O, glorious office! [the office of the ministry] No matter how sick a person may be in his soul, the Gospel can heal him. No matter how deeply a person has fallen into the corruption of sin, the Gospel can pull him out. No matter how troubled, frightened, and afflicted a person may be, the Gospel can comfort him. Whatever the condition in which a person finds himself, even if he is convinced that he must perish because of it, the preachers can confidently oppose him, saying: “No, as certainly as God lives, He does not want the death of any sinner. You shall not perish; instead, you shall be saved. Turn to Jesus, who can evermore save all who come to God through Him.” And if one who lies near death calls out: “God, what have I done? Woe to me! Now it is too late! I am lost!” the preachers should call to him: “No, no, it is not too late! Commit your departing soul to Jesus. You too shall still be with Him in paradise today.” O, glorious, high office, too high for the angels! May we always hold it in high regard, not looking at the person who bears it and despising his weakness. but looking instead at theInstitutor of his office and His exuberant goodness. Let us turn to Him in faith so we can experience the blessings of which the preachers have spoken and, through them, be gathered together one day into the barns of heavens as a completely ripe sheaf. –CFW Walther

Question 33: What, then, is the office or work of the ministry of the church?

Answer: Sirach says, 38: 25-26: “The wisdom of a scribe (namely for the kingdom of heaven) requires opportunity for leisure; and it is necessary for him to be free of other matters, who wants either to obtain that wisdom for himself or impart it to others. For how can he deal with wisdom, who must hold the plow and drive the oxen, etc.?” The office of a minister of the church therefore is, that he diligently study the holy Scriptures and give himself to reading them (1 Tim. 4:13), moreover, that he labor in the Word and doctrine (1 Tim. 5:17), that he feed the flock of Christ and the church of God (1 Pet. 5:2; Acts 20:28); that is, he is to serve the church with the preaching of the word and administration of the Sacraments and the use of the keys. As Origin aptly writes on Lev. 8: “These two are works of a priest: First, that he learn of God, by reading the Holy Scriptures and frequent meditation, and that he teach the people, but that he teach the things that he himself has learned from God. There is also another work, which Moses does: he does not go to war, but prays for the people, etc.” –Martin Chemnitz

My heart its incense burning,
I’ll offer thanks and praise,
Now, with return of morning,
And through all future days;
I’ll praise thee on Thy throne,
Great source of every blessing,
My song to Thee addressing
Through Christ, Thy only Son.

Thy mercy claims my praises!
This kept me through the night;
And now from sleep it raises,
To greet the dawning light.
This, too, it is that hath
My many sins forgiven,
Which, in the face of heaven,
So oft provoked Thy wrath.

In mercy still direct me
Throughout the coming day:
From Satan’s wiles protect me,
From sin, and from dismay:
Defend from fire and storm,
From want and ev’ry weakness,
From sorrow and from sickness,
From sudden death’s alarm.

Let angels keep their stations,
Nor cease their guard of me,
Averting all temptations
Which draw my soul from Thee!
Thy shield hold Thou above!
Then nothing shall distress me,
To duty I’ll address me,
Rejoicing in Thy love.

(German Anonymous, 1592. Tr. by H. Mills, 1856)

The following handout is produced each week by Bob and Cathy Mattson, of Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Tacoma, WA. It is created for a prayer breakfast, and designed for personal devotion and reflection on the gospel text for the week. Each installment includes a prayer from Martin Luther, a selection from the Small Catechism, the text of the gospel reading for the week, and a related devotional commentary from Luther’s writings.

Easter III.doc

Easter III.pdf

09-Easter 3rd Sunday

by Ty Andor

We are driven at times to ask, “Where is the God of justice?” (Malachi 2:17) There seems to be no earthly reward for those who deserve it, and even worse, those who deserve the opposite of an earthly reward flourish. “You are always righteous, O Lord, when I bring a case before you. Yet I would speak with you about your justice: Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do the faithless live at ease?” (Isaiah 12:1) The complaint in short is that life is simply not fair, and being pulled out of the well of this kind of despair does not come easy. The awakening effect of a personal tragedy may begin the process. Only a Word from God can bring us into the assurance of faith.

The following story from Josh Swiller (via The Moth) represents the former, and Psalm 73 the latter.

Psalm 73

Truly God is good to the upright,*
to those who are pure in heart.
But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled;
my steps had nearly slipped.
For I was envious of the arrogant;
I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

For they have no pain;
their bodies are sound and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are;
they are not plagued like other people.
Therefore pride is their necklace;
violence covers them like a garment.
Their eyes swell out with fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.
They scoff and speak with malice;
loftily they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against heaven,
and their tongues range over the earth.

Therefore the people turn and praise them,*
and find no fault in them.*
And they say, ‘How can God know?
Is there knowledge in the Most High?’
Such are the wicked;
always at ease, they increase in riches.
All in vain I have kept my heart clean
and washed my hands in innocence.
For all day long I have been plagued,
and am punished every morning.

If I had said, ‘I will talk on in this way’,
I would have been untrue to the circle of your children.
But when I thought how to understand this,
it seemed to me a wearisome task,
until I went into the sanctuary of God;
then I perceived their end.
Truly you set them in slippery places;
you make them fall to ruin.
How they are destroyed in a moment,
swept away utterly by terrors!
They are* like a dream when one awakes;
on awaking you despise their phantoms.

When my soul was embittered,
when I was pricked in heart,
I was stupid and ignorant;
I was like a brute beast towards you.
Nevertheless I am continually with you;
you hold my right hand.
You guide me with your counsel,
and afterwards you will receive me with honour.*
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you.
My flesh and my heart may fail,
but God is the strength* of my heart and my portion for ever.

Indeed, those who are far from you will perish;
you put an end to those who are false to you.
But for me it is good to be near God;
I have made the Lord God my refuge,
to tell of all your works.

by Donavon Riley

By the seventeenth century Luther’s formulation of justification had been contradicted in part if not in total by the Protestant doctrine of applied grace. This marked a curious commonality between Lutherans and their presumed Roman Catholic opponents. In Roman Catholic teaching applied grace is at the heart of grace in general. In Lutheranism it became the center of the doctrine of justification. In both traditions applied grace becomes definitive, Wilhelm Dantine writes, “of a personal appropriation of salvation; it is a matter of becoming a believer and of being a believer.”

For Roman Catholics, justification meant very little for practical piety. For Lutherans faith in justification became something visible, a subjective way of appropriating salvation. Whether it was in devotional writings or choral music personal piety had developed a profound and layered function amongst Protestants. But how did this turn away from Luther’s fundamental hermeneutic of justification occur? Perhaps the answer is best located in the development and popular acceptance of the ordo salutis. In the Protestant understanding of the “order of salvation” justification was fitted into a scheme of salvation, losing its most elemental character and strength: the simul. For Christians the Gospel is a double exchange (a double in-dwelling). Christ takes on the sinner’s struggle with sin, Satan and death (the unhappy exchange – the Cross) and the sinner receives Christ’s victorious righteousness, life and salvation (the happy exchange – the Resurrection). According to the ordo salutis this way of speaking had almost no theological currency.

Stemming from the era of late Orthodoxy and early Pietism the term ‘ordo salutis’ gained its footing in the middle of what is referred to by Church historians as “the time of High Orthodoxy.” The ordo was formulated as a system of divine actions, following and worked out one from another, constructed in such a way that one could come to know the riches of the Holy Spirit’s blessing and significance for his life. Eventually even the Holy Spirit with all his benefits was understood as a chain of religious occurrences in the inward man. The ordo salutis became nothing more than a scheme of salvation in which one was transformed through a process of inward grace-provoked growth. Reading the works of Reinhold Seeberg, Heinrich Schmid, and Christoph Luthhard one can follow this break from Luther’s formulation of justification. It is rooted in the use of juridical categories to define the function of justification.

In the sixteenth century theologians such as Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer had used “forensic” language as a means of describing the biblical character of justification: a pardon is declared by the divine judge on account of Christ’s merit. But pushed far enough and faith emerges as a means (medium salutis) of justification. As Dantine writes, “it followed logically that faith, because of its undeniable importance to the salvation of the individual, in the end became the all-supporting ‘means,’ the secret mediator, and in any case the central pillar of the entire justification event.” This can be seen most readily in Pietism and its off-shoots.

As the effect of faith (effectus fidei) justification was defined in such a way that faith itself became the secret hub of Christian life. Faith became the feeling of absolute dependence in exactly the manner Schleiermacher defined it. As Heinrich Schmid explained, “This act occurs at the instant in which the merit of Christ is appropriated by faith.” “Faith,” for Schmid, sounds remarkably similar to the Roman Catholic teaching about the Mass! The doctrine of faith as something applicatory moved away from Luther’s formulation of justification, reversing in many ways what Luther had clarified regarding the distinction between law and gospel, faith and works, God hidden and revealed, etc. One can recognize this “reversal” running through Pietism, the Great Awakening, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Bultmann, and the Finnish school of Luther research which presumes that faith effects justification.

In the Finnish school, for example, the work of theologians such as Tuomo Mannermaa marks a pre-occupation with faith and the inward man. For Maanermaa, to maintain a purity regarding justification with its grace centered character the continuity of salvation must be clearly mapped – in this case, as a development that takes place intra nos, in the inner-self of believers. This understanding that faith effects a change in the ‘inner-man’ has also been helped along by the Protestant and Roman Catholic reliance on legal norms and idealistic ethics of sentiment to define how justification assists in helping one work out salvation according to an ordo salutis.

As a result justification is not necessarily equated, for Lutherans, with Luther’s formulation of the frohliche Wechsel – the joyous exchange. Instead it has been re-formulated and defined according to an ordo salutis. The description of justification at present has come to sound remarkably similar to the language used at the Council of Trent that, “for those who work well unto the end and trust in God, eternal life is to be offered, both as a grace mercifully promised to the sons of God through Christ Jesus, and as a reward promised by God himself…”

Well known are Luther’s theses (propositiones) on the authority of the Church in matters of doctrine and in adiophorous matters. He says: “The Christian Church has no authority to ordain any article of faith, never has ordained and never will ordain one. The Church of God has no power to enact any precept as to good works, never has done it, never will do it. All articles of faith are fully established in Holy Writ, so that there is no need of ordaining even one more. All precepts of good works are fully prescribed in Holy Writ, so that there is no need of appointing even one more. The Church of God has no authority to ratify articles [of faith] or precepts [of good works], or to give sanction to Holy Scripture itself, as though the Church were a higher authority or clothed with judicial powers, never has done it, never will do it. On the contrary, the Church of God is ratified and endorsed by Holy Scripture as its lord and judge. The Church of God approves, that is, it recognizes and acknowledges the articles of faith or Holy Scripture as a subject or a servant does the seal of his lord. For the maxim is sure: He who has no power to promise and grant either the future or present life, cannot ordain articles of faith. The Church of God has authority to appoint rites and customs in regard to festivals, food, fasting, prayers, vigils, etc., but not for others, only for itself; neither has it ever done, nor will it ever do otherwise. A church is a group or assembly of baptized and believers under one shepherd, whether of one city, or of an entire country, or of the whole world. This pastor or prelate has nothing to ordain, because he is not the Church, unless it be that his church empowers him. (Opp. v. a. IV, 373ff.; St. Louis XIX: 958)”

(via Francis Pieper, Dogmatics III, 430-1)

The following list of resources on Augustine was compiled by Donavon Riley, and includes both primary and secondary material.

William M. Alexander, Sex and Philosophy in Augustine, August Studies 5 (1974).

Augustine, Against Julian, translated by Matthew M Schumacher (New York: Fathers of the Church Inc. 1957).

Augustine, Against Two Letters of the Pelagians, translated by Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 1997).

Augustine, De Civitate Dei, translated by translated by R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998).

Augustine, contra Iulianum opus imperfectum, Corpus scriptorum Latinorum, vol. 85 (Vindobonae: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1974).

Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, translated by John H.S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press 1953).

Augustine, De Perfectione Justitiae Hominis, translated by Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 1997.

Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, translated by Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 1997).

Philip L. Barclift, In Controversy with Saint Augustine: Julian of Eclanum on the Nature of Sin, Recherches De Theologie Ancienne Et Medievale 58 (1991).

Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press 2000).

Dennis R. Creswell, St. Augustine’s Dilemma: Grace and Eternal Law in the Major Works of Augustine of Hippo (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. 1997).

G.R.Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994).

Alister E. McGrath, Divine Justice and Divine Equity in the Controversy between Augustine and Julian of Eclanum, Downside Review 101 (1983).

Reinhold Seeberg, Text-Book of the History of Doctrines vol. 1: History of Doctrines in the Ancient Church (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers 1895).

William S. Babcock, Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency, Journal of Religious Ethics 16 (1988).

Patout J. Burnes, Augustine on the Origin and Progress of Evil, Journal of Religious Ethics 16 (1988).

LeRoy Burton, The problem of Evil: A criticism of the Augustinian point of view (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company 1909).

Robert M. Cooper, Saint Augustine’s Doctrine of Evil, Scottish Journal of Theology 16 (1963).

Francis Eugene Durkin, The theological distinction of sins in the writings of St. Augustine (Mundelein, St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, 1952).

Alan D. Fitzgerald, Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company 1999).

W.H.C. Frend, The Early Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1982).

Christopher Kirwan, Augustine (London: Rutledge Publishers, 1989).

William Maker, Augustine on Evil: The Dilemma of the Philosophers, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 15 (1984).

Frederick H. Russell, “Only Something Good Can Be Evil”: The Genesis of Augustine’s Secular Ambivalence, Theological Studies 51 (1990).

Beginning April 22nd, the Luther Academy and the Association of Confessional Lutherans will be hosting a three day “Congress on the Lutheran Confessions” at the Ramada Mall of America, Bloomington, MN. The schedule of events and speakers are as follows.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

11:00 a.m. Congress Registration Begins

1:00 p.m. Welcome and Introductory Remarks

1:15 p.m. Syncretism/Unionism and the True God: Does God Compromise?

Rev. James Bauer, Denver, Colorado

2:30 p.m. God, gods, and the Occult

Rev. Todd Wilken, Waterloo, Iowa

4:00 p.m. The Trinity in the Old Testament

Rev. Steven Briel, Corcoran, Minnesota

5:15 p.m. Reception sponsored by the Association of Confessional Lutherans

Thursday, April 23, 2009

9:30 a.m. The True God and Evolution: Can They Co-exist?

Rev. Dr. Fritz Baue, Fairview Heights, Illinois

10:45 a.m. The God of Liberation Theology – the Replacement Religion

Rev. Robin Fish, Sr. • Laurie, Missouri

12:00 p.m. Lunch

1:30 p.m. The God of American Evangelicalism

Rev. Klemet Preus, Plymouth, Minnesota

3:00 p.m. Christology: Key to Understanding the Trinity

Rev. Dr. David Scaer, Fort Wayne, Indiana

5:00 p.m. Gemütlichkeit Social Hour

6:00 p.m. Thursday Evening Banquet

Friday, April 24, 2009

9:00 a.m. Pneumatology: Key to Understanding the Trinity

Rev. Dr. Leo Sanchez, St. Louis, Missouri

10:30 a.m. The God of Civil Religion: Can We Pray to Him?

Rev. Dr. David Adams, St. Louis, Missouri

11:45 a.m. ACL meeting

*Discount for early registration! Send in your registration prior to April 8 (postmarked no later than April 8) and you may deduct $5.00 per person from the posted conference registration fee.

Lodging accommodations must be made separately from conference registration. To make reservations at the RAMADA MALL OF AMERICA, call 1-800-328-1931, 1-800-272-6232 (or 952-854-3411), and be sure to mention the “ACL Congress on the Lutheran Confessions” to get the special room rate of $89.00/night (plus tax). Or go to their website, www.ramadamoa.com, and use the group code, Congress–Lutheran ACL, to get the special rate. (Don’t delay – to get the special group rate, reserve before April 1, 2009.)

