Colleagues,

Couple of weeks ago a ThTh reader in Fairbanks Alaska asked me (here on the equator in Singapore!) when I was going to do a review of Gibson’s Passion movie. He got specific:Several Questions;

What would the movie look like (or if it wouldn’t even be, why not?) if Mel had come to the Crossings Community and said – “Help Me…be my theological consultant” rather than going to the S.J. [=Jesuit] who was in the film credits?Does this movie reflect Luther’s theology of the cross, as some reviewers (who were not Lutheran) have suggested?

How do I, as a parish pastor, address my Sunday School Teachers on Saturday (yeah, this Saturday) to discuss the movie, one of whom feels “this movie was inspired by God” and another who feels it is commercial exploitation?

Who can help me with my “elevator speech” about the difference between a theology of the cross and a theology about the cross? My current speech ends with the elevator empty and me mumbling to myself that I thought I knew what I was going to say….

Why did I, and a lot of other pastors, get caught up in the frenzy without having seen it?

I responded to this Polar Plea saying I’d not seen the film and it wouldn’t open until today (April 1) here in Singapore. I also had no knowledge of the “frenzy” he mentioned that the film has apparently churned up in the USA. So I was ignorant both of the cause and the context of the hullabaloo. Hardly credentials for doing a review.

But I learned that ThTh co-conspirator Robin Morgan had seen the film early on–and she also knows about the “frenzy.” So for this Thursday’s posting here are Robin’s reflections. We’ll find out if she helps lighten the burden that this Polar pastor must bear.

Peace & Joy!
Ed Schroeder

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Who Do You Say That I Am? A Review of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”
By Robin Morgan

It seems to me that Lutherans are particularly good at three significant days in our lives: infant baptisms, funerals and Good Friday. These are moments when nothing we can do will make any difference in the outcome. An infant in arms, a family grieving the loss of a loved one, disciples standing at the foot of the cross are all equally impotent to effect what is taking place. Here in these extreme moments, our Lord’s promise to us, justification by grace, for Christ’s sake, through faith, stands out in bold relief. We are indeed beggars. It is only God’s gracious act on our behalf through Jesus Christ that makes any difference.

Which is why I don’t completely understand the hue and cry among Lutherans about Mel Gibson’s film, “The Passion of the Christ.”

Granted, the movie is devoid of context. Except for a few flashbacks of tender interludes with his mother or disciples, Jesus’ life and ministry are absent. Even why this man is being tortured and put to death is not entirely clear. Why when countless people over the centuries have been subjected to this kind of degradation and worse did Gibson make a movie about this one?

Granted, the stereotypic anti-Semitic images are straight out of medieval European piety that led to horrific suffering among Jewish people at the hands of Christians. The Church must forever acknowledge our sins of anti-Semitism and guard against anything that fans the flames of such prejudice and the monstrous consequences that come from it.

Granted, Pilate, unlike the indecisive, but seemingly well meaning bureaucrat caught in a no-win situation in the movie, was a ruthless thug who ruled Palestine with the iron rod of Rome.

Nonetheless, the whole movie is about those hours when the evil humanity’s sin had unleashed was brought to its despicable, inevitable conclusion. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, was tortured and put to death. The whole movie is about those hours when our actions or inactions meant nothing – when God as Judge and Christ as sacrificial lamb and savior are center stage battling for our lives.

It was violent. He wasn’t a beautifully carved corpus hanging on a cross made from highly polished Black Forest wood. He was flesh and blood in agony. Yet even those of us who profess/confess the depth of Lutheran theology don’t want to accept that it was that bad. We want our Jesus gentle and pleasant — someone who teaches our children to be kind and moral, but then gets out of the way when the real work of running the world is being done. In some ways, regardless of its shortcomings, this movie rubs our noses in Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?”

Why would those of us who profess/confess the depth of Lutheran theology shy away from the opportunities this movie provides to speak about our Lord? Start wherever your conversation partner starts. Whether you begin with the anti-Semitism, the violence, or the androgynous Satan, follow Philip’s example when he was speaking with the Ethiopian eunuch, “Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this [the question about Isaiah 53 that the Ethiopian posed], he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.” (Acts 8:35)

The core of what we have to offer the church catholic and the world is being portrayed in movie theatres around the globe. Of course it’s the Gospel according to Mel, so what? As Paul says in Philippians, “Some proclaim Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from goodwill. These proclaim Christ out of love, knowing that I have been put here for the defense of the gospel; the others proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but intending to increase my sufferings in my imprisonment. What does it matter? Just this, that Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in that I rejoice.” (Phil 1:15-18)

If our only purpose is to preserve pure doctrine and 16th/17th century counterpoint, then we need to rethink calling ourselves church. I know that church is wherever the Word is rightly preached and the Sacraments administered, but is the Word being rightly preached when mission to the world really isn’t part of our agenda? We might as well retreat behind the walls of our architecturally superior buildings with our pure doctrine and proper sacred music like the medieval monks who copied illuminated manuscripts and considered themselves above the common people. Whoever may be the Luthers of our day won’t even be on our radar screens except as enemies.

It’s messy out here in the world. Messy and violent. No movie will ever be able to portray exactly what happened on that first Good Friday. But film is an important means of communicating in our post-literate culture. Wade out into the muck of pop culture and proclaim the good news of Jesus. The Lord’s promise to us, justification by grace, for Christ’s sake, through faith, is made for such extreme moments. And in the doing, we may be enriched in ways we never imagined possible.

Colleagues,

For this festival day, the Annunciation of Our Lord, something special: John Damm’s sermon at John Tietjen’s funeral.Both John D. and John T. impacted me significantly in my very first year as a student at Concordia Seminary. I came to the Sem. with no “prep school connections” having done a B.A. at Valparaiso University instead. All the other entering seminarians came via one of Missouri Synod’s many such prep schools, actually “Gymnasium” leftovers that the Saxon immigrants had brought with them as their educational system. Because I was prep-less, there was no old school network awaiting me when I got to the St. Louis seminary.

For reasons not totally clear to me, I fell in with “the Bronxville crowd” from New York City — a strange match if there ever was one for this midwestern farm boy. Besides John D. and John T., there was a third John, John Lemkul. First, Second and Third John adopted me as a candidate for cultural development. That meant season tickets to the symphony [I had never even heard that there were three B’s, Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms] and then the post-concert culture of pizza and Chianti at their favorite Italian restaurant. Talk about culture shock! Both for me and for them!

I still have a photo from 1952 of all three Johns carrying my luggage (sic!) as I along with classmate Dick Baepler boarded the Holland-America Lines’ “Zuider Kruis” (Southern Cross) in New York City to sail off for a year as exchange student seminarian in Germany.

But that was long ago, the middle of the last century. So it is more than just Seminex nostalgia that prompts me to pass on this homily to you. My connection to, and affection for, John D. and John T. goes way back.

Here’s the text John Damm sent me along with his permission to pass it on to the Crossings Community.

Peace & Joy!
Ed Schroeder

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Mass of the Resurrection
John H. Tietjen
Thursday of the Sixth Week after the Epiphany
19 February 2004
Trinity Lutheran Church
Fort Worth, Texas

Isaiah 25:6-9; 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20; Saint John 11:21-27

How fitting for us to begin this Mass of the Resurrection singing Martin Luther’s hymn, Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands (LBW, 134). It’s John Tietjen’s choice, and it certainly establishes the right theological tone for this celebration of John’s faith and life. When he made the selection, he had no way of knowing we would sing it on the day after the Lutheran Church commemorates the death of the Reformer.

>From the vantage point of this pulpit, it’s obvious that people from every walk of life who knew John have come together to remember him, to reflect on his life’s work and to rejoice. Those are the three strong verbs I want to use today: Remember, Reflect, Rejoice.

This morning Trinity Church has become a prestigious portrait gallery that can vie with its distinguished neighbor just a few blocks away. Each one of us brings our unique perspective, knowledge and memories to this service. Each one of us has a personal portrait of John that is treasured. I propose to share my portrait of John with you. I hope, after the committal service, you will take the time to share your portrait of him with his family in the fellowship hall.

First, I remember John as husband, father and grandfather. His romance with Ernestine began about sixty years ago in a little parish church in Queens, New York. Over the years that romance matured and developed into a portrait that speaks of devotion, faithfulness and love. When John looked into Ernestine’s eyes fifty years ago last June and said: I DO, he meant it with all his heart, mind and spirit. And things never changed.

I must take this occasion to say a special word about Ernestine. Through thick and thin, she was to John what “Kate” was to Martin Luther: a refuge in time of trouble. She was his source of strength right up to his final hour on earth.

>From that marriage came three daughters and a son. Today they rise up to call their father “Blessed.” When they were growing up, John had, for want of a more apt description, a law-gospel relationship with them. He established the rules and regulations for living together, and they were expected to keep them. It’s not always easy living with someone who claimed that while he wasn’t always right – he was never wrong! But his children always knew that the bottom line was love – an intense, deep, all-encompassing fatherly love. Look how it worked: four beautiful adults who live their Christian faith and life with integrity and love. And in these years of their Dad’s illnesses, they have been as caring and devoted as possible.

They made John a grandfather and what delight he took in being with his grandchildren, really enjoying their company and proud of their achievements. All of you were a special blessing to your grandfather.

I remember John the colleague in ministry in the parish and the seminary. It’s worth noting that John began and completed his public ministry in the parish, first in New Jersey and then, believe it or not, in Texas! Those parish experiences were pivotal and informed every other expression of ministry he exercised in the church. His loving pastoral heart and outreach are still fresh in the memories of you dear people at Trinity, and that same portrait of him is still treasured by those he served fifty years ago.

When he became president of the largest Lutheran seminary in the world, that pastoral heart was not left behind. Former students will say “Amen” to that. Today that pastoral sense of vocation John had is very much alive at The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago in the chair of pastoral ministry created in his honor. The incumbent of that chair is with us today, Professor Mark Bangert. I know John would be pleased.

Is it a mere coincidence that this very day of John’s funeral is the 30th anniversary of the birth of Concordia-Seminary-in-Exile, affectionately known among us as Seminex?! I think the Saint Louis seminary portrait needs a few extra brush strokes. Some of the veterans of those tumultuous years are here today and know in their hearts that their fearless leader never let them down, not even in the darkest days of controversy. The Jonah story probably became a symbol of the battle being waged about biblical interpretation in the Missouri Synod at the time, but John never acquiesced to the demand that he toss a few colleagues overboard to save the ship.

Given the theological climate at many seminaries today, the portrait of John we colleagues and students and ELIM supporters hold in our hearts could be a model for other churches and seminaries in their time of conflict. John tried, with every gift God had given him, to help everyone realize that we Lutherans cannot club each other into submission with the law and synodical resolutions and mock trials. Instead, he always pointed us to the Gospel and to the metanoia (the new mind) the Gospel can produce. I think we hold that Gospel portrait of him especially dear.

Of course, my portrait of John has to have him wearing his clerical collar and when at the altar, in eucharistic vestments. You know how wholeheartedly he embraced what we now call the evangelical-catholic revival in American Lutheranism with its rich sacramental life. In the parish and in the seminary, good historian that he was, he called us back to our heritage and then pushed us forward into the coming century. Worship was always central.

My portrait of John somehow has to convey his vision of church unity, both Lutheran and ecumenical. His first published book, dedicated to Ernestine, was entitled “Which Way to Lutheran Unity?” (CPH, 1966). In it he built a sound platform for fruitful Lutheran dialogue, a dialogue that ultimately brought significant segments of American Lutheranism together in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

His passion for unity reached far beyond Lutheranism, although that’s where it always started for him, with the affirmation of Article 7 of the Augsburg Confession: “For the unity of the church it is enough to agree concerning the teaching of the Gospel and the administration of the sacraments.” In the last sermon he preached from this pulpit on Sunday, January 18th, he made reference to the fact that this day was the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Throughout his ministry, the unity of the church was an absolutely essential part of his agenda for living as faithfully and as effectively as he could in a divided church. The John H. Tietjen Endowment Fund being established at Trinity Church will be an annual reminder of John’s ecumenical concern.

