparationist soteriology, wherein he was in a constant state of pilgrimage, striving towards the final merit of salvation; that is through deep introspection, and flagellation of his physical body. He believed God, under the conditions set forth by an Aristotelian-ly conceived notion of God (actus purus), hated him. He thought this because he felt the deep ditch between his own sinfulness up against the Holy God. And within this frame his only hope was to cooperate with God, through the means of grace dispensed by the Holy Roman Catholic church, to the point that he might finally assuage God’s judgment by somehow achieving the righteousness of Jesus Christ. The problem with Luther’s system though, and that of the late medieval/scholastic church, is that there was never a time where this type of assurance of achievement could ever be reached. And so, Luther tormentuously labored under this great weight of despondency and failed effort before the God who hated him (or that’s how Luther felt).

So, when Luther was encouraged by his father in the faith, Johann von Staupitz, to read the New Testament for himself in Greek, Luther was introduced to the strange new world of the Bible/NT (to borrow a phrase from Barth). Here he came to understand that the Christian could only be found righteous before the living God as that person was in participation with, in union with the risen Christ. Luther came to understand that he could do absolutely nothing to achieve this righteousness; that his good works, and self-flagellation could never bring him any closer to eternal life. Because of the breath of Holy Scripture, Luther, over against the scholastic theology of his Augustinianism, came to realize that he could only rest in the grace of God alone, that was stood in by faith alone in Christ alone. Once he was struck with this lightning bolt of revelation, as it were, his fears and anxieties melted away, only to be replaced with a boldness before the living God, the church, and the world; to the point that Luther would stare down the barrel of the Holy Roman gun of the papacy itself.

From a materially theological point of view Luther came to understand that he had to stand up against the Thomist/Aristotelian anthropology and soteriology that had led him, and so many others in the society, into the dregs of the belief that God was angry and hated him and them. Simeon Zahl writes the following with reference to this Luther[an] theological milieu:

More specifically, from Luther onwards Protestants have argued that one of the chief problems with the sort of model articulated in neo-Thomist soteriology is that it is fundamentally overoptimistic about Christian ethical transformation. The Protestant argument against a soteriology focused on the ontological infusion in the Christian of sanctifying grace is that, for all its intellectual elegance and coherence, it simply does not work very well in practice, and certainly not well enough to function as the core dynamic through which salvation comes about. Protestant spirituality is traditionally focused very substantially, especially where salvation is concerned, on what we might call the “rhetoric of passivity.” What I mean by this is the sense that much of the force of the Christian message is precisely its efficacious protest, in and through the work of Christ, against the natural human tendency to freight our day-to-day actions and feelings with soteriological or crypto-soteriological significance. It is just this freighting, basic to the neo-Thomist vision, that Martin Luther found punishing and terrifying rather than inspiring or transformative or productive of meaning.[1]

Precisely because of the retrieval movement underway within, mostly, evangelical Reformed theology, many Christians in the churches, unbeknownst to them, are being hampered by the recovery of the very theological themes that Luther et al. was attempting to thwart with reference to thinking God under the conditions set forth by Thomas Aquinas, and his reception among Post Reformed orthodox theologies.

All the aforementioned to state: the original Protestant, Martin Luther, had no intention of starting a reformation that would ultimately stillbirth, by collapsing back into the very Thomistic/Aristotelian themes he felt so burdened and tortured by. Luther desired that all would finally be set free from the stringencies provided for by thinking of God in terms of the Big Brain in the Sky, who also happened to be the Great-Law-Giver in the sky, with no grace or mercy for the fallen and bruised reeds of the world. Luther attempted to perform for his salvation, just as the Pharisee, who became an Apostle, Paul was attempting to do under his own distorted understanding of appeasing God through law-keeping (even if the conditions between Luther’s theological times and Paul’s were not exactly parallel).

