Furnished with reason that has a heart

In Luther's brilliant exposition of the First Commandment in his Large Catechism he says something rather strange:

it is the trust and faith of the heart alone that make both God and an idol.

Oswald Bayer, in his explanation of Luther's theology of the human being explains where that sort of thinking is coming from:

The human being is animal rationale, habens cor fingens - a being furnished with reason that has a heart, which imagines, makes pictures, invents...There are thus two basic powers that drive the human being - his rational consciousness and his utopian consciousness. The one defines the intellectual interaction with the world of human beings and is primarily oriented toward the present; the other is located in the realm of the imagination, which focuses primarily on the past and the future - interpreting the past and projecting into the future....The power of imagination fabricates images - sketches of goals for life, of happiness, as well as images of fears about disaster. They are all rational remembrances, diagnoses, prognoses, guided by images that the human heart has imagined and produced, by pictures of fear and hope, which once again are grounded in certain experiences.

Luther's definiton of the human being as an animal rationale, habens cor fingens has its theological validity within creation, but is to be understood first of alll...as a theological description of sin.... In an exactly parallel way, Calvin says: "the fantasy of the human being is a factory that works ceaselessly to make idols."

This is correct if the circumstances of the sinful situation are at are at issue. But at the same time, that which identifies what is appropriate to the creation in this formula still remains: even in faith I am cor fingens, in that I praise God by letting God by God, in that I, when I - in spiritual, spirit motivated (Col 3:16) creativity - accord to him what is appropriate to him. The cor fingens is at work even in a poetic song of praise, but in the sense that it offers thanks. Thus Luther's famous phrase fides creatrix divinitatis [faith is the creator of divinity] is to be understood as follows: the faith is the creator of the deity, to be sure, non in persona sua, sed in nobis - not in and of itself, but in us. We make God to be God, that we give him what is due to him; we let God be God.

(pp.174-175, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

Can't say I understand it deeply, or that I know what to make of it. But its interesting.

Theocentric or anthroprocentric?

Reading Tom Torrance is great because he gets how exciting and shocking it is that God became man in Jesus Christ. He has taught me to see that this is central to everything, while never losing what PT Forsyth says is 'the true seat of Incarnation — a Christ made sin' ("Immanence and Incarnation"). This post is a bit of an application of that...

Listening to a recent discussion on Wright and Piper's debate I was reminded about how both see much contemporary Christianity as too anthroprocentric, and not theocentric enough. I've never been completely happy with drawing a sharp distinction between the two as humanity is made in the image of God. Therefore to be truly anthroprocentric is to be theocentric.

But we can go further in rejecting this dichotomy.

Both Wright and Piper are part of the Reformed tradition and so this also reminded me of John Halton's post quoting Herman Bavinck saying that 'the Reformed Christian thinks theologically, the Lutheran anthropologically' (RD 1:177). John says that he would like to say that 'the Lutheran thinks Christologically' and to be Christocentric is to combine the two in the God-man.

In Christ the true God is revealed, but we are less familiar with the idea that he also reveals our true humanity. For some reason we have focused on all the NT statements that Jesus is the image of God (e.g. 2 Corinthians 4:4; Colossians 1:15; Hebrews 1:3, cf. John 1:18; 12:45; 14:9) as just referring to his divinity and missed the implication that this shows his humanity as well.

As Tom Smail comments:

Christ is both the divine prototype that is stamped on to our humanity and so imparts to it the divine image, and is also the human being who has received that image and is the perfect expression of it. In the rest of us, in our over-flexible human nature, that image has been eroded and distorted but in Christ it is fresh and new, authentic and complete.

(p. 59, Like Father, Like Son)

So if we want to be free to be ourself we have to look to Christ. But not by following his example, because we cannot be the image of God, but by being in the image of God by his gracious identification with us in our sinful twisted humanity.

Adam is, as is said in [Romans 5:14], the type of Him who is to come. Man's essential and original nature is to be found, therefore, not in Adam but in Christ. In Adam we can only find it prefigured. Adam can therefore be interpreted only in the light of Christ and not the other way round.

(p. 29, Karl Barth cited in Tom Smail, Like Father, Like Son)

How being creatures gives us dignity

A recent realisation for me has been that the unbridgeable divide between Creator and Created, between God and Human, does not just honour God as God but also gives human beings dignity.

Karl Barth comments:

It is only the heathen gods who envy man. The true God, who is unconditionally the Lord, allows him to be the thing for which He created him. He is far too highly exalted to take it amiss or to prevent it.... There can be no doubt that with an autonomous reality God does give to man and to all His creatures the freedom of individual action

(CD III/3, p. 87, HT Colin Gunton)

The key thing in that quote is that human dignity is a gift. Because it is not ours, then the gift can be a massive as the giver can afford and as permanent as the giver is unchangeable in his attitude towards us.

The dignity of any human being lies in the indissoluble intertwining of element and instituting word. It is attributed to him or her — bestowed, given on loan — by the One who promises and gives himself unconditionally to humankind: namely, God. Thus, my dignity as a human being is attributed to me "without any merit or worthiness on my part". This dignity is at the same time categorically withheld from me and categorically granted to me; it is given to me totally without merit—and precisely because of this, it cannot be taken away from me by any other human.

(p.279, Oswald Bayer, "Self-Creation? On the Dignity of Human Beings" Modern Theology 20:2 April 2004)

Because all that we have is from God he is not going to jealously want back what he has given us. He does not resent our creative activity but encourages us in it.

the figure of Prometheus, who epitomizes the very notion of self-creation, is often played off against the creator-God of the Christian creed. But this is unjust because the "Prometheus" of the young Goethe revolts against a jealous and merciless Zeus and not against the One who—as the Almighty and at the same time Merciful One—grants the dominium terrae to humankind, entrusting them with it, all the while remaining himself free from envy.

(ibid, p. 276)

Because we are "acknowledged as a person prior to invoking any language of merits or qualities" (p. 280) we have dignity whether we are bright or stupid, pretty or ugly, physically strong or weak. This understanding should "utterly revolutionize the bio-ethical debate" (p. 280) but it should also encourage me and enable me to be creative without fear, and love without evaluating the worthiness of those I love.