05-4 Theology of the..

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6 LOGIA As we know, the truth in Kierkegaard’s parable entered human history in Jesus Christ. Paul eloquently summarized the historical version of the story in Philippians 2: Who being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death—even death on a cross! The king cast off his regal robes and became a helpless baby, a lowly footwasher, and a shameful crossbearer. Not very scary, but that is precisely the point. God has love and courtship on his mind. In Jesus, God meets us face to face., but incognito and humbly, to win us over with a dying, sacrificial love to be his own bride forever. As he conquered the forces of darkness and death, the risen and exalted Christ is still with us, and out of his loving designs, humbly hidden in his gospel, cloaked in mundane human language and the common elements of water, bread, and wine. Through these, word and sacrament, his gospel ministry of salvific courtship with frail, sinful people continues. Only now he carries it out through common human bodies like yours and mine. We in his church have become part of our Lord’s humble disguise! The king cast off his regal robes and became a helpless baby, a lowly footwasher, and a shameful crossbearer. nb It’s not very flashy or spectacular, nothing like the great Old Testament extravaganzas. Hollywood would never clamor for the screen rights, but here is God’s loving face as clearly as we can receive it from him. And it is his ministry and the way he condescends to meet us for our sake out of his mercy and love. Make no mistake about it, God was not fooling around when he made his Son incarnate. The cross cost him the humiliation and death of his own Son, and all for the sake of his burning love for us sinful human beings. In the gospel, we truly meet an honest-to-God: God as he truly is, a loving and merciful heavenly Father. God’s Preparatory Meeting Honest encounters among persons human or divine, however, always require that everything significant is out in the open. Fireballs and smoke will not reveal a loving and gracious God on the divine side of the meeting, and deceitfulness and dishonesty will not do on our side. All who think they have the spiritual mettle to request a face-to-face meeting with God must realize, as C. S. Lewis did, that such a meeting requires that we rebellious sinners bring only our true face to the encounter. And there is the rub that brings the curiosity about divine matters within both child and learned scholar to a screeching halt. We don’t have the spiritual mettle natively within us for that. True moral self-honesty is a spiritual virtue, but we sons and daughters of Adam are spiritually dead. God, therefore, has another face and ministry for us and our salvation to prepare us for the real-face-to-face meeting with him through the gospel. Through this preparatory meeting he gives us a true and honest face and the humility to meet him in his love and mercy. You cannot meet God as he truly is until you have met up with yourself as you really are. God will not be mocked by sham meetings with faceless human beings. We must wear our true face, and that is just what God would provide by meeting him through his law. Here we see one of the most unique and distinctive features about Christianity that separates it from all the religions of man. Most religions have a moral code that is commended to us with the promise that through it we can all become better people. With legal enlightenment and commitment to a virtuous sense of duty, we can all make significant progress in overcoming our perceived moral defects. Do-ability with sufficient resolve is the hallmark of man’s moral precepts. “I ought, therefore I can,” said the famous moral philosopher Immanuel Kant. He constructed a whole system of ethics based on that assumption. But when we stand in the mirroring light of God’s law of life, it casts a shadow of darkness and death about us that elicits the opposite confession: “I ought, but I don’t and I can’t.” God’s law shows us that our problem is not at its root immorality or weak resolve: ours is a problem of spiritual bankruptcy and death. This is the dark truth that lies tucked away deep in the soul of every sinner, that must be faced with all repentant honesty before we can meet the gracious God face to face. Our idolatry and deceitfulness of the heart must be confronted for what they are. The gap between what we are and what we ought to be needs to be seen as the great abyss that we are unable to cross. Jesus expressed the pith and marrow of God’s law when he repeated the Deuteronomic formula “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul and your neighbor as yourself.” And setting himself up as the revealed enfleshment of the law, he commanded his disciples to “love one another even as I have loved you.” Love is the law of the Spirit of life, for God is love and God is life. There are two elements in full-strength law. The first is love, the character of God and the core purpose of human existence that God designed