Lutheran Quote of the Day: Bayer on the Performative Nature of God's Word

"Luther also discovers this kind of performative word in the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, as well as in the Christmas story ("To you is born this day a Savior!"), the Easter story, and many other biblical passages. As we have said before, he regards these sentences as promises (promissiones). They are the concrete way in which Christ is present, and his presence with us is clear and certain: it clearly liberates us and makes us certain. I cannot remind myself of this freedom and certainty in isolation; I cannot have a monologue with myself. These gifts are given and received only by means of the promise spoken by another person (and not only by the official priest or preacher), who addresses it to me in the name of Jesus. I cannot speak the promise to myself. It must be spoken to me. For only in this way is it true. Only in this way does it give freedom and certainty.

"What this certainty is all about is clear from a short passage in the Lectures on Genesis that Luther virtually offers as a theological legacy: "I have been baptized. I have been absolved. In this faith I will die. No matter what trials and problems confront me, I will not waver in the least. For he who said: 'The one who believes and is baptized will be saved' (Mark 16:16), and 'whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven' (Matt. 16:19), and 'this is my body; this is my blood which is shed for you for the forgiveness of sins' (cf. Matt. 26:26,28), cannot lie or deceive. This is certainly true." In the Lectures on Galatians (1535) Luther writes, "And this is the reason why our theology is certain: it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves (nos extra nos), so that we depend not on our own strength, conscience, mind, person, or works but on what is outside ourselves (extra nos), that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.""

-Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, trans. Jeffrey Silcock and Mark Mattes (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), 130.

Lutheran Quote of the Day: Bayer on Faith and the Promises of God

I thought this bit from Oswald Bayer's, Theology the Lutheran Way, went well with my previous post, Faith and the Promises of God. In it Bayer affirms the basic structure of a proper relationship before God, that is, in God's self-giving through the Word of promise and our receiving through the open hands of faith. This is what Bayer calls the vita passiva, the receptive life.

"Everything depends on God's performative word for the enactment of the promise of the forgiveness of sins and the healing of our ingratitude towards our creator. Since this word precedes our faith, our response of faith and prayer can never lead us to understand the divine service as a "self-realization of the church." Even as the response of the church faith remains God's work.

"The standard arguments from ecclesiology and sacramental theology resort to the category of "representation," and speak of the "self-realization of the church" and of the church as the "original sacrament." It is clear from this that the criterion of the particular divine service, which Luther vigorously promoted from the beginning of his Reformation theology, is not at all self-evident. For him, worship has to do with the enactment of the word and faith, of promissio and fides. This is classically formulated in the treatise, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520): "For God does not deal, nor has he ever dealt, with us except through the word of promise. We, in turn, cannot deal with God except through faith in the word of his promise." This asymmetrical correlation between word and faith, where the word always comes first and faith follows the word, is for Luther the criterion of the true divine service. At the end of his life he preached a sermon at the consecration of the castle church in Torgau in 1544. There he gave his famous definition of the divine service that beautifully exemplifies this criterion. He calls on the people to join him in the consecration "in order that the purpose of this new house may be this: that nothing else may happen in it except that our dear Lord himself may speak to us through his holy word and that we respond to him through prayer and praise.""

-Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, trans. Jeffrey Silcock and Mark Mattes (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), 88-89.

Lutheran Quote of the Day: "Every Action of the Triune God is a Promise that Gives and a Gift that Promises"

"In the particular divine service, we can hear, taste, and see, through the word, that what holds the world together in its inmost essence is the categorical gift rather than the categorical imperative (contra Kant). The particular divine service does not cultivate its own separate religious sphere, but it discloses the world as creation. In the light of his Reformation discovery that the Words of Institution spoken over the Lord's Supper are fundamentally performative words that give what they say, Luther developed his characteristic understanding of creation as God's gift. Luther has these gift-giving words of the Lord's Supper in his ears, before his eyes, and in his heart when he confesses that every action of the triune God is a promise that gives and a gift that promises.