Christian, if you are feeling like a Luther, beat down by false doctrines of God, undone by performance and law-based understandings of salvation; take heart! The Christ has come to not only declare, but to in fact be the Good News of great joy, of great peace, for the whole world. His is a life of absolute and immediate grace that brings the wayfarers into the heavenly throne room, where the burden is light. Jesus, as Luther came to understand, has already performed God’s salvation for us. The call, in light of this reality, is to simply rest in the finished work and person of God in Jesus Christ; for He is indeed, God’s salvation for you, for me, for the world-wide. When you’re tempted to look inward, know that Christ went inward for us, that we might finally look upward to the very being of our life in God’s being in becoming for us in the concrete humanity of Jesus Christ. Throw off every hindrance that would seek to bog you down in the liable of the devil; and finish, not in the flesh, but in the Spirit who has become for you, through the vicarious humanity of Christ, God’s guarantee of salvation come, and coming again.

[1] Simeon Zahl, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 116 kindle ed.

The Lutheran Connection with TF Torrance: The Kerygmatic Christ as the Concentration

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The Gospels of the New Testament witness all present Jesus via His historicity, and the facts of His life as they unfolded in particular frames of reference. John the evangelist ended his Gospel with the quip, “And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen.” Clearly, Jesus was a historical personage, but this is not how the Christian has come to know Him at a first order; nor is it the way that the Evangelists of the Gospels present Him. They, all along the way, were hard pressed to see past the ‘veil,’ so to speak, of Christ’s humanity; indeed, His “historicity,” His “flesh-and-blood-ness” made Him so vulnerable to be mis-taken, that His disciples themselves mis-took Him for most of their time with Him. There were those rare moments, Matthew 16, and Peter’s confession, and Matthew 17, the Mount of Transfiguration, come to mind, where they seemed to be ‘getting it,’ but then His kenotic flesh hid His glorified personhood from them once again. It wasn’t until after the Spirit came, who Jesus said would bear witness to Him, and teach them many things (cf. Jn 14—16; 20 etc.), about just who and what Jesus was, and remains as the Son of David and the eternal Logos. The Spirit taught the Evangelists that Jesus, in His person, is the Deus absconditus (hidden God) who is Deus revelatus (revealed God). In other words, the Evangelists’ offer a depth-dimensional interpretation of who Jesus is and what He is about in regard to the eternal purposes of God made historical and concrete in the particularity of the scandal of God’s cross.

Thomas Torrance offers a profound word on this reality, in regard to the “Jesus of faith” as that relates to the “Jesus of history.” He points out that to know the Christ, for the Christian, is to first know the Son of God made human (and thus historical) for us. He presses the notion that when we are confronted with Jesus, we are confronted with a way to think both history and eternity together, but to think it from the eternity of God for the world such that that eternity is freely shaped by His election to be God with us (Immanuel) rather than against us. Torrance writes:

All this means that any Christological approach that starts from the man Jesus, from the historical Jesus, and tries to pass over to God, and so to link human nature to God, is utterly impossible. In fact it is essentially a wrong act: for it runs directly counter to God’s act of grace which has joined God to humanity in Christ. All Attempts to understand Jesus Christ by starting off with the historical Jesus utterly fail; they are unable to pass over from man to God and moreover to pass man to God in such a way as not to leave man behind all together, and in so doing they deny the humanity of Jesus. Thus though Ebionite christologies all seek to go from the historical Jesus to God, they can make that movement only by denying the humanity of Jesus, that is by cutting off their starting point, and so they reveal themselves as illusion, and the possibility of going from man to God is revealed as likewise illusory.

