Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther In his teaching [on original sin] Luther is also very different from the teaching of the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, most of us are more familiar with the Catholic teaching than we are with the Protestant teaching of Luther. Nothing is more foolish than to think that the [...]
Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther For sin is not foreign to me; it is not random, clinging to my external appearance, like all sinful acts are and do. It is also not something that is beyond me, as in the tragic sense, underscoring my existence. Rather, sin is as intimate as the [...]
Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther The law should be able to teach a person to call upon the Holy Spirit who gives us a new heart. It should be able to take them out of themselves because this Pointing-Away-from-Myself is the task of the law, which is why it is called pedagogue [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther The “conditions of the law” are not fulfilled by mere deeds for God sees into the heart. God asks whether what we do is done out of love – pure, great, full love. Luther hates the confidence and security a person feels through his [...]
Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther Indeed, the law is to be regarded in the same light as works. “For through the law a hatred of the law is awakened, but through faith a love for the law is infused.” For with the love of God who loves us, the love of His [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther To speak of the righteousness of the sinner is not the exception and to speak of the righteousness of the righteous is not the rule. On the contrary, the God who is revealed in Christ makes the sinner righteous – that is the rule, [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Kreuz und Auferstehung The Cross is the utterly incommensurable factor in the revealtion of God. We have become far too used to it. We have surrounded the scandal of the cross with roses. We have made a theory of salvation out of it. But that is not the cross. That is [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith according to Luther Since the good or evil of a work is of a quality that emanates from the relative good or evil of the person that performs it, the burning question of the Reformation is not “How are good works possible,” but is “How does a [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther Therefore, there is only one way to receive new life and that is through faith which is nothing less than pure receptivity; the acceptance of that which God promises in His Word to man. [Luther writes] “No work and no merit brings him the [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther Luther presents the appropriation of faith in a twofold manner and the background for this appropriation is always the last judgment of God. The challenge that the very first words of forgiveness pose to men is not something of a psychological phenomenon, but rather [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith according to Luther Luther has formulated the recognition of the priority of existence over action in a famous, consistent antithesis which was for him to remain a guiding star: “no iusta operando iusti efficimur, sed iusti essendo iusta operamur,” which means, “not through doing what is right [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Hans Iwand, The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther Let us remember this: the Law pushes the “I” together so closely that they become one form, one flesh and one will. God’s righteousness transforms the “I” in faith to become one with Christ so that they become one form, one flesh [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith according to Luther Luther tried to describe what happened to him. It became clear to him that this foreign righteousness was also and at the same time our righteousness, and that it did not stand outside of us, but rather in us, since God is who He [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Iwand, The Righteousness of Faith According to Martin Luther Since Luther is for us such an important teacher of the faith, we cannot leave him within the confines of denominationalism. Both friends and foes who see him thus do not do justice either to his intentions or to his teachings. Luther [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Hans Iwand, Righteousness of God According to Luther Why is God’s giving of the law necessary? Is God really revealed in the law as much as He revealed in the gospel. Or, is what we call God’s law something different from what we call political, social or natural order in the [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Iwand’s sermon “The Loincloth” For when this thread, the life-thread of faith, breaks, when the nail on which everything hangs is loosened, then it is the same with everything else as well. Being able to listen, listen and not act without his bidding, wanting to listen and therefore asking God, being [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Hans Iwand, The Righteousness of Faith according to Luther We are today in a similar situation: grace, compassion, love, and mercy are words that we like to hear. They are “evangelical words.” But doesn’t “righteousness” belong to the law and in the Old Testament? Doesn’t righteousness mean that God gives