"The universal character of the categorical gift finds its counterpart in the universality of the response, for which we are empowered by the gift and promise: "For all of this I am bound to thank and praise, serve and obey him." An ethos of giving and love is included in the response. It is included but not identical to it. Thus, it is a mistake to conclude from Romans 12:1-2 that "the doctrines of worship and Christian 'ethics' coincide." It is even less possible to understand this Magna Carta of the new obedience (Rom. 12:1f.) in the sense of the Roman Catholic idea of the sacrifice of the faithful together with Christ in the Eucharist. This proposal is no better than the claim that worship coincides with ethics. Neither proposal has any place for the indispensable distinction between faith as God's service to us, and love as the service of the faithful to their fellow creatures. This distinction is so necessary for salvation that we cannot do without it.

"In the overall context of the letter, the "sacrifice" and the "worship" that Paul speaks of in Romans 12:1-2 explain the significance of Baptism, which Paul sums up as living a new life (Rom. 6:4). This not only has ethical implications but it goes beyond ethics and includes the whole physical perception of the world which needs to be worked out in a comprehensive aesthetics that looks at how our senses, emotions, memory, and imagination are all involved in our experience of reality. We can only view creation properly through that judgment and "death" which is enacted in Baptism; otherwise all talk about creation is idle chatter."

-Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, trans. Jeffrey Silcock and Mark Mattes (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), 86-87.

Lutheran Quote of the Day: Bayer on the Communicative Basis of Life

I was going to post an original today, but it has evaded me... So here is a wonderful quote from Oswald Bayer. It reflects many of the things I have written concerning the structure of our lives being communicative in nature. I express this explicitly in my post, The Word, Communication, and Sanctification.

Bayer says that the church (in its broadest sense) is the primary order of creation where we are addressed by God's Word and where we are expected to respond to that Word in faith. Life takes on a liturgical shape that is reflected in our own divine service.

"According to the second narrative of creation, God's first word to humankind is the promise of life (Gen. 2:16): "You may eat..."! This promise of life, however, is guarded by a threat of death (Gen. 2:17): "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.

"In his Lectures on Genesis (1535), Luther comments on this passage in lapidary fashion: "Here we have the establishment of the church before there was any economic or political order." Prior to household and government, God instituted the church, not a particular church but a universal church, a church without walls. It existed in the word and in faith, by the fact that God calls Adam (and so all humankind), into life, and in this way "preaches" to him, "sets his word before him." Accordingly, "God wants only this: that he [Adam] praises God, that he thanks him, and that he rejoices in the Lord."

"There are three basic forms of life, three orders (stande). Although they are interconnected, they also need to be distinguished. God the creator has established these orders and he orders human life in them by his word. Of these three basic forms of life: the church, the household (including marriage and family), and the state, the church is the first. It is the basic order. It includes all people, since all are addressed by God and are called to offer him a free and thankful response. We are humans precisely because God has given us life, because he has addressed us, because we can hear him, and because we can and must respond to him. God's address and our human response are the essence of worship. Indeed, they are the essence of religion, cult, and church, if we understand church here as an order of creation. All people and all religions belong to it. Every human being as such belongs to the church, as an order of creation. In fact, this is what defines us as humans. But this order is now corrupt due to human ingratitude and sin, so that it is no longer in fact the church.

"Luther holds that divine service, the church, is meant to be an "order of creation," and not, in the first place, something specifically Christian. That may at first strike us as a strange thesis! But its value will become evident as we proceed.

"The scriptures provide us with the basis for a particular kind of "natural" theology and at the same time a phenomenology of religion. We find it in the primordial promise of life, valid for all people (Gen 2:16), as well as in God's self-introduction, "I an the Lord, your God!" (Exod. 20:2). We also find it in the first commandment, that we should have no gods besides him (Exod. 20:3), where the threat of death guards the promise of life (Gen 2:17). Like Romans 1:18-3:20, natural theology assumes that every human being lives in a relationship with God, which, in practice, is always being broken from our side, and so is fundamentally disordered. Reason, not so much theoretical but practical reason, guided by the imagination, always tries to grasp hold of God, but it is always wide of the mark. Luther (commenting on Jonah 1:5: "The sailors were afraid and each cried to his god") could say quite emphatically: "these men in the ship all know of God" "but they have no sure God." The office of Christ is to make us certain of God."

-Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, trans. Jeffrey Silcock and Mark Mattes (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), 86-87.

Lutheran Quote of the Day: Bayer on the Separation of Faith and Theology

The disturbing decline of any theological integrity, especially among laity, in the church can be directly tied to the modern belief that faith is a purely personal and subjective experience. Bayer argues that this is due to a separation between the concepts of faith and theology. This can especially be seen in American Evangelicalism, though the Lutheran church is certainly not immune to this trend. Recent studies show that even many in the Lutheran church are willing to believe such things as Christ not being the only way to salvation, or salvation occurring outside of the Christian faith. The fact is, everyone has a theology, a set of beliefs that inform the way they view religion, their faith, and their interaction with the Word of God. The problem is, most people believe this is a personal journey that the church has little to do with. The Christian faith, though, is not a road that needs to be traveled alone, nor is it a road that hasn't been traversed before; many have gone before us and have experienced many of the same things we have. It is the Church's job to give their churches the tools to grow and strengthen faith and belief. This starts of course with Scripture, and then with the historic creeds of the faith, and then the historic teachings of their church and their confessions. By not emphasizing these through catechises we deprive our churches of the tools needed to sustain a faith that is based on God's Word. Liturgical churches tend to do this better, it seems, but we all need to decry the claim that one's faith is one's own personal business that one needs to figure out for one's self. While American Evangelicalism has enjoyed great success over the past few decades, this certainly will not last if they continue down the road of their substance-less theology; their congregations will drift farther and farther away from the historic Christian faith, even if their clergy nominally remain to cling to it.

"The point of the meta-critique is to deal with the much-criticized separation of church spirituality from university theology, life from doctrine, and a theologian's personal faith from the issues that impinge on that faith for which the theologian is publicly responsible. However, the meta-critique we are promoting does more than deal with the symptoms of these separations. It attempts to bring about a radical healing by going to the root of the problem. The experience of more than two hundred years of church history, the history of theology, and the history of ideas shows that Semler set theology on a fundamentally wrong course when he made the separations. It is time therefore to take a fresh look at the concept of theology, both historically and systematically... This new look at the understanding of theology within the context of a meta-critical engagement with the classical problems of modernity will shed new light on Luther's understanding of theology. It will also illuminate the traditions of the Middle Ages and of the ancient church, and at the same time Judaism, insofar as these have a bearing on the heart of Luther's theology: the crucial importance of prayer (oratio), meditation (meditatio), and spiritual attack (tentatio) in the formation of the theologian.

"If we affirm Luther's understanding of theology in the context of a critical engagement with the problems of modernity, we will not try to resolve one-sidedly the tension between faith and knowledge, spirituality and scholarship, the affects (which include the emotions, the senses, the imagination, the memory, and the desires) and the intellect, the heart, and the head. In short, we will not try to resolve the tension between its monastic and scholastic aspects. Rather, we must preserve this tension and focus on meditation, which for Luther always means engaging with the biblical text, for this is central to understanding theology as a "grammar of the language of the Holy Scriptures." This is the only way to overcome the modern attempt to treat theology as if it had no substantive object, without resorting to the kind of scientific objectivity advocated by positivism."

-Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, trans. Jeffrey Silcock and Mark Mattes (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), 84-85.

"Hey! Let's Keep it Forensic in Here!" Towards an Objective and Subjective Understanding of Grace

I want to talk about how Lutherans understand grace.

I think there is an increasing trend in Lutheranism to talk of the grace of God in increasingly safe terms. And by safe, I mean in purely forensic and objective terms.

