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Martin Luther: A ‘Mighty Fortress’
MARTIN LUTHER: A ‘MIGHTY FORTRESS’
I: — It is March 1545. Luther has eleven months to live. He isn’t terminally ill. He has, however, been convicted of high treason, a capital offence. Anyone assisting him will also be deemed treasonous and, if caught, executed. Condemned by the pope as a heretic since 1520, he has been an outlaw of the Holy Roman Empire since 1521. Anyone who assassinates him will be rewarded. He can never forget that life is short and death is sure. Now he is reviewing his vast written output, fine-tuning theological expositions that have convulsed Europe, infuriated church authorities, provoked academic debate, and above all comforted millions as they found themselves newly assured that the arms of the crucified Saviour held them securely in a grip on them that would always be stronger than their grip on him.
At this time – March 1545 – Luther is revisiting the complete edition of his Latin writings. While his Latin writings span decades, the preface to them is new, and one of the last items he will pen. Listen to him as he takes us back to an earlier moment in his life and theological career:
I had indeed been captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the Romans….a single word in chapter 1 [:17], ‘In it the righteousness of God is revealed’ …had stood in my way. For I hated that word ‘righteousness of God,’ which, according to the use and custom of all the teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically regarding the formal or active righteousness, as they called it, with which God is righteous and punishes sinners…. I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly…I was angry with God, … the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath…..Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.
At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words,… ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ There I began to understand that the righteousness of God,… that by which the righteous lives, is a gift of God, namely faith…. Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me…. Thereupon … I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise….[1]
What had been Luther’s experience prior to this moment when the righteousness of God, so far from being that gift of God, owned in faith, which renders sinners rightly related to him, had instead been unrelieved condemnation that God, righteous in himself, visited upon hopelessly guilty sinners forever unrighteous in themselves?
II: — Luther’s experience, circumstantially his alone, inwardly appeared no different from the experience of humankind. For instance, death looms for everyone. One hundred-and-fifty years before Luther’s era, the Black Death (bubonic plague) had carried off 40%-45% of Europe. Three of Luther’s friends had recently succumbed to a fresh outbreak. Only days ago one of his best friends died suddenly. Hunting one day with a companion, Luther accidentally fell on his dagger, severing an artery. He pressed his hand in his groin to stem the haemorrhage while his companion procured help, aware that he had come within a hair’s breadth of death.
Later, when Luther was walking near the town of Stotternheim, a thunderstorm overtook him. A lightning-bolt’s near-miss found him exclaiming, “St. Anne (she was the patron saint of miners, and Luther’s father was a mine-owner), help me. I will become a monk.”
In July 1505 Luther entered the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt. Monastic life appeared to agree with him, at least initially. Looking back, twenty years later, on this period of his life, Luther smiled at the spiritual self-confidence he and others enjoyed at that time: “The greatest holiness one could imagine drew us into the cloister…we considered ourselves holy from head to toe.”[2] Soon he found himself immersed in the study of Scripture and church doctrine. Assigned to probe the academic question, ‘How does one find a gracious God?’, the exercise quickly became a personal preoccupation whose anxiety no mediaeval discussion could relieve.
Ordained to the priesthood in 1507, Luther continued his work in Scripture. (Gordon Rupp, Cambridge University historian and a Methodist scholar of Luther, maintains that if Luther were a candidate at a university today he would be hired as Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature.) As a Hebraist Luther quarried in the book of Psalms, initially; unlike many contemporary Christians, he found the gospel on every page. Listen to him as he exulted as early as 1515 in Psalm 119, whose 147th verse exclaims, “I came before the dawn and I cried, because I very much hoped in your words.” Now lit up by this passage Luther enthused, “Indeed I come before the dawn…because you, God, promised to forgive me…. I come early and cry because I have hoped in your words. Your mercy, the mercy of a God who promises, has made me bold to pray out of season, as it were, before I have any merits.”[3]
At the same time, Luther’s schooling in Renaissance Humanism at Erfurt University (the pre-eminent locus of humanist scholarship in Germany), contributed to his nascent theological formation and remained a major ingredient in his theological understanding (although less widely recognized than the humanist contribution of other Reformers such as Zwingli and Melanchthon and Calvin). “I am convinced”, wrote Luther as early 1523, “that without humanist studies untainted theology cannot exist, and that has proved true…. There has never been a great revolution of God’s word unless God has first prepared the way by the rise and flourishing of languages and learning.”[4] In addition, his exposure to humanism heightened his distaste for theological speculation and rendered him averse to any theological articulation that assumed an Aristotelian underlay. For Luther was convinced that Aristotle, the dominant philosopher the mediaeval church had co-opted; Aristotle had obscured and denatured the gospel for centuries.
In 1510 the Augustinian order sent Luther to Rome. He walked (1500 kms.), every step heightening his anticipation of the glories that awaited him in the city. Arriving in Rome, he was disillusioned by the ingloriousness that met him everywhere: the shabbiness of the environs, the poverty of the people, and not least, the throngs of prostitutes. Still, he managed to ascend the Scala Sancta, the sacred staircase, repeating the Lord’s Prayer on each step. Told that such an undertaking would earn heavenly bliss for anyone the religious devotee named, he whiffed superstition. He walked home, having completed the only trip outside Germany he was to make.
Notwithstanding the theological misgivings his trip to Rome had aroused, Luther remained fixed in a theological meritocracy; namely, God accepts those whose goodness merits their acceptance; or at least God accepts those whose confession of sin is equal to the nature, depth and scope of their sin. Luther, profounder than most, knew he could confess only the sin he was aware of, and even then, would never grasp sin’s enormity to God. He was inconsolable not because he was psychologically bizarre but because he was spiritually perceptive.
Then how did Luther escape the cyclical trap of sin, misery, and condemnation before God?
III: — The way out, as mentioned earlier, was delivered to him through his study of the Psalms. He began lecturing on the Psalter in 1513. He would steep himself in it for the rest of his life. In it he found the gospel everywhere. Seeds were sown in his Psalms-studies that would bear fruit abundantly ever after. In no time Luther heard and rejoiced in the throb of that bass note which reverberates throughout the Bible and establishes the rhythm of the Christian life; namely, the truth and reality (not the mere idea) that what God declares, God effects. God’s utterance brings forth the reality it announces, the all-determining truth and reality of the believer’s life, as undeniable to the kingdom-sighted as it is incomprehensible to the kingdom-blind. To say the same thing in more biblical vocabulary, when God declares us to be rightly-related to him not on the basis of what we do but on the basis of what he has done on our behalf in his Son – namely he has borne our sin and borne it away – then we are rightly-related to him. There is nothing we should do or can do to ingratiate ourselves with him. We are as much a child of God right now (‘rightly’ now) as we can ever be. By faith we are bound so closely to that Son with whom the Father is pleased that when the Father looks upon the Son he sees us included in the Son and therefore pleased with us as well. At once Luther’s tormented questions, “What must I do? Have I done enough? Is my doing good enough? And how would I ever know?”; these questions evaporated.
Years later Luther was to write a tract, Two Kinds of Righteousness. The two kinds are ‘alien righteousness’ and ‘proper righteousness.’ Alien righteousness is alien only in the sense, but crucially in the sense that it comes from outside us, comes from Christ, is always his gift and never our achievement. Proper righteousness, on the other hand, is the Christian, already rendered such by having ‘clothed’ herself in Christ’s alien righteousness; proper righteousness is the Christian now repudiating the arrears of sin that still cling to her.
Let me say it again. Alien righteousness, the Son’s right-standing with the Father, is a gift we own in faith. Once rightly-related to God, we rightly repudiate, properly repudiate non-anxiously, the old man or woman of sin in us, which old man or woman, says Luther, was slain at the cross but won’t die quietly. Paradoxically Luther exclaims that Christ’s alien righteousness “swallows up all sins in a moment”, even as by our proper righteousness we aspire to distance ourselves from Adam. Put simply, because Christ’s righteousness is ours we are forgiven by God and know it; because our old man/woman has already been slain at the cross, we may and must now put him to death. At all times, we must remember, the foundation and stable basis of the Christian life is what Christ has accomplished for us and forever vouchsafes to us: a new standing before God wherein we come before him as the son or daughter accepted by him and at home on his knee.
This lattermost point requires amplification. Justification by faith hadn’t been taught by any theologian Luther had read, especially by Gabriel Biel, or by anyone Luther had read about in Biel. Biel, the representative spokesperson for late Mediaeval nominalist theology, had maintained that moral aspiration is in truth a seeking after God that God recognizes and rewards. At life’s end, sinners can hope that their aspiration, ‘topped up’, as it were, by God’s grace, will suffice for their acquittal before God, their justification.
Reading Scripture attentively, Luther saw that sinners, whose moral achievement is indisputable, wield their achievement as a bargaining point before God wherein they insist that their right-conduct in terms of a code is tantamount to that right-relatedness to God-in-person of which Scripture speaks. Sinners, Luther insisted, were dead coram Deo; not ill, not deficient, not defective, not lame, but dead. As such they achieve nothing and can claim nothing with respect to their predicament coram Deo. They need a new standing before God that a corpse cannot acquire. Therefore, justification has to be utterly gratuitous, sheer gift of God. In addition, such justification is the sure foundation and stable basis of the Christian life now, not an unsure, wished-for, wait-and-see outcome at life’s end.
Two hundred years later, Charles Wesley (who himself came to faith in 1738 upon reading Luther’s commentary on Galatians) exclaimed, “No condemnation now I dread” just because Wesley first knew himself “Clothed in righteousness divine.”
It was Luther’s experience first. ‘Justification by faith’ (shorthand for ‘justification by grace through faith on account of Christ) became and remained the foundation of the Reformation. In his commentary on the Psalms Luther extolled, “If this article stands, the church stands; if it falls, the church falls.”[5] Reinforcing his point, Luther later added, “Without this article the world is nothing but death and darkness.”[6] It was upheld thereafter as the bedrock and stable basis of the Christian life. Luther’s position as a Reformer was established. From this position, he would think and write and preach for the next four years, all of it coming to a head when the pope summoned him to a hearing in the city of Worms. As he came upon the city (he had travelled from eastern to western Germany) he wrote a friend, “All the way from Eisenach to here I have been sick. I am still sick…. But Christ lives, and we shall enter Worms in spite of all the gates of hell and the powers in the air.” Days later he would find himself saying, with unparalleled courage in the face of the mightiest institution in Europe, “Here I stand. I can’t do anything else. God help me.”
Courage? We ought never underestimate the courage Luther’s stand would require. Erasmus, possessing Luther’s horror at abuses in the church yet lacking Luther’s apprehension of the gospel; Erasmus, always ready to ridicule but forever reluctant to reform; Erasmus knew what courage was required, and knew just as surely that he didn’t have it. In his feeble self-extenuation he wrote, “…mine was never the spirit to risk my life for the truth….Popes and emperors when they make right decisions I follow, which is godly; if they decide wrongly, I tolerate them, which is safe.”[7] Erasmus, Luther knew by 1530, “was not concerned for the cross but for peace.”[8] Years later, saddened and annoyed at Erasmus’ cowardice and shallowness, Luther would conclude, “Everything is a laughing matter for him.”[9]
IV: — Constrained by the living Word of God, sharper than any two-edged sword, Luther was aware that much needed reforming, not least the matter of indulgences. Upset initially by the traffic surrounding indulgences, and soon offended by the logic of them, Luther penned his Ninety-Five Theses and hung them from the door of the church in Wittenberg. Hallowe’en – All Hallows’ Eve – would never be the same after 1517. What was the indulgence traffic in Luther’s day? Whom did it profit? Why was Luther vehement?
At this time the pope needed to finance the remodelling of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. He issued an indulgence, a certificate authorizing the remission of the temporal punishment of sin in return for payment. In Wittenberg the master-hawker was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar famed for his salesmanship. A slogan was said to accompany his sales pitch: “When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory to heaven springs.” In case poetry was ineffective in having hearers part with their coin, Tetzel supplemented his rhetoric with grisly pictures of deceased persons alive and writhing in purgatory, crying out to relatives to purchase their release. And if neither poetry nor terror moved them, Tetzel was aware that fervent devotion might. In this regard Tetzel announced that when indulgences are offered and cross-plus-papal-coat-of-arms are displayed, the cumulative effect is equal to the cross of Christ. Such a steroidal indulgence, Tetzel insisted, would pardon even someone who had violated the Virgin Mary.[10]
Luther was appalled. He assumed that the new archbishop of his territory, Albrecht of Mainz, would surely want to be informed of religious abuses occurring within his territory. Luther was aware of the immense power Albrecht wielded. Albrecht was, after all, not only archbishop and cardinal; he was also archchancellor of Germany and the most powerful political figure after Emperor Charles V[11]. Not least, Albrecht was one of only seven men charged with electing the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Luther sent a copy of his protest to Albrecht of Mainz, together with a covering letter. The covering letter was unambiguous. “Once they acquire indulgence letters, the poor souls believe they can be sure of their salvation,” Luther pressed; “Good God! Souls that are being instructed under your care are being sent to their death, and it will be harder and harder for you to account for all this. Therefore I could keep quiet no longer.”[12] Four years later, when he was sequestered at the Wartburg, Luther would write to Philip Melanchthon, “I curse the hardness of heart that prevents me from drowning in the tears I should weep for the slain of my poor people.”[13] Again, Luther’s courage here is noteworthy. Years earlier Dr Dietrich Morung, a priest in Wurzburg, had preached from the city-church pulpit a sermon that questioned the entire indulgence mentality. Cardinal Raimudi Peraudi, papal commissioner for indulgences and papal legate to Germany, had had Morung excommunicated and then incarcerated for ten years. Luther knew what he was risking.[14]
And then Luther attached a second copy of his Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg.[15] (He didn’t nail it, we might note in passing, since in the sixteenth century papers were affixed to doors with wax.)[16] It was customary in university towns to post topics inviting debate on public bulletin boards, since academic debate, in those days was a civic event. All Luther had in mind was a public discussion of the theology underlying the indulgence practice and the finances floating it.
In Luther’s era, when a major church position opened up, it was sold to the highest bidder. (This practice was called ‘simony.’) Few clergy, however, were wealthy enough to bid on the position. Therefore, the church, seeking to maximize pecuniary gain, opened up the bidding to wealthy lay persons whose wealth ensured the topmost bid. Once the lay person had gained a church office meant only for clergy, he recovered his bidding-war costs through ecclesiastical taxation and monies otherwise pertaining to the office. Then and only then was the officeholder consecrated.
Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz had done exactly this. When Albrecht had indicated his interest in the position, officials in Rome set him up with the Fuggers, a major banking enterprise in Europe. Now there was a three-party constellation: Albrecht, the papacy, and the Fuggers. Each party anticipated benefiting hugely. Tetzel was recruited to raise the money.
What theological understanding attended indulgences? Indulgences never purported to alter eternal punishment for sin. (Only God could.) They merely affected temporal punishment, which temporal punishment the church could rescind, since the church had imposed it in the first place.
Here is how indulgences worked. We sin, repent before God, and are forgiven. Still, we need to make reparation and receive temporal punishment for our sin; whereupon the church, through its clergy, assigns penance. It is possible, in this economy, for one to arrive at life’s end and have temporal punishment still owing, insufficient penance having been assigned. The punishment owing is a debt that is ‘paid’ (paid off) by means of ‘doing time’ painfully in purgatory following one’s death. A papally-authored indulgence, acquired through a cash payment, remits the debt and releases someone from purgatory.
In the popular understanding, however, some of the aforementioned subtleties were unknown. While according to Canon Law indulgences remitted sin’s temporal punishment but didn’t forgive sin’s guilt, Archbishop Albrecht’s book Instructio Summaria left the matter ambiguous, with the result that the public understandably read ‘indulgence’ as ‘forgiveness of all sins’. Luther knew that when people purchased indulgences they did so believing that they thereby ensured their salvation.[17]
Luther objected to the practice on several grounds. First there was the crass materialism of it all, the ‘thingification’ of the Christian life. Whereas the Christian life, Luther insisted, was the most intimate, personal relation between believers and their Lord, now it was a business or banking or institutional transaction. In his tract Two Kinds of Righteousness Luther was to insist that when we are rightly related to God through faith in Jesus Christ, such faith, so far from an abstract, cold, one-sidedly forensic transaction; such faith, rather, is an encounter in which Christ (the bridegroom) is heard saying, “I am yours”, and the believer, (the bride) is constrained to say at the same moment, “And I am yours.” Justification isn’t a hollow declaration; it is an effective word from the Lord who is present, in person, in his utterance; justification, then, is a mutual embrace and mutual pledge of utmost warmth and intimacy as Christ and his disciple encounter each other and embrace each other and are fused to each other. Indulgences, on the other hand, were utterly sub-personal and could only depersonalise participants.