The burden of John’s prayer was not only for Christian unity, but for the well-being of God’s people Israel. The Jewish people have always had a special place in his thinking and praying. Having grown up in a part of our country with a strong, vibrant Jewish presence, John made it his interfaith vocation to help undo the mischief we Christians and, in the last century, what we Lutherans have often perpetrated on the chosen people of God in the name of our Christian Messiah.

As you and I remember the portraits of John we treasure, it becomes important to ask: what made the John Tietjen we knew tick? What was it that held all these facets of his complex life together? What made it possible for him to write in the Epiphany Letter he sent us six weeks ago: “In 2004 I begin a journey that leads to the end of my life. I walk it in hope.” Let’s reflect on that hope – a hope that gave meaning and purpose to his life and everything he was and did.

I suspect you’ve had enough of this John’s remembering that John. Instead let’s allow him to speak for himself. Knowing him, isn’t that how he would prefer it? He didn’t need anyone to speak for him. In the last sermon he preached he said: “I have things I want, in fact need, to say. They are a burden on my heart, especially the message in today’s Gospel (Matthew 16:13-16).” (He’s referring to Peter’s confession of faith.) “As we say in the language we have developed recently, I have a legacy to leave behind.”

What is that legacy? His clear, consistent, constant proclamation of the Gospel: the good news in Peter’s confession when he said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Building on the substance of that confession of faith, John said: “Peter’s confession makes clear who Jesus is: as Messiah he tells us what he did – as Son of God he did the Messiah’s work of bringing God’s gracious rule into people’s lives. Jesus makes all the difference in how we see God and God’s relation to us, what we do with our lives, and what we can expect God to do for us.”

In Peter’s confession of Jesus as Messiah, John found and embraced God’s gracious plan for the kind of life he would live every day and everywhere no matter what happened. Listen to John’s confession of faith: “God is a very present help in trouble, as I am ready to witness. God gives the strength needed for the problems each new day brings. I have placed my life in God’s hands. Therefore, I know all will be well, including what happens at death. No, death is not the end of it all. Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. God raised Jesus from the dead. Because he lives, I too will live. The Messiah said so.” For John that was enough!

The more I reflect on John’s confession of faith, the more I am moved to rejoice because John understood that God’s plan for him was not to end at the moment of his death. That’s why he could conclude his Epiphany letter to us saying: “I look not just to the close of my life but to its culmination.”

Here John had in mind what Saint Paul revealed to the Christians in Corinth about the resurrection of the dead, today’s Second Reading. When I was with him last August, he had just finished reading N.T. Wright’s book, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress 2003) and had almost completed a review of the book for Currents in Theology and Mission. The review will appear later this year.

John began his review by quoting v. 17-19 of 1 Corinthians 15. It’s Paul’s response to those Christians in Corinth who argued against the resurrection. He wrote: “If Christ had not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” In his review, John made this comment on those verses: “For me the apostle’s point is very personal. If Christ had not been raised, I have been living and proclaiming a lie.”

“I share Wright’s conviction that the Christian hope for resurrection to the life of the world to come is grounded in Jesus’ resurrection on the third day after his death by crucifixion.” Then John gave us twenty-first century Christians the reminder that our space-time worldview differs from that of New Testament Christians. For us who live in the world of space-time, bodily resurrection is in the future. We are limited by the space-time constraints of life in this present age.

And now I quote John verbatim: “But God is eternal, and when we die we go to be with God in eternity, which is no longer governed by space-time. We leave space-time behind. For the believer at death the consummation of the age to come is now. There is no waiting in eternity. Bodily resurrection is no longer future but now. So when we lay loved ones to rest Ôin the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ’ (ELCA Occasional Services, p.126), we can comfort our hearts with the confidence that, because God raised Jesus from the dead, our loved ones share already now in the resurrection that for us is still in the future.”

Now John has become part of that glorious future. This is not pious exaggeration meant to alleviate the pain of our understandable sadness and mourning. We still have to wait for our resurrection before we can see John ‘s smile of recognition. But the thrilling truth remains: John is alive with Christ’s resurrection life right now. Indeed, he is more thrillingly alive than he ever was before, because for him every tear is past, every malignant growth, every infirmity of his increasingly fragile body gone. We have every reason to rejoice!

And we who remain here, bound in our space-time capsule, what about us? We must wait for our resurrection. But our waiting, like John’s, can be tempered by our Christian hope. We can let Saint Paul bless us as he blessed his dear Christian friends in Rome: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (15:13).

John S. Damm
Senior Pastor Emeritus
Saint Peter’s Church in the City of New York

Colleagues,

We’ve been in Singapore almost three weeks now. I’ve preached both of the last two Sundays. That’s likely to continue, since I’m being “farmed out” to each of the seven congregations that make up the Lutheran Church in Singapore for a two-week stint as “theologian-in-residence.” They’ve even printed a business card for me with that information on one side, and our standard USA specs on the other side. My two weeks now closing at Yishun Christian Church (Lutheran) included an evening seminar on one of the topics I’ve offered before, “In a Sea of Faiths, Why Jesus?” More on that below. Each congregation is also asking for similar seminars or workshops on topics that they have requested.

Besides these assignments of a fortnight each in the different congregations, I have some “church-wide” duties. Biggest one is an every-Monday-morning seminar with the 20-some pastors in the LCS. They’ve asked for five sessions on “Lutheran Hermeneutics” and five on the Lutheran Confessions. I started the Hermeneutics gig a week ago with the Augsburg Aha! and this week we practiced that on specific texts, including next Sunday’s gospel, using — you guessed it — the Crossings matrix for reading and preaching the word of God as law and promise.

The natives are friendly and give me the impression that they want to be more Lutheran. From what I’ve learned, that links to the fact that very few of the pastors have attended Lutheran seminaries. Not that attending a Lutheran seminary will guarantee much of anything these days. But I digress. The two seminaries here in Singapore, Trinity Theological College and Singapore Bible College, are the alma maters of most of the clergy. Both are ecumenical seminaries, and you can guess from the very names what the respective traditions are. The only specific Lutheran input for the Lutherans at these seminaries in the past has been a course on “Lutheran Distinctives” taught by an expat missionary professor usually from the ELCA or its predecessor bodies. Right now an LCS pastor with a graduate degree from the Lutheran Seminary in Adelaide, Australia, is currently leading this, and of course he’s asked me to fill out the rest of the semester of his every-Thursday afternoon sessions.

I mentioned before that there are 20 pastors in the seven congregations. Why 20, you ask? Every congregation is really a Siamese twin, with English speakers and Chinese speakers, each group with its own pastor or pastors, and its own worship and community life.

It’s hot and humid, really like St. Louis in July and August. One pastor tells us it’s really been cool the last few days, with a low of 76. It will soon be “normal,” he says, which means a high of 95. We’re still at the end of the monsoon season, with rain almost every day.

Our home is what people call a four-room apartment (the kitchen and two bathrooms don’t count). So: living-dining room, the “master” bedroom with bath attached, another room where we have our computer and desks, and another room that we can use for storage, with a single bed — for visitors! The LCS has provided this apartment for us as part of their agreement with the ELCA mission folks in Chicago who have brokered our presence here as “Global Mission Volunteers.”

Marie has spent lots of time working with the computer, which a young Chinese genius named Adele got configured so that we can still access our usual Compuserve e-mail account. The majority culture here is Chinese, although curiously the first official language of this nation-state is English. But nobody speaks it the way we do — with no accent! Singapore is small, roughly twice the size of the city of St. Louis, and like St. Louis it’s almond-shaped. It has 250 square miles and four million inhabitants, we’re told. The public transportation system is super-modern. E.g., for the Mass Rail Transit system you buy a piece of plastic, add value to it as needed, tuck it in your wallet, and when you go through the turnstyle you just touch your wallet to a magic space and the gates open. When you leave at your destination and touch another magic space the super-computer calculates the fare you’ve used and tells you how much you have left on your pass. Why can’t we do that in America?

Enough cultural reflections. Now back to that Why Jesus? seminar of last week. In previous classes on this theme we’ve had discussions on Why Jesus for Muslims, for Buddhists, for Hindus. And I do have some thoughts that make sense to me and often to students. And much of that is gathered from folks who came from those religious traditions into the Christian faith. I listened to hear how they answered the question why Jesus was both Good and New for them when they heard the gospel. A frequent accompanying factor that I’ve also learned is the power of the person who’s doing the Christian witnessing. We heard it last Sunday from the driver who came to pick us up for church: “It was the overwhelming love and concern for me and my wife on the part of Myron and Edith Danford that finally persuaded us.”

The new turf about which I was asked last week is the Taoist tradition that permeates the Chinese world. And there I need to talk to more people and have them tell me what’s Good and New about Jesus for folks hooked on “harmony” as the way of salvation. Diagnostically, of course, disharmony is the malady but, as I learned from my class that evening, there is no God-factor in the mix. Instead, the cosmic reality is bi-polar. Opposites abound throughout the universe and within each human being. Disharmony comes when they are not kept in balance. Harmony is the opposite. Many practices exist to help make that happen, all the way from Tai Chi to proper nutrition. Even Falun Gong, which we’ve seen in action on the street, offers its own brand of harmony.

I’ve got a lot to learn, both about this “other gospel” and what’s good and new about a crucified and risen Messiah for Taoists. I remember years ago when a Buddhist master from Japan came to Concordia Seminary and he dialogued with Bob Bertram about harmony. I wish I had taped that session. One thing I remember is Bob articulating the Gospel’s alternative to harmony. It was not achieving balance with the realities of the old creation. Instead it was the good news of a new creation. But for that you simply had to talk about the Creator, and also his beloved Son, the cornerstone of that new creation. That also brings to mind an axiom I learned from Kosuke Koyama, that the eastern mind stops in its reality quest at the stuff of heaven and earth, while Biblical theology pushes one step farther, to the Lord who made heaven and earth. That Lord needs to be reckoned with, not just the stuff that came from his creative hand.

As you see, I have some work to do.

Peace & Joy!
Ed Schroeder

Colleagues,

It was on this Thursday –52 weeks ago–that Bob Bertram died. ThTh 248, George Forell’s “Is it Still Worth Being a Lutheran?” had just been posted when I got the news. Was that title on that day a serendip or what? Bob’s own 82 years of “being a Lutheran” might signal his answer if George, Bob’s Luther-scholar buddy from ancient days, had ever asked him. But it isn’t the label “Lutheran” that counts, Bob would have been quick to say. It is what the label points to. And nowadays different Lutherans point to different things. What did Bob’s label point to? Here’s an answer from an eye-and-ear witness. She is Cathy Lessmann, current office manager for Crossings who also doubles in the same role for the Lutheran School of Theology here in St. Louis [LST-STL].The occasion was another 50th anniversary, this time Bob’s 50 years of teaching. We confected a liturgical wing-ding at an ELCA congregation and as it unfolded, 5 “witnesses” arose one each from the 5 decades of these 50 years to give testimony. My decade was the second one when the two of us were theology profs at Valparaiso University. As at the wedding at Cana, the best wine came at the end. Cathy spoke for the last 10 years, Bob’s teaching in the Crossings Community and for LST-STL. Thelda Bertram had the last word, of course, a reprise for the whole half century.

And now, here’s Cathy!

Peace & Joy!
Ed Schroeder

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Robert Bertram our Teacher, a 50th Anniversary Celebration

I”m here to represent lay people. By now I figure that there’s got to be hundreds and hundreds, perhaps thousands and thousands (because 50 years IS a long time!) of lay people, like many of you, whose lives have somehow intersected Bob’s life. We’re not doctoral students, we’re not intellectual giants, we don’t consider ourselves colleagues, we’re just the plain old simple people who have known Bob over all these years, have sat in on some of his classes, some of them Crossings classes, or in our Lutheran School of Theology here in St. Louis, have worshiped with him, have heard him lecture, have been his neighbors, or have worked with him.

That might sound unimpressive and unremarkable, but don’t tell Bob that! My goodness! To hear him talk about us, you’d think we were the most remarkable people in the world! He absolutely raves about us! I can’t tell you how many times he’s said to me, after a class he’s taught in our Lutheran School of Theology, “My, Cathy! Aren’t these people SOMETHING! I just can’t get over them!”

And you know what it is about us that he raves about so much? Our faith! He tells us it is SO great! After a while we realize, because he is a good teacher, that he’s right! We catch on that our faith IS great, not because it is so heartfelt or sincere, but because it is in JESUS, and Jesus makes our faith great….You might say Bob is impressed with the company we keep.

