Pastoral discernment

I heard Mark Mattes say in a talk not long ago that the art of distinguishing law and Gospel is not a matter of syntax but of pastoral discernment.

I experienced that powerfully this week when I shared with a friend Philippians 1:6: "I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ".

It was a verse that had really encouraged me and I hoped would encourage them. They appreciated it, although felt that in my words there was a hint of condemnation for the negative feelings they were experiencing. Fair or not, I knew that they needed to hear the Gospel, but I delivered the wrong goods.

On the other hand sometimes I can fail to realise what goods need to be delivered at all. I can think that someone needs to hear a command when they need to hear a promise. On other occasions I can think someone needs to hear a promise when they need to hear a command.

It is a hard skill, as Oswald Bayer comments:

Luther refers to the discovery of how to make the distinction as a breakthrough...But such freeing does not have the character of an experience that one, as such, can leave behind and that one can keep at the ready and used at will. It remains an art and a skill, a blessing that is experienced when one can distinguish properly in a very tough situation.

(p. 67, Martin Luther's Theology)

There has been a lot of blog discussion recently about the role of the law in sanctification and I have found Dane Ortlund's reflections very, very wise and perceptive. Among them he observes that "ministry context plays a part in how we parse out the gospel [Also] personality--specific, unique, wiring; our own personal bent--plays a role [as] does personal history and background".

Books and blogs loose this pastoral element which is one reason why I am slow to recommend a book that has helped me to a person unless I feel I know them fairly well. One Christian may love a book and another hate it, and that can have nothing to do with its worth.

So I appreciated that when Dave Bish experienced Joe Thorn's book as "more like law" he didn't generalise that to saying that the book was law. To some other people I am sure they will experience it as Gospel.

This is not to say that everything is relative because I do not think words can mean whatever you want them to mean. But if both law and Gospel are personal address then the person being addressed is important as well as the words used. Tone, context and the character of the person speaking are also massively significant.

Luther's Reformation Discovery

Bayer writes of Luther:

His "Reformation discovery" happened in the wake of a deeply profound reflection on the sacrament of penance, which had been required of him by the monstrosity of indulgences. At first, Luther understood the priestly word of absolution: "I absolve you of your sins!" as an activity of declaration, which states something already present. The priest sees the remorse, takes it as a sign of the divine justification - the divine absolution occurring already in the one being absolved but unknown to him - and lets this appear as such. He states it or the assurance of the one being absolved. By this means the word of absolution is understood as a judgment in the sense of a statement.

The result of Luther's Reformation discovery was that language is no longer to be viewed solely as a system of signs "that refer to objects or situations or of signs that express an emotion. In either case the sign is - as a statement or as an expression - not the reality itself. In other words, the linguistic sign is itself the reality; that it represents not an absent but a present reality was Luther's great hermeneutical discover, his 'Reformation Discovery' in the strict sense." It can be classified as a speech act that is an "effective active word that establishes community and therein frees and makes certain. It does what it says. It says what it does."

(p. 152, Mark C. Mattes, The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology)

Faith is the goal and not the condition of the gift

Derrida’s well known thesis that every counter-gift—especially every expected counter-gift—turns a gift into an exchange, and thereby retrospectively annuls it as pure gift. For Paul Gerhardt, as for every Christian and theologian, the Creator, as the unconditioned and unobligated Giver, wills to have a counter-gift, the response of faith. Gerhardt would contest with all his energy the claim that this counter-gift changes the nature of the gift or annuls it. The gift calls for a counter-gift, a response, and empowers the giving of it. This orientation and expectation of the gift cannot and need not be understood as a condition attached to it: it need not be understood as its causa finalis. Goal-directedness is not necessarily a condition.

The question does not arise, then, whether every imaginable counter-gift encroaches upon the character of a pure gift as gift, or even goes so far as to destroy it. It is rather a matter of asking which counter-gift is commensurate and corresponds to the gift in such a way that the latter is comprehended in its essence, apprehended, acknowledged in its truth.

(Oswald Bayer, The Ethics of Gift, LQ Vol XXIV (2010))

What I understand Bayer's laboured prose to be saying is that:

• When we give a gift we expect it to be received (by faith)
• When we call something we give to someone 'a gift' we implicitly call on the recipient to receive it
• Receipt (faith) is the goal of the giving - but it is not a condition attached to the giving
• In fact, by God's grace and power, in the act of giving his Son he also provides the faith which is the goal. In Christ, representing God and Man, is both the giving and the receiving done for us - and that is applied to us by his Spirit which he pours out on us [not all that is in Bayer].
• If we treat it as an exchange our response is not the goal of the gift but means we lose out, the gift is dirtied, and the giver is dishonoured.