No, it is quite clear that unless we are to falsify the facts from the very start, we must face with utter and candid honesty the New Testament presentation of Christ to us, not as a purely historical figure, nor as a purely transcendental theophany, but as God and man. Only if we start from that duality in which God himself has already joined God and man, can we think God and humanity together, can we pass from man to God and from God to man, and all the time be strictly scientific in allowing ourselves to be determined by the nature of the object.[1]

Interestingly, it isn’t just the Reformed, like Torrance who thinks this way about the approach of the Christian vis-à-vis the Christological reality as that relates to a knowledge of God, and thus everything. Both Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, as Eberhard Juengal identifies, offer similar thinking with reference to thinking God in Christ not purely as a datum of history, but a dandum of God’s free gift of Himself for the world. Luther writes:

He gives utterance not only to things [res], but also to the use [usus] which things are to be put to. For many preach Christ, but in such a way that they neither recognize nor express his ways and his miracles . . .  as do most of those preachers who only preach the stories of Christ, when they are preaching at their best. But it is not Christian preaching when you preach Christ only from a historical point of view; that is no proclaiming the glory of God. But this is: when you teach that Christ’s story refers to its usefulness for us as believers unto righteousness and salvation. That is [then], that he accomplished all not for himself, but for us by the will of God the Father, so that we may know that everything that is in Christ belongs to us.[2]

The connection between what Luther is getting at and Torrance isn’t one-for-one, but the basic premise between the two is significant. The point: that attempting to think Jesus Christ from a purely historicist angle simply fails precisely because of who Jesus is, and thus remains to be for us. He isn’t a relic of history, He was never history’s accident, instead He is the risen Christ who has kerygmatic thrust, evangelical power for us now; ‘if this be not true we are of most people to be pitied.’

Melanchthon, Luther’s colleague, writes something very similar, in spirit, to both Luther and Torrance:

Thus the faith which makes us pious and righteous in the eyes of God is not just this, that I know the history, how Christ was born, suffered (the devils know this too); no, faith is the certainty or the sure, strong trust in the heart that with my whole heart I take God’s promises to be sure and true, by which are offered to me without any merit of mine forgiveness of sins, grace and full salvation through Christ the Mediator. And so that no-one can say it is simply a matter of knowing history, I will add: faith is this, that my whole heart accepts that same treasure. This is not my doing, nor my gift or offering, not my work or preparation. It is [simply] that a heart takes for its consolation and trusts in the fact that God grants and gives to us, not we to him, that he pours all the riches of grace upon us in Christ.[3]

We are visiting different contexts, at least with reference to Torrance in juxtaposition with Luther and Melanchthon, but the main premise is present in all three: viz. that to know Christ is to not to know a relic of religious history and phenomena, but to know Christ is to know Him presently in our midst, as the ground of our life and being in all things.

It is this ‘Christological confessionalism’ that has always attended the liveliness of the Church’s vitality in the world. Insofar that the Christus praesens (to riff a phrase) is not the reality; insofar that the risen Christ is merely thought of in ‘secular’ or profane terms, this is where the Church ceases being the Church, and instead slips into being another social club in the culture writ large. When Christological concentration is not the focus of the Church’s teaching and theologians, when her disciples fall into a following of a Christ of history, without first understanding that He is the Christ of God’s faith for us, it is at this point that the Church becomes just one more platitude of human self-projection; it is at this point that the Church becomes an idol wherein its people come to see their reflection as their idol’s, a christ of an abstract and desolate history. In order for the liveliness of the Church to be always present, she must repose in the strong reality that Jesus Christ is indeed risen, present, and active as the eternally present for us Theanthropos, Godman.

We would do well to follow the leads of Torrance, Luther, and Melanchthon in their respective Christological concentrations. In the end, the Eschaton, the Christian, if they hadn’t prior, will come to recognize that this is the focus that dominates all of heaven, and at that point the entirety of all creation, including the rocks, will cry out that Jesus is King!

 

[1] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation, edited by Robert Walker, 10.

[2] M. Luther, Operationes in Psalms, 1519-21, WA 5, 543, 13-21 cited by Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2001), 29.

[3] Philip Melanchthon, Apology of the Augsburg Confession, cited by Eberhard Jüngel, Justification: The Heart of the Christian Faith (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2001), 29-30 n. 46.