E-mail: The ACL@TheACL.org Website: TheACL.org

(a sermon preached by John Donne on Easter Day, March 28th 1619, at the Cathedral Church of Saint Pauls, London download as .pdf)

“What man is he that shall live and not see death, That shall deliver his soul from the power of Sheol?”   Psalm 89:48

At first, God gave the judgement of death upon man, when he should transgresse, absolutely, Morte morieris, Thou shalt surely dye: The woman in her Dialogue with the Serpent, she mollifies it, Ne fortè moriamur, perchance, if we eate, we may die; and then the Devill is as peremptory on the other side, Nequaquam moriemini, do what you will, surely you shall not die; And now God in this Text comes to his reply, Quis est homo, shall they not die? Give me but one instance, but one exception to this rule, What man is hee that liveth, and shall not see death? Let no man, no woman, no devill offer a Ne fortè, (perchance we may dye) much lesse a Nequaquam, (surely we shall not dye) except he be provided of an answer to this question, except he can give an instance against this generall, except he can produce that mans name, and history, that hath lived, and shall not see death. Wee are all conceived in close Prison; in our Mothers wombes, we are close Prisoners all; when we are borne, we are borne but to the liberty of the house; Prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of Execution, to death. Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the Cart, between New-gate, and Tyborne? between the Prison, and the place of Execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never thoroughly awake; but passe on with such dreames, and imaginations as these, I may live as well, as another, and why should I dye, rather then another? but awake, and tell me, sayes this Text, Quis homo? who is that other that thou talkest of? What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death?

In these words, we shall first, for our generall humiliation, consider the unanswerablenesse of this question, There is no man that lives, and shall not see death. Secondly, we shall see, how that modification of Eve may stand, fortè moriemur, how there may be a probable answer made to this question, that it is like enough, that there are some men that live, and shall not see death: And thirdly, we shall finde that truly spoken, which the Devill spake deceitfully then, we shall finde the Nequaquam verified, we shall finde a direct, and full answer to this question; we shall finde a man that lives, and shall not see death, our Lord, and Saviour Christ Jesus, of whom both S. Augustine, and S. Hierome, doe take this question to be principally asked, and this Text to be principally intended. Aske me this question then, of all the sons of men, generally guilty of originall sin, Quis homo, and I am speechlesse, I can make no answer; Aske me this question of those men, which shall be alive upon earth at the last day, when Christ comes to judgement, Quis homo, and I can make a probable answer; fortè moriemur, perchance they shall die; It is a problematicall matter, and we say nothing too peremptorily. Aske me this question without relation to originall sin, Quis homo, and then I will answer directly, fully, confidently, Ecce homo, there was a man that lived, and was not subject to death by the law, neither did he actually die so, but that he fulfilled the rest of this verse; Eruit animam de inferno, by his owne power, he delivered his soule from the hand of the grave. >From the first, this lesson rises, Generall doctrines must be generally delivered, All men must die: From the second, this lesson, Collaterall and unrevealed doctrines must be soberly delivered, How shall we be changed at the last day, we know not so clearly: From the third, this lesson arises, Conditionall Doctrines must be conditionally delivered, If we be dead with him, we shall be raised with him.

First then, for the generality, Those other degrees of punishment, which God inflicted upon Adam, and Eve, and in them upon us, were as absolutely, and illimitedly pronounced, as this of death, and yet we see, they are many wayes extended, or contracted; To man it was said, In sudore vultus, In the sweat of thy browes, thou shalt eate thy bread, and how many men never sweat, till they sweat with eating? To the woman it was said, Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee: and how many women have no desire to their husbands, how many over-rule them? Hunger, and thirst, and wearinesse, and sicknesse are denounced upon all, and yet if you ask me Quis homo? What is the man that hungers and thirsts not, that labours not, that sickens not? I can tell you of many, that never felt any of these; but contract the question to that one of death, Quis homo? What man is he that shall not taste death? And I know none. Whether we consider the Summer Solstice, when the day is sixteen houres, and the night but eight, or the Winter Solstice, when the night is sixteen houres, and the day but eight, still all is but twenty foure houres, and still the evening and the morning make but a day: The Patriarchs in the old Testament had their Summer day, long lives; we are in the Winter, short lived; but Quis homo? Which of them, or us come not to our night in death? If we consider violent deaths, casuall deaths, it is almost a scornfull thing to see, with what wantonnesse, and sportfulnesse, death playes with us; We have seen a man Canon proofe in the time of War, and slain with his own Pistoll in the time of peace: We have seen a man recovered after his drowning, and live to hang himselfe. But for that one kinde of death, which is generall, (though nothing be in truth more against nature then dissolution, and corruption, which is death) we are come to call that death, naturall death, then which, indeed, nothing is more unnaturall; The generality makes it naturall; Moses sayes, that Mans age is seventy, and eighty is labour and pain Psal. 90:10. and yet himselfe was more then eighty, and in a good state, and habitude when he said so. No length, no strength enables us to answer this Quis homo? What man? &c.

Take a flat Map, a Globe in plano, and here is East, and there is West, as far asunder as two points can be put: but reduce this flat Map to roundnesse, which is the true form, and then East and West touch one another, and are all one: So consider mans life aright, to be a Circle, Pulvis es, & in pulverem reverteris, Dust thou art, and to dust thou must return; Nudus egressus, Nudus revertar, ²² Iob 1. Naked I came, and naked I must go; In this, the circle, the two points meet, the womb and the grave are but one point, they make but one station, there is but a step from that to this. This brought in that custome amongst the Greek Emperours, that ever at the day of their Coronation, they were presented with severall sorts of Marble, that they might then bespeak their Tombe. And this brought in that Custome into the Primitive Church, that they called the Martyrs dayes, wherein they suffered, Natalitia Martyrum, their birth dayes; birth, and death is all one.

Their death was a birth to them into another life, into the glory of God; It ended one Circle, and created another; for immortality, and eternity is a Circle too; not a Circle where two points meet, but a Circle made at once; This life is a Circle, made with a Compasse, that passes from point to point; That life is a Circle stamped with a print, an endlesse, and perfect Circle, as soone as it begins. Of this Circle, the Mathematician is our great and good God; The other Circle we make up our selves; we bring the Cradle, and Grave together by a course of nature. Every man does; Mi Gheber, sayes the Originall; It is not Ishe, which is the first name of man, in the Scriptures, and signifies nothing but a sound, a voyce, a word; a Musicall ayre dyes, and evaporates, what wonder if man, that is but Ishe, a sound, dye too? It is not Adam, which is another name of man, and signifies nothing but red earth; Let it be earth red with blood, (with that murder which we have done upon our selves) let it be earth red with blushing, (so the word is used in the Originall) with a conscience of our own infirmity, what wonder if man, that is but Adam, guilty of this self-murder in himself, guilty of this in-borne frailty in himself, dye too? It is not Enos, which is also a third name of man, and signifies nothing but a wretched and miserable creature; what wonder if man, that is but earth, that is a burden to his Neighbours, to his friends, to his kindred, to himselfe, to whom all others, and to whom himself desires death, what wonder if he dye? But this question is framed upon none of these names; Not Ishe, not Adam, not Enos; but it is Mi Gheber, Quis vir; which is the word alwayes signifying a man accomplished in all excellencies, a man accompanied with all advantages; fame, and good opinion justly conceived, keepes him from being Ishe, a meere sound, standing onely upon popular acclamation; Innocency and integrity keepes him from being Adam, red earth, from bleeding, or blushing at any thing hee hath done; That holy and Religious Art of Arts, which S. Paul professed, That he knew how to want, and how to abound, keepes him from being Enos, miserable or wretched in any fortune; Hee is Gheber, a great Man, and a good Man, a happy Man, and a holy Man, and yet Mi Gheber, Quis homo, this man must see death.

And therefore we will carry this question a little higher, from Quis homo, to Quis deorum, Which of the gods have not seene death? Aske it of those, who are Gods by participation of Gods power, of those of whom God saies, Ego dixi, dii estis, and God answers for them, and of them, and to them, You shall dye like men; Aske it of those gods, who are gods by imputation, whom Creatures have created, whom Men have made gods, the gods of the Heathen, and do we not know, where all these gods dyed? Sometimes divers places dispute, who hath their tombes; but do not they deny their godhead in confessing their tombes? doe they not all answer, that they cannot answer this text, Mi Gheber, Quis homo, What man, Quis deorum, What god of mans making hath not seen death? As Iustin Martyr asks that question, Why should I pray to Apollo or Esculapius for health, Qui apud Chironem medicinam didicerunt, when I know who taught them all that they knew? so why should I looke for Immortality from such or such a god, whose grave I finde for a witnesse, that he himselfe is dead? Nay, carry this question higher then so, from this Quis homo, to quid homo, what is there in the nature and essence of Man, free from death? The whole man is not, for the dissolution of body and soule is death. The body is not; I shall as soon finde an immortall Rose, an eternall Flower, as an immortall body. And for the Immortality of the Soule, It is safelier said to be immortall, by preservation, then immortall by nature; That God keepes it from dying, then, that it cannot dye. We magnifie God in an humble and faithfull acknowledgment of the immortality of our soules, but if we aske, quid homo, what is there in the nature of Man, that should keepe him from death, even in that point, the question is not easily answered.

It is every mans case then; every man dyes; and though it may perchance be but a meere Hebraisme to say, that every man shall see death, perchance it amounts to no more, but to that phrase, Gustare mortem, To taste death, yet thus much may be implied in it too, That as every man must dye, so every man may see, that he must dye; as it cannot be avoided, so it may be understood. A beast dyes, but he does not see death; S. Basil sayes, he saw an Oxe weepe for the death of his yoke-fellow; ³³ Basil orat. de Morte. but S. Basil might mistake the occasion of that Oxes teares. Many men dye too, and yet doe not see death; The approaches of death amaze them, and stupifie them; they feele no colluctation with Powers, and Principalities, upon their death bed; that is true; they feele no terrors in their consciences, no apprehensions of Judgement, upon their death bed; that is true; and this we call going away like a Lambe. But the Lambe of God had a sorrowfull sense of death; His soule was heavy unto death, and he had an apprehension, that his Father had forsaken him; And in this text, the Chalde Paraphrase expresses it thus, Videbit Angelum mortis, he shall see a Messenger, a forerunner, a power of Death, an executioner of Death, he shall see something with horror, though not such as shall shake his morall, or his Christian constancy.

So that this Videbunt, They shall see, implies also a Viderunt, they have seene, that is, they have used to see death, to observe a death in the decay of themselves, and of every creature, and of the whole Worlde. Almost fourteene hundred yeares ago, S. Cyprian writing against Demetrianus, who imputed all the warres, and deaths, and unseasonablenesses of that time, to the contempt, and irreligion of the Christians, that they were the cause of all those ils, because they would not worship their Gods, Cyprian imputes all those distempers to the age of the whole World; Canos videmus in pueris, saies hee, Wee see children borne gray-headed; Capilli deficiunt, antequam crescant, Their haire is changed, before it be growne. Nec aetas in senectute desinit, sed incipit a senectute, Wee doe not dye with age, but wee are borne old. Many of us have seene Death in our particular selves; in many of those steps, in which the morall Man expresses it; Wee have seene Mortem infantiae, pueritiam, ⁴⁴ Seneca. The death of infancy in youth; and Pueritiae, adolescentiam, and the death of youth in our middle age; And at last we shall see Mortem senectutis, mortem ipsam, the death of age in death it selfe. But yet after that, a step farther then that Morall man went, Mortem mortis in morte Iesu, We shall see the death of Death it self in the death of Christ. As we could not be cloathed at first, in Paradise, till some Creatures were dead, (for we were cloathed in beasts skins) so we cannot be cloathed in Heaven, but in his garment who dyed for us.

This Videbunt, this future sight of Death implies a viderunt, they have seene, they have studied Death in every Booke, in every Creature; and it implies a Vident, they doe presently see death in every object, They see the houre-glasse running to the death of the houre; They see the death of some prophane thoughts in themselves, by the entrance of some Religious thought of compunction, and conversion to God; and then they see the death of that Religious thought, by an inundation of new prophane thoughts, that overflow those. As Christ sayes, that as often as wee eate the Sacramentall Bread, we should remember his Death, so as often, as we eate ordinary bread, we may remember our death; ⁵⁵ Bern. for even hunger and thirst, are diseases; they are Mors quotidiana, ⁶⁶ Aug. a daily death, and if they lasted long, would kill us. In every object and subject, we all have, and doe, and shall see death; not to our comfort as an end of misery, not onely as such a misery in it selfe, as the Philosopher takes it to be, Mors omnium miseriarum, That Death is the death of all miserie, because it destroyes and dissolves our beeing; but as it is Stipendium peccati, The reward of sin; That as Solomon sayes, Indignatio Regis nuncius mortis, ⁷⁷ Prov. 16:14. The wrath of the King, is as a messenger of Death, so Mors nuncius indignationis Regis, We see in Death a testimony, that our Heavenly King is angry; for, but for his indignation against our sinnes, we should not dye. And this death, as it is Malum, ill, (for if ye weigh it in the Philosophers balance, it is an annihilation of our present beeing, and if ye weigh it in the Divine Balance, it is a seale of Gods anger against sin) so this death is generall; of this, this question there is no answer, Quis homo, What man, &c.

We passe then from the Morte moriemini, to the fortè moriemini, from the generality and the unescapableness of death, from this question, as it admits no answer, to the Forte moriemini, perchance we shall dye; that is, to the question as it may admit a probable answer. Of which, we said at first, that in such questions, nothing becomes a Christian better than sobriety; to make a true difference betweene problematicall, and dogmaticall points, betweene upper buildings, and foundations, betweene collaterall doctrines, and Doctrines in the right line: for fundamentall things, Sine haesitatione credantur, ⁸⁸ Aug. They must be beleeved without disputing; there is no more to be done for them, but beleeving; for things that are not so, we are to weigh them in two balances, in the balance of Analogy, and in the balance of scandall: we must hold them so, as may be analogall, proportionable, agreeable to the Articles of our Faith, and we must hold them so, as our brother be not justly offended, nor scandalized by them; wee must weigh them with faith, for our own strength, and we must weigh them with charity, for others weaknesse. Certainly nothing endangers a Church more, then to draw indifferent things to be necessary; I meane of a primary necessity, of a necessity to be beleeved De fide, not a secondary necessity, a necessity to be performed and practised for obedience: Without doubt, the Roman Church repents now, and sees now that she should better have preserved her selfe, if they had not denied so many particular things, which were indifferently and problematically disputed before, to be had necessarily De fide, in the Councell of Trent.

Taking then this Text for a probleme, Quis homo, What man lives, and shall not see Death? we answer, It may be that those Men, whom Christ shal find upon the earth alive, at his returne to Judge the World, shall dye then, and it may be they shall but be changed, and not dye. That Christ shall judge quick and dead, is a fundamentall thing; we heare it in S. Peters Sermon, to Cornelius and his company, ⁹⁹ Acts 10:42. and we say it every day in the Creed, Hee shall judge the quick and the dead. But though we doe not take the quick and the dead, as Augustine and Chrysostome doe, for the Righteous which lived in faith, and the unrighteous, which were dead in sinne, Though wee doe not take the quick and the dead, as Ruffinus and others doe, for the soule and the body, (He shall judge the soule, which was alwaies alive, and he shall the body, which was dead for a time) though we take the words (as becomes us best) literally, yet the letter does not conclude, but that they, whom Christ shall finde alive upon earth, shall have a present and sudden dissolution, and a present and sudden re-union of body and soul again. Saint Paul sayes, Behold I shew you a mystery; ¹⁰¹⁰ 1 Cor. 15:51. Therefore it is not a cleare case, and presently, and peremptorily determined; but what is it? We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. But whether this sleeping be spoke of death it self, and exclude that, that we shall not die, or whether this sleep be spoke of a rest in the grave, and exclude that, we shall not be buried, and remain in death, that may be a mystery still. S. Paul sayes too, The dead in Christ shall rise first; Then we which are alive, and remain, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the ayre. ¹¹¹¹ 1 Thes. 4. But whether that may not still be true, that S. Augustine sayes, that there shall be Mors in raptu, An instant and sudden dis-union, and re-union of body and soul, which is death, who can tell? So on the other side, when it is said to him, in whom all we were, to Adam, Pulvis es, ¹²¹² Gen. 3:19. Dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return, when it is said, In Adam all die, ¹³¹³ 1 Cor. 15:22. when it is said, Death passed upon all men, for all have sinned, ¹⁴¹⁴ Rom. 5:12. Why may not all those sentences of Scripture, which imply a necessity of dying, admit that restriction, Nisi dies judicii naturae cursum immutet, ¹⁵¹⁵ Pet. Mar. We shall all die, except those, in whom the comming of Christ shall change the course of Nature.