As an aside, Derrida's thesis was not well known to me, but his way of thinking is very familiar to me from my heart and the days we live in where we are suspicious of all authority. Perhaps it is a generalisation, but I wonder if Modernists trusted certain classes of people too much, and others too little. But Post-modernists distrust everyone - including God.

In, with, and under the gift the Giver gives himself

Worth the effort of reading carefully...

It is to be emphasized that the triune God not only gives ... "something" but as a "someone" he gives himself. In, with, and under the gift the Giver gives himself and communicates himself with his power. The gift can in no way be isolated from the Giver—that would be a reifying misunderstanding. The Formula of Concord thus rightly rejects the opinion that, "not God himself, but only the gifts of God dwell in believers." The converse is likewise valid: that the Giver may not be isolated from his gift—that would be a personalistic misunderstanding. God does not give himself, without giving something—without giving himself together with our fellow-creatures: "the Father gives us himself with [!] heaven and earth, together [!] with all creatures," [Luther, Confession Concerning Christ's Supper] through which he addresses us; creation is speech and gift to the creature through the creature.

(bold = me, the "[!]" belong to Bayer, p. 456, Oswald Bayer, The Ethics of Gift, LQ Vol XXIV (2010))

God is the Gospel, resurrection is the Gospel and new Creation is the Gospel.

God with the life he brings, together with the church and all creation is the Gospel.

[NB for those readers not up on Lutheran theology, the formula "In, with and under" is Luther's classic way of describing the Christ's presence in the Lord's Supper]

Forcing into a unity

Many arguments about theology, and particularly apologetics seems to be about where we start. For example, when talking about God do we start with the Trinity because the concept 'god' we come with is a Procrustean bed which will prevent us ever having a true understanding of God, or can we start with our flawed concepts and refine and reshape until we get to a correct understanding?

Oswald Bayer summarises the alternative we are often presented with:

Does theology start with a particular concept in order to demonstrate its universality, or does it begin with a general indeterminate concept in order to fill it with a specifically Christian content?

He says both alternatives, epitomised by Barth and Schleiermacher respectively, share in common the belief that there is a unified reality that we can know now. Bayer argues that on the contrary God encounters us now in distinct ways which cannot be overcome except in the Eschaton. He lists these as:

1. "through the opposition of the law that points its accusing finger at me, convicts me of sin, and hands me over to death;"
2. "through the promise of the gospel, in which God himself speaks for me, indeed take my place in Jesus Christ;"
3. "through the assault of God's incomprehensible, crushing hiddenness that radically contradicts the gospel and is more than merely an effect of the law";

As human beings we are constantly trying to create an all-encompassing unity in God, or our theological system, but while this unity must "be believed [it cannot] also be conceived" by the mind.

If we speak of a "unity" in connection with law and gospel, life and death, judgment and grace, it must be clear that this is meant in a strictly eschatological sense"

... of course, where Barth is correct is in recognising that the Eschaton has been brought forward in the person and work of Jesus Christ - so we can look for unity in him, as well as at some indeterminate point in the future.

Glorious isolation?

"We cannot compare the fact of Christ with other facts, nor can we deduce the fact of Christ from our knowledge of other facts... we cannot understand [the fact of Christ] in terms of other facts"

(p.1, TF Torrance, Incarnation)

I think that's half right. We cannot deduce Christ from other facts, but to understand him we do need to compare him with other things.

Theology is not a conversation that faith has with itself, it is not a monologue, but it is a critical engagement with doctrines, ideas, and ideologies inimical to the faith of the church. It only becomes what it is meant to be by engaging with objections and entering into disputes.... faith should be no stranger to conflict and dispute if its charter is: "I am the Lord, your God. You shall have no other gods besides me!"

we cannot examine the claim [of Christ] in isolation but only with reference to other things. Without such points of reference, we cannot even articulate the necessary contradictions. For proof of this, we only have to look at 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16, Romans 1:18-3:20, and Acts 17. Only an a priori Christological construct, divorced from all connections with life and suffering, could exist in glorious isolation because it spins everything out of itself.

