Lutheran Theology in Engagement with World Religions

Abstract : When Lutheran theology engages the world religions, it can offer valuable insights into God's word in action which could come from outside the church. In light of God's Word in action which is an indispensable part of Martin Luther's theology, the author draws special attention to Lutheran irregular theology in connection with a universal dimension of God's grace, theologia crucis, and God's reconciliation with the world. Thus, Lutheran theology is of pro‐Old Testament orientation in relationship with Israel, and also of dialogical and public character in dealing with the issue of religious pluralism.     

Who is God in the Old Testament? Retrieving Aquinas after Rahner's Answer

Karl Rahner adamantly argued that the God of the Old Testament is the unoriginate Person of the Father. This forms the bedrock of his trinitarian theology, often credited as renewing Christian appreciation for the Trinity. However, his position that the Old Testament God must be identified as the Father contradicts much of the Christian tradition, including strands of Greek theology whose emphasis on the Father he claimed to restore to the West. This article retrieves the theology of Thomas Aquinas after Rahner in order to correct the imbalance of Rahner's position with greater nuance in appreciating the mystery of God in the Old Testament.     

Thomas Aquinas’ Divine Simplicity as Biblical Hermeneutic

Long draws from the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann's commentary on Jeremiah some strong reasons for rejecting the traditional teaching on divine simplicity. Above all, for Brueggemann the book of Jeremiah simply will not work if God is simple: God explicitly tells Jeremiah that God suffers and also that God changes in response to Israel. According to Long, however, Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity actually upholds the points that Brueggemann draws from Jeremiah. Long argues that theological accounts of divine simplicity should especially have two purposes: to serve as a way of manifesting in speech the mystery of the Triune God, and to affirm God's transcendent sovereignty over creation. In light of Brueggemann's approach, Long examines four early Reformed theologians: Peter Vermigli (1499‐1562), Girolamo Zanchi (1516‐1590), John Biddle (1615‐1662) and John Owen (1616‐1683). While Biddle rejects divine simplicity, the others uphold it. Long shows that their teaching on divine simplicity focuses on God's transcendent sovereignty over creation. By contrast, Long finds Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity to be more helpful in upholding Brueggemann's insights, insofar as Aquinas uses the doctrine to defend the simplicity of the Triune God. Rather than focusing on God's sovereign power, Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity focuses on getting the Trinitarian processions right.     

The Aesthetic Collision: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Trinity and the Cross

The relationship envisioned by Hans Urs von Balthasar between the Trinity and the events of Christ's passion and death has elicited concern from various theologians that he has muddled the important distinction between God's eternal life ad intra and his interaction with the world through the economy of his actions. This article argues that such a reading of Balthasar's theology is ultimately a serious misconstrual of his work since it overlooks the aesthetic categories established early in The Glory of the Lord through which his narration of the cross‐event must ultimately be interpreted. By interpreting Balthasar in this manner, this article clarifies the content of what is perhaps Balthasar's most important theological contribution, and provides a creative alternative for how best to situate the relationship (oft‐discussed in twentieth‐century theology) between the Trinity and the crucifixion.     

‘Word without Measure’: The (Ir)reducible History of Jesus Christ in John Webster

John Webster's Christology bears a twofold character. First, Webster attends to the particular identity of the Son of God who is and acts in and as Jesus Christ. Second, Webster articulates, in increasing measure, the rootedness of the Word's assumption of the flesh in the Son's eternal relation to Father and the Holy Spirit. Both features of Jesus' history – namely its irreducible particularity and architectural traceability – establish God's self-correspondence: the concrete history of God with us corresponds to God's eternal being and act. Webster's later work accords material priority to the Son's antecedent existence as the second person of the Holy Trinity. I locate the impetus for this shift in Webster's theological construal of history which serves, in turn, to inform and revise the dogmatic task of unfolding Jesus' history. No longer inhibited by a predominately modern view of human history, Webster more readily traces the history of Jesus Christ to the eternal procession of the Son of God.     

Salvation: Its Forms and Dynamics in the New Testament

Abstract : Salvation takes several forms in the New Testament, including earthly‐historical saving acts by the earthly Jesus and eschatological salvation by God's saving work in Christ. The dynamics of salvation can be considered from both anthropocentric and theocentric approaches. In the former salvation is by works, faith, or grace, but issues can be raised about each. In the latter salvation is spoken of as the act of God in Christ (a theopractic approach) or by the act of Christ on God's behalf (a Christopractic approach). Issues arise concerning canonical contexts, whether something happened at the cross effective for humanity and the cosmos, and the scope of redemption.     