In the second place, Luther opposed the church’s usurping God’s prerogative. The church of his era understood the ‘power of the keys’ (Matt. 16:19) to reside in institutional authority vested in it by Christ, enabling the church (i.e., the clergy) to remit temporal punishment or retain it. Luther, and all the Reformers following him, upheld the ‘power of the keys’ as the efficacy of the gospel preached. The church proclaims the gospel, which gospel is nothing less than Jesus Christ in his presence and power. As the church attests the gospel, the Lord whose gospel it is, the Lord who ever remains Lord and judge of his body, the church, so as not to inhere it; this Lord acts in the power of the Spirit and forgives penitent believers. Plainly there is the most intimate relation between Christ and his people, head and body. Luther liked to speak of the totus Christus, the whole Christ. To have Christ at all is to have Christ entire, head and body. Nonetheless, the head is never buried in the body. Never does the Lord of the church collapse himself into the church or transfer his authority to it.
In the third place Luther objected to the confusion between the penalty for sin and the consequences of sin. The penalty for sin is alienation from God arising from God’s judgement. The consequences of sin are the ‘after-shocks’ reverberating through perpetrators’ lives and the lives of those they touch. The penalty for sin is cancelled as penitent sinners own God’s mercy. The consequences of sin – dismemberment or death, for instance, following the impaired driver’s collision – remain as long as life lasts, spreading relentlessly like ripples from a stone dropped once into water.
In the fourth place Luther deplored the flagrant commercialisation of it all. Make no mistake: the indulgence traffic was hugely rich. Between 1486 and 1503 Cardinal Peraudi, a masterful indulgence-pusher, had raised over 500,000 guilders through the popular vehicle.[18] In the village of Vorau, an Austrian municipality so very small that by 2009 its population numbered only 1496, Peraudi was reputed to have sold 50,000 letters of indulgence.[19] Not only was the invention of the printing press to enter into its glory in the dissemination of Reformation tracts, treatises, tomes and translations of the Bible; the invention of the printing press, double-edged like every human invention in a fallen world, had already inked hundreds of thousands indulgence certificates. While Luther opposed indulgences for theological reasons (one of which was affording financial protection to exploited people), the indulgence traffic made millionaires out of printers as surely as it did church bureaucrats. Different persons from diverse spheres now fused their fury concerning Luther, as surely as Pilate and Herod became friends the day Jesus Christ was condemned.
In the letter to Albrecht that accompanied the Ninety-Five Theses, Luther underlined his conviction that “indulgences confer upon souls nothing of benefit for salvation or holiness”. And then in the same letter he tersely reminded Albrecht, “…it is the first and sole office of bishops that the people learn the gospel and the love of Christ.”[20]
Luther followed up both the Theses (Latin) and the Letter (Latin) with his vastly more popular sermon in German, A Sermon on Indulgences and Grace.[21] It was the sermon in German, reprinted at least twenty-four times between 1518 and 1520, rather than the Theses in Latin, that made Luther a household name overnight.
Tetzel, apoplectic at Luther’s renown, riposted six months later (April 1518) with one hundred and six theses denouncing Luther’s ‘errors’.[22] Tetzel’s retort was never reprinted.
Pope Leo X (the last non-priest to be made pope) supported Tetzel and Albrecht. Leo labelled Luther “a wild boar in the Lord’s vineyard;” i.e., purely destructive. Leo had become a cardinal at age 13 and pope at 37. He allegedly remarked, “God has given us the papacy; now let us enjoy it.” He spent colossal sums of money, and relished parading around Rome on Hanno, his albino elephant. (The elephant, admittedly, cost him little, since it was a gift of King Manuel I of Portugal.)[23] Leo pronounced Luther a heretic and excommunicated him.
What about Protestant theology today? Are indulgences peculiar to late-mediaeval churchmanship, a matter we can put behind us forever? As the year 2000 approached and the new millennium loomed, Pope John Paul II issued a Jubilee Indulgence. The Jubilee Indulgence was much less onerous than many of its predecessors, for it maintained it was necessary to visit one church once only. And if visiting a designated church was too much, the indulgence could be gained by foregoing tobacco or alcohol for one day, or for making any donation on behalf of the poor.
V: — The Ninety-Five Theses were posted in 1517. Much thereafter poured from Luther’s pen. And in 1520 there appeared three more unforgettable tracts: Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of the Christian. The lattermost remains the most widely read item in all of Luther’s writings.
Not only is this tract moving on account of its understanding and expression; it is also comprehensive in its discussion as few other tracts are. Luther himself wrote of it, “Unless I am mistaken… it contains the whole of the Christian life in a brief form.”
Before we probe Luther’s tract we must be sure we understand ‘freedom’ in conformity to Scripture. In popular parlance, freedom is the capacity to choose among alternatives. A child at an ice-cream counter is said to be free to choose vanilla or strawberry or pistachio. Such ‘freedom’ (so-called) is nothing more than indeterminism; that is, the child hasn’t been coerced, outwardly or inwardly, to choose one flavour over another.
Yet when Paul reminds the Christians in Galatia, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal.5:1), he cannot mean that Christ has set us free so that we may choose to obey Christ or disobey him. (Such freedom, so-called, is nothing less than the bondage of sin.) The apostle can only mean that Christ has set us free to obey him – and this only. In other words, freedom is having Jesus Christ remove all impediments to our obeying him; to say the same thing differently, freedom is the absence of any impediment to acting in accord – and only in accord – with one’s true nature.
Imagine a derailing switch placed upon railway tracks. The train is impeded from travelling along the rails. When the switch is removed, the train is said to be free to run along the rails. If someone asks, “But is the train free to float like a boat?”, the proper reply can only be, “But it isn’t a train’s nature to float like a boat; it’s a train’s nature to run on rails.”
Christ has freed his people to act in accordance with their true nature; namely, a child of God. In other words, Christ simultaneously frees us from all claims upon our faith and obedience that contradict our nature as child of God and frees us for everything that reflects our nature as child of God. It is our nature as child of God to love God and neighbour in utter self-abandonment.
Luther succinctly sets out the theme of the tract:
A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.
Expanding on this statement Luther writes,
We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbour.
Christians, freed by Christ for their true nature – bound to Christ by faith and bound to the neighbour by love – live henceforth in radical self-forgetfulness. Taken out of themselves, their self-absorption shrivels and their anxiety evaporates. The gospel effects this, and can effect it just because the gospel, as all the Reformers after Luther insisted, isn’t chiefly idea but rather power. The Reformers everywhere reflected Paul’s conviction that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).
Luther goes on to say that there is only one way of living in Christ by faith. There are, however, three ways of living in the neighbour by love.
[1] We live in the neighbour by love as we share our neighbour’s material scarcity, and do so out of our material abundance, even material superfluity. Luther admits this costs us little. If I have five shirts, giving one to a shirtless neighbour exacts little from me. Luther notes too that when we do this we also gain social recognition (today, we’d say an income tax receipt for ‘gift in kind’).
[2] We live in the neighbour by love, in the second place, as we share the neighbour’s suffering. Luther maintains this is costlier in that proximity to suffering in others engenders suffering in us. Painful though it is, however, we feel good about it; and if we do it well, we are rewarded for it (the Order of Canada or the Lions’ Club Humanitarian Award accorded Mother Teresa).
[3] Finally, says Luther not in his Christian Freedom tract but in a later one, we live in the neighbour as we share the neighbour’s disgrace, the neighbour’s shame. This is by far the costliest way of living in the neighbour. Here there is no reward; here there is no social recognition. Here, on the other hand, there is nothing but social contempt and ostracism. Here we profoundly know what it is to be ‘numbered among the transgressors’, for was not our Lord before us publicly labelled with a disgrace he didn’t deserve? In concluding his discussion of this matter Luther insists that our service “takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss…. [the Christian] most freely and most willingly spends himself and all that he has” – including his reputation.
VI: — One more mediaeval tradition Luther overturned was clergy celibacy. His rejection of clergy celibacy was one instance of his rejection of sacerdotalism. Sacerdotalism is the notion that the clergy have spiritual powers invested in them by virtue of their ordination. The notion that the sacraments can be administered effectively only by clergy, for instance, is one aspect of sacerdotalism. Another notion is that the pronouncement of absolution following confession will leave the penitent forgiven by God only if absolution is pronounced by a clergyperson.
Luther insisted that Jesus Christ, our ‘great high priest’, has fulfilled the priestly line of the Older Testament. For this reason, there isn’t, and there can’t be, a priestly class in the church. All Christians are priests before God. To be sure, Luther maintained, for the sake of order at Sunday worship, only someone whom the congregation has recognized and authorized is to preach and administer the sacraments, lest chaos overtake the congregation. Nevertheless, the distinction between clergy and laity with respect to spiritual powers has been eliminated.
Luther reinforced his understanding here by having congregants receive Holy Communion in both kinds, bread and wine, whereas lay people, to this point, had been given bread only (wine, along with bread, being consumed by the clergy only). While giving wine to lay people may seem a small point to us, in Luther’s day it was huge: from now on the church was to be defined not in terms of a clergy hierarchy (priest, bishop, pope) who had unique powers; the church was to be defined as the people of God, a ‘kingdom of priests’, a ‘holy nation’, in the words of the apostle Peter (2nd Peter 2:9). Luther eliminated the clergy/laity distinction.
Marriage among the Reformation clergy was another sign of its disappearance. The mediaeval church had forbidden the clergy to marry (beginning in the tenth century) inasmuch as marriage was inferior to celibacy. In Luther’s day marriage was thought to be vitiated by the depravity of women. Women, it was said, had been the downfall of Adam, Samson, David and Solomon. In the Aristotelian mindset that underlay much of the mediaeval church, women were said to be botched males; if copulation were error-free, a male would result every time.[24]
In addition, Luther faulted the church fathers, in particular Jerome, Cyprian, Gregory and Augustine. Hadn’t Cyprian, a giant in the Patristic era, written, “If you hear a woman speak, flee from her as if she were a hissing snake”?[25] The mediaeval church had expatiated on the various ways in which marriage was fraught with sin, the last way being marital sex undertaken for the sheer pleasure of it.
Luther and his followers inverted the late mediaeval understanding by transferring the praise of monastic life to marriage. In no sense was marriage second-best. In the fourth century, Jerome had assigned numerical values to marriage and celibacy. On a scale of 0 to 100, Jerome assigned 100 to virginity, 60 to widowhood, and 30 to marriage. Marriage was last in this scheme because it was a concession to inferior persons who would derail spiritually and psychologically without the institution. Inverting all such calculations, Johann Bugenhagen, Luther’s friend and pastor of the city church in Wittenberg, exclaimed, “It is faith, and not virginity, that fills paradise.” (In this regard it is worth noting that while Pope John Paul II had canonised or beatified almost 300 people as of 1997, he had elevated no woman who wasn’t a virgin.)[26]
Luther was not naïve in this matter. Always looking to Scripture, he knew Jesus to have said (Matt. 19) that some men are born eunuchs; some become eunuchs for the kingdom of God, and some become eunuchs thanks to the violence of other men. Roughly, then, there are people who, for many different reasons (not least psychological difficulties) are incapable of sustaining a lifelong union; in addition, there are those who forgo marriage because of a vocation to celibacy; and there are those who, through sheer misfortune, are denied the opportunity to marry. None of this, however, undoes God’s mandate to marry following God’s pronouncement that it isn’t good to be alone. And needless to say, Luther, as Hebraist, was aware that marriage is the commonest metaphor everywhere in Scripture for God’s covenant relationship with his people. This fact alone guarantees that marriage ought never be slighted.
Luther exemplified his high view of marriage in his love for his wife, Katharina von Bora. She had been assigned to a convent at age six. Having appropriated Luther’s understanding of the gospel as she matured, she had somehow conveyed word to Leonhard Koppe, a fish merchant, that she and others wanted to embrace the Reformation understanding of faith and life. In 1523 Koppe extricated twelve nuns from the convent in herring barrels. (This feat too required enormous courage. In Catholic Saxony, one year later, a man was beheaded for helping a nun escape.)[27] In 1525 Luther married Katharina. Together they had six children, and until he died he loved her in exemplary fashion. Listen to Luther extol his beloved Katie in his 1531 sermon On the Estate of Marriage:
God’s word is actually inscribed on one’s spouse. When a man looks at his wife as if she were the only woman on earth, and when a woman looks at her husband as if he were the only man on earth; yes, if…not even the sun itself sparkles any more brightly and lights up your eyes more than your own husband or wife, then right there you are face to face with God speaking.[28]
Luther delighted in his Katie as he delighted in nothing and no one else. He regarded husband and wife as God’s gift to each other. And because the clergy and laity alike were God’s people without spiritual distinction, the clergy should cherish the same gift – marriage – and thank God for it.
Brother Martin had no idea, in 1517, that his Ninety-Five Theses would precipitate an earthquake. His reading of Scripture, however, reminded him that when God spoke at Sinai, God’s voice shook the earth (Heb.12:28). And his reading of Scripture confirmed every day his conviction that when the gospel is announced, Jesus Christ acts and speaks, once more shaking the earth – and all of this for the sake of that kingdom, Luther grasped with iron fast certainty, which cannot be shaken (Heb. 12:28).
Luther’s favourite Psalm was 118. “Although the entire psalter and all of holy scripture are dear to me as my only comfort and source of life,” revelled Luther, “I fell in love especially with this psalm. Therefore I call it my own….Here you see how the right hand of God mightily lifts the heart and comforts it in the midst of death….Is not this astounding? The dying live; the suffering rejoice; the fallen rise; the disgraced are honored.”[29] It was crucial that the disgraced be honoured, for whereas Luther the brash monk had earlier boasted “We considered ourselves holy from head to toe,” the older Luther, only eighteen months from death, wrote his friend, Georg Spalatin, “Now join with us prodigious and hardened sinners lest you diminish Christ for us….You can be a bogus sinner and have Christ for a fictitious savior. Instead, get used to the fact that Christ is a genuine savior and that you are a real sinner.”[30]
While Luther maintained Psalm 118 to be his favourite, his most frequently cited was Psalm 50:15: “Call upon me in the day of trouble” (says the Lord); “I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” Luther, in trouble from the moment he was pronounced an outlaw (1521) until he died 25 years later, had called upon God relentlessly. Was he delivered? Certainly he believed he was. Did he glorify God? His theological legacy – 450 treatises, 3000 printed sermons, 2600 extant letters – is largely a paean of praise to God.
Two weeks before his death (18th February 1546) Luther, now in Eisleben, learned that his wife Katharina, minding children in Wittenberg, was anxious concerning his illness. He wrote her telling her that her anxieties for him were groundless: “I have a caretaker who is better than you and all the angels; he lies in the cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom, and yet, nevertheless, he sits at the right hand of God, the Father almighty. Therefore, be at peace.”[31]
You have a caretaker, and I have a caretaker, who lies in a cradle and rests on a virgin’s bosom even as he sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty. Therefore you and I may, and must, be at peace.
The Reverend Dr Victor A. Shepherd
[1] LW 34: 337.
[2] WA 17:1, 309. Quoted in Hendrix, 27.
[3] LW 11: 51. Hendrix 70. Emphasis added.
[4] LW 4: 34. Hendrix 169.
[5] WA 40: III, 352-353.
[6] WA 39: I, 205. Sine hoc articulo mundus est plane mors et tenebrae.
[7] R.A. Mynors, et al., eds. The Correspondence of Erasmus. 12 Vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974-2003. EP 218 quoted in Pettegree, Brand Luther, 231.
[8] WABr II: 387-9. In Pettegree 231.
[9] LW 54: 81. In Hendrix 171.
[10] Hendrix, 58.
[11] Hendrix, 136.
[12] LW 48:46. Hendrix 55.
[13] LW 48: 215. Hendrix 113.
[14] Pettegree, Brand Luther, 61.
[15] In addition to sending a copy of the Ninety-Five Theses and an accompanying letter, Letter of Martin Luther to Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz (LW 48:43-49) Luther also subsequently preached and published in German his sermon, A Sermon on Indulgences and Grace (WA 1:239-46.
[16] See Timothy J. Wengert, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, ix.
[17] Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology, 101.