(p.187, Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way)

The Triune God as Speech Event

It's quite fashionable to describe the Trinity as a dance. CS Lewis does in Mere Christianity, and Tim Keller picks up on this in The Reason for God (p.215):

When we delight and serve someone else, we enter into a dynamic orbit around him or her, we center on the interests and desires of the other. That creates a dance, particularly if there are three persons, each of whom moves around the other two [...] Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love. the early leaders of the Greek church had a word for this - perichoresis. Notice our word "choreography" within it. It means literally to "dance or flow around"

That's great, I love it. But I'm also slightly disatisfied. Maybe it's because I don't really like dancing, but despite all that is said about other-centredness and movement it feels slightly self-contained and static to me. Perhaps it's because I see the dance as happening somewhere over there, and "Jesus...inviting you into the dance" (p.221, ibid). Instead I should see the dance as "Jesus moving toward us and encircling us with an infinite, self giving love" (ibid) and then it would be better. But usually the "dance of God" is a description of the triune life apart from the salvation of the world, and I'm increasingly convinced that we mustn't talk about the Trinity apart from that.

In Luther's hymn "Dear Christians, one and all rejoice", Luther imagines the triune life of God not as a dance but as a conversation about the salvation of the world. Oswald Bayer comments on this hymn:

If the Trinity is a dialogue, if God, within himself, is communication, relationship, a relational three-ness, then he does not allow himself to be conceptualized in any way as a monad, as a monarchical being or subject. Instead, within himself he is in motion: speaking and hearing, speaking and answering, as Father and Son, to whom the Spirit listens, so that what is heard can be communicated to us [cf. John 16:13]. Thus the entire being of the triune God is a unique communication to me and to all creatures, an event of complete giving and a trustworthy, reliable promise.

(p.341, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

I like that more. Although I must make sure it is not my likes and dislikes driving my theology!

Are we sure assurance should be sought for?

[To S]

Luther's whole theology was driven by the question of how he could be assured of God's favour - how he could know that he was saved. He even defined faith as including assurance of salvation.

Our theology is shaped by the questions we asked. Was that the wrong question for Luther to be asking? Should we expect Christians to be sure of their salvation? Perhaps it is even unhelpful.

In contemporary Evangelicalism you could often assume that good emotions, and positive feelings are the primary purpose of all Christian activities. So we don't even think if there is anything wrong with Luther's question. But it is a question we should ask. Why is assurance of salvation essential to Christian faith?

Off the top of my head I would give two answers:

1. It honours God as truthful. To not be assured of your salvation is to call God a liar, because he promises just that in the Bible, the words of Christians, and the sacraments. "when the soul firmly trusts God's promises, it regards him as truthful and righteous. Nothing more excellent than this can be ascribed to God [this is the] very highest worship of God" (Martin Luther, The Freedom of the Christian).
2. It is the only way anyone will do good works. We will never be motivated to do truly good works by mere command, even less by fear. Unless we are sure that we have all that we need we will look first to shoring up our own salvation, before seeking to serve others. Unless we know for sure that God loves us we will not love him in return. A few quotes:

"For what reason is faith, as trust in God's promise [of our forgiveness], given priority over all works? In what way does it alone make all works good? Because it alone - and thus God alone, who establishes faith - breaks open the nature of the sinner as one curved in on himself; only he can loosen the fist that is clenched so tightly, so that my existence on behalf of others becomes natural once again and takes place with 'passion and love.' The imagery of receiving and passing on to others brings us to the foundational motif of Luther's understanding of God, that of categorical gift: through the Son, God in the Spirit gives himself to us as Father, in every sense of the word, so that we do not hoard and keep for ourselves what is given to us, which is what we do as sinners, but instead pass it on to others" (p. 283, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

"if we recognize the great and precious things which are given us, as Paul says [Rom. 5:5], our hearts will be filled by the Holy Spirit with the love that makes us free, joyful, almighty workers and conquerors over all tribulations, servants of our neighbours, yet lords of all." (pp.304f, Martin Luther, The Freedom of the Christian)

"It is impossible to love God until the forgiveness of sins is first grasped by faith. For the heart that truly believes that God is angry is unable to love God until he is shown to be reconciled. For as long as he terrifies us and appears to be casting us into eternal death, human nature cannot bring itself to love such a wrathful, judging, and punishing God. It is easy for complacent minds to fabricate some foolish dreams about love [...] But in its agony and its battles the conscience experiences the emptiness of such philosophical speculations." (p. 126, Apology of the Augsburg Confession)

The doctrine of the Trinity at the end!