Bob takes great interest in each one of us and in our lives and in our relationships; so much so that we all consider him to be our very best friend, our very own personal mentor. We vaguely know that Bob has other, important duties, like mentoring doctoral students, engaging in ecumenical dialogues, editing the new Book of Concord, writing his own book, etc. etc. but he just seems so concerned about US that we think we’re first on his agenda. We love being with him, I think because he radiates acceptance. He is extremely patient with us, so kind, so forgiving of our shortcomings.

Often he has more confidence in our abilities than we do ourselves! (But then that gives us confidence.) He can bring the hardest concepts into language we can understand, and he can do so without intimidating us with his vast knowledge. He corrects us with such gentleness that it takes us a while to realize we’ve been corrected! I remember it once took me three whole days to figure out I had been reprimanded by him!

You might say Bob treats us AS IF we were some kind of royalty, AS IF we were beloved siblings to Jesus Christ himself! AS IF I, Cathy, were Jesus’ twin sister whom He dotes on, or Carolyn Crowe, or Sallie Holland. Once again, (with the Spirit’s help and because Bob is such a good teacher…and by now I hope you realize I don’t mean teaching just through lectures!) we catch on: We ARE royalty: beloved children of God because Jesus makes us his siblings! And perhaps that was Bob’s intent all along, to teach us who we really are.

But I also think there’s another reason that Bob cares about us lay people so much, in spite of the fact that we’re not all that attractive. Bob loves us because we’re the Church, and Bob loves the head of the Church, Jesus, so very much. So, he has dedicated 50 years of his life ministering to us, teaching us with his life and his lectures.

Bob teaches a course called Christian Theology III on the Holy Spirit (the next time our Lutheran School of Theology offers this class, you really ought to take it!) or the HOLYING Spirit as Bob prefers to call her. There we learned that one of the means God uses to make people, us, holy is the Church…other people, sometimes individuals, through whom he sends his spirit (as if these people are funnels for that Spirit-Wind to blow through). Well, ALL of us who know Bob can’t help but think that he has acted as that kind of funnel for us, that we have been holied by our encounter with him.

In class, Bob makes sure we understand WHICH spirit it is working in us. He asks, how do you know it is THE Holy Spirit? The Answer: because THE Holy Spirit ALWAYS points to Jesus. So back to Bob. How can we be sure that it is THE Holy Spirit funneled through Bob Bertram to us, making us holy? Well, just take one example, the Crossings method which Bob came up with many years ago. I can almost hear Bob asking me himself, “Cathy, what is it about this segment of your life, or this relationship of yours, pinpointed in this Biblical text, that prompted God to intervene so DRASTICALLY as to send Jesus, his beloved Son, to earth to be crucified?” “Remember Cathy, go back and do a proper diagnosis. It is not just the external problem that needs healing, it’s also the internal level, and most critically, the eternal level.” And THEN to hear the sweetest, most precious words ever heard, put so simply in terms of “the sweet swap” which heals my “eternal,” my “God” problem: Jesus offers to take my death, my sorrow, my sin, and in exchange gives me his life, his righteousness, his position with God, and in so doing, heals the whole of me.

Yes, I have been holied, and so have many hundreds, thousands of other people. But here’s the funny thing! We completely forget to go to Bob and say thank you to him! Instead, we go right to the Father, and we thank Him for holying us, for sending us such a powerful blast of the Spirit Wind. But especially, our encounter with Bob prompts us to give thanks for Jesus, whom we get to call our Savior and our Lord.

Cathy Lessmann

Colleagues,

For this first full week in Lent, GO to the Crossings to <www.crossings.org> and click on “More Literature – Robert W. Bertram’s.” Then click on “Pardon My Dying — A Sequel to Ash Wednesday,” a magnum opus from 1972. It’s already been a year since Bob died, the second week in March 2003. This week’s ThTh 299 and the next one, ThTh 300, d.v., will be some celebrative theology in Bob’s memory.After reading Bob’s “Sequel” — if you can take more — keep on reading below. It’s my sermon from 1996 on the 50th anniversary of Bob’s ordination.

Peace & Joy!
Ed Schroeder

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Trinity Sunday 1996 – June 2, 1996.
Commemorating Bob Bertram’s ordination to the holy ministry half a century ago. At Bob and Thelda’s home congregation, Luther Memorial Church, Richmond Heights, MO 63117

The Texts for Trinity Sunday
Genesis 1:1 – 2:3
2 Cor. 13:11-14
Matthew 28:16-20

Today’s sermon calls for a Crossing, crossing Bob Bertram with the texts for Trinity Sunday: R-W-B and his ministry with the divinity of the Trinity.

Now, he’d be the first to say: “Eddy, au contraire, crossing the congregation is the assignment for today, and since I’m here I’ll get crossed too–if such Crossing really happens!”

Ay, there’s the rub. The rub that Bob has been rubbing for lo, these many years. That crossing really happens. That the Word of God, God’s diagnosis and God’s healing, really rubs off onto and into people. That law and Gospel genuinely intersect our lives, cross us (as Big Bend Blvd. crosses Clayton Rd.) and make us different as we come out of the intersection. Bob’s been doing that to us over the years. That’s one reason why we’re here this a.m.

I first intersected Bob 48 years ago. That’s half of 96, half the span of this century so far. It was 1948. It was the first course in philosophy that Bob taught at Valparaiso University. Its title was: Recent Religious Philosophies. But, of course, that title was a disguise for Crossings–although I didn’t recognize it at that time. Maybe you, Bob, didn’t either.

Freshly graduated from “the sem” just 50 yrs. ago these very days, he and Thelda got married (June 12) and moved to the U. of Chicago for graduate work. There President O. P. Kretzmann, the mad genius of V.U., discovered him along with other whiz kids (as we called them in those days) and enticed them for a pittance to teach at Valpo while they finished off their graduate studies. In Bob’s case, it was the scenic route. So 17 yrs later the Ph.D. was finally done.

Why I’m the preacher for this solemn and auspicious occasion is apparently that on Bob’s scenic route of ministry he’s crossed mine over and over again. As I said, my intersection with Bob started 48 years ago. At first major mentor for my V.U. philosophy major, he then was Theology department chair when I came back to V.U. to teach later on. Also chair of the syst. dept. when Marie & I came to St. L. and I started teaching at “the sem.” That made me a co-conspirator with him as “the sem” got drawn into the battle of Missouri. Then colleague for that dear decade at Seminex (where toward the end the two of us were about the only ones left in the department of syst. theol.). And now for more than a decade collaborator in Crossings.

The best way to honor teachers is to learn from them. Many of us here, Bob, honor you in just that way–we have learned from you. To put it succinctly I’ll borrow Melanchthon’s words about Luther: “He taught me the Gospel.” You, Bob, taught us the Good News about Jesus.

To get back to the only real assignment for any sermon I’d better get back to the day’s texts, the readings for Trinity Sunday, and let them cross us. But I’ll seek to do so with your help, Bob. How so? By saying once more what you once taught us.

First of all, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a complicated riddle for us to figure out, or even to believe when we can’t figure it out. Instead, the doctrine of the Trinity is Gospel, Good News about God. Both Good and New. New for sure, in that no other people except Christians talk about God this way. And Good, very Good News about God. That the One who created us also rescues us; that the one who judges us also makes a sweet swap in Jesus to heal us; that the power of God now loose in the world is the Healing Spirit. Trinitarian God-talk is Good News talk about God, because it was first of all Good News talk from God–from God to us.

I’ll pick out 4 words from today’s three texts for this Trinitarian crossings. For each of these you’ve been our teacher.

THE GENESIS TEXT.
Key word: IMAGE.

“Let us make the human in our image.” So we are created in the Image of God.

What’s that? Bob may not have been the first to come up with this picture of that IMAGE, but he has taught it to us like this. We humans image God as mirrors, reflectors. Bob’s quip about Adam’s first words when he awoke from his rib surgery and first saw Eve: “You remind me of someone I know!” Images of God are God-reflectors.

What bounces back and forth between God-reflectors is is not light-waves, but conversation.

And it happens between us humans because the mirror that we are is first of all for conversation with the creator. God speaks, and we are able to hear the divine address. We were created that way, for that very purpose. God’s speaking to us elicits a response. When WE talk, then God listens. God responds to our response and calls us then to listen to THAT message. Humans are able to hear and able to respond to God. Hear-able and response-able. But it is not merely information exchange, as the next chapters of Genesis reveal.

Although we (Adams and Eves of the world) are response-able, our responses to God the Creator-Giver are routinely the wrong responses, ir-responsible. Whereupon God doesn’t back off, but pursues that irresponsible response and asks for an accounting from us for that. God’s response comes with a “Why?” as the first word. Why did you do/say this? Why, Adam and Eve, are you hiding in the bushes? And thus the pressure is on to give an account of ourselves, to justify ourselves before God.

Genesis 3 provides the primordial pattern. It’s an X-ray diagnosis in three layers.

Step-1 Making the wrong response. Irresponsible behavior. Even more so, irresponsible when God calls them (us) to account. Passing the buck, the blame, to anybody else, in frantic attempt to justify ourselves. Finally passing the buck back to God himself. “The woman YOU gave me… The serpent YOU created….”

Step-2 Underlying that is Unfaith already operating. Having trusted the address of the Other Voice in the Garden, there is no more trust in the Voice of the Creator. No fear, love, trust, vis-a-vis God as conversation partner. Just sheer terror and the compulsion to hide for shame.

Step-3 God still responds even to this. Although the execution is postponed, the verdict isn’t. The wages of sin is death. The first step on the way to that death is expulsion from the garden.

There is Good News in Genesis, even for fractured images. But it’s not to be found in the image we are, the God-connectedness we start out with. Good news for fractured images comes from another Image, the one speaking in Matthew’s Gospel.

THE MATTHEW TEXT.
Key word: EXOUSIA (authority)

Step-4. The Good News term in the closing verses of Matt. 28 is authority (exousia). You’ve been the church’s teacher on that one too, Bob, especially from Matthew. Relocating Authority has been part of our rhetoric ever since you imparted it to many of us–from Seminex days onward.

Jesus claims to have “all exousia.” And what is that? There is authority, and there is authority. In Matthew you helped us see the difference. Jesus’s authority is not “Gentile” authority, where one commands, the others obey, or else. No, the authority that Jesus claims here at the end of Matthew is an authority he worked hard to get. It’s the upside-down authority of not being served, but serving, of giving his life a ransom for many. This authority is compelling only by virtue of its own winsome attractiveness, its being Good and New–and being offered to, not coerced upon, us.

You, Bob, have pressed this upon us as Paul does in Philippians 2 where he probes that strange way that Jesus was equal to God. Not by claiming his divine perks, but by swapping his fullness (these perks) with the empties. Emptying himself into the form and image of us who are empty of God’s glory–empty as in death, even the really empty death on a cross, so that we might be filled with the God-glory that is natively his own. What a sweet swap, to coin a phrase.

And what does Jesus get for all his efforts? He gets us. Which he apparently sees as a good deal. So much so, that he proudly takes us along with him when he heads back home announcing to his Abba, “look what I picked up down there on earth and have now brought home!” That is Good and that is New. That makes the Swap really Sweet.

THE CORINTHIANS TEXT.
Key word: KOINONIA

Step – 5 After the sweet swap of Christ’s Good Friday and Easter, Bob, you’ve taught us to go straight to faith. And you’ve always kept up the drumbeat, Bob, that as Good and New as the Sweet Swap is, it’s only our own when we trust it. Fides is sola. Because that is the only way that promises work. When they get trusted, they become operational.

And what gives faith such power to render sinners righteous? It’s not the moxie or the chutzpah of the one doing the believing. It’s the clout of the One being trusted. Faith effects the transfer whereby Christ’s righteousness becomes our righteousness. We know you pilfered that from Luther–and he stole it from Paul and John and Isaiah and finally Jesus himself–viz., “Glaubstu, hastu; glaubstu nicht, hastu nicht.” [When you believe it, you have it; when you don’t believe, you don’t have it.”]