[18] Hendrix, 57.
[19] Pettegree, Brand Luther, 61.
[20] LW 48: 44.
[21] WA 1:239-46.
[22] For an English version, see Johann Tetzel’s Rebuttal against Luther’s Sermon Indulgences and Grace, trans. Dewey Weiss Kramer (Atlanta: Pitts Theology Library, 2012).
[23] Hendrix, 67.
[24] For an amplification of this matter see Victor Shepherd, Interpreting Martin Luther: An Introduction to his Life and Thought, 301; and Steven Ozment, Protestants, 152-3.
[25] LW 54: 357.
[26] John Kent, Wesley and the Wesleyans, 106-7.
[27] Hendrix, 136.
[28] LW 51:17-42.
[29] LW 14: 45; 14, 86.
[30] WABr 10: 639.
[31] Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: The Preservation of the Church – 1532-1546, 373.
Martin Luther on Reformation Sunday
A
[1] Who is the best English hymnwriter? Surely everyone is going to shout, “Charles Wesley”. Who is the best liturgist? Anglicans and non-Anglicans agree it’s Thomas Cranmer. The most perceptive Bible translator? – William Tyndale. The most able catechists in English Christendom are the Westminster divines, while the finest preacher is deemed to be Hugh Latimer.
Imagine all these gifted people, gifted with diverse talents, gathered up and concentrated in one individual. What it took a dozen Englishmen two hundred years to accomplish, Martin Luther did in twenty. Luther is prodigious.
Did it all begin on Nov. 9, 1483 when Luther was born? Not exactly. It began thirty years later when Luther, tormented by uncertainty concerning his standing as unholy sinner before holy God, ransacked Scripture yet again but this time found lighting up for him the life-giving theme of the righteousness of God.
Up to this point Luther had always understood the righteousness of God as a quality in God that merely highlights the unrighteousness of the sinner. In other words, the righteousness of God, a righteousness that God possesses in himself, can only be bad news: God’s righteousness exposes and condemns the sinner’s unrighteousness.
Now, however, Luther saw with Spirit-given Kingdom-sightedness that the righteousness of God is that act of God whereby God renders his people rightly related to him; that is, the righteousness of God is that act of God whereby God turns capsized relationships right-side up. In the same way, the power of God isn’t a quality that God possesses so as to render human capacity insignificant. The power of God, rather, is that act of God whereby God empowers his people. The wisdom of God is that act of God whereby God renders his people wise.
Up to this point Luther had looked upon human righteousness as active; it was a righteousness we were supposed to achieve or acquire by extraordinary feats of so-called sanctity, religious observances, pilgrimages, fasts and flagellations; supposed to achieve or acquire, that is, but weren’t able to.
Now, however, Luther discerned and ever after spoke not of an active righteousness whereby we come to merit our standing with God; instead he now spoke characteristically of a passive righteousness that was passive only in the sense that our righted relationship with God is God’s gift, a gift that we can never fashion or forge or achieve, yet may and must receive. This gift has already been fashioned for us by the One whose cross has borne our sin and borne it away. The believer’s righteousness is passive in the sense (only in the sense) that the hymnwriter captured centuries later, “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling.”
In his fresh appropriation of Scripture Luther grasped that what he could never achieve had been given him; the acquittal a guilty person could never earn, someone else had won for him; the pardon a condemned rebel would never deserve, the sin-bearing Lord had pronounced upon him. In short, a clemency that remained out of reach was his, thanks to crucified arms that embraced him so as never to let him go.
Luther gloried in the truth and reality of the greatest gift imaginable; namely a righted relationship with God. He gloried in it and glowed with it every time he spoke of it.
[2] Listen to Luther himself as he traces for us the path whereby he came to glow:
“Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction….Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul…most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.
At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, ‘In it [i.e., the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live’. There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous [person] lives by a gift of God, namely, by faith….There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me….And I extolled my sweetest word [‘the righteousness of God’] with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word ‘righteousness of God.’ Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.”
[3] The “place in Paul” was Romans 1:17. For the rest of his life Luther would return to the epistles, chiefly Romans and Galatians, whenever he needed to revisit the gospel of right-relatedness with God by faith, the good news that God, thanks to his cross-wrought mercy, puts in the right with himself those who through their disobedience and defiance are currently in the wrong before him.
Specifically, Luther found Paul’s epistle to the Galatians the clearest, ‘impossible-to-miss’ declaration of the gospel. Luther wrote a commentary on Galatians in 1519, and another one, much expanded, in 1535. He used to refer to Galatians as his ‘Katie von Bora’. Katarina von Bora, everyone knows, was Luther’s wife (with whom he remained ardently in love); by naming Galatians as ‘my Katie’ he meant that whenever he needed invigoration, comfort, consolation, encouragement, not least correction, he knew where to go.
Luther relished Romans and Galatians inasmuch as there he found the epicentre of the gospel stated clearly and compellingly. For this reason, these two Pauline epistles would correct aberrant readings of Scripture elsewhere.
Luther couldn’t have known, of course, that the gospel of Romans would give rise to 80 commentaries on Romans alone, written by scores of thinkers, in the 16th century. He couldn’t have known that Romans would undergird the Evangelical Awakening in the 18th century. He couldn’t have known that Romans would undergird Karl Barth’s theological bombshell in the 20th century. But he wouldn’t have been surprised to see it happen. And he would have known why.
While Luther would extol the gospel of God’s grace for the rest of his life, a gospel unmistakeably delineated in Romans and Galatians, he didn’t come upon it there for the first time. He came upon it first in the Older Testament. To be sure, the Older testament doesn’t use the vocabulary of Romans/Galatians, but certainly the Older Testament speaks of the God whose mercy visits mercy upon those whose predicament before him is otherwise hopeless, and who thereby gives them a standing and a recognition – ‘you are my daughter, my son, with whom I am now pleased’ – they could never merit or achieve. Luther found the gospel throughout the Older Testament, but especially in Deuteronomy, the second half of Isaiah, and the Psalms.
[4] Plainly Luther exulted in the good news of God’s righting sinners with himself through faith in the crucified; plainly Luther exulted in this inasmuch as he was preoccupied with being in the right with God. Why was he preoccupied? Was he neurotically anxious over an insignificant matter? Was he obsessing over something inconsequential?
Luther was oceans deeper than this. He was aware that God is not to be trifled with. He knew that the sinner’s predicament before God is perilous. When I was on my way to my doctorate (University of Toronto) I had to appear before Prof. Jakob Jocz, Wycliffe College, for an oral examination. When the examination had concluded, Prof. Jocz, a Christian from eastern Europe who had witnessed unspeakable suffering and who was as deep as a well; Jocz said to me, “Mr. Shepherd, your grasp of the gospel is remarkable. Always remember that people never get the gospel; they never get the gospel until they understand that God is properly angry with the sinner.”
Luther knew as much. Luther knew that our defiant disobedience principally does three things to God: it breaks God’s heart, it provokes God’s anger, and it arouses God’s disgust.
Scripture, particularly the Older Testament, speaks again and again of God’s heartbreak at the recalcitrance of his people. (All we need do here is read the book of the prophet Hosea.) As for God’s anger, it too is found on every page of Scripture, not least in the gospel accounts of the public ministry of Jesus, where Jesus ‘boils over’ every day, it appears. As for God’s disgust, Scripture reminds us that we are repulsive to God; we are a stench in the nostrils of God. Over and over Scripture uses the language of ‘defile’ and ‘defilement’. Sinners are defiled people whose defilement God finds obnoxious.
How obnoxious? What’s the most repulsive thing you can imagine? (Don’t tell me!) Luther, whose imagination never lacked vividness, lived in an era that hadn’t yet seen a flush-toilet. Luther’s vocabulary with respect to repulsiveness – I think I should say no more lest I empty this room and spoil your lunch.)
[5] Let’s shift gears and think about Christmas. Every year in the Christmas season Luther capered and cavorted, laughed and leapt like children so very excited on Christmas Eve that they are beside themselves. Why was Luther near-delirious with joy over Christmas? He was ‘over the moon’ because he couldn’t thank God enough for the Christmas gift. The gift, of course, is Christ Jesus our Lord, given to us as the Saviour we need as we need nothing else.
Luther knew that when God looks out over the entire human creation, God can’t find one human being, not one, who renders him the glad and grateful, cheerful obedience God expects from the people he has created. Whereupon God says to himself, “If I’m going to find even one human being who renders me such cheerful obedience, I shall have to provide that human being myself in the person of my Son”. And so we have Christmas, where God in his mercy provides the human covenant-partner of God who remains rightly related to his Father in life and in death.
Luther knew that because Jesus of Nazareth is the one whose entire life and death are unbroken obedience, then insofar as we cling to the Nazarene in faith we are bound so closely to him that when the Father sees the Son with whom he is ever pleased he sees you and me included in the Son: we too, clinging to this one in faith, are declared – effectually declared – to be rightly related to the Father.
Luther knew, in the second place, that when sinners provoke God’s just judgement upon them, God’s judgement is just and there is nothing sinners can do to relieve themselves of it. Yet the breathtaking news of Christmas is that in the Son whom God has brought forth in our midst: in him, on Good Friday, the just judge visits his judgement on the Son who has identified himself with sinners, even as the just judge, the Father, one with his Son, absorbs his judgement in himself. If the just judge has exercised his judgement upon us only to absorb it in himself, what is left you and me? – mercy, pardon, acquittal, acceptance.
Luther knew, in the third place, that when sinners arouse God’s disgust (God finds sinners loathsome), the good news of Christmas is that the one crucified between two terrorists at the city garbage dump has soaked up the stench we are with the result that those who cling to him in faith are now rendered the fragrance, the perfume, of Christ (as the apostle Paul speaks of Christians in 2nd Corinthians).
Luther ‘lit up’ over Christmas just because he knew that in the Bethlehem gift the obedience we are expected to render but don’t; in this one such obedience has been rendered on our behalf. The anger we have provoked has been borne for us and borne away. The disgust we arouse has been soaked up by the one who leaves us smelling like roses. (Don’t we speak, at Christmas, of the ‘rose of Sharon’?)
All Luther wants to do is thank God for this gift and cling so very tightly to this gift in faith so as to be identified with him forever.
For Luther, then, the Christmas child is our salvation. In him we enjoy the same relationship with our Father that he, the Son, enjoys with his Father; namely, we, now rightly related to God, are that child of God with whom the Father is ever pleased.
At this point Luther knew himself a free man; a free man because freed by God’s gospel.
B
Yet Luther knew that those who have been freed for God have been freed not only for the praise of God but freed also for the service of the neighbour.
In 1520 Luther published a tract that has turned out to be the best-known of all his writings. The tract is labelled Christian Freedom.
Not only is this tract moving on account of its understanding and expression; it is also comprehensive in its discussion as few other tracts are. Luther himself wrote of it, “Unless I am mistaken… it contains the whole of the Christian life in a brief form.”
Before we probe Luther’s tract we must be sure we understand ‘freedom’ in conformity to Scripture. In popular parlance, freedom is the capacity to choose among alternatives. A child at an ice-cream counter is said to be free to choose vanilla or strawberry or pistachio. Such ‘freedom’ (so-called) is nothing more than indeterminism; that is, the child hasn’t been coerced, outwardly or inwardly, to choose one flavour over another.
Yet when Paul reminds the Christians in Galatia, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal.5:1), he cannot mean that Christ has set us free so that we may choose to obey Christ or disobey him. (Such freedom, so-called, is nothing less than the bondage of sin.) The apostle can only mean that Christ has set us free to obey him – and this only. In other words, freedom is having Jesus Christ remove all impediments to our obeying him; to say the same thing differently, freedom is the absence of any impediment to acting in accord – and only in accord – with one’s true nature.
Imagine a derailing switch placed upon railway tracks. The train is impeded from travelling along the rails. When the switch is removed, the train is said to be free to run along the rails. If someone asks, “But is the train free to float like a boat?”, the proper reply can only be, “But it isn’t a train’s nature to float like a boat; it’s a train’s nature to run on rails.”
Christ has freed his people to act in accordance with their true nature; namely, a child of God. In other words, Christ simultaneously frees us from all claims upon our faith and obedience that contradict our nature as child of God and frees us for everything that reflects our nature as child of God. It is our nature as child of God to love God and love the neighbour in utter self-abandonment.
Luther succinctly sets out the theme of the tract:
A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.
Expanding on this statement Luther writes,
We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbour. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbour through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbour.
Christians, freed by Christ for their true nature – bound to Christ by faith and bound to the neighbour by love – live henceforth in radical self-forgetfulness. Taken out of themselves, their self-absorption shrivels and their anxiety evaporates. The gospel effects this, and can effect it just because the gospel, as all the Reformers after Luther insisted, isn’t chiefly idea but rather power. The Reformers everywhere reflected Paul’s conviction that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation (Rom. 1:16).
Luther goes on to say that there is only one way of living in Christ by faith. There are, however, three ways of living in the neighbour by love.
[1] We live in the neighbour by love as we share our neighbour’s material scarcity, and do so out of our material abundance, even material superfluity. Luther admits this costs us little. If I have five shirts, giving one to a shirtless neighbour exacts little from me. Luther notes too that when we do this we also gain social recognition (today, we’d say an income tax receipt for ‘gift in kind’).
[2] We live in the neighbour by love, in the second place, as we share the neighbour’s suffering. Luther maintains this is costlier in that proximity to suffering in others engenders suffering in us. Painful though it is, however, we feel good about it; and if we do it well, we are rewarded for it (the Order of Canada or the Lions’ Club Humanitarian Award accorded Mother Teresa).
[3] Finally, says Luther, we live in the neighbour as we share the neighbour’s disgrace, the neighbour’s shame. This is by far the costliest way of living in the neighbour. Here there is no reward; here there is no social recognition. Here, on the other hand, there is nothing but social contempt and ostracism. Here we profoundly know what it is to be ‘numbered among the transgressors’, for was not our Lord before us publicly labelled with a disgrace he didn’t deserve? In concluding his discussion of this matter Luther insists that our service “takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss…. [the Christian] most freely and most willingly spends himself and all that he has” – including his reputation.
Conclusion
Martin Luther on Reformation Sunday: the man from Wittenberg launched a revolution that altered the course of history. Today we have probed only one area of his work, but it’s an area foundational for everything else.
Luther recovered the freedom of the gospel: the freedom that gives penitent sinners the gift of free right-relatedness to God thanks to the crucified Son; and the freedom whereby otherwise self-preoccupied people can forget themselves by abandoning themselves and their fussiness as they live henceforth to assist the neighbour whose need is undeniable and whose suffering is relentless.
Martin Luther happens to be a giant.
Victor Shepherd October 2017
Syllabus
Historical Theology 0536
Department of Theology
Tyndale Seminary
Winter 2005
Wednesdays at 8:30 a.m.
Instructor: Dr. V. Shepherd
416 226 6380 (ext. 6726)
e-mail: victor.shepherd@sympatico.ca
This course endeavours to acquaint students with the development of Christian thought from the post-apostolic period to modernity. As the course progresses students will gain familiarity with the kinds of theological thinking found in different eras; e.g., the patristic, the mediaeval, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the post-Reformation,, the Enlightenment, the modern.
The objectives of the course are
[1] to have students understand the church’s struggle to preserve “the faith once delivered to the saints” throughout the vicissitudes of history;
[2] to have students understand how theology is always written in a context (political, social, philosophical) and is always affected by the context, despite protestations to the contrary;
[3] to acquaint students majoring in church history with theological rigour, and to acquaint students majoring in theology with history’s surge and significance;
[4] to have students appreciate the multi-dimensionality of the gospel as different aspects of the faith are investigated week-by-week;
[5] to promote an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the differing traditions that comprise “the household and family of God”;
[6] to reassure students that Christ’s promise to his church, the community of the faithful, is a promise that he invariably keeps;
[7] to emphasise the truth that a Christian, a congregation, or a denomination that is unaware of the past is like people suffering from amnesia: they are to be pitied and feared, not because they can’t remember details but rather because they can’t be trusted.
Text for the course: Olson, Roger E.; The Story of Christian Theology (IVP, 1999) ISBN:0 8308 1505 8
Readings for the course will be supplied in a “Kinkos” volume.
Requirements for the course are
[1] one essay, approximately 3000 words long (the essay may be written in accordance with the APA style manual.)
[2] a final, end-of-semester examination.
Essay and examination will be weighted equally.
Prerequisite for the course is the successful completion of THEO 0531 and 0532 or Theo 0530
For Seminary regulations pertaining to absenteeism, late work or incomplete work, please see the student handbook.