for us from the beginning. Love is the core of the moral and spiritual environment that we inhabit, grounded in God’s very being. When we love we are captivated by another with spontaneous, joyful regard. The beloved’s needs, desires, and concerns become the center of attention that motivate and shape our involvement and relation to the beloved. Love’s activity and concern is always other-directed and always freely given. Love does not seek for the self, but for the other (1 Cor 13:5). The second part is “law proper,” which was added because of sin (Gal 3:19). It is the “you must—or perish.” Do it or die! Law proper places duty and obligation before us with the threatening penalty of death: a penalty that captivates us at the most fundamental level of our self-love and concern, our very well-being. Love is demanded under penalty of death. To serve the law is to enlist in the service of legal duty and to do so out of concern for the self, not concern for the other. Do what is required and you will live. In other words, your duty or your death! To be moved by legal necessity and the damning curse of the law suffocates the freedom and spontaneity that love requires. When we are capti-
THE TWO-FACED GOD 7 vated and driven by the law, there can be no love, but when we are grasped by love, the law’s demands and threats evaporate. Indeed, they can even seem silly. Imagine strolling in a park and spotting a young couple sitting on a bench. As you watch them out of the corner of your eye for several minutes, it becomes obvious that they are deeply in love with one another. You can tell just by noticing how they look at one another. Now imagine going up to them and saying, “Surely you realize that you must love each other. It’s the law!” They would look at you as though you were crazy, would they not Surely they would wonder, “How must we do what we simply cannot help but do” Love’s compulsion is tied to the beloved, but never legal necessity. Where there is love, the force and compulsion of legal necessity are not only absent; to lovers they seem ridiculous. It was again Kierkegaard who understood that the two elements, love and law, have a paradoxical “hide-and-seek” relationship with one another. If you encounter one, the other is in hiding and nowhere to be found. If you experience the demand— “you must”—love is absent and nowhere to be seen. If love is a present flowing reality, then the law has disappeared from view. Yes, love is the law of life, but love and law are never experienced together, for like oil and water they repel each other in our experience of each. We are either grasped by the necessity of doing our duty for our own good, or we are captivated by love and what is good for the beloved. Let’s explore the paradox further. It is certainly true that we are always capable of being more kind and considerate of others than we have been, and we corrupt ourselves if we do not even try. Moreover, we will never love unless we make a conscious effort. Nevertheless, deliberately striving to love people will not accomplish the goal. Love is a fruit, not a work. Where love exists. it spontaneously carries its own burden for the beloved without strife or any sense of legal compulsion. The law of love presents sinful humans with a paradoxical dilemma, a moral and spiritual “catch-22.” The paradox can be illustrated by the example of a painter who deliberately tries to become a great artist. If he does not strive, he will never become an artist, much less a great one. But since he makes genius in his craft a deliberate goal of striving, he proves he is not and never will be a genius. Great artists are such without striving. Their abilities simply unfold in their work like the petals of a rose before the sun. Genius is a gift of God; it is not a work; and so also is love. Love blossoms from a grace-nourished faith in the Christian life as faith is exercised in our relations with others. If we do not strive to love with all that is in us, we surely condemn ourselves. But on the other hand, love is not ours for the striving. Moreover, love is our duty, but we can never love when we are driven by a sense of that duty. Imagine that a husband confesses to his wife that he has been striving to love her for the past ten years and that he plans to redouble his efforts in the coming year. Has he not confessed to her that he hasn’t loved her in years, that he doesn’t love her now, and for that matter, he can’t If you were his wife, what would you say to him Are we not tempted to tell this man to please stop But isn’t it also true that he would stand self-condemned before his wife if he confessed to her that he doesn’t love her and, for that matter, he isn’t even going to try Catch-22! Checkmate! The husband is damned if he tries and damned if he doesn’t. Consider a second example from the late Edward John Carnell. Imagine that it is a husband’s first wedding anniversary and he knows how much his wife loves roses. He stops off after work and picks up a dozen beautiful, long-stemmed, dew-dripping roses and presents them to her when he