Which leads us to word Number 3, in the II Corinthians text: koinonia. The translation “fellowship” of the Holy Spirit is a deflated rendering for what the Holy Spirit is up to. It’s koinonia with the genitive (in Greek). And that means imparting, partnering, having a part in, partnership, being a share-holder–of what was once Christ’s property now becoming ours as well. Not just togetherness, but having a share of something you didn’t have before. And that by Faith alone.

THE CORINTHIANS TEXT.
Key Word: MIND, SAME MIND

Step-6 Here’s the last link in the diagnosis/prognosis. The key term is MIND, SAME MIND, in Paul’s final encouragement and benediction in II Corinthians.

You, Bob, have let us see that Paul is not pushing for horizontal harmony in a conflicted congregation with this bon mot that he uses frequently. No, the harmony he’s plugging for is a spin-off of the koinonia partnering that the Spirit works when linking us to Christ. He’s calling for our heads to be in harmony with the mind of Christ. That’s the one and same mind that Paul always promotes. It’s the new mentality, the new mindset, for managing our lives the very same way that Christ manages us. Remember, not lording it over us; but lording it under us, serving, not hankering to be served–and giving his life….

Your counsel has been for us to “mind the store with the mind of Christ.” It’s the churchly store, of course, and you’ve not given up the drumbeat for that, in ELCA, in Seminex, here at Luther Memorial. But also minding the store of our own personal lives. And also minding that part of the world that God assigns to us as our “store” and says: “Here, take care of this for me.”

Trinitarian theology is Good News. It’s what the brothers and sisters in the early church worked out in language to confess what God has done “for us and for our salvation.” It X-rays what our IMAGE problem really is with God. It sets the foundation for Jesus’ AUTHORITY to be our brother and at the same time “My Lord and my God.” It pinpoints where the Power comes for us to PARTICIPATE in God’s own Life, as God’s Healing Spirit “takes what is Christ’s, and makes it our own.” The MIND OF CHRIST which finally changes our mind is the “same mind” whereby the deity operates. It is indeed, we say in the Lord’s Prayer, the will of God that how things are done in heaven is how they are to be done on earth. Same mindset–for us and for our salvation.

The language of the doctrine of the Trinity, Elert once said, is finally doxological language. To be sung, not dissected. It’s where our faith finishes, not where it begins. Faith always begins with Christ, the way (to God) the truth (about God) and the life (of God). If God really was in Christ reconciling the world, then Trinity is the God-language that fits, and doxology is our finale.

All of the above, Bob, you’ve helped us to learn, better still, to believe. So don’t take it amiss when we include you now in the Trinitarian doxology with which this homily concludes.

Let the congregation sing. The melody is Old Hundredth.

Praise all through whom God’s blessings flow–
Name one? Bob Bertram here below.
His “sweet-swap” Jesus sets us free
To love, trust, praise the Trinity.

And now the “real” doxology:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Praise him all creatures here below.
Praise him above, ye heavenly host.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen

Colleagues,

Last month’s postings ThTh 291 and 292 featured the DAYSTAR conference in St. Louis at that time and the “Mission Affirmations,” the Missouri Synod’s ground-breaking mission manifesto of 1965. In ThTh 291 I did a bit of sifting through the MAs using the law-promise filter. Some aspects seemed good to me, some “needed a little work.” When asked, “why not offer your own rewrite?” I said I’d try. Here it is.There were six affirmations. I take them one at a time. The original one-sentence mission affirmation from 1965 comes first, then comes the “RSV,” revised Schroeder version.

Peace & joy!
Ed Schroeder

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Affirmations of God’s Mission
Adopted by The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod
(1965)

1. ORIGINAL: The Church Is God’s Mission.[RSV = Revised Schroeder Version]
   The Church is Created by God’s “NEW” mission to the world, God’s unique mission in Christ.

   The Church is both the product of God’s new mission in Christ to God’s old world, and thereafter its agent. God sends Christ on a MERCY mission to God’s own broken world. The depth of that brokenness is God’s “other” deal with the human race–first articulated in Gen 2:17 [“you eat . . . you die.”], first enacted in Gen. 5 [“. . .and he died; …and he died; …and he died” ad nauseam]. In this old mission, God’s own “old” mission, mercy for sinners is hidden. Instead God “counts trespasses.” No sinner survives such arithmetic. In Christ’s death & resurrection God offers these same sinners mercy, call it forgiveness of sins. God re-connects with them as Abba. It defies moral logic, yet that is the Christian claim. From which follows a simple definition of church: “Church = Christ-trusting sinners.” All talk of Christian mission, namely, God’s own mission #2, is grounded here.

2. ORIGINAL: The Church Is Christ’s Mission to the Whole World[RSV] Christ sends that church to replicate Christ-trusting throughout the world, where God’s other arithmetic is all-pervasive.

   There is no technical NT term for mission as we use that word today. Closest is the language of God’s “covenant,” or again, God’s “serving.” The Greek technical terms in the NT are “diatheke” and “diakonia.” But the way that God does covenant-service in Christ is very different from his alternate covenant-service apart from Christ. These two covenant-service-projects [hereafter CSP] are grounded in two very different–finally contradictory–words from God. St John differentiates them as God’s “law coming through Moses” vs. God’s “grace and truth coming through Jesus Christ” (1:17). St. Paul and other NT writers use other contrasting terms for these two CSPs.

   Thus God’s old CSP is as different from God’s new CSP as night from day, as death from life. There is no “generic” CSP that covers both. Thus they must be specified, distinguished. It is always God’s new CSP in Christ that rescues sinners from God’s old CSP with its bad-news bottomline for sinners. Christ sends his trusters to replicate for worldlings what he has done for them, namely, offer them Christ’s own CSP. To wit, to offer them the promise of Christ’s own cross and resurrection so that they too might move from God’s old CSP to God’s new one. Christ hands HIS project on to his trusters: “As the Father sent me, so send I you.”

3. ORIGINAL: The Church Is Christ’s Mission to the Church[RSV] Christ-trusters continue to be agents of Christ’s mission to fellow church members. Christ-trusters need maintenance service–from other Christ-trusters.

   Even though Christ-trusters are already “churchified,” they need constant nurture. For within their lives they too sense the “old Adam/old Eve” present — and operational. “Lord I believe, help my unbelief” is the standard, not the exceptional, admission of all Christ-trusters. In the language of the Smalcald Articles, they constantly assist one another with “mutual Gospel-conversation and consolation.” In short, they continue to offer the crucified and risen Christ to each other, so that “repenting and believing the Good news” AGAIN AND AGAIN becomes their own daily regimen. [This is perhaps the most important ecumenical phrase in the Lutheran Confessions. There are no barricades of any sort for any Christ-truster to practice this “means of grace” (so Smalcald) with anyone–both to those who claim Christ as Lord, and those who don’t.]

4. ORIGINAL: The Church is Christ’s Mission to the Whole Society[RSV] The Church carries Christ’s Mercy-Mission to the Whole Society conscious that God”s other CSP is already in operation there. That has required Christ-trusters of every age to see society with binocular vision, lest either of God’s two covenant-service-projects gets short shrift.

   Apart from Christ, God has from the beginning been at work in human society with his initial CSP. As wondersome as that CSP is–yes, good and gracious–it does not bring mercy to sinners. It preserves and cares for creation, yes. But forgiveness of sinners, no. The sinner’s dilemma is healed only in the new CSP grounded in Good Friday and Easter. It is definitely something else. Ask any forgiven sinner.

   Articulating that distinction for Christians in society is crucial for both CSP’s to proceed well. Lutheran language has capitalized on the Biblical metaphors of God’s left and right hands. Not two different realms (as territories), but God’s two different operations on the same turf, in the one and only world there is.

   Christ-trusters, even before they encounter Christ, already have assignments in God’s “old” CSP, God-given assignments as caretakers, stewards, in God’s world. Such assignments arise already at human birth whereby God places people into specific spots in his creation. And along with that placement come multiple callings from God to “be my sort of person in all the relationships wherein I’ve placed you.” When human beings also become Christ-connected, they get a second assignment: “Replicate your Christ-connection, offer Christ’s redemption, in all the relationships you already have in your initial CSP.” A frequently used collect in the liturgy says it thus: “We dedicate our lives to the care and redemption of all that you [God] have made.” Care and redemption are two distinct jobs, not at all synonyms. Yet, the two come from the same God, and both become the assignments for every Christ-truster.

5. ORIGINAL: The Church Is Christ’s Mission to the Whole Man[RSV] The Church Is Christ’s Mission to the Whole Person – but not forgetting the 2-CSP distinction. Like God’s own self, God’s human agents work ambidextrously in the world. Their right hand DOES know what their left hand is doing–and vice versa.

   Biblical anthropology does not divide humans into body and soul. Bible language sees people made of distinct components, yes, but as one unified whole person, no member of which is superior to the other. The Biblical focus is on relationships. How is this unitary, though multi-membered, person related to significant others in his/her God-given placements? That is the question.

   The root relationship, of course, is someone’s God-relationship. Where that is fractured, only God’s right-hand CSP will do the job to bring healing. In all other relationships–with other humans, with one’s own self, with other creatures, with creation as a whole–God’s other hand is at work to care for and preserve what’s already created. Christians use the language of “social ministry, medical missions, inner mission,” etc. when they engage in such left-hand work. Such terms also apply to those who do not know Christ at all but are deeply involved in this CSP of God. They too are God’s left-handers. But they are not doing right-hand stuff, getting sinners to trust Christ. If there is some doubt about that in certain situations, ask them.

   Designating such missions and ministries “left-hand” is in no way derogatory. Those tasks are divine assignments, godly work. Labelling it “left-hand” is descriptive. It describes what God is achieving there, that is, caring for creation. That is not yet redemption. Left-hand CSP does not translate sinners into Christ-trusters.

   In executing God’s right-hand CSP Christ-trusters concretely offer the crucified and risen Christ to the receivers, God’s offer of merciful forgiveness encountered nowhere else in creation. Right-hand CSP is more than just speaking or offering “God’s love.” God’s love is already operating wherever God extends his left hand. Rain and sunshine are offers of God’s love. Giving up One’s only-begotten Son into death to rescue other renegade offspring is something else. It explodes the “love” category–“scandalously”–as St. Paul sometimes said.

   The right-hand CSP is an offer of Christ’s specific mercy-promise to folks who, for whatever reason, do not trust it, so that they may trust it. That offer occurs in concrete words and worded-actions (sacraments) designated as “means of grace.” The Smalcald Articles specify five such word/actions that offer this promise. They are visible, audible. You can record them when they are happening.

   God’s left hand CSP–also assigned by God to folks who do not trust Christ–protects, preserves, restores the other relationships mentioned above. Christians have no scruples in joining God’s other left-handed workers in this operation. In fact, Christ commends it.

6. ORIGINAL: The Whole Church is Christ’s Mission.[RSV] All Members of the Church are on assignment in both of God’s Missions.

   If you are alive at all, you are God’s left-hand missionary. If in addition you also trust Christ, you are membered into another body, the body of Christ. That gives you a second mission assignment beyond the first, God’s CSP number 2. To be baptized is to be a CSP-2 missionary. When the congregation prays that offertory prayer IN UNISON, it is “all of us” who “dedicate our lives to the care and redemption of all that you, God, have made.” All means all. Working out the strategies in any given place and time for this double mission of care and redemption is a major piece of the agenda when the Christ-connected gather for “mutual conversation and consolation.” The overarching rubric is that none of God’s TWO Covenant-Service-Projects suffer loss.

   All members of the church urge people to trust Christ. That finally amounts to urging people who do not trust Christ to switch gods, to “hang their hearts” [Luther’s phrase] on Christ, to abandon whatever their hearts have been trusting before. That is what St. Paul proclaimed to his audience on Mars Hill: “You worship many gods here in Athens. I urge you to switch. Hang your hearts on the one that is still unknown to you, the Christ whom God raised from the dead.” Christians do the same thing on today’s Mars Hill where other gospels abound. In doing so they do not argue that their gospel is the best. Rather their claim is that it is Good News, an offer both “good” and “new” that they too had never heard before. Nor have they heard it elsewhere on the Mars Hills of today. They seek to extend the same offer to others. They urge them to trust it.

