05-4 Theology of the..

36 LOGIA
them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them,
and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and
that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast
loved them, as thou hast loved me (Jn 17:21–23).
To be one with Christ, a branch on his vine—this dependence is
the basis for our independence. To lose ourselves and to be found
in him, not having our own righteousness, but the righteousness
that is through faith in him, to die to our old selves and to be
reborn again in his image—this is the only really original thing at
all in this tired old world of ours.
Like the Apostles’ Creed and other symbols
of the church, the Te Deum sums
up all of our faith, not just one aspect
of it, in very few words.
nb
Our best sermons, it has been said, are those in which we do
not preach Christ, but in which Christ preaches himself. Augustine
puts it colorfully when he speaks of the preacher “belching”
(the Latin verb is eructare) the gospel. It springs up from within
us, in other words, naturally and spontaneously, even in spite of
ourselves—from the fullness of the heart, where the word of
Christ dwells richly. Preaching should not, therefore, be considered,
as it often is, a virtuoso performance by a great orator standing
before an audience. In a very real way, it is the word of God—
from which not a jot or a tittle will pass away—as much as the
word of the preacher. The preacher should not regard his sermon
as some kind of personal achievement any more than anything
else in our Christian life is really solely our own. Everything we are
and have is a gift from above. Even Jesus was careful to point this
out about his own authoritative teaching: “My doctrine is not
mine, but his that sent me.” A good sermon will be original, all
right—how could the freshly minted word of God applied to life
be anything else—but any originality that the preacher has comes
not from himself, but from the one who sent him.
VI.
Luther called the Te Deum a symbol. What did he mean by that
Like the Apostles’ Creed and other symbols of the church, the Te
Deum sums up all of our faith, not just one aspect of it, in very
few words. It is comprehensive and compact. It includes a song of
praise, a confession of faith, and a prayer for help, all in fewer
than two hundred words. One of the most powerful and expressive
of all Christian symbols is simply two lines that cross each
other at right angles, yet it stands for the crucifixion, for our salvation,
for our redemption. Like the cross, the Te Deum is profound
yet simple. Little children are able to sing it. The greatest
weaknesses of some of our best modern attempts at hymnody
(Martin Franzmann’s otherwise admirable hymns come to mind)
is that they are too complex, too literary—they are designed to
be sung by adults. Luther said of his own preaching:
When I preach here I adapt myself to the circumstances of the
common people. I don’t look at the doctors and masters, of
whom scarcely forty are present, but at the hundred or the
thousand young people and children. It’s to them that I
preach, to them that I devote myself, for they, too, need to
understand. If the others don’t want to listen, they can leave. 30
Hymns, like the Te Deum, which can be understood by the simplest
without being trite or vulgar and which address the greatest
truths in the utmost seriousness without being pompous or
sentimental—these are truly rare treasures and not to be lightly
discarded.
The Te Deum, like the other great symbols of the early church,
is also Trinitarian. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The doctrine
of the Trinity was hammered out on the anvil of controversy,
as early Christians were forced to articulate their beliefs visà-vis
a variety of heresies, each of which were distortions of the
truth. This doctrinal focus is made explicit in the words of the
hymn itself (for example, the triple Sanctus), but it seems also to
have permeated the structure of the Te Deum. The hymn is
divided into three parts. This tripartite division is not simply a
matter of style or ornamentation, but it is, rather, integrally connected
with the substance of this Trinitarian composition. The
first thirteen verses praise God the creator of heavens and earth in
his celestial majesty; the next six verses confess in credal fashion
the Son who came to earth to save us; the last ten verses consist of
petitions that we pray through the assistance of the Holy Spirit
(cf. Rom 8:26–27). This tripartite structure is reinforced by musical
settings (as in The Lutheran Hymnal of 1941) that shift from a
major key at the beginning, to a minor key in the middle, and
then return to a major key at the end.
Central to Trinitarian debates in the early church was the correct
understanding of the relationship of the Son to the Father
and to the Holy Spirit. Some heretics (like Sabellius) insisted that
the Son was the same as the Father and that God had not become
man, but had simply adopted the form of a man. Arius, on the
other hand, maintained that the Son was not equal in power with
the Father because he was not coeternal. Many of the first orthodox
hymns, especially those written by Ambrose, appear to have
been reactions to Arius’s false teaching. When the Te Deum was
first sung, the expression “the eternal Son of the Father” probably
received special emphasis. These were fighting words in the
fourth century—and, indeed, they still are, or still should be.
(One need think only of the absurdities sponsored by the Jesus
Seminar or the predictable conclusions drawn by recent sociological
studies devoted to the so-called quest for the historical
Jesus. 31 ) In fact, the verse Tu Patris sempiternus es filius is the fifteenth
in the Latin version, the exact center of the twenty-nine
verses that make up the traditional Te Deum. The very structure
of the piece says something about what those who sing it believe.
Christ is the center of this hymn, just as he is the center of everything
else, too. What he did for us is the great turning point of
salvation history. His incarnation is the center of time. (Despite
some attempts among the politically correct to alter the practice,
it still is customary in most circles to measure human history in
terms of “Before Christ” and Anno Domini.) And Christ is the
center of our individual Christian lives, too. What Jesus did for us