Schedule
Jan 12 THE NATURE OF AND NEED FOR THEOLOGY
Jan 19 GABRIEL BIEL (348-360)* the nature of justification
a foil for the Reformers
Jan 26 MARTIN LUTHER (375-394) the righteousness of God
theologia crucis
Feb 2 JOHN CALVIN (408-413) a doctrine of scripture
Feb 9 COUNCIL OF TRENT (444-449) the path to the Council of Trent
the shape of tridentine theology
Feb 16 PURITANS (493-509) dispelling the myth
Jonathan Edwards on Religious Affections
Feb 23 JOHN WESLEY (510-517) the nature of Christian perfection
Mar 2 ANABAPTISTS (414-428) the protest of the Radical Reformers
Mar 9 ATHANASIUS (144-172) the cruciality of the homoousion
Mar 16 Reading Week – no class
Mar 23 ANSELM (316-3250 Cur Deus Homo?
Mar 30 AQUINAS (331-347) the refutation of Anselm’s ontological argument
the “five proofs”
analogical predication
Apr 6 SCHLEIERMACHER (538-547) the attempt at accommodating “The Cultured
Despisers of Religion”
Apr 13 KARL BARTH (572-586) the “doctor” of the 20th century church
the relation of gospel and law
Apr 20 Final Examination
* The numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Olson, The Story of Christian Theology.
Supplementary Readings :
Biel Oberman, H.; “The Process of Justification”, Part II, The
Harvest of Mediaeval Theology
Oberman, H.; “‘Iustitia Christi’ and ‘Iustitia Dei’:
Luther and the Scholastic Doctrine of
Justification”, Harvard Theological Review,
Vol. 59 No. 1, Jan. 1966
Luther Luther, M.; The Freedom of the Christian (Man)
Christian Liberty
Althaus, P. The Theology of Martin Luther
Ebeling, G.; Luther
Rupp, G.; Luther’s Progress to the Diet of Worms
Rupp, G,; The Righteousness of God
Calvin Calvin, J.; The Institutes of the Christian Religion,
Bk. IV, Chapt. I, Sects. 1-11, 22 (keys, church)
Calvin, J.; The Institutes of the Christian Religion,
Bk. III, Chapts. XXI – XXIV (predestination)
Calvin, J.; Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God.
George, T.; Calvin and the Church
Milner, B.; Calvin’s Doctrine of the Church
Parker, T.; Calvin (biography)
Wendel, F.; Calvin
Radical Reformers
Williams, G.; The Radical Reformation
Steinmetz, D.; Reformers in the Wings
Council of Trent
Janelle, P.; The Council of Trent
Jedin, E., History of the Council of Trent
Dickens, A.G.; The Counter-Reformation
Puritans
Daniels, B.; Puritans at Play
Packer, J.; A Quest for Godliness
Wesley The Works of John Wesley (Albert Outler, ed., Abingdon)
Vol 1: “Salvation By Faith”
“Scriptural Christianity”
“The Witness of the Spirit” – I
“The Witness of the Spirit” – II
“The Witness of our own Spirit”
Vol. 2: “Christian Perfection”
“Catholic Spirit”
Vol. 3: “The Danger of Riches”
Lindstrom, H.; Wesley and Sanctification
Maddox, R.; Responsible Grace
Williams, C.; John Wesley’s Theology Today
Athanasius Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word of God
Norris, R. (ed.;) Christology of the Later Fathers
(Library of Christian Classics)
Kelly, J.; Early Christian Doctrine
Anselm Anselm, Cur Deus Homo?
Deane, S.; Saint Anselm, Basic Writings
Hopkins, J.; A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm
Aquinas Gilby, T.; St. Thomas Aquinas, Theological Texts
Chesterton, G.; St. Thomas Aquinas
Copleston, F.; Aquinas
Kenny, A.; Thomas Aquinas
Schleiermacher Schleiermacher, G.; The Christian Faith
Schleiermacher, G.; Lectures
Mackintosh, H.; Types of Modern Theology, Chapts. II & III
Barth, K.; Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Chapt. 11
Barth Barth, K.; Dogmatics in Outline
Barth, K.; Evangelical Theology
Barth, K.; The Humanity of God
Bloesch, D.; Jesus is Victor!
Bromiley, G.; An Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth
Torrance , T.; Karl Barth
Liberation Theology
Bonino, M.; Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation
Brown, R.; Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with
Third World Eyes
Gonzalez, C. and G.; Liberation Preaching: The Pulpit
and the Oppressed
Armerding, C. (ed.); Evangelicals and Liberation
Essay Topics
- Justification According to the Council of Trent and the Magisterial Reformation. (You may select
one reformer)
- Luther’s Ecclesiology.
- Luther’s Notion of the Two Kingdoms.
- Luther’s Understanding of the Ordained Ministry.
- The Christology of the Radical Reformers. (You may select one reformer)
- Anabaptists, Zwingli and Calvin on the Lord’s Supper.
- Menno Simons’ Understanding of Baptism.
- Menno Simons and Ignatius Loyola: Divergence and Convergence in their Understanding of the
Christian Life.
- Calvin on the Three Uses of the Law.
10. Calvin’s Understanding of Scripture.
11. A Puritan Understanding of the Believer’s Holiness.
12. A Puritan Theologian on Sanctification.
13. A Comparison with respect to Substance and Mood of Luther’s Small Catechism, Calvin’s Geneva
Catechism, The Heidelberg Catechism, and The Westminster Shorter Catechism.
14. Wesley’s Puritan Inheritance.
15. Wesley’s Understanding of Christian Perfection.
16. The Place of the Doctrine of Prevenient Grace in Wesley’s Theology.
17. Wesley’s Understanding of Regeneration and Assurance.
18. The Doctrine of…(Atonement, for instance) in the Hymns of
Charles Wesley.
19. A Comment on Critique of Selected Doctrine(s) in the Thought of Schleiermacher.
20. Barth’s Assessment of Natural Theology.
21. Barth’s Doctrine of the Word of God.
22. Barth’s Appreciation of the Blumhardts.
23. An Exposition and Critique of Athanasius’s Notion of Recapitulation.
24. Thomas Aquinas on Predestination (or Grace, Faith, etc.).
25. The Scriptural Adequacy of Anselm’s Understanding of the Atonement.
26. Roman Catholicism: A Comparison of the Council of Trent and
Vatican II.
- (Any topic approved by the instructor.)
Supplementary Readings
HISTORICAL THEOLOGY
Supplementary Readings:
Biel Oberman, H.; “The Process of Justification”, Part II, The
Harvest of Mediaeval Theology
Oberman, H.; “‘Iustitia Christi’ and ‘Iustitia Dei’:
Luther and the Scholastic Doctrine of
Justification”, Harvard Theological Review,
Vol. 59 No. 1, Jan. 1966
Luther Luther, M.; The Freedom of the Christian (Man)
or Christian Liberty
Althaus, P. The Theology of Martin Luther
Ebeling, G.; Luther
Rupp, G.; Luther’s Progress to the Diet of Worms
Rupp, G,; The Righteousness of God
Calvin Calvin, J.; The Institutes of the Christian Religion,
Bk. IV, Chapt. I, Sects. 1-11, 22 (keys)
(church)
Calvin, J.; The Institutes of the Christian Religion,
Bk. III, Chapts. XXI – XXIV
(predestination)
Calvin, J.; Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God.
George, T.; Calvin and the Church
Milner, B.; Calvin’s Doctrine of the Church
Parker, T.; Calvin (biography)
Wendel, F.; Calvin
Radical Reformers
Williams, G.; The Radical Reformation
Steinmetz, D.; Reformers in the Wings
Council of Trent
Janelle, P.; The Council of Trent
Jedin, E., History of the Council of Trent
Dickens, A.G.; The Counter-Reformation
Puritans
Daniels, B.; Puritans at Play
Packer, J.; A Quest for Godliness
Wesley The Works of John Wesley (Albert Outler, ed., Abingdon)
Vol 1: “Salvation By Faith”
“Scriptural Christianity”
“The Witness of the Spirit” – I
“The Witness of the Spirit” – II
“The Witness of our own Spirit”
Vol. 2: “Christian Perfection”
“Catholic Spirit”
Vol. 3: “The Danger of Riches”
Lindstrom, H.; Wesley and Sanctification
Maddox, R.; Responsible Grace
Williams, C.; John Wesley’s Theology Today
Athanasius Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word of God
Norris, R. (ed.;) Christology of the Later Fathers
(Library of Christian Classics)
Kelly, J.; Early Christian Doctrine
Anselm Anselm, Cur Deus Homo?
Deane, S.; Saint Anselm, Basic Writings
Hopkins, J.; A Companion to the Study of St. Anselm
Aquinas Gilby, T.; St. Thomas Aquinas, Theological Texts
Chesterton, G.; St. Thomas Aquinas
Copleston, F.; Aquinas
Kenny, A.; Thomas Aquinas
Schleiermacher Schleiermacher, G.; The Christian Faith
Schleiermacher, G.; Lectures
Mackintosh, H.; Types of Modern Theology, Chapts. II & III
Barth, K.; Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Chapt. 11
Barth Barth, K.; Dogmatics in Outline
Barth, K.; Evangelical Theology
Barth, K.; The Humanity of God
Bloesch, D.; Jesus is Victor!
Bromiley, G.; An Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth
Torrance, T.; Karl Barth
Liberation Theology
Bonino, M.; Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation
Brown, R.; Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with
Third World Eyes
Gonzalez, C. and G.; Liberation Preaching: The Pulpit
and the Oppressed
Armerding, C. (ed.); Evangelicals and Liberation
Introductory lecture
Historical Theology
Introductory Lecture
Biblical Theology
-it attempts to grasp the specific “angle of vision” of a biblical writer or school of writers;
ultimately of the testament (newer or older) as a whole, seeing the uniqueness, unity and
comprehensiveness of the biblical witness to God’s self-disclosure and self-bestowal in
Jesus Christ.
-e.g., the theology of Paul, John, “Hebrews”, Jeremiah, Deuteronomist.
-e.g., who is Jesus Christ according to each of the gospel writers?
Systematic Theology
Critical Task:[1]
(a) it examines contemporary beliefs about God in the light of Christian sources, especially
scripture.
(b) it assesses beliefs with respect to their importance.
E.g., (i) dogma — the “building blocks” of the Christian faith, departure from which is apostasy.
(ii) doctrine — what a denomination regards as important and a test of fellowship.
(iii) opinion — something deemed advisable but not essential.
Note: There is no universal categorization. Consider the matter of the Virgin Birth.
Constructive Task:
(a) it attempts to grasp the truth of God whole and apprehend it in its interconnectedness; i.e., it seeks to grasp the unity and the coherence of the truth of God.
(b) it attempts to relate the faith of the church to the contemporary world, in the vocabulary and thought forms of the world.
Here it must carefully distinguish “adapting” from “adopting.”
(c) it attempts to preserve catholicity, catholicity consisting of identity plus universality.
Defining the faith preserves identity; defending the faith preserves universality.
Historical Theology
It presupposes that God has never left himself without witnesses throughout the centuries. Therefore
(a) we must ask how the gospel has been articulated, spoken in the thought-forms of each era in such a way as either to elucidate the gospel or to obscure the gospel.
(b) we must probe the place of tradition.
(c) we must ensure that the dead are allowed to vote.
(d) we must understand that while history doesn’t repeat itself exactly, there are very significant overlaps; e.g., there are no new heresies.
[1] See Olson and Grenz, Who Needs Theology?, pp.68ff.
Why Theology?
WHY THEOLOGY?
The Basis of Theology
-the God about whom theol. speaks discloses himself to us: God acts on our behalf, gives himself to us, and illumines us concerning all that he has done.
-speculation doesn’t yield knowledge of God.
-we do not search for God; we flee him, and know him only as he overtakes us.
-theology is a rational explication of our understanding of the God whom we now know.
Note the nature of biblical “knowing.”
-scripture and HS are the source of our knowing (encountering) God; theol. is the intellectual activity by which truth about God is formulated and its meaning clarified.
Objections to Theology
1] It appears to contradict the immediacy, intimacy, intensity and simplicity of faith.
2] It appears to undercut the urgency of action (we are to be “doers” of the word) in the midst of a world whose suffering is incomprehensible.
3] It appears to be “dogmatic” in the worst sense of the term.
4] It appears fixated on disputes of earlier centuries.
Why Theology is Necessary
1] It forfends amnesia, and all the problems associated with amnesia. (See objection #4.)
It provides the “ballast” in the keel of the good ship “church.”
2] It is necessary in the struggle against false teaching.
3] It provides instruction in faith.
4] It apprehends the totality of the biblical witness.
It apprehends the integration of this totality.
5] It honours the concern for T/truth.
In Short
1] Faith seeks understanding. God is to be loved with the mind.
We cannot commend what we do not understand, however slightly.
2] Faith engages that world which God has refused to abandon. How does the Christian mind relate to philosophy, economics, psychology, ecology, the arts?
3] A church that disdains theology is saying
(i) there is no substance to the gospel
(ii) there is no such thing as T/truth
(iii) intellectual “mush” is God-honouring
(iv) the past cannot inform us at all.
Gabriel Biel
GABRIEL BIEL
? – 1495
– was born at Speyer during the 1st quarter of the 15th century.
– is little-known w.r.t. his childhood, youth, or early adulthood.
– was ordained to the priesthood in 1432 and entered Heidelberg University .
– distinguished himself academically and became an instructor in the faculty of arts.
– did further study in 1442-1443 at the U. of Erfurt (where Luther was later to study. Erfurt was the centre of German Humanism, and both Biel and Luther absorbed little of it.)
– enrolled in 1453 in the faculty of theology at U. of Cologne (21 years after his ordination.)
– immersed himself ( Cologne ) in the Nominalist thought of Occam (as contrasted with the “older” thought of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.)
– was engaged in mid-life chiefly in day-to-day matters of church life.
– was cathedral preacher in Mainz, and at this time associated himself with and thereafter remained a member of the Brethren of the Common Life (BCL: a group that pursued devotional depth — what today we call “spirituality” — and ethical rigour in a communal setting, but found nothing at all disagreeable about the church’s theology.)
– was appointed in 1484 (Luther was born in 1483) professor of theology at the U. of Tuebingen .
– was appointed in 1489 rector of U. of Tueb . (Likely he was 75 years old now.)
– died in 1495, having spent his last years exclusively among the BCL.
– Note: one of his theological “grandsons”, Johann Eck, was Luther’s principal opponent and formidable opponent in disputations atLeipzig (1519), Worms (1521) and Augsburg (1530.)
BIEL ON JUSTIFICATION
Presuppositions: (i) the Nominalist understanding of God: chiefly in terms of will or power.
(ii) the Nominalist understanding of grace: God is able to do anything that is not simply contradictory; e.g., God cannot make a square circle. (This is not “something” that God can’t do; rather, it is by definition a “no-thing”, nonsense. In the same way God cannot annihilate himself, since God exists necessarily.)
Note: (i) the Nom’t und’g of grace begins with philosophical speculation.
(ii) the ” ” of grace is characterized by power.
The Prot. Reformers will have much to say on both points.
God is the source of all power, concerning which there are two kinds:
potentia absoluta: metaphysical freedom to do anything at all that isn’t self-conradictory.
potentia ordinata: a limited capacity, power, or freedom which God has because of God’s
self-limitation.
By PA God has willed to create. (He was under no necessity to create.) But once he has created a finite world, then God is bound ( PO ) by his self-imposed order. If he were to violate this order he would be inconsistent.
E.g., God has willed that pain follow injury ( PO ). There is no metaphysical reason for this; of his own unconstrained will he has willed it. God could have (PA) created the world in any way he wanted, but in fact has created it as we have it. (Note here the Nominalist stress on the “freedom” of God.)
By PO God has imposed upon himself a way or pattern of dealing with us his finite creatures, and (more tellingly) with us his sinfulcreatures. Therefore it is of utmost importance that we recognize his way of dealing with us and conform ourselves to it.
A question that theology has always asked is, “How do sinners get right with the all-holy God?” I.e., how do people who are wrongly related to God come to be rightly related? How are sinners “justified”, set in the right with God?
An Overview of Biel ‘s Understanding of Justification
Biel casts his answer in terms of the respective roles that God and humans play in justification and final glorification.
Our role has to do chiefly with the nature of the human act.