Glen Scrivener recently posted a great post on why when doing theology we should start with the Trinity, not with any general teaching about God. I must admit I've been largely sold on this over the last few years, and found that while people may not practice it, nobody ever seems to disagree with the basic idea that the Trinity is where we should begin.... that was up until very recently, when I came across a confident broadside against it in the most surprising place.

Oswald Bayer notes that starting with the doctrine of the Trinity "is the pattern that is followed by an ever-increasing number of dogmatic theologians throughout the world" (p. 335, Martin Luther's Theology; A Contemporary Interpretation). But this is not something which he approves of. He describes as "one of the grandiose blunders of the more recent history of both philosophy and theology" (p. 339)!

He believes that the doctrine of the Trinity is "properly located neither as a bland addition nor in the middle as just one dogmatic theme among many, but correctly in the middle and correctly at the end" (p.334). The reason for this is that "the triune nature of God can only be comprehended only as an unfolding of the pure gospel" (p.335 - reminds me of the title to Tim Chester's Theology Network, "The good news of the Trinity"). He sees a number of problems if we start the doctrine of the Trinity. E.g:

• "if one proceeds in such a way, one will come dangerously close to... a brand of speculation that ignores time and the situation" (p.335)
• it "ignores or minimizes the problem of unfaith" (p.335)
• it has no place for the sufferer's experience of God as his seeming enemy, or take seriously the "reality of evil".

The basic problem though is that those who want to see the Trinity placed at the beginning see what is first in theology as the most fundamental. They are always concerned that we fit what follows to what comes before, and that much theology has fit the Trinity into the procrustean bed of a Unitarian view of God. However, a Lutheran who believes in law and then Gospel believes that what follows is the more fundamental. The Lutheran believes the good news is a surprise.

Bayer believes that we should begin with "'general' teaching about God", but not because he thinks that the Trinity is subsidiary. He has no love for the God who is not Trinity. "The God who comes to us apart from being the triune God, who is purely and completely love, 'looks on,' and has for us the grimace of the devil" (p.338). General teaching about God, even a monotheistic God, is something that belongs to the non-Christian and will be left behind in eternity.

The distinction between what is involved in the teaching about the Trinity and "general" teaching about God [...] is encountered in faith and in the hope that this distinction will be removed, along with the distinction between law and gospel, in the eschaton. The the triune God - he alone - will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:28). Then we also will no longer be assailed by the oppressive, incomprehensible hiddenness that weighs us down even to the point of our death. It will be consumed by open love which itself cannot be comprehended, which will free us from its power and which comes to us conclusively already now in the gospel.

The end that we believe in and hope for, because of the love that has come to us and has been promised to us - the consummation of the work of creation by the triune God - is misinterpreted with regard to its true character when it is claimed that it exists as a timeless principle of knowledge and existence. Its universality cannot be demonstrated in the abstract, not even with theoretical means linked to the Trinity; one cannot apply its truths to every circumstance one can postulate and treat it as an a priori. (pp.339-340)

Glen and others (hi Glen!) are driven by their conviction that we should start all our thinking about God with the Trinity to argue that the Trinity was fully understood by the OT saints. Hence the regular 'Angel of the Lord' etc debates. But while a Lutheran would admit that the Trinity was seen in the OT, just as the Gospel was preached in the OT, they would also want to retain a distinction because:

just as the chief teaching of the New Testament is really the proclamation of grace and peace through the forgiveness of sins in Christ, so the chief teaching of the Old Testament is really the teaching of the laws, the showing up of sin, and the demanding of good. (Martin Luther, Preface to the Old Testament)

For Oswald Bayer there is always a shape and a story to the Bible and to our lives. He sees those who start with the doctrine of the Trinity as flattening the contours of this story, and so missing out on the depths and the heights of the Bible's message about God.

... I must confess its shook up all my thinking. Who knows how it will all settle again.