What is the Doctrine of the Trinity For? Practicality and Projection in Robert Jenson's Theology

This articles engages the theology of Robert Jenson with three questions in mind: What is the doctrine of the Trinity for? Is it a practical doctrine? If so, how, and with what implications? It seeks, on the one hand, to identify whether Jenson's trinitarian theology ought to count as a “social” doctrine of the Trinity, and to what extent he puts it to work for human socio‐practical purposes. On the other hand, in light of Jenson's career‐long worries about Feuerbach and projection onto a God behind or above the triune God revealed in the economy, the article interrogates his thought with a view to recent critiques of social trinitarianism. The irony is that, in constructing his account of the Trinity as both wholly determined in and by the economy and maximally relevant for practical human needs and interests, precisely in order to avoid the errors of Feuerbachian “religion,” Jenson ends up engaging in a full‐scale project of projection. Observation of the human is retrojected into the immanent life of the Trinity as the prior condition of the possibility for the human; upon this “discovery,” this or that feature of God's being is proposed as a resolution to a human problem, bearing ostensibly profound socio‐practical import. The article is intended, first, as a contribution to the work, only now beginning, of critically receiving Jenson's theology; and, second, as an extension of general critiques of practical uses of trinitarian doctrine, such as Karen Kilby's or Kathryn Tanner's, by way of close engagement with a specific theologian.     

THEOPHANY AND INDICATION: RECONCILING AUGUSTINIAN AND PALAMITE AESTHETICS1

Based on an analysis of certain theophanic narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures (Exodus 3 and 19, 1 Kings 19), this article poses the question of their Christian exegesis: which of the Persons of the Holy Trinity appeared to the patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament and how? This seemingly trivial question has become a decisive and controversial topic in the formation of two distinct theological aesthetics: one influenced by Augustine in the West and another that finds its culmination with Gregory Palamas in the East. The aim of this article is to reconcile the polemical interpretations of Old Testament theophanies by employing a Christological understanding of aesthetics as developed by Hans Urs von Balthasar (in his Herrlichkeit) and a more nuanced understanding of signification as developed by Husserl and Merleau‐Ponty under the concept of indication.     

Unapocalyptic Theology: History and Eschatology in Balthasar's Theo‐Drama

In this essay, I evaluate the claim that Hans Urs von Balthasar's interpretation of trinitarian doctrine undermines the importance of history for the Christian God. Where other critics argue that the very distinction between immanent and economic Trinity robs the economy of salvation of theological significance, I contend that the underlying problem lies in how Balthasar restricts the theo‐drama to an event between heaven and earth on the cross of Golgotha. Through this limitation of God's active involvement in history to a single event, Balthasar's theo‐drama becomes an “unapocalyptic theology”, which devalues God's salvific history with the world and the biblical expectation of an eschatological end of history. Furthermore, Balthasar underplays the messianic‐political dimension of the Christian concept of salvation and thereby cements the status quo of a yet unredeemed world.     

Architectonics Matter: Some Advantages of Treating the Unicity of God in Advance of the Trinity of Persons,in Dialogue with Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas's distinction between what is essential and personal in God has been widely criticized in Protestant and Catholic modernity because of its supposed isolation of God from the economy of salvation. Based upon consideration of the divine goodness, I defend Aquinas's arrangement in Summa Theologiae I, qq. 1–49, advancing metaphysical inquiry along four lines. I discuss, first, the fittingness of ascribing conceptual priority to the common in advance of the particular; second, how Aquinas's ‘double perspective’ illuminates the New Testament language of ‘participation’ in the divine nature; third, the manner in which God's attributes structure God's works, illustrating the concordance of nature and works; fourth, and last, how Aquinas’s architectonic clarifies the relationship between God's essential names and transcendentality.     

How Revolutionary is the Holy Spirit?

Most theologians agree that the early church neglected the Holy Spirit in formulations of the Trinity, and in recent years, many books have been written to redress this deficiency. Pentecostal theologians are especially invested in recovering a fuller doctrine of the Holy Spirit. These two monographs, one by an established scholar (Steve Studebaker) and the other by a relative newcomer (Andrew Gabriel), are among the best on this topic. Both are unafraid to be critical of Pentecostal theology and both are valuable for their specificity. Gabriel revises the divine attributes of classical theism while Studebaker goes even further by arguing that the Holy Spirit constitutes the Trinity. Neither author is sympathetic to Social Trinitarianism, and Studebaker in particular is critical of Richard of Saint Victor, who is often credited as an early progenitor of the social model. This first complete translation of Richard's treatise on the Trinity, by Ruben Angelici, reveals a radical view of the Holy Spirit and thus needs to be taken seriously by all future discussions of this topic. Richard not only gives the Holy Spirit its own personal identity but also ties the Spirit to God's power of listening, just as the Son is God's Word.     

LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF NEIGHBOR IN THE THEOLOGY OF KARL RAHNER AND KARL BARTH

The way Barth and Rahner envision the relationship between the commands to love God and neighbor is affected by their views of the relationship between the immanent and economic Trinity. Rahner identifies the immanent and economic Trinity; thinks the two commands are identical, and believes that self‐acceptance is the same as accepting Christ and revelation. Barth insists that, while identical in content, the immanent and economic Trinity must be sharply distinguished without separation; insists the two commands are inseparable but not identical and maintains that we must seek God only in Christ. This divergence, I contend, results from their very dissimilar understandings of nature and grace and is rooted in their different starting points for theology, namely, transcendental experience for Rahner and God's Word and Spirit for Barth.     

A PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF BIBLICAL MYTH1

The author looks at some ways in which certain biblical myths tell a story, a story about loss—loss of freedom, of the homeland, of God's favour, ultimately loss of the good object—and about guilt for these losses. He describes in the post‐exilic myth of the Old Testament and the Jesus myth of the New Testament a pattern in which, he argues, there is a ‘retreat’ from the depressive anxieties that seem to be troubling the group, with loss and guilt becoming mediated through a rigidified defensive organisation that holds out the promise that it will make this loss and guilt easier to bear. Guilt, worthlessness, badness and fallibility are split off and projected into a near foreign group blamed for loss, while within the group's own boundary there is an identification with righteousness and power. The author describes the post‐exilic myth and the Jesus myth as what he terms ‘hardened myths’ that embody a belief in an idealised privileged identity in which exclusive group possession of the good object is asserted. The analysis of such hardened myths reveals a shared belief in the efficacy of group idealisation. The author links the formation of these hardened myths with what we know about how individuals manage actual loss, and argues that (for the group as for the individual) the myths express collusion with the moral authority of an idealised and very punitive superego. The paper ends with a very brief suggestion that, analogously, hardened myths may be relevant in other cultural and social milieux, especially, perhaps, the troubled relations of some psychoanalytic groups to one another.     

Trinity,Simplicity and the Status of God's Personal Relations

It is commonly argued by Christian philosophers and theologians that the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity is incompatible with the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. First, it would seem that the presence of relations in God suggests a composition of substance and accidents in him. Second, if all that is in God is God, as simplicity claims, then it would seem that one could not maintain the real distinctions between the divine persons, as the Trinity requires. In answer to these challenges this article seeks to recover Thomas Aquinas' and the Reformed scholastics' emphasis upon the subsistence and pure actuality of the personal relations in God. The article concludes that while God's personal relations are really distinct from each other, there is no real distinction between the personal relations and the divine substance and that the Trinity and the doctrine of divine simplicity are thus agreeable.     

God's Triunity and Self-Determination: A Conversation with Karl Barth, Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar

Abstract: A recent disagreement between Bruce McCormack and Paul Molnar highlights some of the issues involved in discussing the relationship between God's triunity and determination to be God‐with‐us. Can we say that God's determination to be with us is the basis of God's triunity? Must we identify the Son's being as eternally toward‐incarnation? How does God's freedom relate to God's eternal decision to be God‐with‐humanity? In this article I argue (contra McCormack) that God's triunity logically precedes God's determination to be with us, but (contra Molnar) that this logical precedence entails neither that the pre‐incarnate Son is utterly unknown to us nor that God retains some freedom to be God‐without‐humanity.     

ELECTION AND THE TRINITY: TWENTY-FIVE THESES ON THE THEOLOGY OF KARL BARTH

A new and “revisionist” reading would argue that the later Karl Barth saw the existence of the eternal Trinity not as the ground and presupposition, but as the consequence of God's pre‐temporal decision of election. A more “traditionalist” reading, on the other hand, as defended by this essay, denies that proposition. The texts adduced by the revisionists, it is argued, fail to make their case. More plausible, alternative readings are offered, counter‐evidence is marshaled, and the deleterious theological consequences of the revisionist alternative are spelled out. Barth could not have adopted it without contradicting his most basic convictions.     

Why Not Now? Karlstadt's Whether We Should Proceed Slowly and Avoid Offending the Weak in Matters that Concern God's Will (1524)

Abstract

Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt's Whether We Should Proceed Slowly [Ob man gemach faren soll] in 1524 was no best seller, and the work is often overlooked today. However, its author was a prolific publisher, especially of German tracts, in the early sixteenth century. His influence upon other so-called radical reformers remains yet to be measured adequately. Despite the fact that Gemach was written shortly before Karlstadt's expulsion from Electoral Saxony, its thesis resonated strongly with other writers who were disenchanted with the trajectory of reforms in Wittenberg after 1522. A careful analysis of Karlstadt's argumentation reveals a rigorous reliance upon Old Testament texts, and it represents the development of a position that holds the Christian congregation responsible for implementing reforms in worship that are mandated in God's commands. As Karlstadt's response to Luther's Invocavit Sermons (preached in March 1522 and published outside Wittenberg in 1523), Gemach shows what Gordon Rupp called Karlstadt's ‘best polemical writing.'