The term forensic is a general term. The Latin forensis generally means: "of a forum, place of assembly." It is used in the sense of things "pertaining to legal trials." (Online Etymology Dictionary) As Lutherans we understand it as our trial or standing coram Deo, before God. We say that justification is forensic, meaning that our justification has its basis outside of ourselves. Through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, our debt is paid and we are decalred righteous in the eyes of God.

We now say: "Well this is all well and good, but what is all this about grace?" In order for me to continue we need to make a distinction between objective justification, subjective justification, and sanctification.

The increasing tendency, to which I am writting against, is to define grace solely as gratia gratum faciens, that is, grace that makes us acceptable before God. We read from the Apology: "And because this faith alone receives the remission of sins, and renders us acceptable to God, and brings the Holy Ghost, it could be more correctly called gratia gratum faciens, grace rendering one pleasing to God, than an effect following, namely, love." (Tappert par. 116) This quote does not mean that faith itself makes us pleasing to God, but rather that this faith (subjective justification) receives the grace that makes us acceptable before God (objective justification/"objective grace").

The how this faith comes and the subsequent sanctification is what I feel is eroding in Lutheran circles. Part of this is because of understanding grace solely as divine favor and the related misunderstanding of how to define grace outside of this conception. It is the difference between the what of the gospel and the how of the gospel.

The what of the gospel we have down pat. We understand the implications of Christ's life, death, and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins. And we are very comfortable declaring this in absolution, the sacrament of the altar, and through baptism. Luckily, in spite of ourselves, these just happen to be the how of the gospel, that is, how God comes to us and ministers to us, creating, sustaining, and enlivening faith.

The how of the gospel, though, is what I feel us Lutherans have been increasingly shying away from. Declaring what God has done is safe enough; Declaring what God is doing is dangerous. What God has done (in Christ) is safely complete in the past, is safely forensic, and stays safely away from all the subjective realities of the life of faith. Talking about what God is doing is dangerous. It means talking about the Word of God and the sacraments working in the lives of believers, about people's hearts, people's faith, the spirit and flesh, the very dangerous Holy Spirit, and the struggles of daily life.

Related to this is the Lutheran understanding of law and gospel. I think more and more we have lost faith that God is the one working through these proclamations. It is as if we were merely trying to convince people that they're sinful, and merely convince them that they're safely and forensically forgiven. No! To preach law and gospel is a divine activity where the Holy Spirit comes to us and literally puts to death and brings forth new life. It is the difference between preaching about Christ and preaching Christ.

The Church is the body that proclaims Christ to the world. We have been promised that these are not just empty words that appeal to the mind. I think we have become more and more rationalistic in how we approach the Word; we forget that we can only receive the things of God through the Spirit of God. To the natural man, the preaching about Christ means nothing, it is foolishness, it is only because of the active and dynamic presense of the Holy Spirit in this Word that makes it mean anything.

We read from Isaiah: "So shall My Word be, which goes out of My mouth; it shall not return to Me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in what I sent it to do!" (55:11)

In response to 1 Cor. 4:7, "And what do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive?" Augustine writes, as recorded in the Formula of Concord: "I erred in this, that I held that the grace of God consists only in this, that God in the preaching of the truth reveals His will; but that our consenting to the preached Gospel is our own work, and is within our own powers. Likewise, St. Augustine writes further: I erred when I said that it is within our own power to believe the Gospel and to will; but it is God's work to give to them that believe and will the power to effect something." (SD, Art. II, Par. 27)

How often do we approach the Word of God like this? That we think its proclamation is merely the telling of certain truths that we need to convince our congregations of? Augustine tells us that the grace of God is to be found in this: That through the Word of God, God is the one who is active as he gives us a new will and new powers to respond to this Word.

The what of the gospel is perfectly objective, as it should; what a trajedy it would be for this to be obscured. Reading of the lives of the saints, and even about Luther's early experiences is terribly depressing. The fear and anguish that led them to such extents to assure themselves of the graciousness of God, compared to what I know of the promises of God leads to great relief. I can only rejoice in the complete termination of the need for self-justificatory activity. The words, "It is finished," never grow old. I am daily reminded of the complete impossibility of basing my life on myself and not on Christ. This is the pristine message of the righteousness of Christ that, back in the 16th century, changed the world forever. It is the pure gospel. It is objective. It is sure. I base my faith on nothing less.

