Luther: Doctors of Theology

I came across a version of this quote below by Martin Luther today in my reading of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics I.1, 18-19.  Barth uses this quote to support the idea that an authentic theologian of the Church ought to be a regenerated Christian, not merely a “mystical” (or “spiritual” in today’s terms) theologian.

“I know of nothing else to do than to pray humbly to God to give us such real Doctors of Theology as we have in mind.  Pope, Emperor, and universities may make Doctors of Arts, of Medicine, of Laws, of the Sentences; but be assured that no man can make a Doctor of Holy Scripture except the Holy Spirit in heaven.  As Christ says in John 6: ‘They must all be taught by God himself.’  Now the Holy Spirit does not ask for red caps or brown, or any other pomp.  Nor does he ask whether a person is young or old, lay or cleric, monk or secular, virgin or married.  In fact, in ancient times he actually spoke through a donkey against the prophet who was riding it.  Would to God that we were worthy to have such Doctors given to us….”

–Martin Luther, Address to the German Nobility (1520 AD).

Johnson: Living Jesus

“Precisely because the New Testament’s language about the living Jesus includes ‘living on’ language about his memory, teaching, moral example, and name it is important to recognize that these expressions are not to be identified with the central conviction concerning Jesus, which has to do not with the persistence of some aspect of his past, but above all with his personal presence in the present.  The conviction of the New Testament writers is that he is somehow present among them, not simply that they are relating themselves to a figure of the past.”  (Luke Timothy Johnson, Living Jesus, 14).

Torrance: Communicating the Gospel

Here is a quote from T. F. Torrance’s Lecture 5 Q & A  in 1981 at Fuller Theological Seminary (http://www.gci.org/av/tftaudio):

“Since the second World War particularly, all our teachers of homiletics with some exception all around the world have said, ‘now look you’ve got to preach to people in terms that they already know, you communicate the Gospel in terms of the patterns of society and the paradigms of society that they already know,’ so what have we done? We’ve built into the Church, and into the Gospel, and theology a continuing obsolescence.  Now, that is where we have damaged the whole relation of the Church to modern culture.

But you take the Fathers, what did they do? They had the exactly the same problems, so they set about the colossal task of reconstructing the whole foundations of culture, evangelizing them, that is what we’ve got to do today.”

One of the reasons I like this quote so much is because I’ve heard so much about contextualization of the Gospel (and this is right and good in itself).  Yet, here is a theologian who is calling for deeper missiological depth and reflection.  He challenges the common idea that being missional is all about contextualization, and points us to the need for evangelizing the very foundations of culture(s)–to bring Gospel transformation to culture(s), rather than simply wrapping the Gospel in cultural forms.

Thoughts?

T. F. Torrance Audio Lectures

Here is a great series of lectures that Thomas F. Torrance gave in 1981 at Fuller Theological Seminary: http://www.gci.org/av/tftaudio

These are an absolute must to listen to for anyone serious about pursuing a career studying/teaching historical, systematic, or philosophical theology!  I warn you that they are very dense, and you’ll be tempted to stop listening but see it through, and really get your mind around Torrance’s thought.  I don’t agree with everything he says, but it is well worth the intellectual exercise!

Most of the lectures consistently deal with metaphysics and epistemology while touching on practically all areas of theology: A history of science and theology, The doctrine of God, Trinity, Incarnation, Creation, Atonement, Calvinism, Holy Spirit, Ecclesiology, Sacraments, etc.

He provides a great critique of Calvinism in Lecture 4:
“By reading back into God temporal, causal, and logical relations from our experience in this world, Calvinism was forced to connect the relative apparent distinctions: between believing and unbelieving, obedient and disobedient, to the absolute decree of God. That’s to say, it interpreted the distinctions between ‘believing’ and ‘unbelieving’ or the ‘apparent’ and ‘non-apparent,’ in terms of the absolute framework of space and time which constitute the all controlling mind or sensorium of God in the Newtonian language.

Now this entailed an ultimate ‘No’ and an ultimate ‘Yes’ in God. In fact it involved a staggeringly schizophrenic concept of God. And out of this comes the doctrine of limited atonement on the one hand or universalism on the other hand. Both twin heresies of the one fundamental mistake. Now the problem we have here, is that of logical-izing and causal-izing relations with God in which we are found to be shut up either to universal necessary salvation on the one hand, or to limited salvation on the other hand….

When the grace of election is interpreted within a dualist and a determinist framework of thought governed by the primacy of number, for example the Newtonian concepts of space and time and logical causal connection in which time and motion are transmuted into mathematical and logical relations, then the basic equilibrium of thought is disrupted, and the result is a soft contradiction and a disruption in the doctrine of election or predestination. In fact, in that context, the notion of predestination is actually turned on its head, for it now becomes a sort of mythological projection into God of culture-conditioned and creaturely connections, namely the kind of temporal-causal connections which we think obtain within the creaturely realm. And that is, as I said, is an intolerable anthropolization of God.”