*repost

 

On Orthodoxy and Heresy and a Theology of the Word of God

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It is unnecessary to jettison all of creedal Christianity in favor of a supposed ‘naked Scripture’ (scriptura nuda). And yet there are many, whether that be on the popular or academic sweep, who maintain that this is in fact what being a Protestant Christian ultimately entails. I have someone in particular in mind with this post (who will remain unnamed), but it has general application too. To be a creedal Christian doesn’t necessarily entail that you ascribe absolute ecclesiastical authority to the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches; indeed, this runs exactly counter to what someone like Martin Luther would have maintained as the original, or at least the most infamous, Protestant reformer. Indeed, Luther, infamously, at the Diet of Worms exclaimed the following:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by the Scriptures that I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot to do otherwise. Here I stand, God help me.

Some might take this as the naked Scripture mode I referenced previously, but that would be mistaken. Luther is simply identifying an order, an “ontology of authority” as that relates to his submission to the living Lord. His conscience is ultimately bound to Holy Scripture, and its reality in Jesus Christ. If Church councils or Popes or Metropolitans contradict the clear teaching (think Luther’s analogia fidei in contrast to the Catholic’s appropriation of the antique regula fidei) of Scripture, then as Luther exclaimed at Worms, he will go with Scripture every single time. Here Crisp indexes what I take to be something that Luther himself would affirm, in regard to a theory of authority vis-à-vis God:

  1. Scripture is the norma normans, the principium theologiae. It is the final arbiter of matters theological for Christians as the particular place in which God reveals himself to his people. This is the first-order authority in all matters of Christian doctrine.
  2. Catholic creeds, as defined by and ecumenical council of the Church, constitute a first tier of norma normata, which have second-order authority in matters touching Christian doctrine. Such norms derive their authority from Scripture to which they bear witness.
  3. Confessional and conciliar statements of particular ecclesial bodies are a second tier of norma normata, which have third-order authority in matters touching Christian doctrine. They also derive their authority from Scripture to the extent that they faithfully reflect the teaching of Scripture.
  4. The particular doctrines espoused by theologians including those individuals accorded the title Doctor of the Church which are not reiterations of matters that are de fide, or entailed by something de fide, constitute theologoumena, or theological opinions, which are not binding upon the Church, but which may be offered up for legitimate discussion within the Church.[1]

This seems like a rather straightforward ordering, or hierarchy, as that relates to understanding how a Protestant would think about authority. Scripture is the ‘norming norm’ which all following developments become, at best, normed norms. That is, Church councils, so on and so forth have a relative, we might say, “eschatological” value to them in the sense that they should never be taken absolutely, but only as proximate thinking as that relates to a proper understanding of Scripture’s teaching vis-à-vis its reality in Jesus Christ. Bruce McCormack helpfully states it this way as he reflects on Barth’s understanding on the development of Christian theology:

I say all of this to indicate that even the ecumenical creeds are only provisional statements. They are only relatively binding as definitions of what constitutes “orthodoxy.” Ultimately, orthodox teaching is that which conforms perfectly to the Word of God as attested in Holy Scripture. But given that such perfection is not attainable in this world, it is understandable that Karl Barth should have regarded “Dogma” as an eschatological concept. The “dogmas” (i.e., the teachings formally adopted and promulgated by individual churches) are witnesses to the Dogma and stand in a relation of greater or lesser approximation to it. But they do not attain to it perfectly—hence, the inherent reformability of all “dogmas.” Orthodoxy is not therefore a static, fixed reality; it is a body of teachings which have arisen out of, and belong to, a history which is as yet incomplete and constantly in need of reevaluation.[2]

Some might read this and think this militates against valuing a creedal Christianity, but just the opposite is the case. If we take McCormack’s identification in Barth’s understanding of Dogmatic development as a jumping-off point, what is being affirmed is the value, the ‘relative’ value of the catholic creeds of the Church. It isn’t an abandonment of the pronouncements and the rich theological grammar developed therein, au contraire!: it recognizes that the church then when confronted with certain internal and external pressures responded in a way that set a trajectory for the Church to think God, to think Christ in ways that would be ultimately definitive as a baseline for thinking God and Christ in ways that Christians everywhere might build upon, receive and develop in orders that might go beyond, but never leave behind at their base level. McCormack continues in a different but related context:

