By Robert W. Bertram [Printed in Dialog 27, No. 4 (Fall, 1988): 268-276. Reprinted with permission from Blackwell Publishing Ltd.] Segundo and Justification by Faith A leading liberation theologian, Jesuit Father Juan Luis Segundo, has complained that “Roman Catholic theology in Europe, especially since Vatican II, is drawing nearer to the Lutheran position on justification.” Segundo deplores that …
The Ministry of “the Ordained” and “the Laity”
(2 Corinthians, chs. 3-6) Presentation I. Are there two distinct ministries? Yes, the “new” ministry vs. the “old ministry,” but not the ordained vs. the lay. Currently we seem preoccupied with the distinction between ordained and lay ministries (ELCA, BEM.) If only to understand that distinction, we need urgently to subordinate it to another, more basic …
CRESSET, CORRELATIONS AND CROSSINGS
Robert W. Bertram [Address at Graduate Students Association, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, September 21, 1987.] 1. During the “fourth decade of the twentieth century” Otto Paul Kretzmann first went public with his little Cresset “toward a new fusion of the intellectual and spiritual life,” of “culture and Christianity,” “a surrendered unity” between “truth …
Bertram’s Subtle Dependence Employing the sincere form of flattery,
a response by Paul Rorem to Robert W. Bertram’s Putting the Nature of God Into Language: Naming the Trinity May 18. 1987 The Style 1. There is nothing like a Bertram exposition…. circling th[e]center, fending off misunderstandings, making words serve new meanings, until it seems language itself is no longer under the law. (Richard Luecke, Currents 14, …
PUTTING THE NATURE OF GOD INTO LANGUAGE: NAMING THE TRINITY
[Address at Lutheran School of Theology Faculty Forum, Chicago, Illinois, May 18, 1987. Later published in Our Naming of God: Problems and Prospects of God-Talk Today, 91-110. Edited by Carl E. Braaten. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989. Used by permission.] Nothing so defies “putting the nature of God into language” as does God’s triunity, except that even that much …
A Time for Confessing Is a Time for Liberating
Edward H. Schroeder [Printed in Currents in Theology and Mission, 14, No. 2 (April, 1987): 85-93. Reprinted with permission.] The Crossings Community, St. Louis, Missouri Bob Bertram became a Liberation theologian in the course of the Missouri Synod controversy of the 70s. Yet neither he nor anyone else noticed that until some years later. Even today in …
A Time for Confessing Is a Time for Liberating
Edward H. Schroeder [Printed in Currents in Theology and Mission, 14, No. 2 (April, 1987): 85-93. Reprinted with permission.] The Crossings Community, St. Louis, Missouri ABSTRACT Becoming a Liberation theologian through the Missouri Synod controversy of the 1970s, Bob Bertram brought his distinctive clarity about the sola fide into Seminex’s give-and-take with Liberation theologians from around the world, …
Luther on the Unique Mediatorship of Christ
Robert. W. Bertram [Address at the Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue USA, Tampa, Florida, February, 1987. Later published in The One Mediator, The Saints, and Mary: Lutherans and Catholics in Dialoque VIII, 249-262. Edited by H. George Anderson, J. Francis Stafford, and Joseph A. Burgess. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992. Used by permission.] NOT AS A MEANS OF GRACE First we …
Correlations and Crossings
Robert W. Bertram [Originally published in The Cresset, Vol. 51, no. 1 (1987) Reprinted with permission — and blessings – from The Cresset] Robert W. Bertram is Seminex Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He is a member of the Commission on Faith and Order of the World Council of …
REFORMATION FAITH AND AMERICAN PRAGMATISM
I. What is it about Martin Luther that interested William James? What is it about William James that interested Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Is what interested the pragmatist James in Luther the same thing which interested the Lutheran Bonhoeffer in the pragmatist James? In Bonhoeffer’s discovery of James, during his stay at Union Seminary during 1930-31, was the Lutheran Reformation …