[A few asides: (a) it is interesting to note that Karl Barth was led the way in both making the doctrine of the Trinity at the beginning of theology, and in arguing that we should deal with Gospel then law. (b) It is also interesting how those who start with the Trinity always seem (IMHO) to be struggling to not say that creation and redemption were necessary for God. (c) In The Cruciality of the Cross PT Forsyth argues that the Atonement (i.e. the Gospel) drives us to the Incarnation, not the other way round. But it could be equally said of the doctrine of the Trinity. The Gospel drives us to the Trinity from our point of view, even if the Trinity is what leads to the Gospel from God's point of view.]

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.

Natural theology, law and Gospel

Glen has been interacting with some thoughts on truth and goodness in pagan philosophers. I agree with him entirely and he says things much better than I could. I just think he could do with a dash of law and Gospel!

I've talked about this more here and here, where you can see how much I'm relying on Oswald Bayer. I came across another Bayer gem that explains what I mean the other day:

"The effect that the law creates is not surprising. One has no trouble understanding what it means to rely on oneself and on one's own deeds; the action-consequences relationship has its own logic. But the gospel is absolutely, completely incomprehensible. That God rescues one from, and brings one safely through, the deserved judgment is a miracle. Law and gospel cannot be plausibly intertwined together; their existence is hard and fast in opposition to each other. The gospel is literally a paradox; it stands against that which the sinner can reasonably expect; it stands against damnation"

(p.228, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

I think that makes clear how there can be good and true things in what pagan philosophers say (which, Glen, I think you could be clearer on), while also proclaiming the foolishness of the Gospel. They teach the good and true law, but cannot teach the Gospel. They never completely teach the law (that actually can only be done by teaching the cross), but they cannot even partially teach the Gospel. To me that makes sense of Psalm 19, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Job, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 1-3 etc

It also makes sense of my experience. For example, I watch a fair number of films and attempt to do this from a Christian perspective. I tend to feel they are often great at showing our plight, but never offer anything but false solutions.

Now there is an interesting question which I haven't really addressed, and that is where does Christ fit into this? I have talked about law and Gospel and Glen has talked about Christ. Does Christ=the Gospel, which is what Luther and Mark 1:1 (granting my discussion with Chris about different meanings of 'gospel') seem to do? But isn't Christ the one shown to be the one who will judge the world (Acts 17:31), and isn't the cross the ultimate proclamation of the law (as PT Forsyth argues)? Can't Paul even say that 'according to [his] gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus' (Rom 2:16)?

Sorry but I don't have time to pick up those threads!... just thought I'd tease you!

BTW I'm sorry if all I do is talk about Oswald Bayer, Glen Scrivener and law and Gospel at the moment. As you can probably tell by the rushed off nature of this post I'm not getting much time at the moment.

More important than the existence of God?

Glen has a few thoughts on Dawkins.

I read Oswald Bayer last night and he made the rather provocative statement that:

"The question about justification is more important than the question about the existence of God."

(pp. 138f, Martin Luther's Theology)

Put that in your theological pipe and smoke it... as Don Carson might say.

I'm not sure I 100% understand him, but an earlier comment throws some light:

"certainty comes to exist in a concrete way. It takes place through the use of certain performative statements of Christian proclamation of the type used in the promise of the forgiveness of sins. Nothing can be abstracted from this concrete activity to concoct a statement that supposedly has general applicability, that would provide a place of refuge in a phenomenological, religious sense, that would have some overarching validity wherein all religions could find commonality. For Luther it follows that atheism is the high point among religions, which is most clearly seen in the religion of self-actualization, in which the human being seeks to make himself reliant simply on himself. [footnote: "Luther emphasizes this in a clearly blunt manner when he puts the Muslims on the same level with the papacy and the Enthusiasts. He does not distinguish between religions and confessions, but only between true and false faith. Everyone who attempts to justify himself apart from Christ is caught up in unbelief, no matter what form it takes."]"

(p.137, ibid)

The formal and material principles

Philip Schaff defines the formal and material principles of the Reformation thus:

the material of life principle (principium essendi) of the Reformation [...] is no other than the great doctrine, which is presented by Paul especially as the entire sum of the gospel - the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith [...]

the formal or knowledge principle [...] consists in this, that the word of God, as it has been handed down to us in the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments, is the pure and proper source as well as the only certain measure of all saving truth.

