There was once an organization called the Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans (FOCL), and they had a publication which I recall was called FOCL News. I penned this article on the new "Lutheran House of Studies" for that publication in order to get the word out. I believe it was written and published sometime in the summer of or fall of 2006. You can see that I was interested from the beginning in establishing a theological ethos at ILT, and wanted to address this question: Given the different interpretations of subsequent traditions of foundational documents, what can ILT do to vouchsafe some normative approach to interpreting those documents? Theological realism, semantic realism, and the possibility of theophysical causation are advanced as possible "grammars" by which foundational documents could be read.
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A Lutheran House of Studies
Dennis Bielfeldt, Ph. D.
WordAlone earnestly desires to establish a new confessional Lutheran theological house of studies. But some ask, “Why? Why does Lutheranism need another place trying to train pastors confessionally? What is so wrong with what we have? While things aren’t perfect, perhaps, they aren’t that bad either. Why does WordAlone think it can establish an institution more confessional than what has already been planted in ELCA, LCMS or WELS soil? Why does it believe that the effort and expense will bear good fruit?”
These are important questions, of course, and it seems that the so-called “Director of the WordAlone Lutheran theological house of studies” (my official title these days) should have ready answers to them. When the WordAlone Convention in May adopted a plan for implementation of the house of studies, it voted on a report in which I spoke of several challenges facing seminary education within the ELCA. At that time, I saw six major issues:
- an economic challenge
- a sociological challenge
- a leadership challenge
- a theological challenge
- an authority challenge
- a rights challenge
I still believe that these identify the major difficulties facing theological education within the ELCA, and I recommend that FOCL readers examine the Report and form their own opinions as to its accuracy. This report, I believe, gives the rationale for why another Lutheran institution is necessary for the training of future pastors and teachers.
If this list is accurate, however, and is successfully answers questions of why we need a confessional House of Studies now within the ELCA context, it does not address the further question of the general theological contour of that house of studies. Given that the house of studies is “confessional,” what does “being confessional” mean for its curriculum and teaching? Even more profoundly, what does “being confessional” mean within Lutheranism generally in our time?
The easy answer to the question of what “being confessional” means is this: For an educational institution to be confessional is for it to privilege the historic confessions of its tradition such that they become foundational (and normative) for the piety, teaching and research of the institution.
Unfortunately, this definition is inadequate. Because our postmodern times allow (and often encourage) multiple readings of texts, two or more institutions grounded on the same confessional texts might have quite different theological trajectories. All the ELCA seminaries can make a claim to privilege Scripture and the Lutheran confessional writings, yet it is obvious that some have departed more significantly from traditional Lutheran theological affirmations than have others. Many celebrate this departure from the tradition as a departure entailed by the radicality of God’s love for us in Christ. (This is clearly true with regard to the sexuality/homsexuality debate raging within the ELCA.)
So how can this situation be fixed? Indeed, how might one fix the interpretations of the Confessions so that they might not drift? What kind of interpretation of Scripture can block interpretations attempting to say that Scripture itself says nothing about the sinfulness of homosexuality? What kind of interpretation of the Confessions and the confessional tradition can block interpretations saying that the Reformers “earnestly desired” to retain Bishops in historical succession with Rome, and thus that Lutherans are mandated by their own confessions to seek visible, ecclesial unity with Rome?
In the absence of a present normative consensus as to what the texts of the Confessions mean, it becomes important to make clear from the beginning that it is not the text itself that grounds a tradition, but rather a particular interpretation of the text. A particular reading of the text, established in part by its situational context, functions normatively and determines, at least partially, the character of any educational institution regarding that text as foundational.
My motivation in offering the WordAlone “fundamentals” is to try to determine if there is sufficient theological clarity in the WordAlone movement to establish normatively a range of interpretations of the Lutheran confessional documents. Given that Lutherans holding to Scriptures and Confessions believe many different things about what Scriptures and Confessions mean and presuppose, is there sufficient clarity within WordAlone to be able to determine for these documents a range of appropriate meanings? What “take” on Scripture and Confessions has seemed to be operating in the WordAlone movement since its inception, a “take” that might be worked up into a list of central theological affirmations or assumptions?
My own attempt at articulating these affirmations of WordAlone appear on the WordAlone website, but I include them also below. I believe that these assertions function as the differentia which give WordAlone its identity as a species within Lutheranism.
- Theological statements have truth-conditions
- God is real, that is, God exists out and beyond human awareness, perception, conception and language
- God is causally related to the universe
- All temporal structures, institutions and conceptual frameworks are historically-conditioned Nothing finite is infinite
- The true church is not visible, but remains hidden
- The Holy Spirit works monergistically, not synergistically, upon sinners effecting saving faith
While all seven statements are important, the first four are especially significant in our theological context and thus I have developed them quite extensively in a longer article that I hope to have published soon. I have space here only to touch upon the first four.
The first assertion makes the semantic claim that what makes a theological statement true is some extra-subjective reality that is relatable to the subject. This statement clearly denies that theological language could merely refer to the self, or to the attitudes, values and orientations of a community. In addition, it claims that theological statements must be more than simple rules by which a community organizes its religious life together. Theological statements function as rules, I believe, only if the community believes them true, only if it thinks these statements state what is, in fact, the case.