. . . Every period in the history of theology has had its basic questions and concerns that shaped the formulation of doctrines in all areas of reflection. In the early church, it was Trinity and Christology that captured the attention of the greatest minds. In the transition to the early Middle Ages, Augustinian anthropology played a large role—which would eventually effect a shift in attention from theories of redemption to the need to understand how God is reconciled with sinful human beings. The high Middle Ages were the heyday of sacramental development, in which definitions of sacraments were worked out with great care, the number of sacraments established, and so on. The Reformation period found its center of gravity in the doctrine of justification. In the modern period, the question of questions became the nature of God and his relation to the world. Basic decisions were thus made in the areas of creation, the being of God and his relation to the world, and revelation, which were to become foundational for further development in other areas of doctrinal concern….[3]

I think the above considerations from McCormack are helpful in regard to situating the way we think about the role of a creedal Christianity insofar that they frame a genuinely Protestant way into thinking about Church authority. As McCormack and Crisp, respectively, identify, the sole authority, or the ultimate authority by which all other iterations of subsequent ecclesiastical reflection take form comes from Holy Scripture and its reality in Jesus Christ (who indeed is the Church’s Head). It is helpful to think these things eschatologically, as both McCormack and Barth do, insofar that Scripture’s reality, just as creation’s in general, is found in and from Jesus Christ. But the way the Protestant, along with the Catholics and Orthodox, think who Jesus is, at a grammatical level, comes from what the early Church councils promulgated; viz. in regard to articulating the inner-theo-logic of thinking the natures of Jesus Christ as both fully God and fully human (the Theanthropos) etc.

Hopefully, at minimum what is gleaned from the above is that there is no reason whatsoever for the Protestant Christian, even if you consider yourself Post Protestant, to abandon a conciliar Christianity simply because you cannot imagine how that type of Christianity can be reconciled with being an adherent of a purported ‘naked Scripture.’ It was never the Protestant way to think away from its Catholic (and I even mean Roman in a sense) roots, it was simply an attempt to think from a deep theology of the Word of God as the authoritative basis for thinking God, and a God-world relation. Yes, there is space to develop further the grammar provided for by the creeds, indeed the conciliar grammar was merely negative language, something like minimal parameters set in order to protect the sheep of the Church from those wolves who would take Jesus and the triune God captive by overly relying upon pagan, and in that context, Hellenistic philosophies that were improperly evangelized that would not allow them to be put to use in retextualized ways, and thus within a kerygmatic frame. In other words, heresy has always been a thing, even now.

If you find yourself feeling genius, that what it means to be Protestant is to chart out in original and unconstrained (by any sense of reception from the past) ways is to develop your own original Christian Philosophy I’d ask you to reconsider. The history is littered with these attempts, and one thing is for sure: such contenders end up in the same cul-de-sac of isolation and disfellowship that such attempts of “originality” always lead to. What ends up almost always obtaining in these adventures of originality is the person inevitability ends up denying, or at least downgrading the divinity of Jesus Christ; which of course leads to a further denial of the Trinity itself. Being a genius or original thinker isn’t worth the pain and destruction of what being antiChrist ends up entailing. I would simply ask such contenders to repent, and be genuinely Protestant by affirming a robust theology of the Word with proper recognition of its explanation through the centuries under the concursus Dei of God’s providential working. Indeed, this shouldn’t stifle creativity and constructivity, in fact it ought to fuel it by providing fruitful and rich developments of Christological and Theologically Proper grammarization that the communio sanctorum (‘communion of saints’) have fellowshipped with, around, and from for millennia.

 

[1] Oliver Crisp, god incarnate, (New York: T&T Clark International, 2009), 17.

[2] Bruce L. McCormack, Orthodox and Modern: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 16.

[3] Bruce L. McCormack, “Introduction,” in Kelly M. Kapic and Bruce L. McCormack eds., Mapping Modern Theology: A Thematic and Historical Introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2012), 11, 14 scribd edition.