arrives home. She naturally is touched by his thoughtfulness and responds with warm and affectionate gratitude. What would be her reaction, however, if in the middle of her thank-yous he were to say; “Think nothing of it honey, I’m just doing my duty” Do we not clearly see that the more committed he becomes by doing his duty, the further his heart and life will travel from real love Checkmate again! He must love his wife; it is his duty. But the more motivated he becomes to doing his duty, the more he destroys the possibility of ever loving her. Duty damns if we do it, and it damns if we don’t, for both destroy love. The law of love presents sinful humans with a paradoxical dilemma, a moral and spiritual “catch-22.” nb Love is not ours for the striving, nor ours for the refusal to strive. Love is our duty under the law, but commitment to duty and all legal considerations void and destroy love. When we are captivated by the law, there is no love. The law always reveals where we don’t and can’t. We both understand and sympathize with the reactions of the wife in our illustrations. And therefore, we also understand the mind of God. Love is a fruit of faith empowered by grace, where, of course, the law has been abolished and is nowhere to be found. The words of St. Paul in Romans 3:19 speak to us: Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be closed and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the law no flesh will be justified in his sight; for through the law comes the knowledge of sin.” This is God’s central purpose of the law. He did not intend it to be either a motivational tool to nurture a true loving heart from one of selfishness and pride, nor did he intend it to be an exercise guide that would enable the practitioner of the “ten principles” to advance in the art of loving. When God added the law to his creative design of love, he provided a potent diagnostic tool to set in bold relief our spiritual deadness and the impossibility of transforming ourselves back into his original plan for us in creation. Love was the constant condition of human existence in paradise until Adam and Eve exchanged their trust in God for trust in themselves. When their trust was destroyed, the full contours of love evaporated with it. At its core, human capacity became bankrupt of the spiritual resources to center our existence around a whole-being love and trust in God. Such an existence was paradise, but paradise was lost. The law was given to show the sons and daughters of Adam that we have no resources within our-
Page 1 and 2: Logia a journal of lutheran theolog
Page 3 and 4: logia a journal of lutheran theolog
Page 5: NOT ONLY REFLECTIVE, LEARNED SCHOLA
Page 9 and 10: THE TWO-FACED GOD 9 wrath and judgm
Page 11 and 12: Luther’s Augustinian Understandin
Page 13 and 14: LUTHER’S AUGUSTINIAN UNDERSTANDIN
Page 15 and 16: LUTHER’S AUGUSTINIAN UNDERSTANDIN
Page 17 and 18: The Doctrine of Justification and I
Page 19 and 20: JUSTIFICATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR EVA
Page 25 and 26: THE DEBATE OVER THE USE OR NON-USE
Page 27 and 28: DIVINE SERVICE: DELIVERING FORGIVEN
Page 29 and 30: DIVINE SERVICE: DELIVERING FORGIVEN
Page 31 and 32: 32 LOGIA fied with Christ. 4 We fai
Page 33 and 34: 34 LOGIA makes it great: its abilit
Page 35 and 36: 36 LOGIA them; that they may be one
Page 37 and 38: 38 LOGIA vidual, written in the plu
Page 39 and 40: 40 LOGIA place in a vacuum; it is i
Page 41 and 42: 42 LOGIA 4. The theology of the cro
Page 43 and 44: Patrick Hamilton (1503-1528) A Scot
Page 45 and 46: REVIEWS “It is not many books tha
Page 47 and 48: REVIEWS 49 liturgy as an enactment
Page 49 and 50: REVIEWS 51 should be timeless, and
Page 51 and 52: REVIEWS 53 What does Mead mean by
Page 53 and 54: REVIEWS 55 dent revolution in Hambu
Page 55 and 56: REVIEWS 57 above-mentioned sort wer
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LOGIA Forum SHORT STUDIES AND COMME
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LOGIA FORUM 61 tempting God. For in
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LOGIA FORUM 63 ME GAVTE LA NATA A r
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LOGIA FORUM 65 basis of church fell
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LOGIA FORUM 67 language is used to
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LOGIA FORUM 69 10. Our worship says
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LOGIA FORUM 71 make a few blunders,
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The Angels Are Aware . . . and We A
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Index of Articles by Author Volumes
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Index of Book Reviews by Title Afte
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Index of Book Reviews by Author Alt
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Index of LOGIA Forum Volumes I thro
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CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Ulrich Asendor
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