But this is only half of the story. Oswald Bayer writes:

"Luther says in the same passage of the Large Catechism that "faith and God" belong together. This is to be understood precisely in the sense of the "and" in the formula: the God who justifies and the human who sins (deus iustificans et homo peccator)." (Theology the Lutheran Way, 20)

Once we start addressing the sinful man, the other half of the theological equation, things get hairy. The God who justifies is pristine, pure, perfect, complete, objective; how the God who justifies interacts with the sinful man is dynamic, scary, life-and-death. But, until we start to recognizing who the object of our message is, we will not be addressing them, but speaking past them. We will not be preaching Christ, but about Christ.

This does not mean that we stop being Christocentric, rather, indeed, we begin to show how truley central Christ really is. Being Christocentric is not merely to say: "you are a sinner; Christ forgives." Paul is a great example for us. For Paul, Christ is not merely some concept of the forgiveness of sins, rather, Christ is a vital and dynamic reality that brings forgiveness and new life. We read from Paul:

"But if Christ is in you, the body indeed is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of the One having raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the One having raised the Christ from the dead will also make your mortal bodies live through the indwelling of His Spirit in you." (Rom. 8:10-11)

"I have been crucified with Christ, and I live; yet no longer I, but Christ lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith toward the Son of God, the One loving me and giving Himself over on my behalf." (Gal. 2:20)

"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." ( Phil. 1:21)

"Therefore, we were buried with Him through baptism into death, that as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, so also we should walk in newness of life." (Rom. 6:4)

"So that, my brothers, you also were made dead to the Law through the body of Christ, for you to become Another's, to the One raised from the dead, so that we may bear fruit to God." (Rom. 7:4)

"For the love of Christ constrains us, having judged this, that if One died for all, then all died; and He died for all, that the living ones may live no more to themselves, but to the One having died for them and having been raised. So as we now know no one according to flesh, but even if we have known Christ according to flesh, yet now we no longer know Him so. So that if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new!" (2 Cor. 5:14-17)

"And He said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness. Therefore, I will rather gladly boast in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may overshadow me. Because of this, I am pleased in weaknesses, in insults, in dire needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for the sake of Christ. For when I may be weak, then I am powerful." (2 Cor. 12:9-10)

We are told that God's grace is sufficient because his power is perfected in weakness. This is the major problem behind the Roman Catholic understanding of grace. Catholics see grace as a gratia infusa, an infused grace. Paul tells us that grace is not something that empowers us, rather, grace comes through our weakness so that the power of Christ overshadows us.

The problem with the common Lutheran understanding of grace is that we have not clearly replaced the Catholic understaning with our own. We have a clear definition of God's grace as his divine favor, that is, an external, forensic, "objective ("existing independent of thought or an observer as part of reality" - Dictionary.com) grace;" but we have not clearly defined how God's grace is shown through his internal work in heart, mind and abilities; "subjective ("pertaining to or characteristic of an individual; personal; individual"- Dictionary.com) grace."

I believe Werner Elert offers a very good distinction that should be adopted as the Lutheran replacement for the error of gratia infusa. We read:

"The change is not effected by the infusion of an object by grace (gratia infusa), but by the personal presence of the Spirit in the Word of grace. Whether this Word is a real force or not can only be answered by those who know they live by grace alone. The righteous shall never perceive it. The poor sinner under sentence of death who has fallen to his knees to be judged hears at this very moment the words, “You are forgiven, rise.” When he finally arises, still shaky and unsteady because his knees seem unable to hold him up, he takes his first steps into the new life which has been granted him a second time. He receives the strength to do it through the perceived Word of grace. No one will ever convince him that his strength was a product of his imagination. The strength to live a new life in grace is the strength of the Holy Spirit." The Christian Ethos, trans. Carl J. Schindler (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957), 217.

