On the Logia website (www.logia.org), Mark Menacher has taken aim at the "fundamentals" I offered up a couple of years ago. A couple of clarifications and some response is in order, I think.
These "fundamentals" were published on the WordAlone website over two years ago. My interests then and now are not the reform of the ELCA, whatever 'reform' might mean in this context. I was struggling in early 2007 to clarify some of the presuppositions of the "working theology" of the WordAlone Network. I wrote these both as descriptive of those presuppositions, but also as prescriptive. In reading Mark's response to them, it is obvious that he questions whether WordAone is worthy even to exist. I will not deal here with that issue, but rather with some of the specific claims he makes about these assertions in themselves, that is, in abstraction from the WordAlone context.
All need to realize that this attempt at fundamentals presupposed that we begin Lutheran theology solidly in the Second Article; we presuppose that Jesus is the Truth and Life. To claim as I did that theological language has truth-conditions is not to claim that Jesus is not the Truth. By talking about theological language having truth conditions, I am saying that Mark's own critique of my work can be either true or false. Unfortunately, much theological discourse seems to have abandoned this basic presupposition. I affirm it.
I am rather puzzled by the other points that Mark makes. To say that God is "causally related to the universe" is not to say that is all we say about God. It is to say that we presuppose that relatedness when making statements about God's acts in the orders of creation and redemption. I find no points of disagreement in his critique of theses (3) and (4). In thesis (5), I was thinking about the Apology, and subsequent reflection on these matters within Lutheran Orthodoxy generally. I find no substantive difference in what Mark says in theses (6) or (7) either. One might not like the term 'orientation', but one needs to look beyond the use of the term, and try to understand what the author might mean by it. I clearly mean that men and women are at enmity with God whether, as Luther says, "they eat, sleep or drink." In (7) I accede that the Holy Spirit works freely and verbally. These are properties of the Holy Spirit's working, presumably. I was talking about a relational fact about human beings, however. The question is whether or not human work contributes in any way to the freeing of human beings from sin, death, and the power of the devil. I am merely affirming what has been the dominant tradition within Lutheranism on this matter.
Fundamental semantic presuppositions have been at work within vast portions of the Lutheran theological landscape that are quite alien (and antithetical) to the semantic horizon upon which the Reformation originated. This is why we have thousands of preachers who can talk confidently about what God has done, but no longer believe that "having done" connotes a causal relationship: X causes Y if and only if were X not to have happened, then Y would not have happened. Failure to attend to what is basic here has raised up a generation of Lutheran preachers and teachers who can talk confidently of God's "mighty acts in history" and yet not mean that God affects nature. That is to say, 'God divided the waters' no longer is parsed to mean that there is a divine being, there are waters, and that the waters would not have been divided were God not to have acted.
I thank Mark for his comments, and I say to him that it seems we really are in agreement on most of these issues.
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