Colleagues, PERSONAL ITEM
This week’s ThTh is the last one for a while that I’ll be confecting in St. Louis. After that, God willing, Marie and I will be 10 thousand miles away on the equator working with the Lutheran Church of Singapore. But I do have a couple ThTh postings already in the hopper to bridge the gap. I hope. Just what’s the LCS task? “Continuing education” they call it. The actual agreement will get worked out when we arrive, but here is a first proposal that was forwarded to us from the ELCA area exec in southeast Asia. It does not look like merely lollygagging with fellow-Lutherans.

Dear Rev. Dr Peter Shen,
I met with Rev. Soh and planned Dr. Schroeder’s visit to Singapore. We planned for the 3 months he will be with us and as Bishop said we could extend it to 4 months. It is from 1st March to 31st May. Each LCS congregation will be having him for two weeks to do teaching and preaching. A congregation would also like him to do lenten devotions on Wednesdays for 5 weeks. We have planned a LCS combined Holy Communion service for Maundy Thursday. He will preach on ” The Wonder of His Presence”.He will be doing two teaching sessions on “The Cross for a Modern world” and another two sessions on “The Song of Songs.” For the Pastors, He will be teaching every Monday morning from 9.30 to 12 noon. There will be 5 lectures on Lutheran hermenuetics and 5 on the Book of Concord. We would also like him to take a day retreat with the pastors on ” Practicing Lutheran Spirituality.”

Pastor Nick Singh

The remainder of ThTh 297 consists of samplings from responses to recent ThTh postings.

FIRST ONE, 
though not intended so, is now an “In Memoriam” for John Tietjen. John died this past Sunday (Feb. 15) at his home in Fort Worth, Texas. The funeral is today. Bryden Black did not intend his response as a post-mortem for John. He was responding to John “live.” Namely, to John’s Sermon on the Confession of St. Peter preached in his home congregation on January 18. We posted it to you three weeks ago as ThTh 294. It was the last sermon John preached.

Bryden’s an extraordinary tent-maker-minister-preacher himself. He’s both an Anglican priest (cum Ph.D., Oxford) and also runs the family sheep-and-cattle ranch in New Zealand. It’s a huge operation–“we put through some 20,000 – yes, that is the figure! – lambs for fattening each year now. ” His own self-descript: “This Anglican does both bovines and ovines, as well as some distance theological teaching plus being one of the bishop’s Examining Chaplains – who too has had a bit of a brush with the cancer scene.”

Dear Ed,It seems that you all are living and reliving some momentous moments … I sense too that lest one desecrate the significance of the likes of John’s Confessionary Sermon, you need a health warning in the subject line of the email: “take off your shoes …!!” And of course, that is exactly what John’s own bon mot is: God’s health warning. No cures this side of Caesarea Philippi: only pilgrimages of faith and therefore hope – and evident love as he gathers up his life of witness centred upon that Messiah’s Cross. Thank you for sharing this precious cargo.

When confronted with the likes of John’s Confession, I can only regurgitate my own musings upon the topic of the Big C. For while “cured” according to medical science, according to the stats of my surgeon (a Mayo Clinic trained fellow), what has really been healed – for me at least – is the sheer awareness of my creaturehood, on the one hand (vs. that big Pauline and Israelite sin of idolatry, Rom 1), and on the other, the graced awareness that the Creator himself is the One who redeems the likes of me on My Cross–which can ever only be henceforth His Cross! Such is the white-heat intensity of imminent mortality and demise . . . . True; we both probably know others who have reacted to such in bitterness and horrid denial. But that too wes sheer grace: that it was not the path/Way/”hodos” (cf. Mark 8-10) that I took upon encountering this ‘business . . .’”

Shalom! As ever,
Bryden

SECOND ONE 
is a response to ThTh 295: “Your God is Too Small – Coping with spina bifida and the wrath of God.” It comes from Jerome Burce, one time Papua New Guinea missionary, now ELCA pastor in suburban Cleveland, Ohio.

Ed,
Concerning the wrath of God–
I chanced by accident last fall across a superb book entitled “Evil in Modern Thought” by one Susan Neimann, Harvard-trained philosopher, ex-philosophy prof at Yale and Tel Aviv U., currently Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. Under the sub-title “An Alternative History of Philosophy” she proposes that the problem of evil, not epistemology, has been the real issue at the core of Western philosophy, and not only for the ancients and medievals but also–especially–for moderns from the likes of Leibniz to the present.Of course the problem of evil emerges as a problem with God, as she makes plain; and her tale can be described as an account of the philosophical tradition’s Jacob-at-the-Jabbok struggle with deus absconditus, now defending him (Leibniz, Kant), now attacking him (Voltaire, Hume), now re-defining him (Hegel et al.), now trying furiously (Freud, Nietsche) to dismiss him. And at the end of the 20th century day, there he is, still lurking in the shadows.

One of Neimann’s own final-page observations: “…One of [Kant’s] greater arguments [was that] if we knew that God existed, freedom and virtue would disappear. It’s an act of Providence that the nature of Providence will forever remain uncertain. Einstein said the Creator was subtle. Kant’s thought showed Him brilliant. Our very skepticism is a providential gift. What binds the real and the rational together must be so fragile that it will seem miraculous–and on occasion the miracle occurs. As with any other miracle, it takes something like faith to perceive it.”

God hangeth on, in other words. We don’t know what to make of him, yet we can’t get rid of him, not if we insist as philosophers must, even in a post-Auschwitz, terror-ridden world, on believing in reason. What the book adds up to is, first, an enormously useful illumination of where and how American culture has gotten many of its central ideas about God (among them some of those you address in this current ThTheol), and second, a lot of powerful prolegomena for the argument that necessitates Christ.

THIRD ONE comes from Neal Nuske in Australia.
Neal’s biog: “1963 Life-changing experience with cancer as a 12 year old child-amputee. Parish pastor in the Luth. Church of Australia 1978-1991. Since 1991, Christian Studies and Study of Religion teacher, St Peters Lutheran College [=High School in Aussie English]. SPLC is a Co-educational boarding school, c.1800 students. Brisbane. Graduate research thesis: A Curriculum Design for adolescents to integrate tragedy in their world-views. This year I am teaching around 160 students from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds, ranging from age 13 to 16. On average there are around 3 Lutheran students in each class of 30. So, as Head of Department and Teacher of Study of Religion, I have had to shape the courses in ways that are mindful of religious diversity as well as ecumenical sensitivities.”

Greetings Ed,I did appreciate your reflections about a theological setting for reflecting upon spina bifida et alia kinds of disease.

This year is the fortieth anniversary of my own encounter with cancer as a child aged twelve in 1963. The encounter resulted in a hemipelvectomy -one of the radical forms of surgery which resulted in the complete removal of my right hip and hip joint- plus a separation of the pelvic bones beneath the scrotum.

Last year was the 25th anniversary of my ordination.

My own reflections about suffering have guided my theological interests. In reference to the question concerning the spina bifida child, I concur with your comments: “If God didn’t, who did?”

As an integral part of a creation that waits with eager longing to be set free from its bondage to decay I also participate in that creation under bondage -as do we all- by the very fact that life is given by the Creator in a context, in a cosmos that is already groaning. The life given to me did not come from outside this broken creation, nor did it come from heaven or any other universe for that matter, that has been untouched by the judgment of the Creator.

I believe Gustaf Wingren put his finger on it when he wrote about the law (judgement) being experienced in and through creation itself.

The life given to us does not come as a pure and untouched gift but is a gift of life given in, with and under all the existential conditions that prevail for a creation under judgment.

Hence the life-death paradox -the paradox strikes in every dimension. We are born in sin and groan with creation.

My body bears the marks of the encounter with judgment.

If we stopped moralising about sin and saw it as it really is we would not deal with the theological aspects of suffering as if suffering itself had some kind of explanation, or moral role in the universe.

Your comment:

We are committed as Christians to monotheism. There is no second “evil” deity onto whom we can shove such things. We are “stuck” with having to bring it all together, “all that exists,” as the catechism says, under one roof labelled “God at work.”

My encounter with cancer was, and is in itself a constant encounter with the inscrutibility of God.

It was the beginning of an energetic and at times vitriolic relationship with a divine being expressed in prayers that were filled with the constant paradox of gratitude and unrelenting cursing -and I mean unrelenting cursing that would break out decades after the 1963 event! The silences were also there but that didn’t bother me because I felt no compulsion to pray. In any case, for myself, prayer is not necessarily the mark of a healthy relationship with God. I had the confidence that when I could not pray the Spirit would take over.

Much better it was in my mind to fire the curses at the God who gave life in the midst of death, rather than begin a battle with some other entity outside of God deemed responsible for evil. The ‘bastardus absconditus’ would be ‘left off the hook’ if a monotheistic perspective succumbed to the inability of theology to endure the paradoxes.

Your comment:

Why God plays the hiding game is itself shrouded.

It is indeed. And theology is not the means by which one is able to peek under the shroud to fathom the mind of God.

I wish we would respect the shroud more. And, mystery itself is part of the shroud. Theology does not take away the mystery. Rather, it is meant to tell one when and where the boundaries of the mystery begin.

I learnt early in theological studies that Lutheran theology was not a discipline of study that set out to provide answers or explanations. However I also saw that this was one of the great needs theological students had, namely to solve the riddles, to dissolve the paradoxes, and believe that comfort to sufferers could come though explanations.

Most of these explanations were designed to gloss over the gruesome reality that the Creator could speak and act in ways that were simply horrific and ugly.

I don’t know why I still believe -perhaps it is the result of that Spirit who continues to pray pro me.

Keep as well as is possible.

Neal Nuske
St Peters Lutheran College
Brisbane

FOURTH ONE. The spina bifida baby elicited this sort of response from several of you:

Why should we blame God for the effect of human sin on the world of God’s creation?

Here’s the gist of my answer to these colleagues:

The key word in your sentence is “blame” which I never used in TTh 295. And you probably wouldn’t want to either–for very long. “Blame” sounds too much like Adam & Eve in Gen. 3, doesn’t it? I.e., switching the roles of who is the Evaluator and who is being Evaluated.

My rhetoric in ThTh 295 said in effect: “It too, yes spina bifida, came from the same Creator who created the rest of the baby.” That’s not a statement of blame. It’s a claim of creation theology, an affirmation about a creature, yes, a wounded creature, and the creator. For “if not from God, then from whom?” One of you mentioned that you appreciate Elert. I can still hear him (Summer Semester ’53 in Erlangen): “Die monotheistische Verpflichtung laesst keine andere Konsequenz ziehen.” [Our commitment to monotheism allows us to draw no other conclusion.]

Instead of blame, there is another “bl-” word that, crazy as it sounds, is the Biblical recommendation: “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. BLESSED be the name of the Lord.” Even for the spina bifida baby with, as I understand it, spinal bone “taken away” from its spinal nerve.

“Blaming” God for anything is itself always blameworthy. Even thinking about doing so, as Adam and Eve learned, can only lead to trouble. Even so, exile was not God’s last word for our primal parents. To say: “Even this came from God’s hand” has better faith-marks than sentiments that seek to get God off the hook. As one of you said, “not God is in the mix here,” but “fouled up genetics or some faulty DNA or other consequences of human sin” in the spina bifida baby. Yet, isn’t that still working the blame-agenda, but then stopping short of passing the buck back all the way to God? Does God need us as defense attorneys? Who’s in the dock, who’s on the bench?

Methinks Blessing or Blaming really is the core issue. How do we respond to God when tragedy strikes? Finally there are only two options, aren’t there: faith or unfaith, trust or distrust? And it ALWAYS takes the insertion–the explicit and palpable insertion–of the Crucified and Risen One (via Word and sacrament) into the tragedy–not as explanation, but as an “other” word from the same God–to make the faith/trust option possible at all.

Isn’t that what Bryden and Neal are testifying above? I think so. And note where they are “coming from.” Down under. In more ways than one. “Sub cruce tecta” as Luther liked to say. And that too is a pun: “covered under A cross” and/or “covered under THE cross.”