each [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Iwand, Nachgelassene Werke 2, pp. 404-405 As unlikely as one can trace Barth’s “fear” to the “anthropocentrism” of the nineteenth-century but instead to the necessity of proclamation (1 Cor. 9:16), just as unlikely can one maintain that Luther did not fear that we humans could be masters over God; in fact, [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Iwand’s sermon “The Loincloth” But – room must still remain for the great “But” of Holy Scripture. “But without faith, it is impossible to please God” (Heb. 11:6). This “But” is not to be overlooked even here. On the contrary, this “But” is the final and deepest meaning of that most [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther pp. 37-38 The view that a person is changed through faith is the view of the Cross. Luther drew many of his concepts regarding the flesh and suffering from the theological mystics. However, his view differs radically from the mystics in that the recovery [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Iwand’s sermon, “The Loincloth” “Just as a man binds a loincloth about his loins – in the same way,” says God, “I have taken you to myself.” As a man takes his loincloth. And he includes what that means: “That they should be my people, to be a name for me, [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith according to Luther, p. 45-46 …wherever grace and forgiveness are proclaimed in the present tense, even in the Old Testament, the Gospel is present. For the Gospel does not bring a new conception of God, a new morality, or a new religion. Rather, the Newness that it [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Here Iwand recounts a story told to him by a German civil engineer who had witnessed a mass execution. Via Iwand, ‘Vortrage und Aufsatze’ (NW 2), p.363 It all happened in a big ditch. Some steps were dug into the limestone going down into the huge grave. Down the steps each of the [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Hans Iwand, “Wie studiere ich Philosophie” (How to study philosophy?) in Um den rechten Glauben, p. 173-182 Theology and philosophy must be in constant dialogue for ‘theology is the confident companion of the human being in his quest for the meaning of the last things, encouraging him not to delude himself [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther, pp. 66-67 From the point of view of the righteousness of faith, the imposters and anti-Christian rivals who preach the righteousness of the law are easily recognized. The righteousness of the law has nothing to do with the fact that a person intends to [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Iwand’s sermon on Jeremiah 13:1-11, “The Loincloth” (February 1936, Freizeit der theologische Fachschaft der Universitaet Koenigsburg in Allenstein, in Bekenntnispredigen, Heft 14, 1936. S. 4-13) How the echo from the warning of Jeremiah sounded is reported to us. ”Come,” they said, “let us take council against Jeremiah; for the priests cannot err in [...]
Thursdays with Iwand B.1, Outline of a lecture on The Primacy of Christology, Thesis (1956) 1.The definitive expression that lies within Protestant theology, the authoritative theme of Christology has come to the fore. 2. The problem, which has been thrown out of the study of doctrine, exists therein, that during the time of Jesus of [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther, p. 39 If we ask Luther what he understands by the Word of God he answers: “The word of God is both law and gospel.” (LW 33:105) Whoever does not make this distinction is denied the ability to attempt a correct interpretation of Scripture. [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via The Righteousness of Faith According to Luther” (pg. 35-6) People who love God with the self-serving loving of concupiscentia spiritualis are horrified at the thought of predestination. They think it is cruel and inhuman that God has mercy on those upon whom he chooses to have mercy and rejects those he [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Summarizing his own understanding of the Word of God and faith, Iwand writes: Faith, however, means: he shall be Lord. Thus God finds the person who even now, in the invisibleness of not-seeing, yet believing, takes him in faith to be the all-embracing fullneas of reality. Whoever believes in God believes in [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Excerpts from “Faith & Knowledge” (1962) The ‘homo-religiosus’ is precisely the person under the law. This is the new ‘post-Schleiermacher-knowledge’ which makes theology today the most exciting and important matter. If that be true, what is going to happen to atheism, what to the church, what to science?… Jesus Christ alone stands [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via Hans Iwand, Glaubensgerechtigkeit nach Luthers Lehre, p. 193 Jesus Christ alone stands among us all as true human being – this is the significance of his incarnation… Ergo, the incarnation of Christ is the very opposite of the deification of Adam. The crucified, ‘as true human being,’ stands in a world [...]
Thursdays with Iwand Via “Kreuz und Auferstehung,” Klappert, pg. 288 The cross is the utterly incommensurable factor in the revelation of God. we have become far too used to it. We have surrounded the scandal of the cross with roses. We have made a theory of salvation out of it. But that is not the [...]