Any human act can be evaluated w.r.t. its bonitas or goodness. (Here “goodness” is a moral category not a theological category. The Reformers will dispute this and insist that “goodness” is the good, the Kingdom of God .)
Upon such an act of bonitas God freely, gratuitously confers dignitas or reward.
God doesn’t have to (PA), but he has willed himself ( PO ) to reward bonitas.
The good act, now elevated to dignitas by grace (of Christ), gives the human agent a claim on salvation.
In other words, a morally good act merits grace by “congruent merit” ( PO ), an instance of God’s mercy. Bonitas, now elevated to dignitas by grace, merits eternal salvation by “condign merit” (PA), an instance of metaphysical necessity.
As already noted, the elevation of bonitas is not strict justice on God’s part, but is rather an instance of God’s generosity.
Once bonitas has been graced and therein elevated to dignitas, however, strict justice applies: God must grant eternal salvation to dignitas(PA) or God contradicts himself, God denies himself — and this is inherently impossible.
The Presuppositions of Biel ‘s Understanding
In a state of nature (i.e., outside the state of grace) humans, trying their utmost, can love God more than anything else. In other words, people can will themselves to love God above all else.
In a state of nature humans have the capacity to choose both good and evil, without which capacity we should cease to be human.
The will (will is this capacity for choice together with the act of choosing) is blind and has to be guided by reason.
Reason is not impaired in the way that will is.
Reason presents the will alternatives for moral action: reason informs the will and advises the will. The will, acting on this information and advice, produces spontaneously (i.e., the will is not moved by anything else) a morally good act (bonitas.)
Yet bonitas, however good, is never good enough to meet the requirements of the holy God.
God gratuitously ( PO ) infuses the act by grace. Grace doesn’t infuse any act, only the morally good act; i.e., grace as seed has to be planted in fertile rather than stony ground. Bonitas alone is such fertile ground.
Plainly, for Biel sin has not made it impossible for humans to act “rightly” without the aid of grace; i.e., the will is not devastated in this regard.
When we fail to act rightly, we fail because of improper cognition (i.e., ignorance): reason did not bring forward the proper object of the will’s willing.
The defect lies not in the will but in reason. Conversely, not the good will but reason (knowledge) is the foundation and root of all virtues.* Therefore the primary task of the church is not to be the herald and “custodian” of God’s grace (God will always add grace to bonitas), but rather to provide people with the proper information about God and the human good, information that assists people in moral improvement. I.e., this information apprises people as to which acts genuinely are bonitas.
How is such information acquired?
(i) partly by a natural knowledge of God and his will;
(ii) partly by a revealed knowledge of God and his will, accepted on the authority of the church or on the authority of a particular preacher.
These two kinds of knowledge together constitute “acquired faith”, acquired faith being the source of all virtue.
Still, as mentioned earlier, these virtues do not meet the requirements of God. For this reason there is always needed grace, the middle term that elevates bon. to dign., at which point the requirements of God are met.
Iustitia (“justice”) is the metaphysical necessity of God’s granting eternal salvation to dignitas. (PA)
It should be noted in Biel ‘s scheme that God graces not only the morally good act but also all aspirations; anyone who tries to be “God’s friend” (a mediaeval term) will find God gracing that effort.
For this notion Biel adduces the following scriptural support:
Zechariah 1:3 — “Return to me, says the Lord of hosts, and I will return to you.”
James 4:8: — “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”
Revelation 3:20 — “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens
the door, I will come in to him and eat with him and he with me.”
( Biel reads all such texts as supporting human initiative w.r.t. our salvation.)
- For Biel , the essence of biblical Christianity is the congruent elevation of moral act or aspiration. God elevates such not from any constraint grounded in his being but from his overflowing kindness (i.e., his will.)
“Doing one’s best” (even if that “best” is highly deficient or defective) is at the same a “begging for mercy”; such importunity the gracious, merciful God never spurns.
Then for Biel justification is [A] by grace alone, since God alone supplies that grace which elevates bonitas to dignitas; [B] by works alone, since we must “do our best.”
The emphasis, of course, always falls on [B]. [A] is the rational, outer structure whose inner content is [B].
The church preaches and teaches [B], leaving God to supply [A]
Humankind’s motivation for moral act/aspiration is twofold: (i) fear of judgement
(ii) hope of salvation.
Biel explicitly rejects justification sola fide (by faith alone) as “an error of carnal and idle men.” To believe that we can be saved sola gratia (by grace alone)is to “scorn God’s justice.” Since genuine love for God is within everyone’s reach even after the fall and in the wake of the fall’s damage to us, it is our responsibility to initiate the process of justification by making that effort which God will then honour and render worthy (meritum de condigno) of eternal salvation.
Despite Biel ‘s reference to grace, grace merely forms the outer structure whose inner content is human achievement; i.e., grace lends our achievement/aspiration salvific force. Put differently, grace makes it possible for us to save ourselves.
Plainly Biel ‘s notion of justification is essentially Pelagian.
The 16th Century Reformers’ Disagreements
1] Outside the state of grace humankind cannot love God at all (never mind love God above all.)
Humans can certainly be religious, but religiosity as such is simply idolatry, a barrier
behind which people flee God in the guise of seeking God.
In the wake of the fall our will is in se curvatus. We are afflicted with “concupiscence”,
rendering ourselves the centre of ourselves and the measure of everyone (-thing) else.
2] Instead of reason guiding the will, the will (the human “heart”) warps reason.
With respect to God, reason is perverted and largely of the order of rationalization.
We can never reason our way to God’s truth or God’s way with us: the cross.
3] While morally good act/aspiration is always possible (even actual), it is neither a sign of grace nor a step toward grace.
Morality is not the vestibule to the kingdom. The harlots and the tax-collectors enter the
kingdom ahead of the morally upright.
In the light of the kingdom (grace), morality has the same significance as religion: an
abomination to God.
4] The entire discussion of condign versus congruent merit contradicts the logic of scripture.
The only “merit” is that of Jesus Christ. His obedience to his Father is imputed to
(reckoned to) those who cling to him in faith.
5] We do not fail to act rightly merely because of improper information/cognition.
The root human problem is not ignorance but perverseness. Humankind wills to
make itself its own lord.
God’s giving us what we want (this is also his curse) — “You shall be as gods, knowing good
and evil” (Genesis 3:5) — means that we extend ourselves into areas of life that God has
marked “off limits”, and so marked for our blessing. No amount of information can overturn
the human predicament. (This is not to denigrate the informational content of the gospel. It is,
however, to deny that even the gospel as information can rectify us.)
People ultimately need not information but deliverance.
Our root problem is not that we are deprived (lacking something) but rather depraved
(perverse.)
6] The primary task of the church is NOT to provide people with proper moral information about
God and goodness (so as left-handedly to foster concupiscence) but
to attest Jesus Christ in the totality of his reality as attested by prophet and apostle,
to embody his truth and reality amidst the world’s life.
Plainly there is a truth-claim to the gospel and therefore a truth-content as well. However, in
articulating the truth of the gospel the Reformers do not provide that vehicle in terms of which
we achieve something meritorious before God. The truth/reality of the gospel isn’t naturally
intelligible, and therefore not the information on the basis of which we initiate the process
of salvation.
7] The grace of Jesus Christ does not pertain (only) to bonitas, thereby elevating it, while the grace of God is that which fashions the overall scheme of salvation.
There is no distinction between the grace of Christ and the grace of God and God himself;
i.e., grace is God himself in his presence and efficacy. Put differently, grace is the effectual
presence of God.
8] Iustitia (justice) is NOT (i) that by which we are measured, an abstract standard or code,
(ii) the metaphysical necessity of God’s rewarding dignitas.
Justice is the same as justification: God’s putting us in the right with himself, and thereby
vindicating himself and his people, relieving the oppressed, clearing the slander of
opprobrium heaped on those deemed “beyond the pale.” (I.e., all that HITZDIQ — the
hiphel of ZADAQ — and DIKAIOUN entail in Isaiah, the psalms, and the NT)
9] “Doing one’s best” is not synonymous with begging for mercy, but is rather disdaining and spurning the mercy that God has wrought in the Son (the cross) and visits upon his people through the Spirit.
The greater the sincerity in moral effort, the stronger the bastion that our pride has built
and to which we point in defiance of Jesus Christ.
10] Fallen humankind does not (because cannot) “unlock the door” to God. Any unlocking is possible only by grace.
The Reformed tradition will invoke here a doctrine of election.
The Wesleyan tradition will invoke here a doctrine of prevenient (pre=before;
venire=to come) grace.
11] In the wake of the fall no one seeks God. We flee God. When we think we are seeking him we are in fact fleeing him. God is “sought” in faith, not in unbelief.
The gospel is the declaration that the God (who never was lost or difficult to locate) has of his
mercy found us. God seeks a rebellious race; that race does not seek him.
12] There is no natural knowledge of God. We pervert the “revelation” found in the creation (e.g., Romans 1) as fast as it is “beamed” upon us. The apprehension of God available through the creation serves only to condemn us.
13] There is no natural knowledge of sin. Since knowledge of sin is a predicate of knowledge of God, and since God is known only in Jesus Christ (this is bedrock for the Reformers), the existence and nature of sin have to be revealed to us.
Only in the presence of Jesus Christ (the cure for sin) is the ailment seen for what it is.
When the psalmist cries, “Against Thee only have I sinned” (Ps. 51:4) he isn’t denying
that sin violates others besides God. He is acknowledging, however, that sin is defined
to be such by reference to God and revealed to be such by God’s self-disclosure in Jesus Christ.
In other words, the revelation of God entails revelation of the nature and disgrace of
humankind. Until we know God (where such knowledge is always participation — by faith — in God’s own life), we can’t know the fact or nature of a defective relationship with God.
For the Reformers, knowledge of sin is always a predicate of grace (knowledge of Christ.)
Where this fact is not recognized, sin will always be misunderstood as immorality or vice
or the violation of taboo. Jesus dies for the ungodly, not for the immoral.
14] “Acquired Faith”, a compend of natural knowledge and revealed knowledge, is wholly wide of the mark.
(i) faith is not knowledge in the sense of information (see #5), even as there is always a cognitive content to faith.
(ii) faith, rather, is fellowship with Jesus Christ. He embraces us by grace, and in the power of his embrace we find ourselves both able to embrace him and eager to embrace him. Faith is always the grace-facilitated response to the action of the person of Christ.
(iii) faith is never acquired in any case but is rather always a gift (exercised.)
15] To affirm that salvation is sola fide is not to scorn God’s justice (i.e., his judgement), but rather to submit to that judgement and receive/affirm the provision of righteousness that the judging/rightwising God has made.
God’s justifying us always includes his judging us. God’s judgement is the converse of his mercy (he bothers to judge us only because he longs to save us) and aims at our restoration. God’s justifying us presupposes his judging us. Then sola fide, an acknowledgement that we can only receive what God has fashioned for us in our need, endorses God’s judgement rather than scorning it.
16] The will is not free to choose but rather is bound.
It isn’t denied that we can choose among creaturely goods; e.g., to eat hotdogs rather than hamburgers, or to study rather than watch TV. But as fallen creatures we can’t “choose” Jesus Christ; i.e., we can’t will ourselves into the righteousness of God. What we most sorely need has to be wrought for us and pressed upon us; it isn’t something that we can choose to effect in ourselves. We can choose (“embrace”) JC only as a result of his having “embraced” us.
17] The distinction between an outer structure of grace and an inner content of (meritorious) work is unbiblical and therefore impermissible.
18] To embrace Jesus Christ in faith and therein become a beneficiary of his righteousness is at the same time to be the beneficiary of God’s; i.e., JUSTIFICATION IN THE PRESENT FORMS THE STABLE BASIS AND NOT THE UNCERTAIN GOAL OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE.
Victor Shepherd January 2000
The Nominalism of Gabriel Biel
The Nominalism of Gabriel Biel
Aquinas is a “realist”, preoccupied with being (being itself), following Aristotle.
God is understood chiefly in terms of being or existence: that which is (necessarily),
the one whose essence is his existence.
Occam is a “nominalist”, preoccupied with willing or power. Less concerned than Aquinas
with metaphysics, he is less concerned with reasoning towards God. Therefore faith isn’t
built on what reason “demonstrates” to be a metaphysical foundation, but rather on what
God has willed.
Result: the scholastic method of relating theology to philosophy (grace perfects nature), is
undercut. Natural theology is devalued.
God’s will determines our faith, not God’s being or our reason.
The command of God is grounded only in the will of God, not in the nature of God
Luther will agree with nominalism’s
(i) denial of natural theology
(ii) denial of the scholastic method of theology
(iii) affirmation of a God whom philosophy can’t control.
Luther will disagree with nominalism’s
(i) insistence that God is to be understood chiefly in terms of power
(ii) insistence that God’s command is rooted only in God’s will.
(The latter notion inevitably causes God(‘s will) to appear arbitrary. Unless God’s will is God’s nature, God’s will has nothing to do with his being; God’s will is the capricious exertion of sheer power.)
Reverend V. Shepherd
Names and Places Associated with Luther
Names and Places Associated with Luther
Places
Erasmus
Melanchthon
Zwingli
Carlstadt
Huss
Staupitz
Frederick (elector)
Wessel
Tetzel
Leo X (pope)
Cajetan
Von Miltitz
Maximilian (emperor)
Charles V (emperor)
Eck
Amsdorf
Von Sickingen
“Junker Georg” (Luther)
Muentzer
Katarina von Bora (Luther’s wife)
Places
Wittenberg
Eisleben
Magdeburg
Leipzig
Eisenach
Erfurt
Mainz
Ingolstadt
Constance
Cologne
Speyer
Marburg
Hesse
Augsburg
Worms
Luther: Outline of Introductory Lecture
Introduction
Background and Youth
The Monk
The Professor
The Indulgence Controversy
The Disputant
The Victor
(The “Jury Recessed”)
Luther’s Theologia Crucis
Luther’s Theologia Crucis
The hidden God is the revealed God
and
The revealed God is the hidden God
The world perceives The truth is
shame glory
weakness strength
folly wisdom
condemnation acquittal
sin righteousness
death life
In order to “benefit” from the gospel (i.e., be a beneficiary of Jesus Christ and all that he has wrought for us) we must “shut our eyes and open our ears.” (Luther)
“The gospel is essentially aural.” (Luther)
The theologia crucis is always to be distinguished from a theologia gloriae.
Theologia gloriae is found
(i) when God is identified with metaphysical speculation
(ii) when the church becomes triumphalistic
(iii) when it is thought that the truth and nature of God can be read off nature
(iv) when it is thought that the truth and nature of God can be read off the face of history, of world-occurrence.
Implicates of a theologia crucis:
(i) the Christian life can never be identified with our evident life, whether public or private.
(ii) the Christian life can never surrender its incognito.
(iii) the hidden life of a Christian is real but isn’t perceived; it is hidden so deeply that it isn’t fully perceived by the Christian herself.
(iv) the Christian necessarily incurs the hostility of the world.
(v) peace is ours through faith as a gift of Christ in the midst of turbulence; to seek the peace (of the world – here Luther includes the peace of religiosity) is to “tempt” God.
(vi) God’s promises are the cause of joy; the Christian’s joy is determined (ultimately) eschatologically.
(vii) in our “trial” (Anfechtung) the Christian must cling to the Word (Jesus Christ).
(viii) the “turning point” in the trial has arrived when faith recognises the trial as an alien work (of God). (God conceals himself under the devil’s hostility.)
(ix) once we have recognised the hidden God in his alien work, we find the revealed God in his proper work, and therein know unspeakable comfort.
(x) the worst kind of trial is to have no trial, for trial keeps faith alive and vibrant.
Calvin on Scripture
Outline of Lecture on Calvin’s Understanding of Scripture
Note: “Holy men of old knew God only by beholding him in his Son as in a mirror….God has never manifested himself to men in any other way than through the Son, that is, his sole wisdom, light and truth.” (Inst. 4.8.5.)
Question 1: What is the relation of the Son to scripture? I.e., how are they both “Word of God”?
Question 2: How are they different?
Lecture
[1] The necessity of scripture for our knowledge of God 1.6.1.—1.6.4.
– the patriarchs didn’t have s. yet knew God
– after them, however, s. is essential to our knowing God
[2] The nature of scripture’s authority 1.7.1.—1.7.3.
– Calvin contradicts the Roman Catholic notion (of that era) that the church confers
authority on scripture. The church recognises the authority of s.
[3] The role of the witness of the Spirit 1.7.4.