(italics original, p.80-98, The Principle of Protestantism)

Martin Luther may be everyone's go-to guy for the material principle, but would we point to the person who called James an 'epistle of straw' as a great exponent of the formal principle? A lot could be written about Luther's doctrine of Scripture, but I think Oswald Bayer gets to the heart of why Luther doesn't fit into the standard neat distinction of formal and material principles. For Luther the 'authority of Scripture is not formal but is highly material and is content driven' (p.69, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation). This means that we don't follow a two step plan to knowing the truth of God:

• Step 1: Establish source of revelation
• Step 2: From that source derive knowledge of God and how we relate to him

This is the way that many Protestant confessions seem to proceed (at least post-Reformation), and it is the way many systematic theologies are organised. Oswald Bayer certainly does not like to do things that way though:

one does not arrive at the solution to the question [of the authority of Scripture] "in the passionless calm of a knowledge which is in the element of pure thought alone" [Hegel]; instead, it includes a change in the existence of the reader and interpreter. The Holy Scripture verifies itself, in that it awakens faith. As has been stated already, it does not work for one to take the so-called scriptural principle and try to differentiate between a "Protestant formal principle" and a "Protestant material principle," which states the teaching about justification; one certainly ought not to treat them as separate. Both are one and the same: wrapped up in the event that takes place when the righteousness of God is actually given as a gift, at the moment the promissio is articulated, one encounters the authority of Scripture, its efficacy and clarity - its ability to enlighten - as well as its sufficiency: its power to bring one to salvation - if indeed Scriputure is given "for the salvation" of human beings (2 Tim. 3:15). The question about the significance of the reformational turning point in Luther's theology and the question about Luther's understanding of biblical authority are the same; they are one and the same question.

(p.75-76, ibid)

I think this is related to what Mike Reeves is getting at when he says when you treat revelation as 'the ladder to get you up into the actual playroom of Christian theology, you tend to treat revelation and scripture in a non-Christian way because it is outside the room' (beginning of talk 2 here). Mike Reeves concern here is with the relation between Christology and revelation, but one thing I have begun to see lately is that Christology, revelation and salvation are all so bound up together that you cannot really separate them without doing some serious harm. John Calvin's Geneva Catechism, 1541, exemplifies that:

1. Minister. What is the chief end of human life?

Child. To know God

[...how do we know?...]

C. By His Word, in which He declares His mercy to us in Christ, and assures us of His love toward us

14. M. Then the foundation for true reliance upon God is to know Him in Jesus Christ (John 17:3)?

C. That is true

(pp.5-7, Trans. and ed. TF Torrance, The School of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church - that is the beginning and end of the introduction section prior to the section on the Apostles Creed)

This may seem to be the height of obscure theological discussion, but if you think that just meditate a while on what this means for how you try and witness to the truth of the Gospel to non-Christians.

Creation without the promise

In what I thought was the most controversial post I have written this year, but that generated no comments, I suggested that without the word of the Gospel creation just communicates the law. I explained that while creation can witness to its creator, it cannot witness to how we are to relate to him (through Christ) and so only condemns. I didn't really explain how if functions as law even if you do not see the witness to God in it. Oswald Bayer describes how:

If the world is not believed as that which is promised, then it will be experienced as a "fearful natural realm" [Arnold Gehlen], as a relentlessly necessary, oppressive law, which says: you must squeeze some sense out of this chaos, this fearful natural realm in all its uncertainty; you have to be in charge of making sense in this and out of this chaotic world; you yourself have to establish its order! If the world is not believed to be that which is promised, then it becomes, as Nietzsche aptly observed, "a thousand deserts, mute and cold." In such muteness and such coldness I experience God's wrath - admittedly so anonymously that I simply cannot even identify it as God's wrath.

(p. 102, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

Justification as Creation; Creation as Justification

I think we have rediscovered in recent years that our salvation is our new creation. We are picking up and emphasising all those NT and Isaianic images of creation when describing our redemption. This is great. Lets celebrate it.

However, somehow in the process there seems to be a desire to shift justification to one side as one metaphor among many. Drawn from the legal context justification can be preferably pushed aside to make way creation which is more fundamental.

Oswald Bayer will not buy into this because to him what God says is fundamental to everything. Justification is what God declares in grace over us, it is also what he declared in grace over the whole of creation.

justification is not simply an isolated topic, next to which other topics can exist; it has essential importance and is connected with every topic. Justification does not affect just my individual life, not even just the history of the world, but impacts the history of nature as well; if affects all things. It is thus not sufficient to speak of the article on justification solely as the articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae - as the article on which the church stands and falls. Instead, the meaning of justification must be taken seriously in its breadth, with ramifications that have application for a theology of creation and for ontology. In a prominent position in the Smalcald Articles Luther says: "One cannot go soft or give way on this article, for then heaven and earth would fall." "Without the article on justification the world is nothing but death and darkness."