That is, a renewed understanding of "subjective grace" in the Lutheran Church is to talk of "the personal presence of the Spirit in the Word of grace."

Though the subject, ourselves, are sinful, fallen, prone to distort, and ego-centric, "subjective grace" in itself is nothing to be wary of. This is because subjective grace does not have the subject as its center, but rather the objective promises in God's Word; it is Christo-centric. It, in a very personal way, deals with and in the subject, but it does not have its basis in the subject; it is not dependent on my own thoughts, feelings, faith, rather, it often works in spite of these things. Bringing back what Paul says 2 Cor. 12, subjective grace puts to death the subject and raises him in the power of Christ; God's grace is perfected in weakness.

The purpose of the pastor is not to lead their parishoners back to themselves (ego-centricism), but to direct them to the promises of God in Word and sacrament (Christo-centricism). As Kurt Marquart says: "It is through these blessed Gospel-channels that the divine life of faith is transmitted to us sinners." "The Third Use of the Law as Confessed in the Formula of Concord." The gospel is not merely a forensic declaration, rather it is also a life-principle that subjectively creates, sustains, and enlivens faith and impels us toward righteousness unto sanctification (Rom. 6:19)

Talk like this as scary for us Lutherans. We cannot point to it, define it clearly, or say it will behave in this way rather than that; "The Spirit breathes where He desires, and you hear His voice; but you do not know from where He comes, and where He goes; so is everyone having been generated from the Spirit." (John 3:8) While all these things are true, we should not fear the Holy Spirit. This is because he is always connected to the promises of God, to his Word, and does not have his basis in the subject.

We have faith in this promise. The Solid Declaration says as much, that we can have faith in the activity of this Word, not based on the subjectivity of self, but on the based on the objectivity of God's promise. We read:

"Therefore, neither the preacher nor the hearer should doubt this grace and activity of the Holy Spirit, but they should be certain that when the Word of God is preached purely and clearly according to God's command and will and people listen to it seriously and diligently and meditate upon it, God will certainly be present with his grace and give, as has been said, what human beings otherwise could neither receive nor take on the basis of their own powers. For the presence, effectiveness, and gift of the Holy Spirit should not and cannot always be assessed ex sensu, as a person feels it in the heart. Instead, because the Holy Spirit's activity is often hidden under the cover of great weakness, we should be certain, on the basis of and according to the promise, that the Word of God, when preached and heard, is a function and work of the Holy Spirit, through which he is certainly present in our hearts and exercises his power there." (SD, Art. II, Par. 55-56)

We need to renew this understanding of subjective grace as "the personal presence of the Spirit in the Word of grace." In neglegence, I fear we have ignored this and have not made clear how the means of grace, through the work of the Holy Spirit, effect our daily lives, strengthening and enlivening faith, keeping us from sin and temptation, and impelling us towards righteousness. May we once again be reminded of these words of the Formulators:

"Moreover, this doctrine points us to the means through which the Holy Spirit wills to begin this conversion and effect it. It also reminds us how these same gifts are retained, strenghtened, and increased, and it admonishes us not to let God's grace have no effect in us, but to exercise ourselves diligently in considering what a grevious sin it is to impede and resist the working of the Holy Spirit." (SD, Art. II, Par. 72)

Lutheran Quote of the Day: The Three Offices of Christ

"The communicative relationship between God and humans that is salvific and not destructive is grounded in the word and takes the form of an exchange of words (in sermonibus tuis). When Luther emphasizes that "Christ is present" in this word, he is defining the mediation more precisely. Christology explicates who is connected, the basis of the connection, and the medium of this connection. To put it more precisely, it identifies who is active and who is passive, who comes and who is brought, who makes the connection and who is connected. The three "offices" of Christ are nothing else than the three interrelated aspects of the one office of mediator (munus triplex). The prophetic office especially is the means of mediation (the word), the priestly office shows who is mediated (God and humans), and the royal office is the power of mediation: Christ's victory over hell, death, and devil. The saving communicative relationship between God and humans is an exchange of words. This is no harmless self-evident correlation and correspondence, but the felicitous outcome of a life-and-death struggle."

