Two Ways of Being a Theologian
The second of our weekly feature columns, “Tuesdays with Forde,” begins today with this brief selection from On Being a Theologian of the Cross, by Gerhard O. Forde. One of the most important parts of Forde’s work on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation is his insistence on framing the issue of the theology of glory vs. the theology of the cross in the terms action as opposed to abstraction, i.e. they are not theologies primarily in the sense of being theological theories, but rather constitute two drastically different ways of being a theologian.
From the Introductory Matters (pp. 12-13):
“Claimed, that is to say killed and made alive by the cross alone as the story, theologians of the cross attack the way of glory, the way of law, human works, and free will, because the way of glory simply operates as a defense mechanism against the cross. Theologians of glory operate with fundamentally different presuppositions about how one comes to know God. They think one can see through the created world and the acts of God to the invisible realm of glory beyond it, and they must think this because for the system to work there must be a “glory road,” a way of law, which the fallen creature can traverse by willing and working and thus gain the necessary merit eventually to arrive at glory.
The cross too is transparent. The theologian of glory sees through the cross so as to fit it into the scheme of works. The cross “makes up” for failures along the glory road. The upshot of it all is a fundamental misreading of reality. The theologian of glory ends by calling evil good and good evil. Works are good and suffering is evil. The God who presides over this enterprise must therefore be excused from all blame for what was termed “evil.” The theology of glory ends in a simplistic understanding of God. God, according to philosophers like Plato, is not the cause of the all things but only what we might call “good.” It is hard to see how such a god could even be involved in the cross.
Theologians of the cross, however, “say what a thing is.” That is, a characteristic mark of theologians of the cross is that they learn to call a spade a spade. Since the cross story alone is their story, they are not driven by the attempt to see through it, but are drawn into the story. They know that faith means to live in the Christ of the story. Likewise they do not believe that we come to proper knowledge of God by attempting to see through the created world to the “invisible things of God.” So theologians of the cross look on all things “through suffering and the cross.” They, in other words, are led by the cross to look at the trials, the sufferings, the pangs of conscience, the troubles–and joys–of daily life as God’s doing and do not try to see through them as mere accidental problems to be solved by metaphysical adjustment. They are not driven to simplistic theodicies because with St. Paul they believe that God justifies himself precisely in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. They know that, dying to the old, the believer lives in Christ and looks forward to being raised with him.”