– the Holy Spirit (i.e., God himself) persuades us of s.’s authority by first persuading
us of the authority of Jesus Christ.
– apologetic argument or rational “demonstration” does not elicit our recognition
of s.’s authority. To attempt to ground the auth. of s. in rational demonstration
is to “do things backward.”
[4] The conjunction of Word and Spirit 1.9.1—1.9.3.
– what God has joined together the Anabaptists put asunder, with the result that
“Spirit” becomes the source of “fanaticism.”
A Summary of Calvin’s Doctrine of Scripture
1] “Word of God” is prior to scripture. The patriarchs were the beneficiaries of God’s address and truth prior to any inscripturation.
“Word of God” can’t be equated with S., can’t be reduced to S.
Yet after inscripturation any claim for “Word of God” must be tested by S.
With respect to the patriarchs, Calvin makes the following points.
- God imparted himself to individuals in a way that remains mystery.
- The truth of God was “engraved” on their heart — i.e., it was nothing ephemeral, not a momentary “flash”. This is to be contrasted with the “lightning flash” Calvin speaks of (the evidence of God in the creation) whose flash is so brief that no one can take so much as one step before darkness redescends.
- They were convinced of the truth of God; i.e., they were possessed of certainty concerning the truth and assurance concerning their inclusion in it.
- They understood the meaning of God’s revelation/truth. There was no obscurantism here, nothing akin to the mystics’ vagueness or the radicals’ under-cognitive emotionalism.
- They knew God to be the origin of this truth. (i.e., revelation is of God and by God.)
- This truth (“doctrine”) was committed to writing. [NB: for Calvin “doctrine” characteristically means not doctrine buttruth/inscripturated/expounded]
Note: (i) Points B through E operate every time we read S. in faith and the H.S. illumines us and vivifies the text so as to acquaint the reader with theliving person and truth of Jesus Christ, which acquaintance yields certainty of him and his truth as well as assurance of our inclusion in him.
Note: (ii) Point A isn’t necessarily inoperative today, for God remains free to impart himself to anyone in any way under any circumstances, the entire development remaining a mystery to us. At the same time, scripture (or any similar declaration of the gospel), vivified by the Holy Spirit, is thecustomary means whereby we become acquainted with God, and scripture is ever the measure of any claim to have encountered God elsewhere. This is not to deny that the God who visits us in the person of the Mediator is known “immediately” in so far as he is not inferred from scripture.
Point F is inoperative: contemporary inscripturation is not necessary since the apostolic testimony to the singular Word-made-flesh is sufficient.
2] The church does not judge S.; the church is not an authority above S. The church acknowledges that S. whose authority is as self-authenticating as are the colours and shapes and tastes of objects. (To say the same thing at greater length and more nearly in the spirit of Calvin’s fullest theological logic: S. authenticates itself as through it people are brought to faith in the Lord of whom it speaks and he authenticates himself. I.e., as Jesus Christ authenticates himself in the power of the H.S., the book by which we heard of J.C. is authenticated too.)
3] “God in person speaks in it [S.].” We do not deduce, infer or conclude God from the printed page. For the Reformers, as for the prophets before them, the inferred God or the deduced God is always an idol, since the true God speaks and acts “in person”, thus rendering inference or deduction beside the point. An abstract inference is categorically different from encounter with living person.
4] The internal witness of the H.S. is necessary for S. to bespeak the Word of God (=Jesus Christ).
Since faith is the “proper and entire work of the H.S.” (Inst. 4.14.8), therefore the H.S. secures our trust in S. only as it first secures our trust in Christ. Note that the logical order is always from Christ to S., even as the temporal order of our coming to faith is from S. to Christ.
5] Apologetic arguments for S. (i) merely “do things backward” (1.7.4.), (ii) leave us “uninflamed” to obey God (1.7.5.)
6] Word and Spirit, while distinguishable, are never separated (as opposed to the thought of many of the radicals.) This is bedrock for the Reformed Tradition.
7] Jesus Christ is the substance of both testaments. God manifested himself to the patriarchs through the mediator only. (4.8.5.)
8] Remember Spurgeon’s tiger: why argue (apologetically) about the might of the tiger when all you need do is let the tiger out of the cage?
9] ( The final word for all of us) — so glorious is scripture as that by which we are included in Christ and thereafter formed by him that our articulation of the glory of it all can never do justice to it: “words fall far beneath a just explanation of the matter.” (1.7.5.)
The Council of Trent
THE COUNCIL OF TRENT (1545 – 1563)
Note the prominence of the Holy See in view of the non-universality of the council.
-no representatives from the Russian or Ethiopian or
Protestant churches.
-the appeal to the pope in rendering the council’s decrees
operative effectively ended conciliarism.
-papal authority was needed to (i) curb the divisive
tendencies of nationalism
(ii) condemn (erroneous)
Prot. doctrine and reassert Catholic orthodoxy.
– Christian humanists had been the first to recognize the need for thoroughgoing reform in the church. (the papal court denied any such need until the sack of Rome in 1527)
– following this acknowledgement why wasn’t a council called immediately?
Reasons for the delay:
1] the jealousies of rival European sovereigns.
2] each sov. would promise support only if the pope recognized that sovereign’s political claim.
3] the long-standing dispute between the emperor (of the Holy Roman Empire) and the king of France over Milan.
4] the council could be called only during a time of peace.
5] the emperor needed the Lutherans in his fight against the Turks; he didn’t want to incite hostility among the Lutherans; the emperor wanted to settle religious differences with the Lutherans himself.
6] a strong pope was needed to overcome the resistance of the Roman bureaucracy.
7] previous councils had been a moral disgrace. (E.g., the Council of Constance, 1414-1418)
8] the pope saw the council as the sovereigns’ attempt to deprive him of power.
9] Luther had pleaded for a general council; Prots. now insisted on being admitted on equal terms with Catholics; but this would have legitimated the Prot. understanding of the faith.
10] the humanist critique had found the Catholic church without adequate leadership to implement reform; 30-year wait!
11] material difficulties: e.g., old delegates and slow travel.
12] local conditions at Trent.
ATTEMPTS AT REFORM BEFORE THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
Pope Clement VII (1525) had attempted to eliminate abuses —
e.g., (i) all unqualified secular clergy (i.e., parish priests) should be forbidden to serve.
(ii) ordination, of itself, does not guarantee spiritual suitability.
(iii) simony and pluralities should end.
– at the same time individual reform movements were springing up; older forms of monastic discipline were enforced.
One such leader of reform was Giberti, bishop of Verona, a humanist.
– visited entire diocese.
-required priests to reside in the parish.
-insisted on conduct befitting a clergyman.
-imprisoned priests who were fornicating.
-attempted to restore vital parish life and dignified worship.
-founded catechism classes for children.
-obtained permission from Pope Clement VII for the renovation of orders in his diocese.
-established orphanages, homes for the poor and wayward women.
-welcomed to his diocese humanists whom the sack of Rome had dispersed.
(In all of this Giberti anticipated much of Trent.)
ROLE OF POPE PAUL III (elected 1529)
-consolidated Catholic holdings and rallied the people in the wake of the Turks’ enslavement of south Italians.
-recognized that since bishop-delegates needed their sovereign’s permission to attend council, he might as well call it and see who could come.
– resolved to preside over the council himself.
-stipulated that only bishops could vote.
-left the authority of the papal office undisputed (impossible if Prots. had been present.)
ROLE OF CARDINAL CONTARINI
-presided at a pre-council board (Giberti, Caraffa, and Pole, an Englishman, were on it too) whose report (1537) was stark: the fact that the church has ceased to be a spiritual society and has become a venal administration is the root of all its abuses. (e.g., the practice of priests — who had taken a vow of celibacy — bequeathing their benefices to their children, as well as the practice of exempting clergy from criminal charges.)
CANONS AND DECREES OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
1] Dogmatic decrees: they refute the new heresies and uncompromisingly assert Catholic orthodoxy.
2] Disciplinary decrees: they deal with moral abuses and with the proper exercise of parish ministry.
THE THEOLOGY OF TRENT CONCERNING JUSTIFICATION
1] As sinner one cannot bridge the chasm between the sinner and God, but one can “draw nigh” to the chasm; i.e., dispose oneself for justification, through co-operating with the initial help of grace.
2] Justification includes remission of sin and regeneration; (i.e., imputed and imparted righteousness.)
3] Justification is not by faith alone.
4] Assurance arises through special, supernatural illumination (i.e., private revelation.)
Decree of the Council of Trent
Summary of
“Touching the Necessity, Authority, Office of Pastors in the Church,
and the Principal Heads of the Christian Doctrine”
DECREE OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT
Q:1 faith is essential to a knowledge of Christ
Q:2 pastors are essential to the quickening of faith, to acquainting people with “a certain and
direct path to the happiness of heaven”
Q:3 without pastors (teachers) Christians will readily be blown off course
Q:4 the presence of the pastor is the mode of the presence of Jesus Christ; the pastor’s
word is the word of Christ
Q:5 more recently and more specifically, pastors are need to spare Christians the spiritual
disaster of Protestantism
Q:6 the Protestant Reformers have written “voluminous works” [e.g., Calvin’s Institutes,
Melanchthon’s Loci Communes, Luther’s Works] whose heresy is open, blatant, and therefore
less dangerous than their smaller works [confessions, catechisms, pamphlets, letters,
occasional pieces] whose heresy is hidden, subtle, and therefore much more dangerous
Q:7 Trent must address this problem
Q:8 there is needed a practical means of ensuring the transmission of the Catholic faith
Q:9 it is recognized that few parish priests are extraordinarily gifted theologically, and
therefore something besides a learned tome is need to help these men
Q:10 both faith and obedience are to be enjoined, love being the goal of the gospel and the
fulfillment of the law, which faith/obedience/love add up to utter, self-forgetful
self-abandonment to God
Q:11 while the “two ends” of faith and obedience are ever to be kept in view, the pastoral
ministry must accommodate itself to the spiritual condition of the parishioner
Q:12 all necessary doctrines are contained in the Word of God, Scripture and Tradition
the four “heads” of Creed, Sacraments, Ten Commandments and Lord’s Prayer provide
the framework for orienting oneself to the gospel, for understanding scripture, and for
remembering the substance of the faith
(Note: the seven sacraments are baptism, eucharist, penance, confirmation, marriage,
extreme unction, ordination)
Q:13 the four “heads” will ensure that the substance of the biblical text will not be overlooked
in any pastor’s exegesis/sermon
What were the original Puritans like?
WHAT WERE THE ORIGINAL PURITANS LIKE?
(Debunking the Myths)
- They were against sex.
- They were opposed to fun.
- They were sartorially ugly.
- They were opposed to sports and recreation.
- They were money-grubbing workaholics who would do anything to get rich.
- They were philistines with respect to the arts.
- They were excessively emotional and undervalued reason.
- They were chiefly older people and were afflicted with the
conservatism of the elderly.
- They were intolerant toward people who disagreed with them.
10. They were excessively strict.
11. They suppressed normal human feelings in the name of religion.
12. They were self-rejecting, self-loathing.
WHO WERE THE PURITANS?
TRAITS OF PURITANISM
- A gospel-oriented movement.
- A movement which viewed life and history as the theatre of spiritual conflict.
- A reform movement.
- A minority movement (English Puritans).
- A movement in which scripture was central to everything.
DIFFERING EMPHASES IN REFORMATION AND PURITAN THEOLOGY
- The mode of expression:
R: a biblical mode
P: a scholastic mode
- The place of Christology:
R: its theology is more Christological in content and outlook
P: its theology is less Christocentric
- The logic of theology:
R: its theology is less rationalistic
P: its theology is controlled more by a determining concept (e.g., covenant)
- The focus of theology:
R: chiefly the Incarnate Word
P: the details of our sanctification
Jonathan Edwards and Religious Affections
JONATHAN EDWARDS AND RELIGIOUS AFFECTIONS
The revivals of 1734 and 1740 were the immediate context of E’s reflections giving rise to RA. RA is an analysis of the role of experience in Christian life and understanding. The book appeared in 1746, two years after E declared that the revival was over.
E can’t be understood if we espouse a traditional head/heart dualism. E insisted, rather, on a unitary self, e.g., concerning his understanding of “affection.”
[1] Affection is not the same as emotion.
Affection is a felt response to an object called forth by an understanding of the nature of the object. Plainly, where there’s no understanding there can be no affection, regardless of how much emotion is present. (There was no shortage of emotion during the revivals.)
[2] Affections differ from passions.
Passions (a) are inclinations that overpower an individual, thus diminishing self-control
(b) captivate people. To be captive to a passion is to be passive. Such passivity is a denial of the active response-aspect of an affection. Whereas passion enslaves the will, affection is an exercise of the will. An affection is a response of the total self as the nature of something (someone) is apprehended.
In the course of the revivals E met people who admitted that previously they had assented to gospel-truth, but who with a new “sense” born of spiritual understanding could “see” the truth and committed themselves to it (Him). [Note the empiricist/intuitionist vocabulary from the Enlightenment: “sense”, “see”.] These people apprehended the nature of God (gospel), were seized by its truth or “excellency” (a favourite word of E’s), and their conviction generated their commitment.
Note the shift from assensus to fiducia, born of apprehending the nature of God. A “sense” or affection was a concomitant of the apprehension.
Note that for E “affection” includes understanding and will. (Here he differs from the older “faculty” notion that understanding, will and affect are related but distinct.)
E wishes to provide people with criteria for exposing counterfeit piety (bodily contortions or jerks, imaginings or visions as such — what he called “negative signs.”
E sought to identify “enthusiasm (in Wesley’s sense), superstition and intemperate zeal.”
E insisted that experience as such was an insufficient criterion; experience must always be measured by scripture.
In RA E identifies true piety with the fruit of the Spirit or holy affections. Positive religion consists in holy affections; these in turn are a means of “testing the spirits.”
E maintains that love (here he has in mind love for God) is (a) the paramount affection, (b) the fountain of all the affections.
Note E’s subtle discernment: Satan is to be seen in both the revivals and in those who oppose revivals. In the revivals, false affections are the tares among the wheat; in those who oppose revivals there is the denial that affections are essential to the Christian life. In other words, since affect-less Christian life is impossible, affect-less revival is equally impossible.
Note E’s two further qualifications:
(i) the Spirit doesn’t everywhere follow the same order of operations. E.g., it mustn’t be assumed that people must first be terrified to the point of despair before they can embrace JC in faith. (Here E differs from much Puritanism.) In the same way, not all fear of judgement is holy; some is mere self-preservation and therefore a manifestation of selfism. (Wesley made this point in Catholic Spirit.)
(ii) other people cannot judge someone’s spiritual state. We can only assess our own, under the God who alone is the ultimate searcher of the heart.
FIRST SIGN: a new inward perception, a new sense of the heart (lacking in unbelievers.)
Here there is a realm or sphere of affection that is not naturally generated. The holy affection is now the new basis to the understanding and will. Genuine believers are aware of the sphere of the spiritual, of the Divine-human encounter as reality. This new inward perception or sense affects the self as a unity: the new self will manifest itself in all that a person thinks, feels, does.
SECOND SIGN: a pure love for God without any utilitarian consideration.
This affection arises entirely from the perception and contemplation of God’s glory. I.e., believers mature beyond loving God for what he has done for them to loving God for who he is in himself; better, what he does for us is an expression of who he is in himself.
E insists that regardless of what Satan can counterfeit, Satan cannot counterfeit an “intrinsic nature”; i.e., Satan cannot counterfeit the intrinsic nature of God or of a holy love to God. Satan cannot simulate holy love just because he has none.
THIRD SIGN: a sense of, “taste” of, the beauty of God’s holiness.
(E understands God’s holiness as God’s “goodness” or “moral excellency”. Is he right in this?)
Not to apprehend the beauty of God’s holiness is to declare oneself spiritually obtuse.
FOURTH SIGN: gracious affections arise from a spiritually enlightened mind.
Spiritual understanding is a spiritual “sense” that apprehends the nature of God in that the one is now a participant rather than an observer. Because of one’s being a “participant”, such understanding is qualitatively different from all natural knowledge.
Definition of “spiritual understanding”: “a sense of the heart for the supreme beauty and sweetness of the holiness of moral perfection of divine things, as well as the discernment and knowledge of things of religion that depends on and flows from such a sense” — e.g., the person of JC, scripture, obedience, prayer. We can apprehend the nature and significance of these only as we have a heart-sense for God’s holiness. E likens this (in a naturalistic analogy) to someone with a musical ear. Such a person can judge spontaneously without making any deductions or hearing any arguments. Such spontaneous judgement is “taste”, and “taste reacts immediately and anticipates all reflection.” Such taste is “a relish of the heart.” This relish means that spiritual understanding already contains inclination and judgement.