-Oswald Bayer, Theology the Lutheran Way, trans. Jeffrey Silcock and Mark Mattes (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007), 19.

I Am Very Excited!

I just received this in the mail. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, other than that I have thoroughly enjoyed other works by Oswald Bayer. But, upon receiving it, and just reading through the translator's introduction, and Bayer's preface, I find myself overcome with excitement.

The basic premise is that theology, properly speaking, is not our work, but God's as he approaches us through his Word. We experience this through Gottesdienst (the divine service), in the broad sense, where we receive God's Word and work through special and general revelation (meditatio), and respond to it through faith and prayer(oratio), or their opposites. Life therefore takes on a "liturgical" shape, which properly is the "receptive life" (vita passiva).

If this doesn't intrigue you, I don't know what will. I think I can safely say that Oswald Bayer is the best thing to come out of Continental Lutheran theology since the "reasonably conservative" Helmut Thielicke.

I will most likely be posting selections from it and posts in response to certain concepts. Despite this, I would highly recommend people going out and getting their own copy, I believe you will be blessed in the doing.

Lutheran Quote of the Day: Bayer on Identity

Expanding on what I cited from Malysz on Identity, here is Oswald Bayer weighing in.

"Those who are born anew are no longer entangled with themselves. They are solidly freed from this entanglement, from the self-reflection that always seeks what belongs to itself. This is not a deadening of self. It does not flee from thought and responsibility. No, it is the gift of self-forgetfulness. The passive righteousness of faith tells us: You do not concern yourself at all! In that God does what is decisive in us, we may live outside ourselves and solely in him. Thus, we are hidden from ourselves, and removed from the judgement of others or the judgement of ourselves about ourselves as a final judgement. "Who am I?" Such self-reflection never finds peace in itself. Resolution comes only in the prayer to which Bonhoeffer surrendered it and in which he was content to leave it. "Who am I? Thou knowest me. I am thine, O God!"

"This new way of existing cannot secure itself, just as it is the liberation from all efforts at self-stabilization and self-organization. Even physically we cannot for a single moment with our own resources continue to exist and not perish. We could not live if breath was not constantly given to us and never withheld for a moment. Similarly, our new way of existing has its reality only in the breathing of prayer. "Pray God that he may work faith in you. Otherwise you will surely remain forever without faith, regardless of what you may think or do." The Lutheran Tobias Clausnitzer (1618-1684) has left us a prayer of this kind that is now a hymn:

All our knowledge, sense, and sight
Lie in deepest darkness shrouded

Till your Spirit breaks the night,

Filling us with light unclouded.

All good thoughts and all good living

Come but by your gracious giving.

"The desire to seek self-assurance and to find one's identity can lead only into the darkness of uncertainty. Faith, however, involves liberation from the drive for self-assurance and therefore from uncertainty. It means liberation from the search for identity and its attempted discovery. In prayer I am led away from myself. I am torn away from self and set outside the self with its abilities and judgements."

-Oswald Bayer, Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003), 25-26.

Lutheran Quote of the Day: Bayer on Theory and Praxis

"Luther was perspicacious enough to see that the gospel will not let itself be pressed into a schema of theory and praxis. He perceived that those for whom the gospel is a theory, "a human figment and idea," are forced to demand that it also be fulfilled in praxis. With the schema of theory and praxis "they fall into the error of saying, 'faith is not enough; one must do works.'" In other words, they think that sanctification must be added to justification.

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"Faith is neither a theory nor a praxis of self-fulfillment. It is a passive righteousness, namely, the work of God in us that we experience with suffering, dying both to justifying thinking and justifying action. The meaning is not that faith is both unthinking and inactive. By it, rather, both thinking and action are renewed."

-Oswald Bayer, Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003), 24-25.