(p. 98, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

God's word is 'the creative Word of God that justifies' (p.97, ibid). 'Creation is speech act' (p.103).

I should really comment more but I haven't got time. By the way, I have quoted Oswald Bayer before the fundamental nature of justification before.

A superabundance of positives

My previous post was sparked by this great passage from Oswald Bayer:

When Luther emphasizes that the law, as it functions, is there already, already determining human existence - as sinful existence - he certainly acknowledges thereby that it in fact precedes the gospel, but not that it has ultimate priority over the gospel. The actual superiority of the gospel remains unaffected [...] If the gospel is considered to be nothing other than the defeat of evil and sin, one runs a risk of minimizing the truth about creation. But Luther sees the work of God already in his creation, when he gives gifts without having to, coming solely by the grace of God, and in that sense already "evangelical." As the means for dispensing the new creation, the gospel has a superabundance of positives, nothing like the way it is described when it is understood exclusively in the context of ways to deal with the negative.

In that the law brings an awareness of unbelief, it presumes the existence of faith and the gospel, materially and logically. For unfaith, as a turning toward false gods, does not work death and destruction in and of itself; that happens in, with, and under the turning away from the true, only, good God. Unfaith is sin because of its rejection of the eternal fellowship promised by God. It is due to rebellion against such fellowship, and thus is rebellion against the gospel, if it is correct that the preamble of the Decalogue - God's self-introduction and self-communication - is pure gospel. In the same way the threat of death (Gen. 2:17) can really be understood only in relation to the preceding promise of life and free provision of gifts (Gen. 2:16).

(p.62-63, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

Interesting that he sees the sequence as determined by whether we are thinking in terms of creation and redemption. Interesting also that he describes unbelief in sacramental language (in, with, and under) as communicating death and destruction.

The antinomian-nomistic modern age

This is basically the same point as he makes in a quotation I have previously posted but it is better put so I'll post this quotation as well.

In its universalizing of the gospel, the modern age is antinomian, but at the same time it is increasingly nomistic.

By its very name, which is crafted to characterize its self-understanding, the modern age distinguishes itself as having an "evangelical" character. It conceptualizes itself as a new age that cannot be outdone, standing under the banner of freedom. It is assumed thereby that the law has in principle been vanquished already: the human being is by nature free, good, and spontaneous. In this sense the modern age is antinomian.

But whatever the new human being of the modern age is, that is what he or she must first become. The gospel of freedom, which is universally said to exist, puts the human being under the pressure to redeem himself at the very same time, and calls for him to achieve the potential that is by very nature his already. But if freedom is not promised and imparted, if instead it is characteristic of me from the outset, if I define myself in relation to it, then I am weighted down, in my individual and collective subjectivity, with having to fulfill the promise of what has been provided for me - not freed for freedom but at the same time " to freedom condemned" (Satre). It is not that I am able to be free, but that I have to free myself. Thus the reverse side of antinomism is nomism.

(italics original, pp.65-66, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

I know that I feel the contradiction in the modern age that Bayer describes, and know other people who feel this, particularly in relationship to careers. It is not just non-Christians that are part of this culture.

The pre-modern age was characterised by a lack of freedom, a constraint by a 'law', of being born to do the job your father did. 80 years ago women felt constrained by an expectation that they would not have a career, but would instead be a housewife. The present age promises freedom to be whatever we want to be. But while promising this freedom we are then thrown back on ourselves to embrace this freedom and achieve the maximum possible. What is good news also condemns and oppresses us.

SVNDE VERGYBT

I am beginning to develop a theory that there is a Luther factoid that relates to almost any topic of conversation. My friends are probably starting to get a bit tired of my trying to work out if this theory is borne out in practice.

The latest factoid I have learnt was that 'Luther had only one phrase of the entire German Bible typeset in capital letters: SVNDE VERGJBT (forgives sins) (Rom. 3:25), which he further identified in a marginal gloss as "the chief point" and the "center-point of this epistle and the entire Scripture"' (p.76, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology).