Peace & Joy!
Ed Schroeder

 

Colleagues,

This week’s ThTh is Steve Krueger’s review of Martin Marty’s just-published biography of Martin Luther. A couple of weeks ago we passed on to you a sermon that Steve preached at the January DAYSTAR conference. From this review you’ll see the same law/promise theology at work which grounded that sermon. That’s one reason I pass it on to you. Steve’s e-address is <skreegs@earthlink.net>Peace & Joy!
Ed Schroeder

P.S. Ten days hence, D.v., Marie and I depart for Singapore and a 3-month assignment in Continuing Education with the Lutheran Church there. We might even stay around a while longer. We have invitations from Malaysia and Sumatra–where there ARE Lutherans–and just this week one concerning Cambodia–where there aren’t! Twenty of you dear colleagues have already channelled contributions into this misision venture. They total $2300 which suffices for our 2 roundtrip airfares. Other angels are helping with some of the other costs involved. We are grateful for all our partners. EHS

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Martin E. Marty. MARTIN LUTHER
(New York: Viking Penguin, 2004),
199 pages. $19.95.

Martin Marty sets out on an enormous enterprise in his new biography of Martin Luther, as anyone who has seen the recent “Luther” movie can attest. How does one do a satisfactory biography of Luther within the space allotted? The movie, “Luther,” was roundly criticized, among other things, for its patchy coverage of a life. Yet, what is one to do with the massive material surrounding Luther in the span of a two hour film?

Marty’s Martin Luther could have easily suffered from the same fate because of the constraints of the Penguin Lives series to which this volume is now added. Joining a list of Lives books which includes biographies of Crazy Horse, Rosa Parks, Herman Melville, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, and Robert E. Lee, to name a few, the series is obviously meant to provide a diverse, high end introduction to interesting lives which have shaped or stirred. For 199 pages in a compressed but beautifully bound book, complete with the famous Lucas Cranach portrait of the reformer on the cover, Marty pulls it off, perhaps, as only Martin Marty can. The prose is tight and even, compressing in a sentence what lesser writers take a paragraph to say. As one friend of Marty’s once quipped to me about listening to a Marty presentation, “He talks fas ter than I can think,” so, in vintage Marty style, no written word goes to waste. It is not, despite its size, a quick read but the prize is a complete and clear biography in the space of less than 200 pages. It is an incredible feat.

The book’s challenge is further compounded in that Marty is writing this volume as an eminent historian for an educated, secular audience. While his love for Luther, especially toward the book’s end, shines through unmistakably, it is a fair and even-handed account. There are no free passes for the reformer, nor for his critics. Marty weaves theology and history, Luther story and larger meanings together making historical judgments to give us a coherent biography that is enormously worth the price of admission. In Marty’s own words:

“Thanks to his gift for pithy and salty expression and his passion for transgressing linguistic and social boundaries, Martin Luther makes it possible for a biographer with some ease to invite into his world people who might, in the normal course of things, stand outside it. It is the biographer’s task to make them feel sufficiently at home in that world that they can make judgments about the story and sufficiently ill at ease in that the telling can provoke them into fresh thinking” (pp. xiv-xv).

The volume is written chronologically, an “old way” of doing biography, apparently, but now seeing a return among historians. Because that is so, one can see the reformer’s life unfold, mature, be taken up by events, and, to some degree, grow cold. I decided to tackle the book by wearing less a historian’s set of lenses than a theologian’s (because that is who I am). In historical judgments, and there are (as one might expect) many, I found myself always deferring to Marty who makes them with ease. For example, after the Leipzig debate, “Opinions about the outcome depended on the eye of the beholder. Most Leipzigers thought Eck had triumphed, while Wittenbergers deemed that, while scarred by some of Eck’s sallies, Luther was the winner” (p. 47). Of course, Lutherans have often heard another version but our party line histories have not always been the most reliable.

Marty divides his biography into four periods in the life of the reformer: 1483-1519 (“The Hunger for Certainty”), 1520-1525 (“Defining the Life of Faith”), 1525-1530 (“Living the Faith”), 1530-1546 (“The Heart Grown Cold, the Faith More Certain”).

In the first period Luther’s beginning years and the medieval penitential system in which Luther wrestled are interpreted in ways very familiar to Lutheran types and very adequately for the general reader. One wonders among Roman Catholics if the story gets told the same way. Marty diagnoses Luther’s core dilemma with more meat than just the usual “quest for a gracious God” against the backdrop of medieval contrition as Luther made contrition “complex,” seeing how “being sorry could mean being self-centered”:

“Through contrition a person could seek advantage by proving to God that he could cooperate in the steps he climbed to please God. Luther instead began a lifelong search for ways in which humans could experience the love of God without using God, without turning God into a convenience” (p. 15).

Marty’s way of saying why Luther found no solace in Staupitz’s efforts to pastor him, that his church only provided ways for seeking to manipulate God thus offering Luther no certainty, has a certain good ring to it (I had never thought of it quite that way before) and would be amply enforced by Luther’s later great Large Catechism line on the First Commandment: “faith makes both God and an idol” (or, as Marty would have it, “the creator of the Deity,” p. 39).

Crossings Community followers will be pleased that Marty walks through the progression of spelling out that core dilemma for Luther in a way that would remind one of “initial, advanced and final” diagnostic talk, taking us to the realization that coram deo, “before God,” humankind essentially has a God-sized problem in need of a God-sized solution. You’ll have to read the volume to see how Marty does it. Ultimately, though, Marty’s portrayal leaves us with what the reformer’s “Anfechtungen” were all about, that is, the collision of the hidden God experienced in seeming arbitrariness and uncertainty and the revealed God seen in weakness in Christ.

The flip side, of course, is the question, does Marty give his reader the real thing in Luther’s prognostic side?

Here is where I find Marty’s account of Luther’s theology deficient. While there are many familiar accents and themes in Luther’s own attempts to find a God-sized solution: connecting faith with righteousness (pp. 37ff), God showing us God’s “backside” ala the Heidelberg Disputation (Thesis 20), pp. 40ff., the themes of Luther’s earlier years, missing in action in Marty’s account, is Luther’s deepest Christology on not just that a sinner’s sins are Christ’s (Marty covers that amply later) but how and why a sinner’s sins are Christ’s as Christ defeats the law. More on this later as we notice how one of Luther’s great works of 1531, his later lectures on Galatians, is missing. That and noticeably absent is the great theme of the proper distinction between law and gospel, so key to understanding Luther’s mature theology. The reformer ultimately comes up with a God-sized solution to the dilemma. The question is, does Marty faithfully explicate it?

The second period of “Defining the Life of Faith” begins with the issuing of the Papal bull (June, 1520). As Marty describes the scene, the issue for the reformer and those grown excited about him was, “he had to describe how they related to each other and to Christ” (p. 57). That, indeed, was the question to a tee and Marty draws from Luther’s answers in the reformer’s three treatises of that year (Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of the Christian). Here the author picks up clearly not only Luther’s unfolding thinking about the Mass (pp. 61ff.) but also the “happy exchange” language of Luther’s radical understanding of the Christian gospel (pp. 65ff.). “In this exchange Christ changes places with sinners, something that Luther agreed the heart can only grasp in faith” (p. 65). Yet, here there is a line that has been part of a debate on Luther’s theology ever since regarding the place of the law which may be more Marty than Luther, “But following the law of God now became a part of the free believer’s expression of faith” (p. 66). There are heavyweight assessors of Luther’s thinking (e.g., Werner Elert) who would disagree with Marty’s judgment call which the author himself even later contradicts:

“In the matter of being declared just, the law of God always and only accused sinners, which meant it judged everyone in the church” (p. 79).

Worms, the monumental work of Luther in the Wartburg, and the unfolding two kingdoms distinction with all the contextual tensions are among the themes discussed brilliantly in this section, the author doing a superb job of unpacking the dynamics surrounding the Peasant’s Revolt in Luther’s emerging thinking. Earlier assessors such as Paul Althaus (The Ethics of Martin Luther) would most likely concur.

The third period of “Living the Faith” begins with Katie. It is interesting that Marty is attentive to the things that interest in the context of modern life and who better than Luther to grab us with issues of sexuality and the church? “Luther, never shy, was almost tasteless when he brought talk of marital intimacies into the open” (p. 106). Yet, equally true, as later studies such as Karant-Nunn and Wiesner-Hanks reveal (Luther on Women, Cambridge, 2003), “As much as he honored wives, he still did little to counter the inherited understanding that the woman was subordinate to the man…” (p. 108). Here Marty dives into the “apparent contradictions” (p. 117) of all church life and secular order. The reformer can discuss the full egalitarian meaning of baptism and yet say “…all Christians are priests, but not all are pastors” (p. 117). It is a good discussion and Marty treats his reader to the reality which any seminary trained pastor knows, doused with the reality of his/her first real parish. “Luther was often dismayed by the visitation reports” (p. 119). Experienced parish pastors, at least, can laugh and nod as Marty makes it all come alive when Luther encountered reality in these years.

The chapter also notes the Lutheran ambivalence on the law:

“While Melanchthon favored also a third use of the law, Luther discouraged it. This third use was to be pedagogical, as it would provide a guide or a rule for reborn believers. This Luther thought unnecessary…” (p.124).

What is missing in the chapter is Luther’s understanding of the dialectic of law and gospel which would have added considerably to why Luther resisted a third use of the law for the Christian. It might have added also to Marty’s discussion of the great debate between Erasmus and Luther over The Bondage of the Will (pp. 127 ff.).

The final period for Marty on Luther is entitled “The Heart Grown Cold, the Faith More Certain.” It’s a gem. This chapter alone is worth the price of admission. It works with a Luther who:

“Remaining pastoral, he identified with and showed empathy to faithful communicants who suffered ‘Anfechtungen’ with him, but his hopes now focused on the end of life and the end of the world” (p. 145).

Here again, in Luther’s dispute with Agricola and the antinomians, who, in Marty’s assessment, took a good thing (Luther’s burden) to the extreme and eliminated the law, “Luther did have answers to such questions, but his reliance on the theme of grace and faith made active in love was not easy to articulate…” (p. 146), the author shows why the theme of the law continued to vex. The Zwinglians, too, are here, whose assault on the real presence, despite seeking Luther’s affections, were “snubbed and marginal” (p. 147). Luther’s relationship with Calvin is largely absent and that is a disappointment in the book. The reformer saw in his legacy factions that “were going their separate ways” (p. 147). In it all, Marty draws us into a movement which Luther had started but soon became one out of his control. The attempt to clarify that movement, at Augsburg, receives short notice, and, perhaps, for good justification. “The relatively mild tenor of the Augsburg Confession, a feature that may have resulted from the fact that Luther was not its author, surprised many” (p. 155).

This chapter also provides some much needed grist for reassessing Luther in the context of Jewish-Christian dialog. There is, of course, little excuse for the later Luther’s well known and tragically misused views. Yet, for the widely beloved and respected author, there is a fresh appeal to contextualize the reformer’s voice. Marty lifts up and assesses Luther’s comments in That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew and notes how the reformer’s major concern was for conversion (p. 170). Then later Marty notes about The Jews and Their Lies that Luther never conceded the “we” in the crucifixion of Christ (p. 171). To notice these with other harsher opinions, Eck’s and Erasmus’ are mentioned, the author “does not exonerate Luther so much as provide a framework for approaching him” (p. 175).

Would that in this section Marty might amplify what he does, in fact, identify as “the one teaching labeled justification” (p. 175). “The teaching” is apparent here and there but we never learn exactly why Luther claimed it as the “nonnegotiable teaching” (p. 175). It was nice to hear that Luther liked to treat the gospel “epigrammatically” (p. 177): “Sinners are lovely because they are loved; they are not loved because they are lovely” (p. 177). But nowhere does Marty’s reader get treated to the deeper Luther Christology of the period which so informed and shaped, such as, “This was a truly remarkable duel, when the Law, a creature, came into conflict with the Creator…Here the Law, which once condemned and killed all men, has nothing with which to defend or cleanse itself. Therefore it is condemned and killed in turn, so that it loses its jurisdiction not only over ChristÑwhom it attacked and killed without any right anywayÑbut also over all who believe in Him” (see LW 26, 369-371 for the full text).

Marty’s “Afterword” assessment by which many are going to know Luther in the new millennium is grand. We are to know Luther as a liberator toward a new age, a boundary breaker, a spawner of a community of people of faith which still struggles to know what “Lutheran” means, but whatever it means, it will have been shaped by a beggar’s faith (amply and beautifully discussed at the end of the book) who were guided by a reformer who said “‘sin boldly’ and did” (p. 194).