The second and third assertions are ontological. They claim that there is some reality to God that is not merely reducible to human experience. Over and against the dominant theological tradition of the last 200 years, the third claim is that God is causally connected to the universe, that there are at least some physical events that would not have obtained had God not causally-influenced them to do so. These two assertions are important because they bring God out of the “causal isolation” presupposed in the development of much Lutheran theology since the time of Kant in 1781. For Kant, God could not be a substance causally-related to the universe, but was instead an “ideal of pure reason.”
Finally, assertion four has epistemological consequences. All objects of knowledge, and all acts or knowing, are denizens of time and are thereby limited by other events within time. Thus, there can be no knowledge of any such objects that are not affected by history. Every act of knowing is historically-conditioned. We have no immediate knowledge of things as they are in themselves, no “bird’s eye view” from which to gaze out on things and know them absolutely. This is so for all acts of knowing, even when it is the divine that is known. This affirmation clearly admits that God is hidden, but does not thereby make a diminished ontological claim about God simply because we cannot know God as He is apart from Christ.
So how is it that the proposed house of studies might successfully establish a normative standpoint on the Confessions such that they become the foundational documents which they must be if they are to govern the subsequent educational trajectory of the institution? How does the WordAlone House of Studies guarantee that it will not become just another expression of a liberal Protestant ethos in North America?
The simple answer is this: If the WordAlone Network can agree on some rather key theological issues, it can establish its house of studies upon on the ground of this consensus. Without some normative theological underpinning, a WordAlone house of studies will drift and shift according to the prevailing theological winds of the day. Let us examine how establishing a normative theological center might affect the house of studies.
Lutherans within and outside the WordAlone Network will likely agree that God confronts us in Law and Gospel, and that the address of the Gospel has salvific significance for its auditors. Lutherans within and outside WordAlone will emphasize the performative nature of first-order statements - - statements referring to the primary objects of theology - - bespeaking God’s grace in and despite human sinfulness. But clearly a majority of folks within the ELCA see no tension between this emphasis and the practice of a mandated historic episcopate. Thus, there is a disconnect between a lively Law/Gospel application of Scripture and “issues of church organization” like the acceptance of the historic episcopate. The problem is a very deep one, and it goes to the very heart of some rather profound theological issues.
I believe that a presupposition of much ELCA thinking is that second-order theological language - - statements dealing with the relationship of theological objects and the first-order sentences bespeaking them - - does not literally have truth-conditions (that is, that its statements are not literally true or false). While all can agree on the abundance of God’s grace in the linguistic encounter in sermon and text, many will assume that further statements about God are unwarranted and even misleading. For instance, why would one ever want to say that ‘God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language’ or that ‘God is causally-related to the universe’? Why would one need to say these things, if the reality of God’s grace is communicated through first-order language? For many liberal Protestants, the problems begin when one begins to speak about God. If this is true, why would one want to affirm statements about God?
The response to this is two-fold: 1) We need second-order language about God to state what it is we actually believe, and to ground what it is we shall teach about God; and 2) What it is we actually believe about God does influence the hearer’s appropriation of the words of Law and Gospel.
In regard to the second response, we must point out that the logic of being forgiven entails that there is one to forgive. In like manner, the logic of living under divine wrath requires that there is a God who is righteously angry. While one might have an experience of being forgiven without there being God, or might have an experience of being under divine wrath without God, one simply cannot be forgiven by God or truly live under divine wrath unless there is a God. Moreover, the contour of the experience of wrath and forgiveness is related to whether or not there is One whose wrath is kindled, and who nonetheless graciously and mercifully forgives. What human beings believe about God dialectically links to howGod confronts us in Law and Gospel. For instance, if John doesn’t believe God has a personal agency, then the experience of grace John has hearing the Gospel will surely be different than what he would have had were he to have held that God was a personal God.
As another example of this, take the words of Scripture ‘fear not!’ In a particular situation, these words spoken can be words of Gospel and grace. They certainly were so for people like Luther who understood the gift of God’s grace and forgiveness over and against a backdrop of divine wrath. Luther and the reformers actually thought that God existed outside of them, and that this God could (and did) adopt particular attitudes about them. Luther thought that God in his hiddenness was so awe-full, that he counseled others to keep their eyes riveted on the Christ. The Words of Gospel promise are so sweet because the human condition before the inscrutable will of the hidden God is so dire.
For Luther, the necessary condition for being a hidden God with inscrutable will that terrifies man and woman outside of Christ is that God is a real being having causal relations within the universe. God is no mere idea of reason, no abstract thought about the unity or mystery of all things. God is a living reality that is a threat to sinners - - and all of us are sinners. It seems, that even though God is hidden, some reflection upon, or encounter with, God’s being is necessary if one is going to understand the situation as Luther did. It should come as no shock that the confessional documents read in quite a different way to those who believe that God has independent existence outside the self. At that point, all thinking about the gift of language stops and we are thrust back into the primal experience of awaiting a word of Gospel from God- - not because it is a word, but because it comes from God.
Much more could be said about these things, but the point is clear. If WordAlone can arrive at some consensus of theological opinion, then there is a foundation upon which to ground a Scripturally-engaged, and confessionally-grounded Lutheran theological house of studies. If WordAlone is unable to define clearly what it is to be both Scripturally-engaged and confessionally-grounded, then its house of studies shall likely not prosper, and the critics who claim it ill-advised and wasteful to have attempted its establishment will themselves perhaps be vindicated. As with most human endeavors, it is extremely important to start correctly.
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