Consider the Scriptures then, and we shall be absolutely concluded neither way; Consider Authority, and we shall finde the Fathers for the most part one way, and the Schoole for the most part another; Take later men, and all those in the Romane Church; Then Cajetan thinks, that they shall not die, and Catharin is so peremptory, that they shall, as that he sayes of the other opinion, Falsam esse confidenter asserimus, & contra Scripturas satis manifestas, & omnino sine ratione; It is false, and against Scriptures, and reason, saith he; Take later men, and all those in the reformed Church; and Calvin sayes, Quia aboletur prior natura, censetur species mortis, sed non migrabit anima à corpore: S. Paul calls it death, because it is a destruction of the former Beeing; but it is not truly death, saith Calvin; and Luther saith, That S. Pauls purpose in that place is only to shew the suddennesse of Christs comming to Judgement, Non autem inficiatur omnes morituros; nam dormire, est sepeliri: But S. Paul doth not deny, but that all shall die; for that sleeping which he speaks of, is buriall; and all shall die, though all shall not be buried, saith Luther.

Take then that which is certain; It is certain, a judgement thou must passe; If thy close and cautelous proceeding have saved thee from all informations in the Exchequer, thy clearnesse of thy title from all Courts at Common Law, thy moderation from the Chancery, and Star-Chamber, If heighth of thy place, and Authority, have saved thee, even from the tongues of men, so that ill men dare not slander thy actions, nor good men dare not discover thy actions, no not to thy self, All those judgements, and all the judgements of the world, are but interlocutory judgements; There is a finall judgement, In judicantes & judicatos, against Prisoners and Judges too, where all shalbe judged again; Datum est omne judicium, ¹⁶¹⁶ John 5. All judgement is given to the Son of man, and upon all the sons of men must his judgement passe. A judgement is certain, and the uncertainty of this judgement is certain too; perchance God will put off thy judgement; thou shalt not die yet; but who knows whether God in his mercy, do put off this judgement, till these good motions which his blessed Spirit inspires into thee now, may take roote, and receive growth, and bring forth fruit, or whether he put it off, for a heavier judgement, to let thee see, by thy departing from these good motions, and returning to thy former sins, after a remorse conceived against those sins, that thou art inexcusable even to thy self, and thy condemnation is just, even to thine own conscience. So perchance God will bring this judgement upon thee now; now thou maist die; but whether God will bring that judgement upon thee now, in mercy, whilest his Graces, in his Ordinance of preaching, work some tendernesse in thee, and give thee some preparation, some fitnesse, some courage to say, Veni Domine Iesu, Come Lord Iesu, come quickly, come now, or whether he will come now in judgement, because all this can work no tendernesse in thee, who can tell?

Thou hearest the word of God preached, as thou hearest an Oration, with some gladnesse in thy self, if thou canst heare him, and never be moved by his Oratory; thou thinkest it a degree of wisdome, to be above perswasion; and when thou art told, that he that feares God, feares nothing else, thou thinkest thy self more valiant then so, if thou feare not God neither; Whether or why God defers, or hastens the judgement, we know not; This is certain, this all S. Pauls places collineate to, this all the Fathers, and all the Schoole, all the Cajetans, and all the Catharins, all the Luthers, and all the Calvins agree in, A judgement must be, and it must be In ictu oculi, In the twinkling of an eye, and Fur in nocte, A thiefe in the night. Make the question, Quis homo? What man is he that liveth, and shall not passe this judgement? or, what man is he that liveth, and knowes when this judgement shall be? So it is a Nemo scit, A question without an answer; but as it, as in the text, Quis homo? Who liveth, and shall not die? so it is a problematicall matter; and in such things as are problematicall, if thou love the peace of Sion, be not too inquisitive to know, nor too vehement, when thou thinkest thou doest know it.

Come then to ask this question, not problematically, (as it is contracted to them that shall live in the last dayes) nor peremptorily of man, (as he is subject to originall sin) but at large, so, as the question may include Christ himself, and then to that Quis homo? What man is he? We answer directly, here is the man that shall not see death; And of him principally, and literally, S. Augustine (as we said before) takes this question to be framed; Vt quaeras, dictum, non ut desperes, saith he, this question is moved, to move thee to seek out, and to have thy recourse to that man which is the Lord of Life, not to make thee despaire, that there is no such man, in whose self, and in whom, for all us, there is Redemption from death; For, sayes he, this question is an exception to that which was said before the text; which is, Wherefore hast thou made all men in vain? Consider it better, sayes the Holy Ghost, here, and it will not prove so; Man is not made in vain at first, though he doe die now; for, Perditio tua ex te, This death proceeds from man himself; and Quare moriemini domus Israel? Why will ye die, O house of Israel? God made not death, neither hath he pleasure in the destruction of the living; ¹⁷¹⁷ Sap. 1:13. The Wise man sayes it, and the true God sweares it, As I live saith the Lord, I would not the death of a sinner. God did not create man in vain then, though he die; not in vain, for since he will needs die, God receives glory even by his death, in the execution of his justice; not in vaine neither, because though he be dead, God hath provided him a Redeemer from death, in his mercy; Man is not created in vain at all; nor all men, so neare vanity as to die; for here is one man, God and Man Christ Jesus, which liveth, and shall not see death. And conformable to S. Augustines purpose, speaks S. Hierome too, Scio quòd nullus homo carneus evadet, sed novi Deum sub velamento carnis latentem; I know there is no man but shall die; but I know where there is a God clothed in mans flesh, and that person cannot die.

But did not Christ die then? Shall we joyne with any of those Heretiques, which brought Christ upon the stage to play a part, and say he was born, or lived, or dyed, In phantasmate, In apparance only, and representation; God forbid; so all men were created in vain indeed, if we had not in him a regeneration in his true death. Where is the contract between him, and his Father, that Oportuit pati, All this Christ ought to suffer, and so enter into glory: Is that contract void, and of none effect? Must he not die? Where is the ratification of that contract in all the Prophets? Where is Esays Vere languores nostros tulit, Surely he hath born our sorrows; and, he made his grave with the wicked in his death; ¹⁸¹⁸ Esay 53:4, 9. Is the ratification of the Prophets cancelled? Shall he not, must he not die? Where is the consummation, and the testification of all this? Where is the Gospell, Consummatum est? And he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost? Is that fabulous? Did he not die? How stands the validity of that contract, Christ must die; the dignity of those Prophecies, Christ will die; the truth of the Gospell, Christ did die, with this answer to this question, Here is a man that liveth and shall not see death? Very well; For though Christ Jesus did truly die, so as was contracted, so as was prophecied, so as was related, yet hee did not die so, as was intended in this question, so as other naturall men do die.

For first, Christ dyed because he would dye; other men admitted to the dignity of Martyrdome, are willing to dye; but they dye by the torments of the Executioners, they cannot bid their soules goe out, and say, now I will dye. And this was Christs case: It was not only, I lay down my life for my sheep, ¹⁹¹⁹ John 10:15. but he sayes also, No man can take away my soule; And, I have power to lay it down; And De facto, he did lay it down, he did dye, before the torments could have extorted his soule from him; Many crucified men lived many dayes upon the Crosse; The thieves were alive, long after Christ was dead; and therefore Pilate wondred, that he was already dead. ²⁰²⁰ Mar. 15:44. His soule did not leave his body by force, but because he would, and when he would, and how he would; ²¹²¹ August. Thus far then first, this is an answer to this question, Quis homo? Christ did not die naturally, nor violently, as all others doe, but only voluntarily.

Again, the penalty of death appertaining only to them, who were derived from Adam by carnall, and sinfull generation, Christ Jesus being conceived miraculously of a Virgin, by the over-shadowing of the Holy Ghost, was not subject to the Law of death; and therefore in his person, it is a true answer to this Quis homo? Here is a man, that shall not see death, that is, he need not see death, he hath not incurred Gods displeasure, he is not involved in a general rebellion, and therfore is not involved in the generall mortality, not included in the generall penalty. He needed not have dyed by the rigour of any Law, all we must; he could not dye by the malice, or force of any Executioner, all we must; at least by natures generall Executioners, Age, and Sicknesse; And then, when out of his own pleasure, and to advance our salvation, he would dye, yet he dyed so, as that though there were a dis-union of body and soule, (which is truly death) yet there remained a Nobler, and faster union, then that of body and soule, the Hypostaticall Union of the God-head, not onely to his soule, but to his body too; so that even in his death, both parts were still, not onely inhabited by, but united to the Godhead it selfe; and in respect of that inseparable Union, we may answer to this question, Quis homo? Here is a man that shall not see death, that is, he shall see no separation of that, which is incomparably, and incomprehensibly, a better soul then his soule, the God-head shall not be separated from his body.

But, that which is indeed the most direct, and literall answer, to this question, is, That whereas the death in this Text, is intended of such a death, as hath Dominion over us, and from which we have no power to raise our selves, we may truly, and fully answer to his Quis homo? here is a man, that shall never see death so, but that he shall even in the jawes, and teeth of death, and in the bowels and wombe of the grave, and in the sink, and furnace of hell it selfe, retaine an Almighty power, and an effectuall purpose, to deliver his soule from death, by a glorious, a victorious, and a Triumphant Resurrection: So it is true, Christ Jesus dyed, else none of us could live; but yet hee dyed not so, as is intended in this question; Not by the necessity of any Law, not by the violence of any Executioner, not by the separation of his best soule, (if we may so call it) the God-head, nor by such a separation of his naturall, and humane soule, as that he would not, or could not, or did not resume it againe.

If then this question had beene asked of Angels at first, Quis Angelus? what Angel is that, that stands, and shall not fall? though as many of those Angels, as were disposed to that answer, Erimus similes Altissimo, We will be like God, and stand of our selves, without any dependance upon him, did fall, yet otherwise they might have answered the question fairly, All we may stand, if we will; If this question had been asked of Adam in Paradise, Quis homo? though when he harkned to her, who had harkned to that voyce, Eritis sicut Dii, You shall be as Gods, he fell too, yet otherwise, he might have answered the question fairly so, I may live, and not dye, if I will; so, if this question be asked of us now, as the question implies the generall penalty, as it considers us onely as the sons of Adam, we have no other answer, but that by Adam sin entred upon all, and death by sin upon all; as it implies the state of them onely, whom Christ at his second comming shall finde upon earth, wee have no other answer but a modest, non liquet, we are not sure, whether we shall dye then, or no; wee are onely sure, it shall be so, as most conduces to our good, and Gods glory; but as the question implies us to be members of our Head, Christ Jesus, as it was a true answer in him, it is true in every one of us, adopted in him, Here is a man that liveth, and shall not see death.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue, sayes Solomon, ²²²² Prov. 18:21. in another sense; and in this sense too, If my tongue, suggested by my heart, and by my heart rooted in faith, can say, Non moriar, non moriar; If I can say, (and my conscience doe not tell me, that I belye mine owne state) if I can say, That the blood of my Saviour runs in my veines, That the breath of his Spirit quickens all my purposes, that all my deaths have their Resurrection, all my sins their remorses, all my rebellions their reconciliations, I will harken no more after this question, as it is intended de morte naturali, of a naturall death, I know I must die that death, what care I? nor de morte spirituali, the death of sin, I know I doe, and shall die so; why despaire I? but I will finde out another death, mortem raptus, a death of rapture, and of extasie, that death which S. Paul died more then once, ²³²³ 2 Cor. 12; Acts 9. The death which S. Gregory speaks of, Divina contemplatio quoddam sepulchrum animae, The contemplation of God, and heaven, is a kinde of buriall, and Sepulchre, and rest of the soule; and in this death of rapture, and extasie, in this death of the Contemplation of my interest in my Saviour, I shall finde my self, and all my sins enterred, and entombed in his wounds, and like a Lily in Paradise, out of red earth, I shall see my soule rise out of his blade, in a candor, and in an innocence, contracted there, acceptable in the sight of his Father.

Though I have been dead, in the delight of sin, so that that of S. Paul, That a Widow that liveth in pleasure, is dead while she liveth, ²⁴²⁴ 1 Tim. 5:6. be true of my soule, that so, viduatur, gratiâ mortuâ, when Christ is dead, not for the soule, but in the soule, that the soule hath no sense of Christ, Viduatur anima, the soul is a Widow, and no Dowager, she hath lost her husband, and hath nothing from him; yea though I have made a Covenant with death, and have been at an agreement with hell, ²⁵²⁵ Esay 28:15. and in a vain confidence have said to my self, that when the overflowing scourge shall passe through, it shall not come to me, yet God shall annull that covenant; he shall bring that scourge, that is, some medicinall correction upon me, and so give me a participation of all the stripes of his son; he shall give me a sweat, that is, some horrour, and religious feare, and so give me a participation of his Agony; he shall give me a diet, perchance want, and penury, and so a participation of his fasting; and if he draw blood, if he kill me, all this shall be but Mors raptus, a death of rapture towards him, into a heavenly, and assured Contemplation, that I have a part in all his passion, yea such an intire interest in his whole passion, as though all that he did, or suffered, had been done, and suffered for my soule alone; Quasi moriens, & ecce vivo: ²⁶²⁶ 2 Cor. 6:9. some shew of death I shall have, for I shall sin; and some shew of death again, for I shall have a dissolution of this Tabernacle; Sed ecce vivo, still the Lord of life will keep me alive, and that with an Ecce, Behold, I live; that is, he will declare, and manifest my blessed state to me; I shall not sit in the shadow of death; no nor shall I not sit in darknesse; his gracious purpose shall evermore be upon me, and I shall ever discerne that gracious purpose of his; I shall not die, nor I shall not doubt that I shall; If I be dead within doores, (If I have sinned in my heart) why, Suscitavit in domo, Christ gave a Resurrection to the Rulers daughter within doores, in the house; ²⁷²⁷ Mat. 9:23. If I be dead in the gate, (If I have sinned in the gates of my soul) in mine Eies, or Eares, or Hands, in actuall sins, why, Suscitavit in porta, Christ gave a Resurrection to the young man at the gate of Naim. ²⁸²⁸ Luke 7:11. If I be dead in the grave, (in customary, and habituall sins) why, Suscitavit in Sepulchro, Christ gave a Resurrection to Lazarus in the grave too. ²⁹²⁹ John 11. If God give me mortem raptus, a death of rapture, of extasie, of fervent Contemplation of Christ Jesus, a Transfusion, a Transplantation, a Transmigration, a Transmutation into him, (for good digestion brings alwaies assimilation, certainly, if I come to a true meditation upon Christ, I come to a conformity with Christ) this is principally that Pretiosa mors Sanctorum, ³⁰³⁰ Psal. 116:15. Pretious in the sight of the Lord, is the death of his Saints, by which they are dead and buryed, and risen again in Christ Jesus; pretious is that death, by which we apply that pretious blood to our selves, and grow strong enough by it, to meet Davids question, Quis homo? what man? with Christs answer, Ego homo, I am the man, in whom whosoever abideth, shall not see death.

(via Christian Classics Ethereal Library)

Are there any who are devout lovers of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!

Are there any who are grateful servants?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting?
Let them now receive their wages!

If any have toiled from the first hour,
let them receive their due reward;
If any have come after the third hour,
let him with gratitude join in the Feast!
And he that arrived after the sixth hour,
let him not doubt; for he too shall sustain no loss.
And if any delayed until the ninth hour,
let him not hesitate; but let him come too.
And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.
For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.
He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour,
as well as to him that toiled from the first.

To this one He gives, and upon another He bestows.
He accepts the works as He greets the endeavor.
The deed He honors and the intention He commends.
Let us all enter into the joy of the Lord!

First and last alike receive your reward;
rich and poor, rejoice together!
Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!
You that have kept the fast, and you that have not,
rejoice today for the Table is richly laden!

Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one.
Let no one go away hungry. Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.

Let no one fear death, for the Death of our Savior has set us free.
He has destroyed it by enduring it.
He destroyed Hell when He descended into it.
He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh.

Isaiah foretold this when he said,
“You, O Hell, have been troubled by encountering Him below.”
Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.

Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.

O death, where is thy sting?
O Hell, where is thy victory?

Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!
Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!

Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!

The Easter sermon of John Chrysostom (circa 400 AD)

(via lcms.org)

Among the many hymns for Lent and Holy Week, there are several significant ones that were written by Lutheran authors. Paul Gerhardt (1607–76), for example, wrote several very familiar hymns:

* O Sacred Head, Now Wounded
* A Lamb Goes Uncomplaining Forth
* Upon the Cross Extended

Another author, Johann Rist (1607–67) wrote “O Darkest Woe,” a hymn for Good Friday that uses stark language to describe the sacrificial death of Jesus.

Another Lutheran hymn writer, who predates both Gerhardt and Rist, is Johann Heermann. Born in 1585 in Silesia (modern-day Poland), Heermann became a Lutheran pastor and served for more than two decades before illness forced him to retire. His pastorate was marked by much personal suffering, especially as a result of the violence and plagues that ravaged much of Europe during the Thirty Years’ War. He died in 1647, just as the bloodshed was drawing to a close.

Heermann wrote nearly 400 hymns. His texts exhibit a great sense of confidence in the promises of God. Heermann’s hymns were so well known in his day that the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II crowned him in 1608 as poet laureate.

The following hymn for Good Friday was published in 1630. For this collection, Heermann used a medieval compilation of devotional writings that were drawn from the early church fathers. Heermann thought that he was setting to verse the meditations of St. Augustine. It is more likely, however, that he based the hymn “O Dearest Jesus” on a meditation written by St. Anselm (1033–1109), archbishop of Canterbury (England) and an important theologian who contributed to the church’s understanding of the doctrine of the atonement.

This hymn appears in its complete form in The Lutheran Hymnal, #143, and in an abridged version in Lutheran Worship, #119. Because of space limitations, the latter version is used below. Following each stanza, several biblical quotations are provided for purposes of meditation and insight.

O dearest Jesus, what law have You broken
That such sharp sentence should on You be spoken?
Of what great crime have You to make confession,
What dark transgression?

Luke 23:20–24 • Pilate addressed them once more, desiring to release Jesus, but they kept shouting, “Crucify, crucify him!” A third time he said to them, “Why, what evil has he done? I have found in him no guilt deserving death. I will therefore punish and release him.” But they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed. So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted.

They crown Your head with thorns, they smite, they scourge You;
With cruel mockings to the cross they urge You;
They give You gall to drink, they still decry You;
They crucify You.

John 19:2–3 • And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and arrayed him in a purple robe. They came up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and struck him with their hands.

Mark 15:19–20 • And they were striking his head with a reed and spitting on him and kneeling down in homage to him. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. And they led him out to crucify him.

What is the source of all Your mortal anguish?
It is my sins for which You, Lord, must languish;
Yes, all the wrath, the woe that You inherit,
This I do merit.

Isaiah 53:4-5 • Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.

2 Corinthians 5:21 • For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

How strange is this great paradox to ponder:
The Shepherd dies for sheep who love to wander;
The master pays the debt His servants owe Him,
Who would not know Him.

Isaiah 53:6 • All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

John 10:11 • I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

Revelation 7:17a • For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd.

The sinless Son of God must die in sadness;
The sinful child of man may live in gladness;
We forfeited our lives yet are acquitted;
God is committed!

Psalm 25:11 • For your name’s sake, O Lord, pardon my guilt, for it is great.

2 Corinthians 5:17-19 • Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

Romans 5:8 • God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

O wondrous love, whose depth no heart has sounded,
That brought You here, by foes and thieves surrounded,
Conquer my heart, make love its sole endeavor
Henceforth forever!

John 3:16 • For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

1 John 4:10 • In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

When, dearest Jesus, at Your throne in heaven
To me the crown of joy at last is given,
Where sweetest hymns Your saints forever raise You,
I too shall praise you!

Rev. 7:9 • After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.

Rev. 2:10b • Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.

James 1:12 • Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him

(the following is a manuscript accompanied by student notes on the theme: “The Death of God” from Christology (1953/54) by Hans Joachim Iwand, translated by Marney Fritts and Donavon Riley)

[1] The Death of Jesus as Necessity

The necessity of Jesus’ death – if we begin with the first assumption that this is the death of God – is a paradox. The necessity is an incompatible contradiction according to our way of thinking ad modem legis. God’s don’t die, people do.

Thinking according to the law, in Subject-Object relationships there always exists the self- subsisting subject (the old Adam) and his/her object (God working in and through the neighbor). To the extent that a necessary death must occur, and functionally speaking – from a sinner’s reality there is nothing but death – the death-event occurs in the revaluing and relocation of the place of the holy by sinners as we seek God where he wills not to be found, no longer finding God where he wills to be found – the first move in the annihilatio Dei.

Setting God aside will of necessity be manifest in the breach of relationship with the neighbor, in the intimate proximity of death brought on by contact with the other person in the manifest demands of life. The neighbor as created creature, as a gift for me to enjoy, giving and offering what is needed for creaturely life, will become as incompatible to my “life-way” as the Creator himself (You rebel openly against God’s will being done through me for your neighbor’s sake and vice versa and thus I cease to be heard by you relationally. Now I am only the ominous jingle of the jailor’s keys).
Instead, you will deal substantively with me and my goods, that life might advance according to your will (what I choose is my choice) toward my final purpose of holding the two of us in readiness for the preaching and hearing of your good news.

The technical term for this upward rebellion, this breach, is Theodicy – a pre-occupation of the Enlightenment w/ the old world’s language. This begins the conversation and what follows with a string of descriptions, definitions, and explanations of “life,” “the world,” “people,” “justice,” “sexuality,” “a market economy,” etc. etc.: Abstract words, which of themselves are meaningless terms, simply awaiting a forthcoming definition from the opinio legis.

Beginning with the self, anthropologically, we project our experience outward upon objects where we encounter a God not preached, seeking to defend the self by looking for visible signs in our encounter with things, in words about God and/or created things. We provoke and enflame the imagination (symbol systems – metaphysics – specifically defined by Luther as a theology of glory) attempting to look through created things for greater meaning that we might see into the mystical being of God – the holy Thou.

But, Iwand begins where Luther begins, with God incarnate in Christ Jesus – hidden deep in the flesh sub-contrario – in God’s self-disclosure (i.e. the manger, Mary’s breast, the wedding at Cana, weeping over Lazarus, crucified, dead, buried – the most human acts!). He progresses in upon us to work death (old) and resurrection (new) through the Son – this word, this proclamation (a hidden word – Deus absconditus). Thus, Christ’s proper work (making something from nothing) makes man (making nothing into something). Man does not make Christ, at least not properly!

Our most important possession – our self-subsisting self – is put to an end, literally put to death, in Christ Jesus. (Rom. 10:4)

The self with all its protruding members (flesh, world, law, letter, etc.) and Christ Jesus are sharply distinguished (Heidelberg Disputation #1) in the moment when death and life confront one another (in the end of the old Aeon – our opposition to God – we are done unto in perfect passivity (we never saw it coming!). (1 Cor. 15:26)

The crucified one, dead and buried becomes the end of us, the end of death, and thus the end of history: the end of death because he becomes death! He is the end of our illness and want, because he becomes illness and want for us! He is the end of cursing and condemnation because he becomes a curse and the condemned for us.

The trouble we have with this is the becoming – that he, not conceptually or metaphorically, becomes that which we covet and cling to as the signs of life, the assurance of our relevance, and the greater meaning our life has “in the grand scheme of things” – he becomes in himself these things and therein the old cornerstones are overturned and shattered: the very foundation that held up and buttressed our mighty fortress.

But, lest we only take in the apocalyptic judgment without considering the eschatological mercy of this totalistic event, it is the resurrection of Christ Jesus that seals the necessity of death’s death (the old Aeon) and marks the necessary birth of the new creation (regnum Christi). Without the resurrection after three days, the disciples would most likely have hit up Caiaphas or Annas for a job, and we would be footnoting this insignificant event in Jewish history as another failed attempt to force the wheel of time down an un-navigable path (Schweitzer).

Thus, the rule of Christ (for Christ must rule and death will give way) is the end of the old-self born of a woman born under the law and the beginning of the new self, born of the spirit born under Christ Jesus (the simul). But, this is just a beginning, an opening shot across the enemy’s bow.
Now we must talk about…

a)    The strange Must!

Christ Jesus exegetes God – the Deus revelatus. Is. 40-52. Not raising a human being up into the Triune identity but rather plunging the creature down into the creation, as a piece of the creation (LC – Apostles Creed Article I)(from the earth you come and to the earth…)

Matt. 16:21, Lk. 24:26; Acts 9:16
Heb. 2:10; 1 Cor. 1:23

Christ comes into history and its normal expectations.

Gal. 4:4.

Note especially the expectation of the Jews (i.e. according to the law).  Instead of purifying or returning to the law (the Jewish expectation), Jesus terminates the sure footing of Torah – the author exegetes himself into the text and out again in a violent revaluation and relocation of the holy! This man and not this text is the word of God… “this word has been fulfilled in your hearing…” The text is not allowed ad hoc to interpret its master.

Rom. 10:4.

The law’s discontinuity is radicalized (politically, theologically, etc.) in Christ Jesus. The violence this rebellion against the word necessitates is simultaneously a rebellion against the Son of Man (apostasis – 2 Thess. 2:3) and a set destination toward (telos) the exegete of the text.

Now, who does unto whom will become somewhat clearer at the end of the story – who the true exegete is and who the text is. Who seizes whom in order to shut up the rebellious tongue; a tongue that cuts to the quick sharper than any two-edged sword could or would. The kingdom comes violently! Something that has never happened, not in religion or in human recorded history, comes in this body.

Mk. 2:21.

Preaching the forgiveness of sins – the killing joke!

Mk. 2:7. Authority, like power politics, is a zero sum game.

Putting himself in God’s place and forgiving sins gratis apart from the law, Jesus is handed over (by the Father) into the hands of men – for Christ must rule and this is a strange must! – in this relationship to his creatures the creature death herself will be conquered along with her man servants and maid servants; namely, along with us.

Ps. 49:14.

This event of the word’s coming in the body, born of a woman, born of man’s flesh and blood, born under the law marks the final collision between the old aeon and the new, wherein one must give way to the other. For in the old Aeon (the old way of speaking) gods do not, cannot, will not die.  But now, the Creator speaks a final word on the subject and translates a new form of speech; Jesus dies, the Word made flesh dies, God dies! Speaking in a new way, creatures can now confess, “A man made the world out of nothing!” “God was born of a woman, born under the law, suffered, died, and was buried, etc.”

Iwand asserts, “When the Creator and the creature meet someone has to change.”  The conclusion is therefore inevitable, the regnum Christi overcomes the rule of this world and its ruler.

Ps. 2:8-9.

A dire necessity lies in this event. It is nothing less than setting God himself aside.

But, living or not, we insist on retaining the verb for our self. The self is both the means and the end before God (corum Deo) and to God, which we assume first and last to be one part of an eternal order (an eternal hierarchy) held in place by God’s lex aeterna, keeping everything and everyone in his/her proper place within the structures of being; a substantive argument. Beginning with the law, the centrality of Christ Jesus’ death and resurrection gets displaced. The law is now ultimate and Christ Jesus penultimate. Thus, in this illusory relationship to him, the self becomes a project (like a barrel of oil, crude yet refined) until he is qualified for heaven – his neighbor then, out of necessity, becomes an opportunity for the promotion of his own righteousness.  In watching the self (his naked self-interest) he watches the law of/in his member(s) and therein the law does its proper work driving, hindering, exposing, and condemning the fraudulent relationship he has with himself and the other.

But a funny thing happens here, the notion of free will ascends from the initial legal assumption that the self has a freedom of choice to act – otherwise, we could and will argue that the law is useless. The hindrance, exposure, and condemnation of the law may often times even provide for and become a goad to further self-improvement.

Is. 45:22.

Beginning in this manner with a little or a lot of the will, Christ preached apart from the law (unconditionally) for you in the forgiveness of sins (because he has become sin) has no place except as an opponent of choice. Christ Jesus is the only option for the forgiveness of your sins, or so some say, but there are so very many options for you in the old legal argument why settle for just one. Therefore, either the will or Christ Jesus must become a theoretical argument with no function in relation to God.

b)    Therefore, there is a completely new destination of God’s will: Matt. 26:42.
c)    The will of God means: the death of the man Jesus. That is the “mystery of his will” Eph. 1:9; Vulgate 1 Tim 1:4 oikonomia. This death can only be defined (the first definition is the true death), if  we see God herein being completely alone in want, then his will is finally revealed.

Herein we can set to on that preaching that enjoys a Platonic flourish. The vital lie is in the belief that we can apprehend the “mystery of his will,” “the final revelation of God,” as but one (albeit a big one!) revelation leading to still other revelations: that Jesus’ death is but one moment on an eternal time line of process and meaning (Moltmann & Pannenberg).

An experience that sets the bar for events yet to come! The technical term for this is “proleptic eschatology.” But, digging at the argument one uncovers Platonism writ large in “the eternal recurrence of the same.” God has set the course (up, up, and away), moving history and us along with it toward his goal for creation. Within this movement, the Spirit will continually instigate events and activities, which will contribute to the maintenance of God’s master plan. Thus, every generation there will be a social justice movement because there is always a need to re-assert the rights of the oppressed. Every era will witness and cooperate in political movements because there is always a need to re-assert the rights of the citizenry, etc. etc. “Life” becomes a cyclical recurrence of the same old motifs until that time when God ushers in the new kingdom – a new heaven and a new earth. The proleptic eschatology comes into play as we who are Christians learn to see in these events, signs of the end time.

Presented in with this patina, death is made to appear reasonable and natural, a part of life’s journey. But, before any first step is taken, the legal metaphor has paved the straight way through the wilderness of choices and each cobbled stone is engraved with words (a Platonic word scramble no less) urging us on, to live well in this, our material world.

In this game, mortality is reduced (cut down into bite size pieces) to morality (Marcus Aurelius). Death is made to act the domesticated tutor who motivates (Kant) and cajoles us toward out higher calling (Aristotle) – our “immortality project.” (Becker) The joke is, neither death or resurrection in our “Christian context” (not that anyone else fairs better) are initiated morally as a doing of our own, though our doings fully participate in one or the other.

LW 28:115.

Early on, Tertullian and Origen, etc. attempted to bridge this ditch with “spirit” language in order to maintain the continuity w/the old legal argument brought over (if not in its entirety at least in large part) from their Neo-Platonic mentors. But no amount of maneuvering will deliver us from this body of sin. The attempt to separate body and soul from sin and corruption, no matter its phrasing or tempo, will separate the eternal from the finite.
The end of you is your fate. Your end marks the emphatic and imperative power, kingdom, and glory of death. Looking to the cross of Jesus, Paul mocks such posturing by us, and our old master, Death.

Gal. 2:19-20.

The foolish belief we cling to that death is a part of the natural order of things (ontology), subject to our need for options regarding the meaning of life, is snubbed outright. For Paul, as for Luther and Iwand, death is exposed in the cross of Jesus as another master and rule and power whom we, lifeless old bag of worms that we are, have been subjected to all along.

No mixture of death and life by theologian or philosopher can be maintained ontologically – past the limits of finitude – in the end there is simply death and life, undefinable, indescribable, unexplainable, unless…the gobbling up of the proleptic argument as well! Death and sin in the Christian witness are turned out, exposed as being forces, kingdoms, and powers. Sin came into the world through one man, and through sin, death. These are ruling powers in opposition to God. Even before the law came (from Adam to Moses…) death reigned.

Rom 5:12.

Death is a lord not a decision, a ruler not a choice, a power not a natural end. We belong to death personally, completely, irrevocably. As the subjects of death – slaves and death’s instruments – we stand by and watch others die. Better, we can “watch” Jesus die listening to his cry every good Friday and say, “Better him than me. Thank God it was him and not me!” But that is just it. The pinch where all options (the synthesizers who offer us options) are left scratching their head, dumbfounded. It was him and not you.

Thus, preachers must forgo the more cliqued practice of explaining away Jesus’ death in their endless clanging about meaning, ratcheting up our life as the hub of the cosmos, as though this were somehow a more soothing alternative. The preacher must become an instrument of death for another lord, the one who was abandoned and forsaken by God. At the point where God’s secret will is finally revealed once and for all, the preacher has something to say that does not descend into trite metaphors. For death and resurrection depend on to whom we belong – death or the lord of death. Jesus is the death of death that we might be the force, kingdom, and power of life through him. From him (life), to the world (death), for him (life) as witnesses (martureo) to this way, this truth, this life.

LW 31:54-55.

And what do you suppose the hearers will do to us then who preach such nonsense?

d)    But that this willing occurs rests solely in the obedience of his son.  Necessity and freedom.  That the death of Jesus was a necessity is as follows – the son of the Father could not be disobedient. This is not fate!  But because of the “Must”, because the Father and the Son are one.

Therefore, we have here the will of God.

Adam and Christ initiate ‘worlds’ or ‘aeons’ to which we belong. Through Adam, death has established a kingdom whose rule has us without any means of escape. Christ lag in Todesbanden. 1 Cor. 15:20. There is no third alternative that lies between them!

Rev. 20:14. The two deaths.
Luther’s Lecture on Romans, 179.
Rom. 5:6, 1 Cor. 15.

God takes away death in Christ by making Christ the death of death – Christ becomes death! What is reasonable and natural to the philosophers about death and resurrection assumes a legal metaphor. But the hand resting on the kill switch is not ultimately you or I, or Satan (he is only the prince of this world after all…) but God, the Creator of this creation. Try amending that and see what you end up with!This eliminates dualism; death and its rule are to be feared, not because we in our limited imagination or Satan with his plans for world domination stand behind death, but because God stands behind death.

“We have to fear death because it is God whom we have to fear in death.” Karl Barth CD 3/2, 626. Without this caveat, Manichaean dualism dominates and rules the day.

Hence the appointed time (kairos).

The cross is the day of YHWH (kairos) and the resurrection becomes mercy time/proclamation time (simul time!) seeing with our ears what we now hold in faith alone (Notice the Enthusiasts reversal of this assertion as they seek to locate evidence of the Holy Spirit in history as a sign amidst myriad kairos events whether they be hierarchical-structural or ecstatic-personal). At the appointed time, the devil moves in as well, bypassing the ordinary sins of the old Adam and plunges headlong into faith – hunting faith – “If you are the Son of God…” (Paradoxically, when the attacker roars we may now hear this as a lullaby or the harmony of a holy cantata, assured that we are in Christ Jesus – Mk. 3:26-27)

The devil attacks in order to trip the old Adam’s default button, unbelief, in an attempt to turn God into remoteness, the ultimate Spirit. For the self, the body is the problem in all the niggling legal assumptions – all the orders of being – and the spirit lifts the self up and away from fleshly (lusts) reality. In Luther’s eschatology everything moves down and in, entering into relationship to God’s people (the necessity of the death is one of relation not assumption – not an at-one-ment (he became as you are that…) but rather an incompatible contradiction (spirit becomes flesh, life becomes death, innocence becomes sin, righteousness becomes damnation – for you no less).

John 12:27-31. It does not of itself proceed according to the plan of some stranded soteriology, as machinery – but according to the moment of his death, his taking over of death as atonement.

There are two poles of human history: 1) Death as punishment. 2) Death as atonement.

Instead, his death is a sacrifice (once and for all. Heb. 10.), which grounds our flight up and away from the Creator’s creation, out of the attachments of life, in the very present presence of the crucified one. This movement down and in, from the Trinity, into ordinary relationships (vocations) is true freedom (not the illusory freedom of atonement theories!) and is the gospel himself. Christ’s righteousness does not belong to us (alien) but is rather worked in us in the relationships of life (proper), calling us into life-defining relationships (the inherent dignity of the low down and common!):

1.)    Family – Source of life in the community and its sustenance for the future.
2.)    Work – The particular form of neighbor love which is also life sustaining through the essentials of life gathered and provided.
3.)    Citizenship – The essential services that are life sustaining and necessary for life (i.e. schools, hospitals, etc.)
4.)    Church – God calls the church and involves the church in providing for life.

This loss of the self, being impinged upon by the other, means being marked by the cross (the judgment) and simultaneously bearing a sign of Easter (the mercy of God).  Of course, it is also mercifully involuntary.  His public sacrifice becomes our defining center.

Jn. 12:27.

Justification worked through vocation is an assertion modernity does not understand and cannot assume from the publicness (political) of the reformation, because moderns likewise cannot bear the critique of false religiosity and vocation that revalues and relocates the place of the holy in and amongst diapers, menstrual rags, and burial shrouds!

Bultmann: the hour regarding the fate of the world has been decided. Does the absolute become historical?  No: The will of the Father takes place in the obedience of the Son.

d)    Question: why must Christ die?
The problem of God’s mercy = his will?
Identified from righteousness and mercy.
Sin is taken up in the righteousness of God.
The death of Jesus= iustitia Dei= our all-encompassing righteousness.

“When the Creator meets the creature someone must change.”

Death does not yield to ideals – the old language has nothing to say regarding the event of God’s self-justification – it simply belches us back up after he sticks his finger down death’s throat. In the justification of the godless, the Creator is re-calling the whole creation; the re-calling is literally causing death to vomit us up. Exercising his right to the whole creation, the Creator restores us (“trues us”) to the creation and destroys the powers that oppress him in his relationship to us, beginning with the promise to the one who is in suffering – not to be distant – but to move in and enter into a relationship with the one who is suffering (not explaining the oppression but handing over the promise of Christ Jesus “for you” – it is Christ who is sickness in you and he cries out to the neighbor (God in the neighbor) from your flesh and blood!).

God has taken on the power of suffering by raising Jesus from the dead – thus, the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection is like mana – you get just enough of it for the moment, you can’t store it up, it’s not to be possessed by any man, like mana, enough for the hunger in order to satisfy the hungry.

2] Jesus’ death

a)    Obedience, chief place Romans 5:19; fateful obedience.
b)    Hebrews 5:7-9: The question of the learning of obedience. Destination of the telos.  Important: “although he was the Son” – complete similarity Phil. 2:5: which is exactly the humiliation he learned. Obedience and sorrow.

Here, there is also obedience unto death: God could (by himself) rescue Jesus.  However, obedience says: “Not mine, but your will be done.” Gethsemane- Matt 26:39.  The cup = death.  It is the taste of death.

c)    But death means: peirasmos (Anfechtung).  Death= God’s remoteness. God is dead (Nietzsche). Therefore, it is who does unto whom: Death – God is then the last great one. Or God is death. The conclusion is that the death of Jesus is the deed.  That in Jesus Christ, God wills the death.

The remoteness is not because we do not enjoy a lively relationship with him. The remoteness is because he wills the death of all who belong and fight for death, all sinners; he wills your death to be put down. It is hard to feel close to someone when he is trying to kill the only thing you love!
Now, the predicate “sin” at this point needs an owner (subject), someone to claim the sin in the relationship between these two incompatible contradictions, so that we can all figure out which one of us God is gunning for, and so we can clear out of the way: No need to risk getting hit by stray bullets! But, as Paul writes, it is Jesus who was made to be sin for us. And, as Iwand writes, it is Jesus who is dead.

So then, does God will the death of God? But God is without sin – He is the divine free and easy – and yet, God is the one doing and Jesus is the one done unto. So then, is Jesus not to be equated with God?

Phil. 2:2-5.

Here, your sin necessarily bumps up against its end, and thus God’s remoteness is at an end, because God, or more specifically, this man Jesus, became sin for you. To terminate the remoteness, and the Anfechtung, Jesus becomes sin, becomes a curse, becomes death for you. And this is the pinch for us: this is not fitting behavior for a proper God! Jesus cannot be God and become a curse. But those of you who refuse Christ as a curse, dead and buried, want your sin removed, not in Christ, but in yourselves. Because you know full well that you can’t trust someone else to take care of your problems, especially something as important as your sin. Of course, to be your very own righteousness before Almighty God, to be your own, personal, Jesus – someone you can understand, someone to hold your hand, someone who cares, someone who shares…Your very own Jesus…You have to manufacture your own righteousness in yourself as well. You try to generate your own god in your self – there is the remoteness of god! No matter where you go, you take yourself with you!

But that is exactly what you want after all the dust settles on the event of his death; his death is his, not yours properly speaking, and thus you want to cite his death as an example of righteousness and then make the move to biography yourself into righteousness. You want to narrate yourself, in your own self, right into righteousness. Because, you can’t get right if you can’t relate…Like attracts like and all that… In this way of thinking, the desire is to escape blame for Jesus’ death. To avoid the blame for his death and especially avoid having Christ Jesus’ cross, dead body and all, applied to your self. People do not want to die under God’s wrath!

Of course, this is exactly the type of person which Luther referred to as a “counterfeit sinner,” “an imitation sinner.” And, finally, it is a basic confusion of law and gospel. When you segregate Christ Jesus from sins that is, from sinners, the penalty, the guilt, and the punishment that was laid on him is not yours. Because if Christ is not ultimately free of having to bear your sins – free and easy to be sinless – how can he ever be like God, or more pointedly…God!

How can God not be an example of the godly life? How could you ever hope to have a relationship with him and eliminate the remoteness? Like does attract like after all and without something to go on what hope do you have?

Hebrews 12:2; Phil: 2:8; John 12:27-31

The old language, the old world, the pagan rule that, “like attracts like,” from Socrates through Aristotle (of course this thinking and acting runs roughshod over all of human history – the cornerstone!). That Christ became a curse, not just one amongst other equally flavorful curses, a curse – or, as Luther observed, that Christ became a curse, is for Paul, a substantive term, not adjectival (now we can talk substantively… about Christ, that the relationship to creatures without the restrictions of substance arguments might be enjoyed gratis).

Christ does not become like one who is cursed, or one of the multitude of the accursed under Levitical law, there is nothing descriptive, interpretive, explainable about Christ’s cursedness – he is a curse! He was made sin who knew no sin. He was made sin. Christ became sin itself. He became sin substantively yet without meaning. And this new way of speaking is to speak the creation into being ex nihilo, from a new relationship between Creator and creature through the word of God alone! The old subject – object, over – under, master – slave definitions are blown up, shot up, thrown out, slain, and annihilated (the annihilatio Dei).

From now on, the subject – subject relationship defined by indicatives and not adjectives, is without meaning and therefore, not open to speculation. It is a relationship that must be heard to be believed. One in which we cannot say enough about this one – our beloved.

Jn. 13:34.

To speak of sin is to speak of Christ Jesus. To speak of curses, condemnations, blasphemies, etc. is to speak of this man, this one man, Jesus Christ alone. He bought it, it’s his, and he is not giving it away. So, enjoy your new vocation as a bride, the old Gomer has been married off, her husband has a firm grip, and her address book has been burned up. This is a relationship, not of like-minded folk, but of incompatible contradictions. Get used to it. Because he is for you, he must be against you. You are a whore after all, spreading your legs for any god that whistles. But, because he is against you, he can be totally, unconditionally for you. You will have no other gods before me!

3] The death of God – Nietzsche’s word and the word of Scripture

a)    That God is dead – is that the judgment of Scripture? Extremely strange:  according to Scripture, it must be the pious (frommen) who kill him.

The cross is the revelation of the antithesis (this marks the end of all natural theology!)  In the encounter between God and man, it is apparent that both could not live together in one world.  Herein, amongst the pious, this will mean that we are the enemy of the God who draws near to us. But the cross also means that God, himself the incarnate man Jesus, is in the antithesis, hanging between the cross and us.  He takes it over as his burden, his lot.  That is its deeper meaning, that he will carry sin on himself.  We do not carry it.  We throw our sins on him. This is the pious lie, that we can bear our own sins, not into death but into righteousness. (The sting of death in the prophets, the death that puts their death to death, is thus the pre-history of the cross. The chief priests kill the prophets because they cannot allow the subject to get loose outside the temple cultus.)

The cross is thus, in the highest sense, a court – The apocalyptic “No!”  Here God stands out as a judge.  That was, admittedly, not readily apparent, but the Scripture states that this great writing is simply not to be eliminated even though there is no experiential proof for the facts of this case.  You cannot look at the cross with tearful eyes and say, “Ah, judgment!” That God looked on Jesus himself as sin, is the deepest depth of this meaning.

THIS IS GOD’S ONLY MEANING.

In the cross, as a court, it has become apparent that only God has the power to abolish sins.  Here the meaning has become how far sin reaches and that it reaches into the deepest depths of the relationship of God to God, and that there it is killed for us – against the will of the pious!  The cross must overcome us.  There is no other way.  Just as God himself takes no other way.  Sin in this old world is unending (infinitum).  It means God and only God can cover, abolish, and bear sin.  The crucifixion is the covering of sin.  It is the final “non-being” (Nicht-Sein): the negation of my being by his.

But the crucifixion is at the same time an accusation against us as the juxtaposition (the distinguishing) of piety and ungodliness.  It is the disclosure that a person can murder God and thereby of himself invoke the law as a power (Stephen’s sermon Acts 7). The assumption is that we alone can create and wield the power of the law over against our adversary – the mythic God-Man Jesus.

But, the crucifixion is our “invocation” of salvation – soteria!  A person must be opened (Jer.23:29) to the proclamation that a person cannot gain sole power, that to us the crucifixion is salvation, that here we find the consolation of God with us and our consolation with God.  It is more than merely standing naked outside ourselves (extra nos).  Here a person sees whom it is standing outside of us (extra nos i.e. in Christo).
Mt. 16:21 par; Acts 3:15; Mt. 17:22.

In the encounter with God, there is life. Can God live as the lowest among us?

In the encounter, the death and resurrection of Jesus belong together because this is where he confronts us rather ingloriously as the lowest among us.  A person cannot tear them apart.  You cannot keep one for your self and let the other drop.  Here again, when the attempt is made to sever the lowliness of his death from the glory of his resurrection, you encounter both hazards that threaten Christology:  Docetism and Historicism. The Docetists must weaken the death.

For the Docetist, the death of Jesus is a passage into his true manifestation at the right hand of God.  Every Christology that relies too much on pneumatology will be inclined toward Docetism: a death that levels the event of dying claiming, “We are already resurrected!” (Vgl. 2 Tim. 2:18) That is the Athens/Jerusalem theological cocktail in a nutshell.

This belief in an immortal substance, or the soul, can be heard in the popular Hellenistic expression, “in the spirit”, which was largely ignored during the middle ages, much to the injury of Christology and the church. Later, the resurrection of Jesus Christ was further scrutinized as a continuous work of some great immortal being – but the resurrection means more than simply an addition to god’s house that never gets finished.  It means something else altogether – it is a phenomenon of a particular kind. The real difficulty in grasping the resurrection of Jesus Christ lies therein. There is no example for us to go by!  It is a date, which stands over-against our whole way of thinking about history. He does not just spring from death; he springs from death, having become death, out of the ground.

That we understand this under girds our entire history – because it is the punctilious end of history. Nevertheless, the other stirrup, historicism, threatens Christology by bringing a particular meaning and character to the resurrection. From the historicist’s point of view, the resurrection, especially the hope of the resurrection that was alive in late Judaism, existed only in the particular imagination and vision of the disciples – that is, if you wanted to look at it from the blatantly deceitful theory which Reimarus developed (1694-1768) in his fragment “The History of the Resurrection”.
At any rate, Reimarus had a faulty theory, which still has consequences today. He spoke of a double Messianic anticipation; the prophetic-political position of the disciples in their hope of a life with Jesus, which, after the catastrophe of his death, was invalidated. Because of Reimarus and subsequent thinking that took its cue from him, Christ was snatched back out of the Daniel-Apocalyptic expectation of the parousia and its hopes for his second coming from the clouds of heaven.

The corpses cling to this possibility and trust in that which slowly but surely supported the people with the message of his resurrection. Here again, in the resurrection of Jesus there is a correct Jewish-Apocalyptic theory connected to the parousia. People worked to improve the Daniel-Apocalyptic theory later, trying to make a psychological and religious understanding out of it, but the immanence of modern historical thinking is like the legacy of Spinoza-ism.  It could not acknowledge the resurrection of Jesus. Instead, the event must be reduced to a subsumable historical category. That means you would have to understand the resurrection following the old language game as the law of the continuing work of the spirit (“in the spirit” or even zeitgeist) in history.

b)    Another question: Who kills God? Kierkegaard: the masses – much too optimistic.

“…it remains so that Christ is in the Church, however he is poured out like water, it remains his bones, however scattered, it remains his heart but languishing, it remains his power, but beggarly-…”

In any case: That is humanity. They cannot let God live, God as God for them, to his honor.

The positive understanding of the resurrection has, even until today, been maintained under the philosophical mantel of Hegel. It is a mixture of historicism and the old world-view of the Docetists. Hegel saw in the historical resurrection a conversion of the superficial (the common external world) toward a unique historical inwardness in the spirit.

The resurrection of the historical Jesus, in Hegel’s reading of it, had raised and abolished death in mundane humanity. That was his significant discovery for the German Idealists and his contribution to church history. This abolition of death occurred in the church because it believed.
First, there is faith. In faith, Jesus lives as spirit because that, in truth, is what he is: the bearer of the divine essence. The problem of the resurrection of Jesus lies in an entirely different direction.

The idealists, wherever they flashed their toothy smile, chewed it up and the humanists swallowed it so that what was passed on was a Jesus who had no resurrection. But, the substance of all New Testament testimonies about the man Jesus is that he was raised.  It is this man, this body, who appeared to his disciples.  So there is then also in the confession of the first church the witness to the first one raised from the dead, the first amongst the brethren. (Vgl. Col. 1:18) Also, in the first witness to the appearance from the grave, there is the meaning that he has said to the woman: Go therefore and tell my brethren (Vgl. Mt. 28:10).

Therefore, he points to the raising up of his “brothers” and if the later Christian brethren are named by him as well, then even these will be translated from death into life.  They are heirs along with the first born from the dead, heirs of the new life together with all the brethren. So we stand before a specific dilemma.  The theology of the eighteenth and nineteenth century had leveled the deity of Jesus in order to understand his death.  Therefore, they abolished it just at the point where everything else comes from.  They had trapped Jesus in his humanity in order to capture his resurrection and to continue seeing it as a spiritual reality in the existence of the community, in respect to his continual work in the world. They committed themselves to this course of thought and teaching in order that they might ethicize the death of Jesus and spiritualize his resurrection. Thus, the death of Jesus appeared as a fulfillment of faithfulness to his calling and his resurrection as the overcoming of the flesh (incarnation) by his spiritual existence.
To summarize, they ‘discovered’ that the resurrection of Jesus means something altogether (primordially) different.  Therein they brought about a great turning point, a movement, which we have yet to apprehend fully.

Second, we understand that the Enlightenment, specifically German idealism, sought to continue isolating the saving death of Jesus Christ from their time and place in order to make for the self a moral-religious signpost in which something visible could pacify the guilty conscience of the individual as well as provide an ‘in’ for the church amidst the broader (credulous) society. However, we are of the opinion that the death of Jesus is a word of reconciliation from the no man’s land, liberating us from their moral grip.

But we must continue going forward. We must accept that the death of Jesus only has significance through his resurrection.

c)    Nietzsche:  God is dead. Means precisely that Jesus is dead: God is dead.  We have killed him.

There can be no return to an original righteousness, to the original creation – that God is dead, that way closed to us. There can be no going back from here on out. The death, his and yours, marks the impossibility of returning from whence we came. Instead, we have encountered something, or rather someone, entirely new: a resurrected body heralding the final word for the old creation and a finalized word for the new creation. And, this will not be the same old thing. For, in the Bible, to put it in functionally definitive terms, God is whoever gets the last word. This dead God, raised from the tomb by the Father, has the final say. He gets the last word first. This is what we mean when we speak of an apocalyptic eschatology in the Biblical witness. Whoever gets the last word – pareisia – not according to a timeline, wherein we give God the first word (creation) and the last word (resurrection) and we get all the words in between (words in search of the word). Rather, the Creator gets the first word last every time. Thus, God’s death does not mark an event in history, resolved in history, according to a time table. Instead, the synthesis of God’s history and human history is swallowed up in death. And, in the resurrection of Jesus, human history is itself put to death and God’s history has the last word.

Mt. 21:33, Acts 7:52.  And besides the astonishment: the law has also not been hindered.

Distinguish here between eschatological hearing of the law and the law talked about within the system of legal options ad modem Aristotelis.

In any case, (the) death (of God) has a human side, a future side for us: The removal of God, Luther: annihilatio Dei.  Not letting God be God.

Nietzsche already had it right.  This grounding has its life in the rebellion of man against God. Just invert the absolute Value (Heidegger); nothing more?

The idea of God, the name of God is empty.  There is no God!  You can kill him – without that, do you have a future?  The whole thing is much too primitive!

d)  (It follows the text “The foolish man” from Nietzsche, the blessed science 125, ch. 2, 126-128).

Jesus lives. The pious hear an opportunity to interject meaning. He sits at the right hand of God. The pious reflect, “Ours is the kingdom and the power and the glory.” He was crucified for us and took our place in death. The pious preach, “We are resurrected!”

He comes to us as the newly ordained high priest, like Melchizedek the king of Jerusalem (Vgl. Heb. 7). The pious teach, “We are victorious!” Contrary to the pious, the words gain their meaning in the activity of the Word upon the hearer: He is the resurrected and living one, who himself administers the work of earthly life.  He has not let it escape his hand. It is not laid in your hands so that you can make something out of it, something you want to take from it or get out of it: yet another “religion.”

Jesus does not give his life’s work away.  He himself administers it, he brings it before God, and he comes to us in only that way, only insofar as he is Lord. But that is not all there is.  That is still in no way the main point, which should be emphasized about this question of meaning.

The main point still lies in the assertion of the first witness he encounters: He is resurrected!

Or the message of the angel, which means:  What are you doing looking for the living amongst the dead? Lk. 24:5. Therein our whole world is signified as a world of death.

Gunther Bornkamm had it right when he said: “We are the dead, he is the living one.”

Or as it written in John: “He is the life.” (Vgl. Jn. 11:25)

We stand today before a whole new work, which runs counter to the false assumptions of the Enlightenment. We should understand the resurrection of Jesus as occurring definitively within our worldview, his resurrection throws the historical text forward upon us in the present as he contexts our understanding that this is a witness for us. This is more than just a spiritual substance and/or the internalization of the historical Jesus. This is the word become flesh without distance or meaning. This is the doing and the being done unto. In this risen one, we now know what a miserable thing it is for sinners to fall into the hands of a living God.

(via William Weedon’s blog Sola Christus)

Many times, Lutherans are challenged with: “Well, where was Lutheranism before Luther?” The implication is that Rome or the Eastern Orthodox have some sort of “corner” on the great church Fathers. But Lutherans have never believed this to be true. The Fathers repeatedly present the same or quite similar approaches to doctrine as the Lutheran Confessions do. Here are some citations from the Fathers that may be of help in dispelling the notion that “Lutheranism” is a johnny-come-lately to the Church scene:

SOLA SCRIPTURA

“Regarding the things I say, I should supply even the proofs, so I will not seem to rely on my own opinions, but rather, prove them with Scripture, so that the matter will remain certain and steadfast.” St. John Chrysostom (Homily 8 On Repentance and the Church, p. 118, vol. 96 TFOTC)

“Let the inspired Scriptures then be our umpire, and the vote of truth will be given to those whose dogmas are found to agree with the Divine words.” St. Gregory of Nyssa (On the Holy Trinity, NPNF, p. 327).

“We are not entitled to such license, I mean that of affirming what we please; we make the Holy Scriptures the rule and the measure of every tenet; we necessarily fix our eyes upon that, and approve that alone which may be made to harmonize with the intention of those writings.” St. Gregory of Nyssa (On the Soul and the Resurrection NPNF II, V:439)

“What is the mark of a faithful soul? To be in these dispositions of full acceptance on the authority of the words of Scripture, not venturing to reject anything nor making additions. For, if ‘all that is not of faith is sin’ as the Apostle says, and ‘faith cometh by hearing and hearing by the Word of God,’ everything outside Holy Scripture, not being of faith, is sin.” Basil the Great (The Morals, p. 204, vol 9 TFOTC).

“For concerning the divine and holy mysteries of the Faith, not even a casual statement must be delivered without the Holy Scriptures; nor must we be drawn aside by mere plausibility and artifices of speech. Even to me, who tell you these things, give not absolute credence, unless you receive the proof of the things which I announce from the Divine Scriptures. For this salvation which we believe depends not on ingenious reasoning, but on demonstration of the Holy Scriptures.” St. Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechetical Lectures, IV:17, in NPNF, Volume VII, p. 23.)

“It is impossible either to say or fully to understand anything about God beyond what has been divinely proclaimed to us, whether told or revealed, by the sacred declarations of the Old and New Testaments.” St. John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith, Book I, Chapter 2

“Nevertheless, sacred doctrine makes use of these authorities as extrinsic and probable arguments; but properly uses the authority of the canonical Scriptures as an incontrovertible proof, and the authority of the doctors of the Church as one that may properly be used, yet merely as probable. For our faith rests upon the revelation made to the apostles and prophets who wrote the canonical books, and not on the revelations (if any such there are) made to other doctors. Hence Augustine says (Epis. ad Hieron. xix, 1): “Only those books of Scripture which are called canonical have I learned to hold in such honor as to believe their authors have not erred in any way in writing them. But other authors I so read as not to deem everything in their works to be true, merely on account of their having so thought and written, whatever may have been their holiness and learning.”–St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia, Part 1, Question 1, Article 8

SOLA FIDE

“Similarly we also, who by His will have been called in Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, or our own wisdom or understanding or godliness, nor by such deeds as we have done in holiness of heart, but by that faith through which Almighty God has justified all men since the beginning of time. Glory be to Him, forever and ever, Amen.” – St. Clement of Rome (Letter to the Corinthians, par. 32)

“To this end has His Grace and Goodness been formed upon us in Christ Jesus, that being dead according to works, redeemed through faith and saved by grace, we might receive the gift
of this great deliverance.” (Ambrose, Letter 76 to Irenaeus, a layman)

“But when the Lord Jesus came, He forgave all men that sin which none could escape, and blotted out the handwriting against us by the shedding of His own Blood. This then is the Apostle’s meaning; sin abounded by the Law, but grace abounded by Jesus; for after that the whole world became guilty, He took away the sin of the whole world, as John bore witness, saying: Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. Wherefore let no man glory in works, for by his works no man shall be justified, for he that is just hath a free gift, for he is justified by the Bath. It is faith then which delivers by the blood of Christ, for Blessed is the man to whom sin is remitted, and, pardon granted.” (Ambrose, Letter 73, to Irenaeus, a layman)

“Human beings can be saved from the ancient wound of the serpent in no other way than by believing in him who, when he was raised up from the earth on the tree of martyrdom in the likeness of sinful flesh, drew all things to himself and gave life to the dead.” – St. Irenaeus (Against the Heresies, IV, 2, 7)

“Indeed, this is the perfect and complete glorification of God, when one does not exult in his own righteousness, but recognizing oneself as lacking true righteousness to be justified by faith alone in Christ.” – St. Basil the Great (Homily on Humility, PG 31.532; TFoTC vol. 9, p. 479)

“But we all escape the condemnation for our sins referred to above, if we believe in the grace of God through His Only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who said: ‘This is my blood of the new testament, which shall be shed for many unto the remission of sins.’” – St. Basil the Great (Concerning Baptism, TfoTC vol. 9, p. 344)

“They said that he who adhered to faith alone was cursed; but he, Paul, shows that he who adhered to faith alone is blessed.” – St. John Chrysostom (Homily on Galatians 3)

“But he calls it their ‘own righteousness,’ either because the Law was no longer of force, or because it was one of trouble and toil. But this he calls God’s righteousness, that from faith, because it comes entirely from the grace from above, and because men are justified in this case, not by labors, but by the gift of God.” – St. John Chrysostom (Homily 17 on Romans 10:3)

“Here he shows God’s power, in that He has not only saved, but has even justified, and led them to boasting, and this too without needing works, but looking for faith only.” Homily 7 on Romans – St. John Chrysostom

“For you believe the faith; why then do you add other things, as if faith were not sufficient to justify? You make yourselves captive, and you subject yourself to the law.” – St. John Chrysostom (Epistle to Titus, Homily 3, PG 62.651)

“’To declare His righteousness.’ What is declaring of righteousness? Like the declaring of His riches, not only for Him to be rich Himself, but also to make others rich, or of life, not only that He is Himself living, but also that He makes the dead to live; and of His power, not only that He is Himself powerful, but also that He makes the feeble powerful. So also is the declaring of His righteousness not only that He is Himself righteous, but that He doth also make them that are filled with the putrefying sores (katasapentaj) of sin suddenly righteous. And it is to explain this, viz. what is “declaring,” that he has added, “That He might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” Doubt not then: for it is not of works, but of faith: and shun not the righteousness of God, for it is a blessing in two ways; because it is easy, and also open to all men. And be not abashed and shamefaced. For if He Himself openly declareth (endeiknutai) Himself to do so, and He, so to say, findeth a delight and a pride therein, how comest thou to be dejected and to hide thy face at what thy Master glorieth in?” – St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 3

“But what is the ‘law of faith?’ It is, being saved by grace. Here he shows God’s power, in that He has not only saved, but has even justified, and led them to boasting, and this too without needing works, but looking for faith only. St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 3

“For the Law requires not only Faith but works also, but grace saves and justifies by Faith. (Eph. ii: 8)
You see how he proves that they are under the curse who cleave to the Law, because it is impossible to fulfill it; next, how comes Faith to have this justifying power? for to this doctrine he already stood pledged, and now maintains it with great force of argument. The Law being too weak to lead man to righteousness, an effectual remedy was provided in Faith, which is the means of rendering that possible which was “impossible by the Law.” (Rom. viii: 3) Now as the Scripture says, “the just shall live by faith,” thus repudiating salvation by the Law, and moreover as Abraham was justified by Faith, it is evident that its efficacy is very great. And it is also clear, that he who abides not by the Law is cursed, and that he who keeps to Faith is just. But, you may ask me, how I prove that this curse is not still of force? Abraham lived before the Law, but we, who once were subject to the yoke of bondage, have made ourselves liable to the curse; and who shall release us therefrom? Observe his ready answer to this; his former remark was sufficient; for, if a man be once justified, and has died to the Law and embraced a novel life, how can such a one be subject to the curse?” – St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Galatians 3

“God does not wait for time to elapse after repentance. You state your sin, you are justified. You repented, you have been shown mercy.” – St. John Chrysostom, Homily 7 On Repentance and Compunction, p. 95 in FOTC, vol. 96.

“Gain for yourself the pardon coming from faith, since he is his own worst enemy who does not believe that he is given what the very generous Bestower of mercy promises in all kindness.” St. Peter Chrysologus – Sermon 58 (On the Creed), par. 13 (TFOTC, Vol. 109, p. 224)

“Give yourself, O man, pardon by believing, since you fell into all the sins by despairing.” St. Peter Chrysologus – Sermon 62 (On the Creed), par. 16 (TFOTC, Vol. 109, p. 245)

“We need none of those legal observances, he says; faith suffices to obtain for us the Spirit, and by Him righteousness, and many and great benefits.” – Chrysostom, Homilies on Galatians 4

“And he well said, “a righteousness of mine own,” not that which I gained by labor and toil, but that which I found from grace. If then he who was so excellent is saved by grace, much more are you. For since it was likely they would say that the righteousness which comes from toil is the greater, he shows that it is dung in comparison with the other. For otherwise I, who was so excellent in it, would not have cast it away, and run to the other. But what is that other? That which is from the faith of God, i.e. it too is given by God. This is the righteousness of God; this is altogether a gift. And the gifts of God far exceed those worthless good deeds, which are due to our own diligence.” Chrysostom, Homily on Philippians 3

Suppose someone should be caught in the act of adultery and the foulest crimes and then be thrown into prison. Suppose, next, that judgment was going to be passed against him and that he would be condemned.

Suppose that just at that moment a letter should come from the Emperor setting free from any accounting or examination all those detained in prison. If the prisoner should refuse to take advantage of the pardon, remain obstinate and choose to be brought to trial, to give an account, and to undergo
punishment, he will not be able thereafter to avail himself of the Emperor’s favor. For when he made himself accountable to the court, examination, and sentence, he chose of his own accord to deprive himself of the imperial gift.

This is what happened in the case of the Jews. Look how it is. All human nature was taken in the foulest evils. “All have sinned,” says Paul. They were locked, as it were, in a prison by the curse of their transgression of the Law. The sentence of the judge was going to be passed against them. A letter from the King came down from heaven. Rather, the King himself came. Without examination, without exacting an account, he set all men free from the chains of their sins.

All, then, who run to Christ are saved by his grace and profit from his gift. But those who wish to find
justification from the Law will also fall from grace. They will not be able to enjoy the King’s loving-kindness because they are striving to gain salvation by their own efforts; they will draw down on themselves the curse of the Law because by the works of the Law no flesh will find justification.

What does this mean? That he has justified our race not by right actions, not by toils, not by barter and exchange, but by grace alone. Paul, too, made this clear when he said: “But now the justice of God has been made manifest apart from the Law.” But the justice of God comes through faith in Jesus Christ and not through any labor and suffering. Chrysostom on Justification, Discourses Against Judaizing Christians. Discourse I:6-II:1:

“Christ is Master by virtue of His own essence and Master by virtue of His incarnate life. For He creates man from nothing, and through His own blood redeems him when dead in sin; and to those who believe in Him He has given His grace. When Scripture says, ‘He will reward every man according to his works’ (Matt 16:27), do not imagine that works in themselves merit either hell or the kingdom. On the contrary, Christ rewards each man according to whether his works are done with faith or without faith in Himself; and He is not a dealer bound by contract, but our Creator and Redeemer.” St. Mark the Ascetic (ca. 425), On those who think that they are made righteous by works.

“Confess Jesus Christ, and believe that He is risen from the dead, and you will be saved. For indeed righteousness is only to be believed; but a complete salvation must also be confessed and knowledge must be added to confidence.” – St. Gregory Nazianzus (On Moderation, PG 36.204)

“While I was sick in the flesh, the Savior was sent to me in the likeness of sinful flesh, fulfilling such a dispensation, to redeem me from slavery, from corruption, and from death. And He became to me righteousness, and sanctification, and salvation. Righteousness, by setting me free from sin through faith in Him. Sanctification, in having set me free through water and the Spirit and His word. And salvation, His blood being the ransom of the true Lamb, having given Himself on my behalf.” – St. Epiphanios (Against Heresies 3.1,2 PG 42.477)

Where Christ enters, there necessarily is also salvation. May he therefore also be in us: and He is in us when we believe; for he dwells in our hearts by faith, and we are His abode. It would have been better then for the Jews to have rejoiced because Zaccheus was wonderfully saved, for he too was counted among the sons of Abraham, to whom God promised salvation in Christ by the holy prophets, saying, There shall come a Savior from Zion, and he shall take away iniquities from Jacob, and this is my covenant with them, when I will bear their sins. Christ, therefore, arose to deliver the inhabitants of the earth from their sins, and to seek them that were lost, and to save them that had perished. For this is His office, and, so to say, the fruit of His godlike gentleness. Of this will he also count all those worthy who have believed in him. — St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke, Homily 127

What is meant by mercy? and what by sacrifice? By mercy then is signified, Justification and grace in Christ, even that which is by faith. For we have been justified, not by the works of the law that we have done, but by His great mercy. And sacrifice means the law of Moses. – St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke, Homily 23

Be not troubled when thou meditatest upon the greatness of thy former sins; but rather know, that still greater is the grace that justifieth the sinner and absolveth the wicked. Faith then in Christ is found to be the pledge to us of these great blessings; for it is the way that leadeth unto life, that bids us go to the mansions that are above, that raises us to the inheritance of the saints, that makes us members of the kingdom of Christ. — St. Cyril of Alexandria, Homily 40 on St. Luke.

SOLA GRATIA

“Why then are you afraid of drawing nigh, since you have no works demanded of you? Why are you bickering and quarrelsome, when grace is before you, and why keep putting me the Law forward to no purpose whatsoever? For you will not be saved by that, and will mar this gift also; since if you pertinaciously insist on being saved by it, you do away with this grace of God.” – St. John Chrysostom, Homily 18 on Romans 10,11

“After speaking of the wages of sin, in the case of blessings, he has not kept to the same order: for he does not say, the wages of your good deeds, but the gift of God: to show, that it was not of themselves that they were freed, nor was it a due they received, neither yet a return, nor a recompense of labors, but by grace all these things came about. And so there was superiority for this cause also, in that He did not free them only, or change their condition for the better, but that He did it without any labor or trouble upon their part: and that He not only freed them, but also gave them more than before, and that through His Son.” – St. John Chrysostom (Epistle to the Romans, Homily 12, Rom 6:23)

“And if any were to cast in prison a person who owed ten mites, and not the man himself only, but wife and children and servants for his sake; and another were to come and not to pay down the ten mites only, but to give also ten thousand talents of gold, and to lead the prisoner into the king’s courts, and to the throne of the highest power, and were to make him partaker of the highest honour and every kind of magnificence, the creditor would not be able to remember the ten mites; so hath our case been. For Christ hath paid down far more than we owe, yea as much more as the illimitable ocean is than a little drop.” – St. John Chrysostom, Epistle to the Romans, Homily X, Rom 5:17

“Is it possible, Scripture says, for one to repent and be saved? It is absolutely and most certainly the case. What, though, if I have wasted my life in sins and then repent: will I be saved? Yes, indeed! What source indicates this? The philanthropy of your Master. Can I take courage from your repentance? Could it be that your repentance has the power to wipe clean so many evils? If it were only up to repentance, then assuredly be afraid. However, since repentance is mixed together with the philanthropy of God, take courage. For God’s philanthropy is immeasurable, nor can any word provide the measure of his goodness. Your wickedness is measurable, but the medicine is immeasurable. Your wickedness, whatever it may be, is human wickedness; but God’s philanthropy is ineffable. Have courage because it surpasses your wickedness. Just think of one spark that fell into the sea; could it stand or be seen? What one spark is in comparison to the sea, so wickedness is before the philanthropy of God; not even this much, but much more so. For the sea, even though it is vast, has limits; but God’s philanthropy is unlimited.” – St. John Chrysostom, Homily 8 On Repentance and the Church FOTC: vol 96, p. 112,113

“Well done, O Christ, O Wisdom and Power and Word of God, and God almighty! What should we resourceless people give Thee in return for all things? For all things are Thine and Thou askest nothing of us but that we be saved. Even this Thou hast given us, and by Thy ineffable goodness Thou art grateful to those who accept it. Thanks be to Thee who hast given being and grace of well-being and who by Thy ineffable condescension hast brought back to this state those who fell from it!” – St. John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith, Book 4, Chapter 4

“And so the power is conquered in the name of him who assumed human nature and whose life was without sin, so that in him, who was both priest and sacrifice, remission of sins might be effected, that is, through the ‘mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus’, through whom we are purified from our sins and reconciled to God. For it is only sins that separate men from God; and in this life purification from sins is not effected by our merit, but by the compassion of God, through his indulgence, not through our power; for even that poor little virtue which we call ours has itself been granted to us by his bounty.”– St. Augustine, City of God, X, Chapter 22

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH IN CHRIST THE KEY TO UNLOCK THE SCRIPTURES

Of faults thus grievous, Christ proved them guilty who professed to be skilled in the law; the scribes, I mean, and lawyers; and for this reason he said unto them, Also to you lawyers, woe! who have taken away the key of knowledge. By the key of knowledge we consider that the law itself is meant, and justification in Christ, by faith I mean in Him. For though the law was in shadow and type, yet those types shape out to us the truth and those shadows depict to us in manifold ways the mystery of Christ. — St. Cyril of Alexandria, Homily 86 on St. Luke

ORIGINAL SIN

And so the human race was lying under a just condemnation, and all men were the children of wrath. Of which wrath it is written: “All our days are passed away in Your wrath; we spend our years as a tale that is told.” Of which wrath also Job says: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.” Of which wrath also the Lord Jesus says: “He that believes in the Son has everlasting life: and he that believes not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abides on him.” He does not say it will come, but it “abides on him.” For every man is born with it; wherefore the apostle says: “We were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.” Now, as men were lying under this wrath by reason of their original sin, and as this original sin was the more heavy and deadly in proportion to the number and magnitude of the actual sins which were added to it, there was need for a Mediator, that is, for a reconciler, who, by the offering of one sacrifice, of which all the sacrifices of the law and the prophets were types, should take away this wrath. Wherefore the apostle says: “For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” Now when God is said to be angry, we do not attribute to Him such a disturbed feeling as exists in the mind of an angry man; but we call His just displeasure against sin by the name “anger,” a word transferred by analogy from human emotions. But our being reconciled to God through a Mediator, and receiving the Holy Spirit, so that we who were enemies are made sons (“For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God”): this is the grace of God through Jesus Christ our Lord. – St. Augustine, Enchiridion 33

“The psalmist does not suppose that he is living this life, for he had said, See, I was conceived in iniquities and my mother bore me in sins. He know that he was born from a sinful origin and under the law of sin.” – St. Hilary (Commentary on Psalm 118, 22)

“The words ‘the Jordan turned backward’ (Ps 114:3), signified the future mysteries of the bath of salvation through which the little ones who have been baptized are changed from wickedness back to their original state.” – St. Ambrose (Commentary on Luke 1, 37)

“We then say, that in many things we all of us offend, and that no man is pure from uncleanness, even though his life upon earth be but one day. Let us ask then of God mercy; which if we do, Christ will justify us; by Whom and with Whom, to God the Father, be praise and dominion, with the Holy Spirit, unto ages of ages. Amen.” – Homily 120 on Luke 18 – St. Cyril of Alexandria

And if you like to hear what other saints also have felt in regard to physical birth, listen to David when he says, I was conceived, so it runs, in iniquity and in sin my mother hath borne me, proving that every soul which is born in the flesh is tainted with the stain of iniquity and sin. This is the reason for that saying which we have already quoted above, No man is clean from sin, not even if his life be one day long. To these, as a further point, may be added an enquiry into the reason for which, while the church’s baptism is given for the remission of sin, it is the custom of the church that baptism be administered even to infants. Certainly, if there were nothing in infants that required remission and called for lenient treatment, the grace of baptism would seem unnecessary. (R.B. Tollinton, Selections From The Commentaries And Homilies of Origen, 1929, p. 211)

Brethren, the selection (rom 5:12-14) from the Apostle for today tells us that through one man the whole world received its sentence… The downfall of one man has flowed out to become a punishment of all, and the vice of the parent has brought a sad catastrophe upon the whole race. (Chrysologus, Sermon 111, Original Sin, p. 175 vol. 17 FOTC)

Through a man sin came and clearly through this sin we are seen to have come under the control of death. O sin, you cruel beast – and a beast not content to vent your fury against the human race from merely one head. We have seen this beast, brethren, devouring with a triple head all the highly precious sprouts of the human family. Yes, brethren, with a mouth that is triple: as sin this beast captures, as death it devours, as hell it swallows down. (ibid, p. 176, 177)

For the whole nature of man became guilty in the person of him who was first formed; but now it is wholly justified again in Christ. — St. Cyril of Alexandria, Homily 42 on St. Luke

ON DIVINE JUSTICE

If Phinees, when he waxed zealous and slew the evil-doer, staved the wrath of God, shall not Jesus, who slew not another, but gave up Himself for a ransom, put away the wrath which is against mankind?…Further; if the lamb under Moses drove the destroyer far away, did not much rather the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world, deliver us from our sins? The blood of a silly sheep gave salvation; and shall not the Blood of the Only-begotten much rather save?…Jesus then really suffered for all men; for the Cross was no illusion, otherwise our redemption is an illusion also…These things the Saviour endured, and made peace through the Blood of His Cross, for things in heaven, and things in earth. For we were enemies of God through sin, and God had appointed the sinner to die. There must needs therefore have happened one of two things; either that God, in His truth, should destroy all men, or that in His loving-kindness He should cancel the sentence. But behold the wisdom of God; He preserved both the truth of His sentence, and the exercise of His loving-kindness. Christ took our sins in His body on the tree, that we by His death might die to sin, and live unto righteousness.–St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, XIII

“And the Lamb of God not only did this, but was chastised on our behalf, and suffered a penalty He did not owe, but which we owed because of the multitude of our sins; and so He became the cause of the forgiveness of our sins, because He received death for us, and transferred to Himself the scourging, the insults, and the dishonour, which were due to us, and drew down on Himself the apportioned curse, being made a curse for us. And what is that but the price of our souls? And so the oracle says in our person: “By his stripes we were healed,” and “The Lord delivered him for our sins,” with the result that uniting Himself to us and us to Himself, and appropriating our sufferings, He can say, “I said, Lord, have mercy on me, heal my soul, for I have sinned against thee.” – Eusebius of Caesarea, Demonstratio Evangelica, X.1

“A sacrifice was needed to reconcile the Father on high with us and to sanctify us, since we had been soiled by fellowship with the evil one. There had to be a sacrifice which both cleansed and was clean, and a purified, sinless priest…. God overturned the devil through suffering and His Flesh which He offered as a sacrifice to God the Father, as a pure and altogether holy victim – how great is His gift! – and reconciled God to the human race…Since He gave His Blood, which was sinless and therefore guiltless, as a ransom for us who were liable to punishment because of our sins, He redeemed us from our guilt. He forgave us our sins, tore up the record of them on the Cross and delivered us from the devil’s tyranny.” –St. Gregory Palamas, Homily 16, 21, 24, 31

For the wrath of man reaches at most the body, and the death of the flesh is the utmost that they can contrive against us, but when God punishes, the loss reaches not to the flesh alone – how could it – but the wretched soul also is cast along with it into torments. — St. Cyril of Alexandria, Homily 87 on Luke

For it was by reason of Adam’s transgression of the commandment that we, having our faces turned away from God, returned to our dust; for the sentence of God upon human nature was, Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return; but at the time of the consummation of this world, the face of the earth shall be renewed; for God the Father by the Son in the Spirit will give life to all those who are laid within it.–St. Cyril of Alexandria, Homily 36 on St. Luke

by Jaynan Clarck Egland

(Note to the Reader: The following is something I felt inspired to write down while meeting with the ACR—Association for Church Renewal—in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. ACR is a gathering of leaders from reform movements across the mainline denominations. The traditions represented at the meeting included Presbyterian, Methodist, Reformed (U.S. and Canadian), Lutheran, and Disciples of Christ. Many present have been meeting together for decades, WordAlone’s vice-president, Mark Chavez, has been attending for the last eight years. I felt it was timely for me to attend and was personally blessed by the experience and therefore felt moved to record and share with the group my impression of what was and is happening among us. I am sharing these comments with all of you as they were spontaneously jotted down and read to the gathering. I’m hopeful that they will help each reader come to an understanding that true ecumenism and unity are not human achievements but gifts from God and that  consensus is spontaneously achieved when the Word of God is authoritative over participants whose collective conscience is bound to that very Word. All present energetically gave a verbal “thumbs up.”)