The volume is marred by liberal quotes from Luther for which there is never a footnote. Only eminent historians, I suppose, can get away with that but we are at a loss when we ask from where Luther’s voice can be further found. The book, on the other hand, is beautifully enhanced by two superb maps by the author’s son and by a fairly decent bibliography.

The Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the University of Chicago has given the world a brilliant biographical read on Luther. I wouldn’t hesitate to suggest it for a moment to the lady at the door who asked (as one did the other Sunday), “Is there a good book on Luther?”

Yes there is.

The Rev. Stephen C. Krueger
Grace Lutheran Church
San Diego, California

Colleagues,First off some corrections on ThTh 293 a fortnight ago, “Seminex at Thirty. Random Ramblings for an Anniversary.” Senectitude triumphed over rectitude. There were three errors that I know of.

1. I forgot Carl Volz’s name in the roster of the dear departed. Here’s how the paragraph should have read:Of the 38 faculty folks who walked “off,” 14 have already walked on through the valley of the shadow of death. I list them here with “Seminex at 30” in memoriam. Herb Bouman, Bob Bertram, Doc Caemmerer, Bill Danker, Alfred Fuerbringer, Carl Graesser, Paul Lessmann, Erv Lueker, Art Repp, Al von Rohr Sauer, Gil Thiele, Carl Volz, Walt Wegner, Andy Weyermann.
2. I promoted Martin Scharlemann, Concordia Semianry’s president after John Tietjen’s suspension, to the rank of Air Force Major General. Martin was a Brigadier General. I should’ve remembered. He was my brother-in-law.
3. We were sacked for “dereliction of duty,” not dirilection.

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Now to the Topic: Your God is Too Small

First three days of this week, Sunday evening to Tuesday noon, I was with 80 “rostered” workers in one of the synods of the ELCA 600 miles from St. Louis. [Go figure.] It was their annual “Bishop’s Theological Conference for Professional Leaders.” The Bishop, who knows the theology I’m hustling, had invited me to hustle it at his place, to make four presentations on “The Word of God: Lutheran Hermeneutics for Our Day.” And one of the “for our day” issues was to be the ELCA’s mare’s nest of homosexuality.

Well, I did what I was asked to do. And on the mare’s nest item there was serious conversation, but little debate. I sense the troops are tired of it. Enough already! One pastor told me: “we’ve been doing the ECLA study we’re supposed to do, but nobody is changing their mind.” My take on that is that education won’t do it. Changed judgments about homosexuality come from lived experience. At least that’s how it happened for me. The study came second. What I proposed at the conference was that the hang-up in the ELCA is biblicism on both sides, both seeking to learn what the Bible “really” says. And there will never be agreement on that. That’s what the Bible experts — pro and con — have already told us in the ELCA study materials.

Even worse is the legalist hang-up that spooks in the shadows of all biblicisms, also in ELCA biblicism on both sides. It’s something like this: once we know what God tells us is the right thing on this one, we can then do the right thing and God will be pleased with us. Paul’s grim axiom for that is: They that live by the law shall die by the law. ELCA beware! The best thing to do is stop the study.

Long time readers of ThTh have already heard me out on this. If you want to review, check the umpteen past postings on the subject now archived on the <www.crossings.org> website. Here’s the list:

1999
Jan. 28
Feb 4
May 27
June 17
2001
June 28

2002
Jan 17
Jan. 24
Feb. 7
May 16

2003
Sept. 18
Oct. 2

Back to the Bishop’s conference. It wasn’t the homosexuality topic that generated most of the serious debate. Instead it was about God as our critic. Discussion in the sessions and Kaffee-klatsching verified what a wide river Lutheranism is these days. Tillich fans identified themselves naming their mentor. Barth, though never named, had his fans too. More than one responder began this way: “I start from the premise that we have a loving God.” In Barth’s own words, probably unknown to this fan, it is: “That God speaks to us at all is already Grace. Lutheran law-and-Gospel needs to be rearranged into Gospel and law.” One pastor (and only one, sob!) identified himself as a ThTh fan, and claimed that what the incognito Barthians were saying was NOT what these colleagues of his had pledged to say when they made their ordination vows. Even the claims coming from the Tillichians was not good enough to pass muster as Lutheran. There were other less-than-Lutheran theologies voiced. But that didn’t surprise.

And, wouldn’t you know it, some of the stickiest stuff came at the very end of the fourth session with the clock ticking, lunch impending and my departure soon to follow. So on the plane home I did re-runs about what I “should have said.” Lest I misrepresent, it was a fun conference. Lots of the folks said they were being helped. Nobody got mad. I did not get crucified, which may signal something about me. There is that modern adage that being a Christian means “You gotta look good on wood.” I came home without even splinters.

Back to the “should have said . . . .” remorse. Yes, I know it’s folly to say “if only I’d . . .” What’s done is done. Probably even worse, such “if only’s” signal unfaith. Mine. Even so I pass on to you some of what I heard and what I tell myself I “should have said.” In some of what follows I’m surely merging what I DID say and what I wish I’d added on.

I’ll focus on the one item mentioned above that recurred in several responses: “God cannot be as critical as you are saying, Ed. I cannot preach that to my people.” This is not the first time I’ve heard this, of course. I remember hearing it at the very beginning of my teaching at Valparaiso University. It was at the first-ever theology dialogue we had with Nortre Dame University. The topic was sin. Our department chair and theirs gave the presentations. Bob Bertram, VU dept chair, spelled out the picture of sin in the Augsburg Confession. First reaction came from the ND dept chair, also a Bob–Robert Pelton, I think: “It can’t really be that bad, Bob, can it?” And in Pelton’s essay he showed us that it wasn’t “that bad.” Pelton’s opinion is, I sense, majority opinion throughout Christendom. All over. Not just at this conference.

Nevertheless back at Augsburg in 1530 the confessors claimed (and showed) that this is false teaching, a falsification finally of the Gospel itself. It is an “other” Gospel. In theological shop-talk it’s anti-nomianism. However, not anti-nomianism about ethics–(“I can do whatever I darn well please; that’s what Christian freedom means”) but anti-nomianism about God–(“God could not be THAT serious about God’s law that he would actually carry his critique THAT far”).

Three exchanges (and now 2 days later what I should have said).

I. ONE CONFEREE:
“I start from the premise that we have a loving God, and therefore this talk about law and gospel as two very different words or actions from the same God to the same sinner–one a word that finally kills sinners, and the other a word that makes alive–that simply doesn’t compute.”

I should’ve said:
How solid is the premise you start with? As pious as it sounds, is it the right place for “starting” Christian theology? I think not. Nor do the Lutheran confessions. Yes, they could be wrong, but they also might be on target. Isn’t it more plausible to start from the premise (at least if you start, for example, from the Genesis creation story) that God is just? God plays fair and square. Isn’t that a better premise? We see it already in the opening verses of Genesis. God not only creates but also evaluates his creation, and does so in fairness and equity. Right from the beginning God brings creation into being by speaking “Let there be…,” and at the end of the day God-speaking evaluates the creation: “It’s good, very good.”

But when you get to the end of the creation story in the third chapter God’s evaluation is very different. It comes because the creatures are different. The primal human pair stop listening to God and begin to listen to that other voice. God is still fair, just, equitable. But no more “good, very good” from the mouth of God.

Listen to God’s different speech: “cursed… enmity… pain…thorns and thistles…sweat of your face… [and at the end] to dust you shall return.” After which comes one more coup–not a “coup de grace” at all–“Get out of my garden. And you’ll stay out.” Had you interviewed Adam and Eve on their way out, they would not have said: “This is good news. We’ve got a loving God.” Hardly. Yet had they had the faith, which they no longer did when God pulled them out of the bushes, they could have said: “God’s not being nasty. He’s giving us a fair shake. We screwed up. The contract said: The day you eat of it, the death sentence kicks in. God’s love, maybe; but God’s justice for sure.”

If you want an over-arching rubric for “starting,” why not start here? God as a justice-giving creator. Creation may be so frightfully screwed up that God’s justice is hard to find. Yes, often clearly undermined by all sorts of demonry. And, yes, we the human creatures are central to creation’s screw-up and the screw-ups on God’s justice . But there is one place where God’s primal justice operates unimpaired. It’s portrayed in the second next chapter after the Eden eviction. In Gen. 5 we hear that staccato report of Adam’s and Eve’s descendants. Ten names in the family tree. The last word about everyone is “and he died.” No exceptions to that fair-and-square justice from God.

Summa, you can’t get to a “loving God” for your theology by premise. Loving God is a conclusion after a long Biblical history. If you don’t take the Biblical path where you’ve “gotta” go through Good Friday and Easter Sunday, there are no grounds for having “loving God” on your theological blueprint, and surely not from starting there.

The one and only (!) place in Christian scripture where we hear “God is love” is in the first epistle of John. For John that is NOT a premise. It is a conclusion. A consequence conviction coming from the cross of “the ony Son.” Gospel-grounded theology does not start there, it ends there.

II ANOTHER CONFEREE:
“I can’t accept that wrath of God stuff you refer to. Humans indeed act in wrath and destroy one another and the planet. And there is the power of evil in the world. But God acting in wrath? Possibly never really. And surely not since Jesus. Since Good Friday and Easter, the wrath of God is gone from creation.” This too is not a new objection to law/promise Lutheranism.

I should’ve said:

1. What do you do with the 150-plus references to wrath of God in the OT, the several dozen wrath of God passages in the NT? Many of these NT texts speak of God’s wrath in operation AFTER Easter. Both in Paul’s writing AND in the Gospel of John, even in the very chapter where you find John 3:16, “God loved the world in just this way.” In that reference (3:36) John’s claim–and it could be Jesus’ own words, for in John’s prose it’s not always clear–is that “Whoever believes in the Son” has immunity from God’s wrath. God’s Son has indeed done it in. But if you don’t trust that Son, you don’t have it. Immunity is not yours. It’s individual medicine, not crop dust sprayed on the field. Those who do not cling to the Son, still have the wrath of God clinging them.Or perhaps this–
2. Sounds to me like your God is too small. I don’t mean that as a nasty dig. I mean it seriously. Literally. There is this large collection of Biblical data about the wrath of God that you apparently can’t fit into your God-concept–yet. So your picture of God needs to expand, expand to the breadth of the Bible’s own God-picture. God is not simply “nice guy” in Biblical texts. God “visits iniquities.” God is at least as complex as we his human images are. You and I know human anger as well as affection both to be present within ourselves. So, say the scriptures–using anthropomorphic metaphors, of course–so does God. That will indeed make it initially more troublesome to talk about God, of course. A monochromatic deity is “easy.” But even more troublesome, it is beneficial both for one’s own faith and for one’s theological blueprint for doing pastoral work. By that I mean it could do its own “Christum treiben” on you–push you to Christ to cope with this paradox. In fact that’s how Paul came to terms with the antithesis. Why God’s law? Why God our critic? Why God’s wrath? “To drive us to Christ.”

This pastor, I learned in the over-lunch conversation we had, did her M.Div. at the University of Chicago. So I should’ve quoted Aristotle. Specifically his axiom that philosophy, like the individual sciences, seeks to “save the phenomena.” I.e, “save” the data that is under investigation by bringing them in onto one blueprint. And the better system is the one that “saves the most data.” The best, if possible, would save it all. Ditto for theologies. The theological blueprint that saves more data is better than one that saves less. A theology that can’t find a place for the wrath of God on its blueprint is a theology too small.

You can declare the wrath of God to be non-existent. But if it does indeed exist, you are in trouble. And if the people you are called to serve have encounters in their lives that they can only portray as the wrath of God, you–with no place on your pastoral blueprint for what they are talking about–are in trouble. With no place for it on your own blueprint, you won’t have a clue for building anything of benefit for these folks. It comes down to the “double-dipstick” we talked about in the first session Sunday evening–the best theology is the one that does not “lose” the merits and benefits of Christ and thus has Christ to “use” in offering Good News to folks who are crying for help.