Anyway, this post is to kick off a few more posts on Luther's theology. I know my few readers will probably agree with my friends that I am perhaps a little obsessive, but while I am reading other stuff it is just not quite as interesting to me!

The unfortunate formula

"The external Word - what is meant in the common but unfortunate formula "Word and sacrament" - should really be identified more appropriately as preached Word as sacrament and sacrament as Word"

(p.250, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation)

... I really like Oswald Bayer!

The fate of the Unevangelised

I hesitate to post on this. It is not something you should talk about lightly and without feeling the weight of what you are discussing. We are all aware of it and so usually when Christian's are asked about it they tend to be tentative in their response and emphasize how we don't know the fate of anyone, and it is not our place to judge. Instead we rightly emphasise that we know the one who judges and he is just and merciful and we want to leave it with him.

Nevertheless, I have come to the conclusion that the reason why we have become uncertain about this question is because we have forgotten two points of massive importance. You may want to disagree with the two points I make, but I think it is helpful at least to identify that our response to these two questions determine your answer to a question about the fate of the unevangelised.

1. Creation only communicates the law and not the Gospel

The law is true knowledge of God, and Creation communicates this to us. It presents us with God as he is loving, kind, just and powerful. However, it just presents us with him, and tells us nothing of how we should relate to him - especially as we then look at ourselves. Because of this we create our own ways of relating to him. Our own 'gospels'. We may ignore him because we cannot imagine how we could relate to him. We may bring him close by worshipping created things. We may try and work our way to a place where we can approach him by good works or acts of contemplation. All of these work only by suppressing the knowledge of God that we have through Creation. They work by downplaying the demands of the law, or making them the 'gospel'. Either way we are left without excuse.

Because the distinction between law and Gospel has been forgotten in much contemporary Christianity, we think there is only one kind of knowledge of God. Because of this we merge or confuse law and Gospel and make them both communicated through creation. Therefore the hypothetical unevangelised man alone on an island in the Pacific has the same kind of knowledge as the well-taught Christian in England, just a different amount. In fact there is not just a quantitative difference between the knowledge of God, but a qualitative difference as well.

Classically, when considering the difference between general and special revelation we go to Calvin's Institutes. We would benefit from listening to Luther as well:

Everyone naturally has a general idea that there is a God [...] But someone may object: "If all people know God, why does Paul say that before the proclamation of the gospel the Galatians did not know God?" I reply that there is a twofold knowledge of God [duplex est cognitio Dei], general and particular. All people have the general knowledge, namely that God exists, that he has created heaven and earth, that he is righteous, that he punishes the wicked, etc. But people do not know what God proposes concerning us, what he wants to give and to do, so that he might deliver us from sin and death, and to save us - which is the proper and true knowledge of God [propria et vera est cognitio Dei]. Thus it can happen that someone's face may be familiar to me but I do not really know him, because I do not know his intentions.

(from 1535 Lectures on Galatians, in p.99, The Christian Theology Reader ed by A McGrath)

2. The Holy Spirit can only be received through the specific word of the Gospel

Constantly we are tempted to have the persons of the Trinity acting separately from one another. One way in which we do this is through a concept of a free-floating Spirit who acts apart from the Word - that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Of course all of creation is sustained by God's Word and the action of his Spirit. In that sense the Spirit does operate even where the Gospel is not preached but he does not indwell believers apart from it.

In what way, then, does the Holy Spirit come to us? How and in what way does he impart himself? The Spirit works faith in the human being inwardly, but never apart from means, never without the external "physical Word" [...]

Luther would formulate the central thesis for his understanding of the Holy Spirit as "The Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel." This means: although the Holy Spirit cannot be apprehended, he is not an incomprehensible fluidity, but comes in a clearly specific Word that can be heard [...]

If the Holy Spirit calls only "through the gospel," but the gospel is gospel only as it is distinguished from the law, then the distinction between law and gospel is decisive with respect to the teaching about the Holy Spirit, about pneumatology, as well. Thus the work of the Spirit is, first of all, to sharpen the law and to bring about God's judgment against sin; only then does the Spirit work through the second and final Word of God, the gospel, in that he forgives sin and creates faith [...]

Whoever agrees today with Luther's understanding of the Holy Spirit, according to which he binds himself to the external Word, and is in agreement with it, muct be ready for the hard task of a fundamental critique of modern subjectivism.

(pp.242-251, Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation).