Bondage of the Will

Two more views on
“Go East, Young Man”
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When members of the Lutheran
Church tell me that another church is better
for them, I rarely disagree. If they want
to speak in tongues, the Lutheran Church
is not the church for them. If they want a
preacher to tell them they are getting better
every day and will soon achieve moral
perfection, there are other preachers who
will suit them better. But I will engage
them in dialogue if they misunderstand
either the Lutheran Church or the church
to which they are headed. For this reason,
I respond to M. Andrew’s “Go East,
Young Man,” in Forum, Logia 7, no. 2
(Easter 1998), 74–75.
M. Andrew observes that there are
many “Lutherans” who want to be
something else: Evangelicals, Romanists,
or liberal Protestants. He observes that
others do want to follow the Lutheran
Confessions, but read the Confessions
disparately through Gerhard, Walther,
Pieper, or the early church. He properly
notes that “the question is really one of
hermeneutic.” Then he asks, “Which
glasses does one put on?” The imagery
of “glasses” betrays Andrew’s hermeneutical
misunderstanding fostered by postmodern
relativism.
Post-modernism asserts that no text
can be read without the “spectacles” of
the reader’s prejudices, especially the
prejudices of class, gender, or ethnic situation.
If one accepts these tenets of postmodernism,
then a church cannot be
objectively evaluated on the basis of its
text-based theology, but only on subjective
bases. I disagree strongly with postmodernism,
not simply out of reaction,
but because I have carefully studied its
Correspondence
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relationship to hermeneutics (my Fort
Wayne S.T.M. thesis on Gadamer) and its
historical origins (my Union Seminary —
New York Ph.D. dissertation on Harnack
and historicism). As M. Andrew has discovered,
post-modern relativism is
absolutely inimical to a confession-based
religion of any type. How does one then
read the Confessions? The Formula of
Concord asserts that the Lutheran Confessions
are a pattern of doctrine “from
which and according to which, because it
is drawn from the Word of God, all other
writings are to be approved and accepted,
judged, and regulated” (FC SD Rule and
Norm, 10). Therefore Gerhard, Walther,
Pieper, the early church —yes, even
Luther himself— are to be judged by this
standard pattern of doctrine. For example,
when Walther and the Confessions
disagree over a particular article of doctrine,
a “confessional Lutheran” will side
with the common confessions of the
church. That is what it means to be
a confessional Lutheran.
The most serious error made by eastern-leaning
Protestants is the assumption
that the theology of the ancient
fathers is still taught and practiced in
today’s Eastern Orthodox churches.
They simply ignore, or are unaware of,
1500 years of doctrinal development in
the Orthodox churches. Several critical
turning points can be mentioned that
prove the gradual deformation of biblical
doctrine and practices in those
churches. First, possibly as early as Justin
Martyr, and deWnitely by the time of the
Alexandrians — Clement, Origen, Eusebius,
et al.— the Greek church had
adapted its teaching to the methods,
term deWnitions, and thought-forms of
Middle-Platonism and Neoplatonism
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(see the scholarship of Adolf von Harnack).
This adaptation resulted in a
signiWcant conXict with biblical theology,
which conXict was expressed in the Trinitarian
and Christological controversies.
Second, although the creeds put an
end to the Neoplatonic threat to Christology,
they made little headway against
the inXuence of Neoplatonic soteriology.
Neoplatonism envisioned salvation as
some sort of “stairway to heaven,” by
which the believer became deiWed by
degrees. This corresponds to the Eastern
Orthodox doctrine of theosis. The former
Neoplatonist Augustine of Hippo
realized that theosis, which posited man
reaching up to God, conXicted with the
New Testament theology of gratia, in
which God reaches down to man.
Augustine’s critique of Neoplatonic
soteriology reformed the Latin church,
but to my knowledge had little impact
on the Greek church.
Third, the Greek church was politically
reunited to the Roman church at the
Council of Florence in 1439 (see the article
by Wayne Jorgensen, “Eastern Orthodoxy,”
in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the
Reformation, 4 vols., ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand
[New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996], 2: 15). The Greek laity and
lower clergy adamantly rejected the East-
West union, which they saw as tantamount
to apostasy. But the conquest
of the Byzantine Empire by the Ottoman
Turks quickly brought this struggle to an
end, with the Romanizing inXuence the
winner. From the sixteenth century on,
the Jesuits increased the Romanizing inXuence
in the Greek church, until the only
signiWcant diVerences were papal authority,
married clergy, the lay reception of the
communion cup, and the Wlioque clause.