A Devotional with Martin Luther and his Theology of the Cross

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The following is a repost I originally wrote approximately in and around 2009. I am currently, and once again, being pressed with a really challenging spiritual attack. I’ve walked through many years of these seasons in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily make the heat right now that much cooler. If you could remember me in prayer at this time I would really appreciate it. And with that I’ll leave you with the following word on Martin Luther’s theology of the cross, and some of its devotional implications for our edification and encouragement.

I was first introduced to Martin Luther’s theologia crucis, or “Theology of the Cross,” in seminary, in my Reformation Theology class. Once I heard of it, I was hooked! It is absolutely brilliant, and represents the best of Martin Luther’s theological offering for the church. My previous post was a tribute to Rory Wheeler, who just went home to be with the Lord as a result of the effects of cancer. Death, even for the Christian, presents lingering questions; the primary one being “why dear Lord, cannot you just vanquish this curse, right now?” It is obvious to all of those with eyes of faith, that the Lord works in ways that would appear “hidden.” He became man, a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths in a manger. He was born into a poor-man’s family from ridiculed Nazareth. The list of God’s hiddeness (Deus absconditus), of course, can be enumerated over and again. Indeed, this is where Luther’s theology of the cross finds its footing; that God works in ways that to the naked eye seem foolish (see I Corinthians 1:17-25, the passage of my Master’s thesis, and motivated by Luther’s theology of the cross). Randall Zachman provides one of the best descriptions of Luther’s theology of the cross that I have ever read. Here is Zachman in full:

In the context of theologia crucis, faith means believing with certainty that God’s Word is true even when the whole world, the heart of the believer, and even God himself contradict the truth that is revealed in the Word, particularly the Word of promise. Thus, when God begins to show mercy, God does so by first revealing wrath (in law); when God makes alive, God does so by slaying. The same contradictions apply especially to those who have already come to faith. God promises the forgiveness of sins, yet our conscience feels nothing but sin and wrath; God promises life, yet we see nothing but death. Faith, therefore, is the art of believing the Word while experiencing, seeing, and feeling the opposite. We believe that Christ is the Son of God, even though we see and abandoned man on the cross; we believe that God cares for the church, even though we see nothing but a church persecuted by the world and apparently abandoned by God; we believe in eternal life, even though we see and feel nothing but death.

However, the primary locus of the theology of the cross is the experience of trial or tribulation (Anfechtung), when the very heart and conscience of the believer sense that God’s promise of grace and forgiveness is a lie. The believer must regard the promise of forgiveness as true and certain even though the conscience testifies to the contrary.

But under the cross which we experience, eternal life lies hidden. . . . We, too, experience the cross, and death appears to us, if not in fact, yet in our conscience through Satan. Death and sin appear, but I announce life and faith, but in hope. Therefore, if you want to be saved, you must battle against your feelings. Hope means to expect life in the midst of death, and righteousness in the midst of sins.

This is the very meaning of being simultaneously righteous and a sinner (simul iustus et peccator): to believe that we are righteous coram Deo even though we feel like condemned sinners.

Within the context of the theology of the cross, the grace of sanctification and its attestation in the testimony of a good conscience would necessarily be subordinated to the grace of justification and the promise of the forgiveness of sins. This is because the testimony of the good conscience confirms one’s faith in the promise, whereas the theology of the cross emphasizes that testimony of the conscience that contradicts faith in the promise; that is, Anfechtung. Therefore, although Luther continually insisted upon the necessity of sanctification and of the testimony of the good conscience, within the framework of theologia crucis he could not help but consistently subordinate the grace of sanctification to that of justification.

Luther’s concentration on the theology of the cross also accounts for his refusal to involve the Reformation directly in the external reform of the church. The Word of God does not deal with external, temporal things, but rather with invisible, eternal things; and such invisible things are revealed under an external appearance that contradicts what is being revealed. The theology of glory, in contrast—such as Luther found in the papacy—emphasizes externals to the point of neglecting the invisible truths revealed by the Word: indeed, to the point of calling God’s Word a lie. Thus, those in the Reformation who would introduce concern for externals—such as Karlstadt with his rejection of idols and the papal mass—misunderstanding the whole nature of the Word of the cross, and divert the attention of believers from the invisible, eternal things of God’s promises to the visible, temporal things of human reason and senses. Yet it is precisely reason and the senses that must be mortified if we are to believe that the Word of the cross is true.