Wrath of God, so Paul, so John, has not disappeared since Jesus was here. One format wherein it is revealed is abandonment, when God “gives up” sinners to their own choices, not intervening in their self-destruction. Here God does not stomp on them. Instead God deserts them. God says (ala C.S. Lewis): “OK, sinner, have it your way. THY will be done.” Divine desertion was Jesus’ own experience (swapping with us, of course) as he uttered that cry of dereliction.

Pushing the wrath of God off the blueprint is no way to help your parishioners when it hits the fan for them. Though “pushing it off” is not a bad image. It’s all in where you push it. The good news is that there is One who invites us to “push it off” onto him, and thereby trump it. That sweet-swap prompts Paul to say it simply: “We are saved BY HIM from the wrath of God.” (Rom. 5:9) That includes encounters with wrath that are yet to come. When parishioners utter their own cries of dereliction, the pastor’s calling is nothing less than to midwife this derelection-sweet-swap. In Augsburg prose, to “illumine and magnify the blessings of Christ, and bring to devout consciences the consolation that they need. . . the consolation offered them in Christ.”

ONE MORE:
I was commending Luther’s theology of creation as grounds for Christians, both hetero and homo, to confess with him in the Small Catechism: “I believe that God made me together with all that exists. God has given me and still preserves my body and soul–whether hetero or homo” and then comes a laundry list of other goodies.

Good conversation ensued and then came this one off the wall–just as the clock was ticking down to closure. “Ed, in your theology of creation, how about a spina bifida newborn? Did God create that baby that way? My response: “If God didn’t, who did?”
“I can’t believe that God would do such a thing.”
“That citation from the Small Catechism ÔGod creates all that exists’ is in your ordination vow, as well as in mine. So how do you link that to spina bifida?”
“Well, I simply can’t say that to the parents of this baby. I can talk about God as creator of the baby, but not of the spina bifida.”

What I should’ve said (maybe)

1. If you have no place on your own pastoral theological blueprint for such tragedies, then you will have to push the spina bifida off onto something else, as I hear you saying you do. Does that signal that your God is too small? That your own theological blueprint cannot “save” this terrible reality?
2. We are committed as Christians to monotheism. There is no second “evil” deity onto whom we can shove such things. We are “stuck” with having to bring it all together, “all that exists,” as the catechism says, under one roof labelled “God at work.”
3. That was one big chunk of Luther’s fight with Erasmus–God’s absolute management of everything, even the awful stuff. Erasmus said no, Luther yes. In western culture Erasmus carried the day, and still does. Possibly also with you. But Luther’s is better. Saves more of the data.
4. There is just “too much” Bible to push off the blueprint on this one. One of the most vivid is Deut 32:39 (spoken against the Canaanite option of two deities, one for good stuff, one for the bad) “See now that I, even I, am the one and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver [you] out of my hand.”
5. Marcion way back in the second century of the early church coped with his experience of evil by choosing the Canaanite option–a bad God who did evil stuff, a good God fully revealed in Jesus. His case was very plausible. He too could have started with a spina bifida baby. Yet he was excommunicated in Rome in 144 and got tagged as a heretic. He was unable to find space for God the critic on his blueprint. So he dumped him.
6. Luther offers one alternative to Marcion, the term “hidden God,” for c oping with such lived experience. He did not invent it. He found it all over in the Psalms and in Isaiah. Hidden-God encounters are terrifying. You can declare them non-existent, but that doesn’t mitigate the terror. God himself is not what is hidden in such encounters. No, a fateful, and often fatal, power against us, not for us, is our experience, and it is way beyond our control. What’s hidden in such encounters with this one and only God there is, is any grace and mercy toward us, that this fateful power could ever be “merciful to me a sinner.”

Enter Jesus, not more of God-hidden, but God-revealed, taking off the veil where mercy was hidden before. This is the Gospel’s proposal for dealing with hidden-God encounters. Same deity, but now with veil removed, showing the whole world God’s shining face in the crucified and risen Jesus.

Hidden-God encounters, spina bifidas of all sorts, are not God’s last word. Why God plays the hiding game is itself shrouded. But not always, not entirely. See the Book of Job. See how the Psalmist, how Isaiah, cope.

To get to the sepcifics:
The Word of God in person encounters deus absconditus on a Friday noon–“My God, my God, why this abandonment?” Bad news for him, good news for us. It’s for us and for our salvation. That’s the sweet-swap offer again. That offer perdures. It outlasts all hidden-God encounters. So he promised: My Word will not pass away. His disciples trust him for it. That word of God trumps the no-mercy hiddenness of God that vexes all of Adam and Eve’s kids, and still vexes God’s kids whom Christ has brought home to his Father. Even trumps spina bifidas. Not necessarily that such afflictions are cured this side of our own resurrections–though that too has been know to happen–but afflicted ones do get “healed” already on this side. The “full cure” is his promise for the other side. We trust him for this side, we can trust him for the other. He operates with a very big blueprint–and a long-range future.

Peace & Joy!
Ed Schroeder

 

Colleagues,

ThTh 294 is a sequel to ThTh 293’s reflections on Seminex’s 30th birthday. On Sunday of that January week in 1974 John Tietjen was suspended from his office as President of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, and the labor contractions began that birthed Seminex. This year on that same Sunday John preached in the congregation where he once was pastor in Ft. Worth, Texas. It was the Sunday on which church commemorates “The Confession of St. Peter.” Confessing the faith–better said: confessing Christ at the center of the faith–was the issue 30 yrs ago. Confessing Christ is ALWAYS the issue, even if there never had been a Seminex.Last week’s posting told of John’s long-running encounter with cancer. In my e-mail exchange with John to get this text for you, one bon mot (of many) is too good to keep for myself. He told me: “I have learned the difference between being healed and being cured. I thank God for healing.” John’s sermon abounds in more bons mots. And no wonder, it’s all about THE Good Word.

Peace & Joy!
Ed Schroeder

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A Sermon by John H. Tietjen
Trinity Lutheran Church, Fort Worth, Texas
January 18, 2004

PETER’S CONFESSION – AND OURS
MATTHEW 16:13-16

When pastor Ron drew up the preaching schedule at the beginning of this year, I was scheduled to preach today. But that was canceled when I developed my serious health problems. Yet here I am ready to preach the sermon. Last Sunday I asked Pastor Ron if I might carry out the previously assigned responsibility. My reason is simple. My health problems are still there, though there is good news since my trip to Houston. But I know I am not going to have too many more opportunities like this. I have things I want, in fact, I need, to say. They are a burden on my heart, especially the message in today’s Gospel. As we say in the language we have developed recently, I have a legacy to leave behind.

I very much welcome the opportunity to speak to you about the message in today’s Gospel. The event is called Peter’s Confession. It is balanced next Sunday by an event called the Conversion of St. Paul. The two leaders of the New Testament church together make up the Week of Prayer for Christian unity. I am not going to deal with that theme today, but rather with the event described in the Gospel. The event is the turning point in all the Synoptic Gospels, those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Up until this event Jesus has been traveling around, mostly in Galilee, gathering disciples and telling people the Gospel, the good news of the coming of the rule of God. From this point on Jesus is going to head toward Jerusalem and to the crucifixion waiting for him there. The crowds who came out to him were getting thin, and Jesus was experiencing opposition. He decided to get out of the limelight, to take the Twelve to Gentile territory, north to Caesarea Philippi, a town named after the emperor and one of King Herod’s offspring.

Jesus wanted to take a sounding, to find out if he had been getting through to his followers, especially to the Twelve. So when they arrived at their destination, he asked them, “Who do people say that I am?” The answers varied: “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “Okay,” Jesus said, “And who do you say that I am?” I can see them all looking at Simon, with whom they had already discussed the matter, expecting him to be their spokesman. He did just that. He said, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

That is Peter’s confession. It is also mine. Is it yours? Not everyone says that about who Jesus is. For some people Jesus is a teacher, a prophet perhaps, whose moral teachings are the foundation of the good life. A variety of answers people give about who Jesus is can be seen in the answers given by the people of the Jesus-seminar and its quest for the historical Jesus in the last decades of the 20th century. Who was he? A charismatic healer, a teacher of Wisdom like Solomon, a revolutionary for the poor and the oppressed, an itinerant cynic like those in the Greek world. When you read what these people have to say, you want to cry out, “Will the real Jesus please stand up?”

Another way people say who Jesus is is by substituting for Jesus key values from their own life. In other words Jesus is not the Messiah; something else is. And they give to that something else the loyalty and devotion that belong to the Messiah. Money is one of those values; so is success, popularity, power. Education is valued as a good above others; so is family. As people seek these goods and values to shape their lives, they put Jesus as Messiah in the back seat.

Peter’s confession makes it clear who Jesus is. He is everything I have said this morning, everything others have said about him, but he is more. He is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. Son of God tells us who he is; Messiah tells us what he does. As Son of God he did the Messiah’s work of bringing God’s gracious rule into people’s lives. Peter made his confession out of the living faith of the people of Israel. They were waiting and longing for the Messiah to come, as many Jews do to this day. Peter was convinced he had found him.

We could use other language to confess the substance of Peter’s confession. With the apostle John we could say Jesus is the eternal Word of God, who creates new life in us. With the apostle Paul we could say Jesus is the embodiment of God through whom we become a new creation. The point is the same. Jesus makes all the difference in how we see God and God’s relation to us, what we do with our lives, and what we can expect God to do for us.

In Houston [sc. at the cancer clinic] this past week I have been reading The Murder Room, a novel by P.D. James. I have learned from reading other works by James that she is not only a great teller of detective stories but that she writes serious literature. I always expect to be rewarded by insights for me personally and that can actually serve as sermon material. I have two quotations from the present volume.

James Calder-Hale, a museum curator, learns in his mid-fifties that his cancer is back.

“He found himself unable to believe that anything he did, anything done to him, his mental attitude, his courage or his faith in his doctors, could alter the [inevitable victory of death.] Others might prepare to live in hope, to earn that posthumous tribute, ‘after a gallant fight.’ He hadn’t the stomach for a fight, not with an enemy already so entrenched.” (*)

The second quotation is from a conversation between Calder-Hale and a museum employee. They are talking about people featured in the museum’s Murder Room. The employee, Tally Clutton says:

“I sometimes wonder where they’ve all gone — not just the murderers and their victims, but all the people photographed in the museum. Do you wonder about that?”

“No, I don’t wonder. That’s because I know. We die like animals and from much the same cause and, except for the lucky few, in much the same pain.”

“And that’s the end?”

“Yes. It’s a relief, isn’t it?”

She said, “So what we do, how we act, doesn’t matter except in this life?” (#)

That’s where you wind up if you don’t make Peter’s confession, or something like it, your own. Commitment to Jesus as Messiah gives us a foundation for living that enables us to be blessed, as Jesus tells us in his Sermon on the Mount. More, it gives the Calder-Hales of this world a resource for dealing with the death sentence you hear when you receive the pronouncement of a terminal illness.

God is a very present help in trouble, as I am ready to witness. God gives the strength needed for the problems each new day brings. I have placed my life in God’s hands. Therefore I know all will be well, including what happens at death. No, death is not the end of it all. Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. God raised Jesus from the dead. Because He lives, I too will live. The Messiah said so.

I hope my point this morning is clear. We have to make Peter’s confession our own. We can do it here in worship. As you meet Jesus in the Holy Communion, say it to him: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And then live that way.

We have to make Peter’s confession for the sake of others. Today at the later service my two grandchildren from Abilene will be here, Elizabeth and Chase. We are celebrating Elizabeth’s eleventh birthday. I want Elizabeth and members of her family to realize what is of first and ultimate importance. I want her to be able to say, “You are Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Oh, how I want that to happen for all the children of the congregation.

A recent report I read tells us that many congregations are investing in youth work in order to hold on to teenagers and their parents and as a result are neglecting children below the teen years. We ought to do the one and not neglect the other. “No child left behind” is a watchword not only for secular education but for education in the church. We have a responsibility, adult Christians, to share our legacy with those who come after us.

That’s it. Like the farmer with only half his herd present, I’ve dumped the whole load. I hope to be back soon with another message of ultimate importance.

[Footnotes.
(*) P.D. James, The Murder Room, p.53
(#) Ibid. pp. 59-60]

John H. Tietjen, Pastor Emeritus
Trinity Lutheran Church, Fort Worth, Texas
Confession of St. Peter, January 18, 2004