FIFTH SIGN: gracious affections “are associated with historical evidence and true conviction.”
The emphasis here is on the conviction that arises from the apprehension of the excellency of God. Conviction arises from a direct (non-speculative, non-balance of probability) apprehension of truth; i.e., there is a “mystical” immediacy.
E uses “historical” in a peculiar way: he means that conviction doesn’t arise from visions and raptures but rather from the spiritual understanding’s grasping God’s glory in the scriptures; i.e.,, the conviction is internal an intrinsic to the gospel itself.
SIXTH SIGN: gracious affections flow from deep awareness of personal insufficiency.
Here E moves beyond Puritan “legal humbling” (the unbeliever’s self-renunciation arising from one’s inability to keep the Law of God) to “evangelical humbling” (the believer’s “sense” of the majesty and awesomeness of God.)
SEVENTH SIGN: gracious affections change us to be more Christ-like.
E emphasizes change of nature; he does not emphasize identifiable moment of conversion.
This new nature perdures.
The unregenerate may be restrained from (outward) sin; the regenerate is restrained from sin because turned toward a life of holiness. [cf. Thomas Chalmers, “the expulsive power of a new affection.”]
EIGHTH SIGN: gracious affections have Christ-like gentleness.
Here E has in mind not spinelessness but rather the biblical meaning of “boldness: strength exercised through gentleness. (The wild horse now tamed and therefore useful but whose spirit remains unbroken; the victorious general who spares a conquered people.)
E opposed “brutal fierceness”, displayed too often by the “fleshly” people in revivals. Such “brutal fierceness”, said E, is (a) indulgence of our depravity, (b) pride.
Zeal is to be exercised against evil, but never against people.
Fervour is always to manifest itself as fervent love.
“An ugly, selfish, angry and contentious spirit” is no sign of the Spirit.
NINTH SIGN: gracious affections soften the heart in Christian tenderness.
Horror at sin (past and present) is a sign of such tenderness; such horror must never recede.
After conversion one’s sense of guilt may be removed, but one’s sensitivity to sin will be intensified.
Here E, like all spiritual counsellors, distinguishes between servile fear and reverential fear. [Ronald Ward: “If we fear God we shall never have to be afraid of him.”]
TENTH SIGN: gracious affections are consistent and constant.
These gracious affections display “beautiful symmetry and proportion.” I.e., the Christian life is balanced.
Counterfeit graces of hypocrites give rise to a “monstrous disproportion in affections.”
E.g., we are to exemplify both love for God and love for neighbour. Our love for neighbour is to embrace both spiritual concern and material concern.
At the same time E is not suggesting perfectionism: the godliest remain “unsteady”, and ultimately aspire to constancy.
ELEVENTH SIGN: gracious affections intensify spiritual longings.
Ever-increasing spiritual appetite is a sign of true piety.
Believers exemplify a hunger for holiness for its own sake.
TWELFTH SIGN: holy practice.
(E discusses signs 1-11 in 200 pages, the 12th sign in 80 pages.)
(i) the believer’s conduct is always to be governed by Christ’s claim
(ii) holy practice is the Christian’s chief business
(iii) obedience to Christ’s claim betokens the genuineness of conviction.
In other words the chief evidence of grace is holy practice, not vivid inner experiences.
A note of the significance of Athanasius’s statement: “…of one substance with the Father…”
A Note on the Significance of Athanasius’s Statement:
“…of one substance with the Father…”
The Contenders: Bishop Arius (256 — 336)
Bishop Athanasius (296 — 373)
The Arian Heresy:
– there are not three “persons” in the Godhead, co-eternal and co-essential, but one only, the “Father”.
– the Son is only a creature, made out of nothing like all creatures.
– the Son is called “God” only figuratively, only by an extension of language.
– the Son is not Son by nature, but only by adoption: God foresaw his merits.
– the Son’s creatureliness is unique: he is peculiarly associated with the Father, but his nature is not that of the Father.
The apostles attest that Jesus Christ was sent by God, was from God, and is of God the Father. What does this mean?
We must look at two heresies that surfaced in the early church (and have been found in the church ever after.)
EBIONITISM: Jesus Christ is only apparently divine.
DOCETISM: Jesus Christ is only apparently human.
The Ebionites maintained:
– that Jesus is the man chosen for a special divine sonship through the descent of the Holy Spirit upon him at his baptism; i.e., JC is not “begotten” but rather “created”.
– that JC is not God-Incarnate, but rather something closer to a prophet (albeit the supreme prophet) indwelt by the Spirit.
– that there is no internal relation between the Father and the Son, but merely an external, vocational relation that Jesus fulfilled in doing the work of the Messiah.
The Ebionites sought to say how God was in Christ so as to recognize Christ’s uniqueness (according to the church’s understanding), without compromising the transcendence of God.
However, they insisted that JC does not embody in his own person the real person or the saving activity of God among humankind.
Therefore JC is not the focus of faith (as he plainly is in the NT); rather, the focus of faith is that Father to whom Jesus directed us in his teaching. (Jesus ultimately points away from himself to God, never to himself as God — said the Ebionites.)
The Docetists sought to explain how God became man in JC so as to give full weight to his divine reality, yet without compromising the unchangeability of God through union with human flesh.
Result: (i) the human nature and the suffering of Christ were treated as unreal, (ii) the gospel was reduced from the saving word to the merely ideational, (iii) the objective and historical reality of Christ was undermined.
Since docetic christology can never affirm that in JC God has taken upon himself the human consequences of sin and absorbed these into himself so as to effect atonement (i.e., that in Jesus Christ God and man are inseparably united for our salvation), therefore docetic christology always tends toward speculation or mythological constructs projected onto God.
Note: both Ebionite and Docetic christologies posit an antithesis between divine truth and physical (historical) event. (The apostles, on the contrary, insist that “The Word become flesh, full of grace and truth…”.)
– in both Ebionite and Docetic christologies JC is contrasted with God or placed alongside God, and this the NT never does! According to the apostles, Jesus Christ is the effectual presence of God.
Briefly:
– if JC were not God, he couldn’t reveal God to us, for only through God may we know God.
– if JC were not man, he couldn’t be our saviour, for only as one with us is God savingly at work in our actual human existence.
(To say the same thing)
– if JC wasn’t really God then there was no divine reality in anything he said or did.
– if JC wasn’t really man then what God did in him has no saving relevance for human beings.
Arianism contradicts both of these essential poles, and puts forth both Ebionite and Docetic christologies; i.e., JC is neither unambiguously human with our humanity nor unambiguously God with God’s divinity: JC is a sort of “third thing”.
Athanasius, seeing what Arius was expounding, wrote, “begotten of the Father, only begotten, from the substance of the Father…true God of true God, begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father…”. Just to be sure that everyone knew what was meant, the proponents of the “homoousios” (“same substance”) attached a canon to the Nicene Creed: “It is anathema to say (i) `There was when he (the Son) was not.’ (ii) `Before being begotten he was not.’ (iii) `He came into existence out of nothing.’
In other words, the crucial section of the Nicene Creed mirrored the apostles’ insistence that faith in Christ coincides perfectly with faith in God.
Arius had taught:
– because of the uncompromisable transcendence of God, the being of God is unknowable and incommunicable. Therefore there can be no Son who is eternally of the same nature as the Father himself.
– like all things created out of nothing, the being of the Son is different from the being of the Father. Therefore the Father is incomprehensible to the Son, and therefore the Son cannot have or mediate any authentic knowledge of God, since the Son can only know what the Son has a capacity to know.
– while the Son is a creature, he is unlike all other creatures: the Son is neither properly divine nor properly creaturely.
Arius insisted: “JC is a Son of the Father only by an act of the Father’s will.”
Athanasius insisted: “JC is the Son of the Father from his very being, essential nature and reality as God. “God, in that he ever is, ever is the Father of the Son.”
homoousios versus homoiousios
The Greek letter iota — i — is the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet. How important is it? What is the difference between asking someone to run your business and asking her to ruin it?
(“homo” in Greek means “same’; in Latin “homo” means “man”!)
(“ousia” in Greek means “being”.)
(“homoousios” = “of the same being/nature/substance”; “homoiousios” = “of similar being/nature/substance.”)
The question answered by the Nicene Creed (Athanasius): is the Son of the same nature as the Father, or merely like the Father?” Plainly, if only “like”, the next question is “How much like? A little bit like or a lot like?”
To be sure, “homoousios”is not itself a biblical term. Nevertheless, said Athanasius, “It breathes the spirit of scripture.” In other words, what is really important isn’t the actual words of scripture but the meanings which they convey and the realities to which they point.
Because of the truth of “homoousios”, whatever we say of the Father we can say of the Son, except “Father”; and whatever we say of the Son we can say of the Father, except “Son”.
Any detraction from the Son detracts from the Father, since to deny the deity of the Son is to deny that God is eternally and intrinsicallyFather. (I.e., the Father is Father in that he is the eternal Father of the eternal Son, not because he is the Father of believers.)
The “homoousios” was a bulwark against both unitarianism (God is eternally triune) and polytheism (because the Father and the Son have the same nature, the Son isn’t a second deity; and because the Father doesn’t need the world to be Father — or to be love — pagan deities tended to need the world to be who they were.)
The Gospel-Significance of “Homoousios”
The gospel significance of “h.” is highlighted by one question: “What is implied if F. and S. are not of one being?”
(i) God is utterly unknowable, since (said Arius) no creaturely being can mediate knowledge of God. To say the same thing: it then cannot be held that there is oneness between what the gospel presents as the revelation of God and God himself. “Revelation” would be no more than human fantasizing projected onto “God”.
(ii) The gospel is not the self-communication of God, nor the self-bestowal of God. (I.e., God reveals and bestows “something”, but nothimself.)
(iii) In JC God has not condescended to us, and his love (so-called) has stopped short of becoming one with us.
(iv) There is no ontological — and therefore no epistemological — connexion between the love of Jesus and the love of God. The supreme mockery then is that God is said to love us in Jesus, but God is not actually that love in himself. (According to the apostles, to believe in JC is to believe in God himself, not merely in a truth about God.)
There is — or might be — a dark, unknown God behind the back of JC. Athanasius insisted, “The knowledge of the F. through the S., and of the S. from the F., is one and the same.”
(v) The acts of JC are not the acts of God. I.e., if JC is not God, then there is no final authority or validity for anything he said or did for human beings. “No creature can ever be saved by a creature.” (Athanasius)
The giver of grace and the gift of grace are not the same.
(vi) Grace is a created medium between God and man. (In truth, grace is the self-giving of God in the incarnate one, in whom giver and gift are indissolubly one. Otherwise grace is regarded as a detachable quality, a “thing”.)
(vii) On the last day we shall be judged by a God who is arbitrary in that he bears no relation to JC and all that the latter stood for.
(viii) What Jesus does on the cross is simply a judicial transaction that punishes a third party. What Jesus does on the cross is not done by him as representative man, and therefore no provision is made for the humanity of all humankind.
(Athanasius insisted that “The whole Christ (God and man) became a curse for us.” I.e., to save us God cursed our fallen humanity and cursed himself in cursing it. “It was not just a man who suffered and died for us, but the Lord as man; not just the life of a man that was offered to save us, but the life of God as man.” Athanasius’ pithiest statement in this regard was, “Our resurrection is stored up in the cross.”)
Karl Barth maintained that at the time of the Nicene controversy the Athanasian “homoousios” was the most significant theological statement since the apostles.
What do we think? Where is the church today?
In the later 500s Gregory of Nyssa journeyed to Constantinople and found all one hundred congregations there to be Arian. His immediate remark wasn’t a lament or a grumble or a wail; it was, “I have work to do.”
Reverend V. Shepherd
Athanasius and the Council of Nicaea
ATHANASIUS
and
THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA (325)
1] Introduction
2] Athanasius
3] Arius
4] Arianism Influences upon Arius: Philo Judaeus
Plotinus
Gnosticism*
Lucius of Antioch
Paul of Samosata
5] The Cruciality of Athanasius’s Theology
Docetism
Ebionitism
“HOMOOUSION” versus “HOMOIOUSION”
The hermeneutical significance of H.
The evangelical significance of H.
The soteriological significance of H
with respect to the Incarnation,
with respect to the Atonement.
Anselm
CUR DEUS HOMO?
Outline Of Argument
I: The attempt at demonstrating the necessity of the Incarnation
II: Unbelievers’ objections concerning the condescension of God
but: (i) the humility and humiliation of God
magnify God’s grace
(ii) it is appropriate for an act of
disobedience to be put right by an act of supreme obedience
III: The inappropriateness of God’s rescuing humankind through deputing human or angel instead of humbling himself
IV: The three-fold imprisonment from which humankind needs to be redeemed:
(i) the enslavement of sin
(ii) the just anger of God
(iii) the power of the devil over sinners
V: The question of the devil’s rights over humankind
VI: The humility of God and the impassibility of God
VII: The apparent injustice and unreasonableness of God’s delivering up the Just Son
VIII: Sin and satisfaction
IX: The (im)possibility of redressing the disorder with the assistance of angels
X: Satisfaction as both the making good of a failure and the assuaging of affront or insult
XI: God’s resolve to fulfil his purposes for us is not a constraint upon God but rather a self-imposed necessity
XII: The role of recompense in God’s salvation
XIII: The mode of the Incarnation
Intellectual ferment around Anselm
Intellectual Ferment around Anselm (1033-1107)
Islamic:
Al Kindi 800-873
Al Farabi 870-950
Avicenna (Ibn Sind) 980-1037
Avempace 1090?-1138
Averroes (Ibn Rushd) 1128-1198
Christian:
Abelard 1079-1142
Bernard of Clairvaux 1090-1153
Albert the Great 1206-1280 (taught Aquinas)
Bonaventure 1217-1274
Aquinas 1224-1274 (was influenced by Islamic
Aristotelianism)
Jewish:
Isaac Israeli ? -950
Judah Halevi 1080-1140
Abraham Ibn Daud 1110-1180
Moses Maimonides 1135-1204
Questions concerning V. Shepherd’s essay on Friedrich Schleiermacher
QUESTIONS CONCERNING V. SHEPHERD’S ESSAY
ON
FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER
- The historic Protestant churches claim that the theological progenitor after whom they are named (Luther, Calvin, Wesley, etc.) informs them and even characterizes them theologically. Nonetheless, the historic Protestant churches have, since Schleiermacher, been influenced considerably by this thinker and his school.
(a) Can as much be said about the newer, smaller,
denominations?
(a) What evidence is there of S.’s influence in your
denomination?
- How has an undervaluation of the “intense joy
to be found in the love of Jesus” precipitated
the liberalism that historic theology opposes?
- In the Faculty of Theology, University of Halle, S. taught every subject except the older testament.
(a) How did this omission affect S.’s theology?
(b) What results from such an omission?
(the plasticine Jesus)
(Christian antisemitism)
(blindness to history as the theatre of God’s activity)
(privatization of the Kingdom of God)
(undervaluation of the creaturely, the earthly,
the earthy, the human.)
- How are biblical concepts (e.g., “father”, “shepherd”, “king”, etc.) used univocally?
analogically?
(multivocally)?
5. What is the connexion between doctrine and truth?
- Why is the doctrine of the Trinity essential to Christian faith?
- What is the difference between an Economic Trinity and
an Immanent Trinity?
- How should we address “cultured despisers” today?
How are we to “adapt” even as we do not “adopt”?
- What does Kierkegaard mean by “Truth is subjectivity”?
10. What is the difference between our apprehension of God
and our (supposed) comprehension of God?
- What did Kierkegaard mean by “Immediacy is paganism”?
- What is the significance of the doctrine of the Virgin Birth?
- What is the difference between creatureliness and sinfulness?
- What is the most telling flaw in liberal theology?
Karl Barth on Gospel and Law
Karl Barth
on
Gospel and Law
Prefatory Comments
B. reverses the traditional Lutheran order: law and gospel.
For L. the law is the instrument of God’s judgement and issues in our condemnation.
the gospel is the instrument of God’s mercy, the word of reconciliation, and leads
to our salvation.
For L. the law is God’s “strange (alien)” work, while the gospel is God’s “proper” work.
For B., however, there can only one Word of God (or else God is two-headed).
The one Word of God is grace. When grace meets out sin it both judges us and saves us.