Luther’s theologia crucis also explains his suspicion of those, such as the Anabaptists, who emphasized the external holiness and moral behavior of the church. If the Word of the cross reveals the truth of God under a contrary appearance, then one would expect the true church not to look like the church at all, but rather to look like God-forsaken sinners. The “synagogue of Satan,” on the other hand, with its theology glory, would look like the true church of God and would demonstrate a superior holiness externally—as in the monks and friars—but inwardly it would be rejected by God. The theology of the cross would therefore lead one not to stress the conformity of the appearance of the church with its faith, but rather stress the ways in which the appearance of the church denies its claim to be the people of God. The church looks like a gathering of sinners rejected by God and the world, whereas it is in truth the beloved people of God. The church cannot be judged by its appearance, but only by whether it has the Word of Christ crucified. Hence the primary task of the church is to preach the Word of God, while letting externals take their course.[1]

How can that not bless you?! There is a lot in this, too much to talk about in toto; as far as the implications and applications, let me grab just a couple. But first I should also notice something else for us. You see Zachman refer to Luther’ “theology of glory,” this was in contrast to the theology of the cross; and it refers to (oversimplified) focusing on doing things for the praise and glory of men, instead of God (just do a word study or theology of glory study in the Gospel of John, you’ll see how this plays out) [Luther attacked the scholastic theology of his day as based upon the “theology of glory” instead of the “cross”]. Now to my applications.

1) It seems like a loving God would vanquish death so that humanity would no longer have to endure the torment of it. Indeed, he has, but it is only with eyes of faith that we understand the significance of the cross and resurrection and ascension. To the world if God is all powerful, and loving (David Hume) why doesn’t he do something about it now? The wisdom of God is displayed in hiddeness, in the unexpected; God is the God whose ways are not our ways, but the way of the cross, the unexpected! Why did the holocaust happen? Why do little kids die from cancer, or starvation? We have to interpret these kinds of questions through the hidden ways of God, through the cruciformity and cross-shaped work of God’s life. That’s the answer to Luther’s theology of the cross; the wisdom and knowledge of God is only penetrated by those who are wedded to him, in Christ, by the Spirit. And it is when we are pressed up against the most dastardly things of this life—tribulations—that we quit depending on ourselves, and throw ourselves on God’s mercy that we enter into the kind of life that God gives himself in his inner-life of mutual and interpenetrating love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is when we are pushed beyond ourselves that God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ is just waiting to smile on is in the midst of our thlipsis, tribulation! Here is the wisdom of God, to take what is intended to destroy, and bring resurrection life out of it!

2) The second application here is a quicker observation. This one has to do with Luther’s/Zachman’s point about how the church should look vis-á-vis the theology of the cross. Frankly, it shouldn’t look like what Western, and in particular, American, upward mobile churches strive to look like. It shouldn’t look like people who have it all together. It should look like people who are broken, needy, and beggarly. When did Jesus do his greatest work of atonement? What was the crescendo of his work? When he went to the cross. When he was most broken. It was here that he brought life to all of humanity, through his death; by rupturing the bonds of self love (homo incurvatus in se), with the unbreakable bond that he shares consubstantially with the Father and Holy Spirit. That is, a life is given shape, by self-giveness; between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is through this kind of brokeness, in the mirror image of the cruci-shaped Son, that we can be the church for the world. That we have something to offer them; only when we are broken, and realize that we receive life as gift from the Father, in Christ, by the Holy Spirit.

Much more to say, but this has run long enough. I think I will talk more about the theologia gloriae “theology of glory,” in the near future.

 

[1] Randall C. Zachman, The Assurance of Faith, 9-10.