Recognizing and celebrating all the historic differences that make us who we are in our varied, faithful expressions of the Christian faith we realize true unity in our common confession of the ecumenical, historic creeds of the Christian Church. We join in one voice in the midst of these turbulent times and for the sake of engaging in the true ministry of the church, which is the telling of the story, evangelism and delivery of the promises of God to a world in need; we affirm and confess the following together:

+ That Jesus is the only way, the whole truth and life itself. That Jesus Christ, Crucified and Raised from the dead is the Lord of the church in which we gather in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

+ That the Holy Bible is the written Word of God and the source and norm of all of faith and life and it has authority in and of itself as it stands over us all interpreting the life of the church, its message and each individual engaged by this Word.

+ That the historical critical method for studying the scriptures was meant to be a tool but has been used as a weapon when it diverges from the Christian understanding of the Word’s authority.

+ That the declining basis of faith and the diminishing nature of all denominations are results of church leaders’ actions that have systematically rejected the basic teachings of the Christian faith:  Jesus’ lordship (Christology); the authority of the Bible as the Word of God; the definition of sin, repentance and forgiveness; the basis for marriage and family; the reality of miracles and spiritual warfare; and the primary mission of the Church.

+ That the primary mission of the Christian Church is evangelism in the name of Jesus Christ whom we are not ashamed of and not social activism, political correctness and justice apart from the Christian story.

+ That we are saved by the grace of God in Jesus Christ and not by works of the law, moralisms, legalisms or spiritual disciplines of any kind.

+ That what the North American church and globally the Christian church are experiencing is not about merely an attack or changes in any one denomination or human institution or even individual attacks on specific churches but rather we are witnessing a redefining of the entire Gospel, the rewriting and reshaping of the Christian faith and the denial of the theology of the cross and Christ Crucified and Risen from the dead.

+ That the current issues pressing every mainline denomination are only symptoms of churches’ abandoning their basic teachings on the created order, the definition of marriage and family, human sexuality and the elevation of self-expression over self-restraint resulting in a new ministry that engages in “unsinning sin” rather than forgiving repentant sinners and preaches acceptance and inclusion rather than forgiveness and salvation.

+ That historic and traditional definitions of sin, freedom and conscience have been changed significantly confusing both pastors and people in the pews in a new form of religion that finds its foundation in inclusivity and relativism of basic teachings of the faith.

+ We reject the notion that the tenets of the Christian faith can be systematically changed by consensus or contemporary majority votes of small delegations of any one denomination. Therefore, as Protestants, we stand together in proclamation and in “protest” against all church leadership that actively leads astray Jesus’ flock in the name of “love,” which is not the Christian love passed down for 20 centuries and recorded in the Holy Scripture. We actively affirm, confess and teach the love of Christ Jesus that addresses human suffering and sin and gives the gifts of forgiveness and salvation to this 21^st century world so much in need of hearing the true Gospel and its good news for all ages.

(Rev. Jaynan Clarck Egland is president of the WordAlone Network)

The following is a report form Mark Chavez, Vice President of the WordAlone Network, on current events in the ELCA.

In spite of requests from 15 ELCA synods and a significant majority of ELCA bishops asking for a two-thirds majority vote, the ELCA Church Council voted to stick with its November decision to propose rules of procedure for the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly that would require only a simple majority vote on resolutions about changes in church teaching and policy to allow practicing homosexuals to serve as ELCA ministers. The Church Council met March 27-30 in Chicago.

The council’s Legal and Constitutional Committee presented a proposed rule for the 2009 ELCA Churchwide Assembly that was nearly identical to the rule it had recommended in November. The Church Council had voted 19-10 to delete the two-thirds majority requirement at its November meeting. In presenting the rule at the March meeting, the committee made no recommendation for approval or disapproval. Ten council members voted for the two-thirds majority rule for the ministry policy resolutions, 21 opposed it and two abstained in the Saturday, March 28, vote.

In recent weeks, 15 ELCA Synod Councils had asked the Church Council to propose a two-thirds majority rule on all the sexuality matters to be considered by the Churchwide Assembly. Three Synod Councils had supported a simple majority rule.

The ELCA Conference of Bishops voted by a two-to-one margin in support of a two-thirds majority rule at their meeting in early March. Because it was a closed session, the ELCA had not reported the bishops’ vote. However, when a council member requested that the council hear the Conference of Bishops’ advice on this matter, the bishops’ views were made public.

Some council members said that if they changed their minds on the rule, it might look like the council was succumbing to pressure from “a few synods.” One member suggested that perhaps all of the other synods agreed with the simple majority rule.

Some council members also said that by making the decision in November — prior to the release of the task force report — their decision was neutral with respect to the content of the task force report. If they changed their minds now, it might look like they were commenting on the content of the task force report.

The 2009 Churchwide Assembly will adopt its rules of procedure at its first session and could amend the rules to reinstate the two-thirds majority requirement for changes in ministry standards.

ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson set the tone for all of the council’s discussions with his report at the start of the meeting on March 28. He said, “We are at the intersection of fear and hope,” and went on to say that the council and the ELCA should not let fear keep them from doing what they ought to do and be who they ought to be. He urged them to move forward boldly in hope.

Sunday, March 29, the council dealt with the proposed social statement on human sexuality and the ministry policies resolutions from the Task Force for ELCA Studies on Human Sexuality.

The Rev. Steve Loy, chair of the council’s Program and Services Committee, which had reviewed the proposed social statement, Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust, before the meeting, said that the committee considered the proposed social statement to be credible and therefore recommended that the Church Council pass it along to the Churchwide Assembly with minimal changes.

When the Churchwide staff and leaders presented the social statement to the Church Council for consideration, they praised the task force for its work.

The Rev. Roger Thompson, chair of the Church in Society Program Committee, said the task force accurately reflected the diversity of views in the ELCA and that the social statement is a “very admirable document.”

The Rev. Roger Willer, director of the ELCA Department of Studies, Church in Society, reported that the task force took seriously the feedback to the 2008 Draft Social Statement on Human Sexuality and made significant revisions in the proposed statement including: writing a shorter statement (1,000 words less); placing sexual ethics within the doctrine of creation; clarifying the role of the Law; using less technical language; locating sexuality in God’s left-handed ruling; and noting that disagreements on sexual ethics are not matters in which salvation is at stake.

The Church Council unanimously approved amendments to the proposed social statement, which the task force regarded as friendly amendments that further the intent of the social statement. Then the council voted by a strong majority to “transmit” the social statement to the Churchwide Assembly as amended.

The Church Council also voted to transmit implementing resolutions related to the proposed statement, with some amendments, to the Churchwide Assembly. Some council members opposed this action.

The amended social statement and implementing resolutions as they will be presented to the 2009 Churchwide Assembly will be available online at www.elca.org/faithfuljourney April 2.

The Church Council then took up the Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies resolutions from the task force. The Rev. Rebecca Larson, head of the Church in Society Unit said that, contrary to some news reports, the ELCA is not proposing a change in rostering policies but proposing a process by which the ELCA will decide if it wants to consider a change in policies.

The task force recommended a series of four resolutions that would allow ELCA pastors and other rostered leaders to be in same-sex sexual relationships.

The Rev. Peter Strommen, chair of the Task Force for ELCA Studies on Sexuality, repeated that the task force had not proposed what the ELCA ought to do, but rather a process for how to proceed when there is no consensus on the sexuality issues.

The Rev. Stan Olson, head of the Vocation and Education unit, said that “structured flexibility” is a shorthand way to refer to what already exists in the ELCA candidacy process. He said that “structured flexibility” is not a proposal for local option because the ELCA does not currently have a local option. If the ELCA already had a local option then it would be accurate to say the task force recommendation is a proposal for local option.

Later in the meeting, Olson clarified that Resolution #4 would allow for different practices among ELCA synods and congregations.

The Church Council voted overwhelmingly to transmit Resolutions #1 and #2 to the 2009 Churchwide Assembly.

Resolution #1 asks the ELCA to “commit itself to finding ways to allow congregations that choose to do so to recognize, support, and hold publicly accountable life-long, monogamous, same-gender relationships.” The council amended this proposal to delete a reference to synods.

Resolution #2 asks “that the ELCA commit itself to finding a way for people in such publicly accountable, lifelong, monogamous, same-gender relationships to serve as rostered leaders of this church.”

The Church Council also voted overwhelmingly to transmit Resolutions #3 and #4, but after much more discussion.

Resolution #3 states that “in the implementation of these resolutions, the ELCA commits itself to bear one another’s burdens, love the neighbor, and respect the bound consciences of all.”

Questions were raised about the definition of “bound conscience” — prominent in the third resolution. Is it a proper definition? Is
it a new definition?

Pastor Willer said that the Church in Society Unit is preparing a document that will show that the definition of “bound conscience” used by the task force is long-standing in Lutheran and Christian teaching. He said it hasn’t been used in recent years, which is why it appears to be new. Willer asserted that Martin Luther understood “bound conscience” to apply not only to central matters of salvation but also to other matters, and that Luther understood it to mean the ability to judge moral doctrine. The document is to be available later this month.

Resolution #4 details the policy changes necessary to current ELCA teaching and policy to enact the previous resolutions.

After much discussion, Resolution #4 was substantially amended and shortened. One council member said that the amendments are more transparent in that they make it clear that the resolution allows a congregation to introduce a practice in a synod that might otherwise not accept the practice.

Throughout all of the discussions on the sexuality issues, only a few people spoke in opposition to the content of the task force documents.

The Church Council made its decisions on the sexuality documents after hearing grim news about the financial situation of the ELCA and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.

Canadian Bishop Susan Johnson was first to report its grim financial situation. She has had to cut her staff by 30 percent. There are now only 10 full-time employees in the ELCIC national office. She is trying to run the office with one-third the real funds they had in 1986. Individual income in Canada has kept pace with inflation, but giving to congregations and giving to synods and Churchwide has not. She believes they will need to reduce the number of synods or to downsize them. “We’re running out of runway,” Johnson said. She added they still have some time to make choices, but they soon won’t.

When the ELCA’s financial condition was reported, the Rev. Wyvetta Bullock, the Executive for Administration, said that the ELCA is close to being on the edge like the Canadian church.

The ELCA has had a significant decline in mission support from synods thus far this year. January 2009 was the second lowest January in the ELCA’s history, February was down, and March is down. In fiscal year 2008 the Churchwide unit received 95.8 percent of planned mission support. The estimate is for only 93 percent in 2009. The ELCA treasurer reported that factoring for inflation, mission support is down 42 percent from 1989.

Because of the revised income estimates, 35.5 Churchwide staff positions were eliminated in recent weeks — 23.5 occupied staff positions and 12 vacant positions. All Churchwide units have made reductions, a partial hiring freeze is in place, and salaries for the highest pay grades will be reduced by 3 percent.

In another action the Church Council approved, with no discussion, the ELCA bishops’ response to the 2007 Churchwide Assembly resolution that called for a report from the bishops to the 2009 Churchwide Assembly on their accountability to ELCA policies. The bishops have concluded that no new document is needed for the 2009 assembly because they had been regularly reviewing accountability all along and the current ELCA documents are sufficient.

The Church Council used process observers throughout the meeting to report on the freedom in the meeting for all to express themselves and for all voices to be heard. Ironically, at the very end of the meeting when advisers to the council were making reports, the Rev. Khader N. El-Yateem, chair of the Multicultural Ministries Program Committee informed the council that none of the Arab or Middle Eastern ELCA congregations had participated in the sexuality studies and feedback in the past several years. The leaders of those congregations did not present the sexuality studies and documents in their congregations because it would have been unhelpful and troublesome. He said many other ethnic congregations had also not participated for the same reasons. He warned the Church Council that it does not have the input or participation of many of these congregations.

(via the WordAlone Network)

Is there anything more than justice and equality for unrepentant sinners behind the drive for change in ELCA ordination policies? The following is a report from yesterday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune on the latest meeting of the ELCA’s church council, the majority of which is content to change its “visions and expectations” for clergy on the basis of a mere majority vote of churchwide assembly attendees this August. As Mike Williams notes on the ILT facebook page, this might not really be all that much of a change, since current policy is not really enforced in practice anyway. It is becoming difficult to see how the ELCA is saying anything more than “anything goes” (e.g. check out Her Church, an ELCA congregation in San Francisco).

So when is enough going to be enough for the proverbial frog in the boiling kettle? What are churches going to do come August? What are the faithful Christians in apathetic congregations going to do? What can people from other denominations, like LCMC and LCMS, do to care for those who are being “left behind”?

It is interesting that the article begins with a military image, but certainly not inappropriate. As the apostle Paul writes, “Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” (Ephesians 6:10-18)

The first battle lines for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s (ELCA) latest proposal on gay ministers were drawn Tuesday when the Church Council rejected a motion to require a two-thirds vote on the question.
The council — essentially the ELCA’s board of directors — voted 21 to 10 with two abstentions to put the “Report and Recommendation on Ministry Policies” to a simple majority vote at its convention in Minneapolis Aug. 17-23. The recommendation would allow gay clergy in the ELCA, but leave it up to individual synods and congregations whether to appoint gay ministers.
The matter is far from settled, however. The issue can be revived for a vote by the full assembly on the first day of the convention, something that people on both sides of the issue expect.
“Sad to say, we saw this coming,” said the Rev. W. Stevens Shipman, pastor of United Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lock Haven, Pa., and secretary of Lutheran CORE, a group that opposes the change.
“We think a decision of this importance needs to be approved by two-thirds of the membership, and we will try to get the synods that agree with that to address the issue with the assembly,” he said.
St. Paul-based Lutherans Concerned/North America, which supports the change, applauded the council’s decision with muted enthusiasm, noting that “there is more to be done.”
“The council recommendation takes a major step for justice and equality,” said Emily Eastwood, executive director. “But this is an interim step. Next comes synod assemblies where synods can weigh in. And then the churchwide assembly, its deliberations and final action. So we are cautious and have much work to do.”
‘Extensive discussion’ ahead
Monday’s vote was the second time the council has taken that position, said the Rev. Rebecca Larson, of the ELCA’s central office in Chicago. “This vote just reaffirms what they’d already decided,” she said.
The two-thirds proposal came from 18 of the ELCA’s 65 synods. The suggested change in the rules for rostering — officially recognizing — gay clergy, along with an accompanying policy statement, “Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust,” now will be submitted to the individual synods for discussion.
The Rev. Peter Strommen, chairman of the task force that drew up the proposal and pastor at Shepherd of the Lake Lutheran Church in Prior Lake, said he expects “extensive church-wide discussion” leading up to the convention.
The two abstentions were by Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson and the board Secretary David Swartling. In doing so, they cited their key roles in the leadership of the upcoming assembly in Minneapolis.
Under the ELCA’s current policies, gays can be ministers only if they promise to be celibate. The proposal to be put before the assembly would remove that restriction.
Presbyterians are also voting
The Presbyterian church is also moving to reconsider its celibacy clause in a vote being conducted one presbytery at a time, a process that won’t be over until May.
But approval requires yes votes from 87 of the country’s 173 presbyteries. At the last count, the issue was losing 69-42.
The ELCA’s gay-ordination debate overshadowed some tough economic decisions made by the council that resulted in layoffs, pay cuts and program cutbacks. Among the hardest hit was the World Hunger Appeal fund, which lost nearly 10 percent of its $20 million annual budget.
In addition, 25 ELCA jobs were cut, the ELCA will halt its weekly radio program, “Grace Matters,” and salaries for all unit executives and senior staff were cut 3 percent.

(via The Star Tribune)

“To ordain does not mean to consecrate.  Accordingly, if we know of a godly man, we choose him and, on the strength of the Word which is ours, we give him authority to preach the Word and administer the sacraments. This is what it means to ordain.”