The one Word, pure gift, then claims us.
The gospel is therefore the content of the law, and the law is the form of the gospel.
Because the gospel is the substance of the law,
(1) theol’l ethics is not accountable to ethics-in-general
(2) theol’l ethics doesn’t reserve one sphere to itself and assign another to phil’l ethics
(3) theol’l ethics must not coordinate itself with general (i.e., natural law) ethics (as is so much RC thought.)
Barth’s Understanding of the Law of God
The Command as the Claim of God
Its basis: God’s self-giving to us in JC, especially in the cross; i.e., his costly salvage operation.
Its content: our restoration to the divine image.
The basis and content together entail
(a) our accepting this as right,
(b) our admitting that we do not belong to ourselves,
(c) our acknowledging specifically the rightness of God’s mercy and righteousness.
Its form: permission, invitation.
Note: because the gospel is the substance of the law, the command of God imposes obligation without legalism and permission without license.
The Command as the Decision of God
In issuing his command God makes the decision of grace. His decision necessitates ours; i.e., we are responsible (antwoertlich).
The commands of God are always God’s personal address to persons.
The Ten Commandments are first commands, and therefore like electrical cables along which God “transmits” specific, personal claim to individuals.
Karl Barth
KARL BARTH
1886-1968
ORIGINS
By his own admission he was made a theologian through the burden of having of having to preach the Word of God while fearful of preaching a merely human word.
INFLUENCES
He was schooled thoroughly in the tradition of theological liberalism (Schleiermacher, Hegel, Ritschl, Harnack, Troeltsch), and abandoned this tradition upon his disillusionment with it in light of its support of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
EARLY DEVELOPMENTS
-his conviction that God is God;
-the 1919 commentary on Romans:
we mustn’t confuse theology with philosophy or psychology;
” faith with religion;
” righteousness with morality;
” the kingdom of God with culture.
-his appreciation of Kierkegaard.
-the 1921 edition of Romans.
-his appointment to Goettingen (1921), Muenster (1925), Bonn (1930).
LATER DEVELOPMENTS
-1927 Christian Dogmatics;
-1931 book on Anselm’s Fides Quaerens Intellectum;
-1932 Church Dogmatics (not Systematic Theology): it is scriptural, Christological, ecumenical.
-characteristic features of CD:
Barth’s consistent point of departure is the Word of God;
his thought always moves from reality to possibility;
his emphasis on reality gives rise to what has been called his “objectivism”;
related to his emphasis on reality and objectivism is his “actualism”;
Liberation Theology
LIBERATION THEOLOGY
- It appears to be a distortion of the gospel with respect to
salvation
faith
sin
church
scripture
- It is appealing inasmuch as
(i) it takes seriously socio-economic history
and its relation to political history
(ii) it lifts up an aspect of scripture too readily
forgotten
(iii) it is related to life, to people, to the
majority of the world’s people,
rather than to academia
- It followed a theology of hope (Moltmann) — hope for the
entire creation — and borrowed heavily from Marx’s
understanding of human distress
- Its basic premises are
(i) people are economically depressed and therefore
dehumanized
(ii) the gospel (re)humanizes people
(iii) the gospel is this vehicle of economic liberation
(iv) Jesus is the paradigm for and the facilitator of the embodiment of such liberation
Question: How thoroughgoing is Liberation Theology’s Marxism?
- Liberation theology magnifies
(i) Hebrew prophetism
(ii) Hebrew messianism
(iii) the exodus tradition
- In addition to traditional Christian vocabulary (albeit retranslated) there is also a new vocabulary:
“conscientization”
“false consciousness’
“praxis”
Question: Are we aware how violent the world is?
- Lessons to be learned from Liberation Theology
(i) we must attend to those whom scripture defends:
the underprivileged.
(ii) more than “charity” is needed
(iii) we must resist colluding with the principalities and powers, and avoid providing religious sanctions for them.
(iv) the gospel must not be falsely spiritualized
(v) to be a-political is impossible
(vi) no church should be subservient to any political arrangement (i.e., no caesaropapism)
(vii) biblical texts which discomfort should not be ignored
(viii) we must re-think the “marks” of the church
(ix) all Christians are called to self-renunciation
(x) who writes history?
(xi) we defend the faith best by living it consistently
- Questions concerning Liberation Theology
(i) Can the gospel be reduced without remainder to social transformation?
(ii) Can socio-economic transformation, however far- reaching, effect human transformation?
(iii) Is Marxist theory the only instrument of social
analysis?
(iv) To what extent does scripture provide the tools
for social analysis?
(v) Is Liberation Theology free from the ideology of
its own praxis?
(vi) If all human reflection is socio-economically determined, then is not Liberation Theology as well?
(vii) Cannot the living God address us, penetrating our
ideological blindness?
(viii) Does Liberation Theology undervalue the doctrine of
justification?
(ix) Is its understanding of original sin weak?
(x) Does it confuse our attempts at “doing justice” with the Kingdom of God?
(xi) Does it say too little about the corruption of all human hearts?
(xii) Does it dismiss too readily the evangelical thrust for social transmutation?
(xiii) Does it tend to use the bible in a way for which it faults other theologies?
Theological Liberalism
THEOLOGICAL LIBERALISM
Its definition
the world’s self-understanding is the starting point and the controlling principle of the church’s (theology’s) self-understanding.
Its inception
it arose as a reaction to rationalist orthodoxy and gained force in the era of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy.
Its characteristics
1] it attempts to take the modern world seriously.
2] it refuses to accept religious belief on authority alone.
3] it owes much to German Idealist philosophy.
4] it massively (one-sidedly) emphasizes God’s transcendence.
5] it replaces the biblical category of promise/fulfilment with that of evolution.
6] it always tends to fall short of an affirmation of the Incarnation, regarding Jesus chiefly as
moral exemplar or as “master” without being LORD.
Herein it emphasizes the “search for the historical Jesus”, thinking it can uncover a “Jesus”
lying behind the testimony of the apostles.
It emphasizes the Bethlehem-to-Golgotha existence of Jesus, but does so (one-sidedly) in order
to provide a paradigm for our imitatio Christi.
7] it ignores the logic of the Older Testament and instead uses the OT illustratively concerning
a theological position that is arrived at independently. (See attached sheet, (Consequences…)
8] it de-emphasizes the doctrine of Original Sin.
9] it emphasizes the social gospel, and enjoins action in the face of racism, sexism, systemic evil,
exploitation, etc. Here it appears to have some affinities with Liberation Theology, but the
latter is controlled by a Marxist pre-understanding lacking in Liberal Theology.
It affirms historical progress and characteristically speaks of “building the kingdom of God .”
Its vulnerabilities
1] is it naïve with respect to human nature, sin, evil, the “principalities and powers”?
does it confuse the human situation with the human condition (Ellul)?
2] did better biblical scholarship undercut its assumptions?
3] is it one-sided, e.g., with respect to the judgement of God?
4] is it simplistic in its confidence in culture?
5] is it ethically flaccid on account of a theology that is primarily ethical?
The Marks of the Church
The Marks of the Church
For the Protestant Reformers there were two notae or “marks” of the church: the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments.
Hendrikus Berkhof, in his Christian Faith, speaks of the following notae:
(i) instruction (i.e., catechetics)
(ii) the washing
(iii) the sermon
(iv) the discussion
(v) the meal
(vi) the diaconate
(vii) the meeting
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
(viii) office
(ix) church polity (church order)
Berkhof maintains that these lattermost two serve to make the other seven operative. [“Operative”, not “effective”: Jesus Christ alone, in the power of his Spirit, makes (i) through (vii) effective or “effectual”.]
The Consequences of Undervaluing the Older Testament
The Consequences of Undervaluing the Older Testament
1] Jesus becomes a wax figure whom we can mould as we wish. Invariably we end up fashioning him after our image. Consider the assorted “Jesus’s” that have appeared in the 20th century: the Idealist philosopher, the businessman, the existentialist, the liberal humanitarian, the social conservative, the supporter of Nazi ideology.
It is most significant that the only physical description the apostles give us of Jesus is that he was circumcized. I.e., it matters not to our faith what he looked like, but it matters supremely that he is a son of Israel .
2] The gospel becomes ideation, an abstract amateurish philosophy, rather than the power of God unto salvation. ( Rom. 1:16) “The power of God unto salvation” is God himself acting to effect our salvation. The gospel, then, isn’t “news” or a report primarily but rather God himself acting; the gospel as “good news” is news of the event that it is inherently.
3] We become antisemites. The history of the church’s interface with the synagogue is the sorriest chapter in the church’s entire history.
4] We undervalue the people of God and fail to understand the church as the people of God. In the wake of this failure the church is understood principally in terms of the clergy or in terms of an institution.
5] We undervalue history as the theatre of God’s revelation and as the theatre of our discipleship.
6] We undervalue the Fall. The story of the Fall occurs only in the OT. It is a presupposition of everything that follows it in scripture. Insofar as we neglect it we adopt a roseate view of human nature, ourselves, and the world in which the Christian mission unfolds.
7] We substitute the category of religious evolution for the biblical category of God’s promise and its subsequent fulfillment. As a result we adopt North America ‘s myth of progress concerning world-occurrence instead of underlining the patience, faithfulness and undeflectability of God.
In the light of the above-mentioned error we undervalue the need for faithfulness, constancy and consistency in our own discipleship and instead assume that developments in western civilization are co-terminous with the kingdom of God .
8] We fail to grasp the central scriptural motif of holiness, both God’s and ours.
A Note on “Ransom”
A Note on “Ransom”
A wealth of Hebrew understanding pertaining to “redemption” lies behind lutron (“ransom”), a concept deployed by Jesus himself.
Note the three major Hebrew words for “redemption”:
1] pdh (padah)
2] kpr (kippur)
3] g’l (goel)
1: (pdh) Redemption is a mighty act of God bringing deliverance from oppression, as in the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt and the house of bondage, and also as in deliverance from the power of death.
It stresses both a redemption out of the oppression of evil and out of the judgement of God upon it, but with a special emphasis on
(a) the cost of redemption through the substitutionary offering of life,
(b) the dramatic nature of the redeeming act as a sheer intervention (a “rescue mission”) on the part of God in human affairs.
It is an act of redemption from unlawful bondage, stripping the enthraller of usurped authority and vaunted right.
(There is no suggestion of a ransom being paid to someone. This is a secular concept of redemption not found in scripture.)
2: (kpr) This term speaks of the sacrificial aspect of redemption, the sacrifice by which propitiation is effected and the barrier of sin and guilt between God and humankind done away with (expiated.)
God is always the subject first and the object only secondarily (lest it appear that something other than God can avert God’s wrath.)
The emphasis here is atonement as judgement upon the wrong through the offering of life, as well as restoration to favour and holiness before God.
3: (g’l) This term speaks of redemption out of destitution or forfeited rights or bondage, undertaken by an advocate who is related to the person in need either through kinship or covenant love.
Here the focus is on the person of the redeemer, the “goel.” The redeemer claims the cause of the person in need as his own cause.
In the older testament all three overlap. All three are used to speak of the redemption of Israel out of Egypt. All three are also used in Isaiah 40 (the promise of a new exodus when God will redeem his people through his anointed servant, the servant mediating the covenant, being afflicted with the judgements of God, and bearing the iniquities of the people as he is made an offering for sin.) The newer testament doesn’t make systematic use of these three, but they are all taken for granted and woven together in the apostles’ understanding of Jesus Christ.
What do the Protestant Reformers Mean by “Total Depravity”?
What do the Protestant Reformers Mean by “Total Depravity”?
“Total” doesn’t mean “utter.” It doesn’t mean that we are as bad as we can possibly be. The Reformers admit that there is much that fallen humankind can do, and can do superbly well: science, mathematics, government, art, music, painting (“culture” in general), and what Calvin calls “mechanical” arts (i.e., engineering.)
However, “total depravity” does mean
[1] the scope of the fall is total: there is no human undertaking that isn’t fallen, sin-riddled, corrupted.
[2] the penetration of the fall is comprehensive: there is no aspect of the human being (reason, will, affect) that is unaffected and by which we can restore ourselves.
E.g. (i), we can still reason (or else we shouldn’t be human; the structure of reason survives the fall), but now our reason subserves the wrong end or purpose, particularly as we approach the specifically human or divine. Reason now applies itself to aggrandizement of ourselves, or exploitation of others, or the legitimization of unconscious motivation (i.e., rationalization).
E.g. (ii), we can still will (to be without will is to have ceased to be human), and can still will moral good, but we cannot will thegood: the kingdom of God . We cannot will ourselves out of our sinnership, cannot will ourselves into the kingdom. (Note John 3:3: apart from Spirit-regeneration we cannot so much as see the kingdom, much less enter it.) The will is “bound” or “enslaved” (not free) in that it cannot will righteousness. But such bondage is never to be confused with philosophical determinism: the Reformers never say that genuine choice is denied us with respect to creaturely matters.
E.g. (iii), we can still love, but now our affections are misaligned; we love what we ought to hate and hate what we ought to love. At the very least we love the creature above the Creator; our loves are “disordered affections”: lesser loves (legitimate in themselves) usurp our greater love (for God.) In addition our creaturely loves are riddled with self-interest.
[3] No one part of the society can save the rest. The individual cannot save the society as a whole, or the society the individual. Economics cannot put right what sociologists identify as the human problem; neither can sociologists put right what economists identify as the human problem.
While Marx reduces all considerations (Freud’s explanation included) to the dialectical laws of materialism (and one’s place in the economic spectrum), and while Freud reduces all considerations (Marx’s explanation included) to intra-psychic unconscious conflict, the doctrine of Total Depravity exposes both as one-sided and short-sighted.
Note too that culture, however sophisticated (Kulturprotestantismus) is not the kingdom, is not even the vestibule to the kingdom, at the same time that culture remains a creaturely good, albeit fallen.
Wesley insisted that he differed “not a hair’s breadth” from the Reformers on this point.
(Balthasar) A note on reason
A Note on Reason
The distinction between reason (or the rational) and rationalism is crucial.
Rationalism affirms
(i) reason has access to ultimate reality
(ii) ultimate reality is what is naturally intelligible
(iii) reason is the essence of humankind
(iv) reason is unimpaired, or at least so slightly impaired as to be naturally correctable
The Christian faith affirms
(i) faith (i.e., a predicate of grace) has access to ultimate reality (There’s no natural access to ultimate reality.)
(ii) ultimate reality is Spirit or the effectual presence of Jesus Christ
See Balthasar.: “…the word of God is not of this world and hence can never be discovered in
the categories and accepted patterns of human reason.” 61
“I was appointed by God from all eternity to be the recipient of this…eternal
word of love, a word, which, pure grace though it be, is…more rational than
my reason, with the result that this act of obedience in faith is in truth the
most reasonable of acts.” 62
(iii) spirit (i.e., our having been created for relationship with God as the good) is the essence of
humankind
(iv) reason as a source of knowledge of God, of the kingdom of God, of the highest wisdom, has been devastated.
Note the naturalistic criticisms of reason: Freud
Marx
Foucault
postmodernists generally.
Note the theological criticisms of reason:
Paul (“…they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools….” Rom 1:21-22)
(“…the futility of their minds; they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them…..” Eph. 4:18) (Reason is impaired with respect to our life in God [knowledge of God]. This is not to say that reason has become irrational. (This would be a logical contradiction.) Irrationality is the obliteration of reason, not the corruption of reason. There is still an earthly wisdom and an earthly good of which fallen humankind is capable and which we ought not to disdain.)
Jeremiah (“…how long shall your evil thoughts lodge within you?” Jer. 4:14. “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt. Who can understand it?” Jer. 17:9)
How much of the rational is rationalisation? The rationality of rationalisation is perfectly rational; it just happens to serve an unconscious end and provide the legitimisation of that end. In the same way the rationality of psychosis is rational.
Reason still functions adequately, e.g., with respect to mathematics. But as soon as reason is deployed in the service of a natural end beyond the relations of logic, the distortion of reason is evident.
The Christian faith affirms that grace alone (faith) frees reason from reason’s captivity and restores reason’s integrity. For this reason the command of God to love him with our minds is not impossible. Not to love God with our minds is both disobedience and idolatry. Faith is not a species of irrationality. Isaac Watts wrote a textbook on logic that was used for 40 years at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale. Wesley too wrote a text on logic. That which mathematics and science probes is the naturally intelligible.
Pascal: “Reason is never more reasonable than when it acknowledges the limits to reason.”