How Big is ILT?

The Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) is continuing to grow. In the fall of 2019, ILT had117 active students with a headcount of 82 and a full-time equivalency (FTE) of 58. Headcount was at 85 in the spring semester 2020 with FTE edging above 60. ILT defines "active students" as those taking courses in the last three semesters that have not withdrawn. Many of our students take courses only one semester a year, so our headcount over the year is slightly over 100. 

We should see headcount and FTE growth this fall (2020) of about 30%, much of which is coming from our PhD program and our new B.A. curriculum. So how does ILT compare in size with its competitors?  
ILT ranked in the Fall of 2019 as the 9th largest Lutheran seminary in North America. You might be interested in the sizes of Lutheran seminaries by headcount. I was and compiled the list below. It was difficult to find all of this information, and on a couple I had to do some guessing. I want to be accurate, so if anybody sees an error, please let me know. FTE comparisons show much the same as headcount comparisons as far as the ranking of institutional size. 
This fall (2020) ILT will almost certainly become the 8th largest Lutheran Seminary in North America. We have some lofty goals, one of which is to grow ILT 25% a year for the next 10 years. Whether this is achievable depends in large part on whether our undergraduate program grows. We won't be able to include that growth as seminary growth, of course, but we do plan on growing the seminary itself into the Top Five over the next few years. 
There are many reasons for our growth during the generally declining theological market. The fact that we have done online education rigorously since our inception means that students who are increasingly going online for their theological education -- some of this movement is driven by the covid-19 panic--are looking at us seriously and liking what they see. After all, we have a great faculty and some exciting programming. 
Here is a list of North American Lutheran seminaries by headcount in the fall of 2019.

• Concordia Seminary (LCMS) 592
• Luther Seminary (ELCA): 465
• United Lutheran Seminary (ELCA): 357
• Concordia Theological Seminary (LCMS): 314
• Warburg Seminary (ELCA): 218
• Trinity Episcopal School of Ministry (Anglican) 176 (I include because the North American Lutheran Seminary is a part of this seminary.)
• LSTC (ELCA): 164
• Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary (WELS): 157
• Martin Luther University (ELCIC): 97
• INSTITUTE OF LUTHERAN THEOLOGY: 82 
• Lutheran Theological Southern (ELCA): 68
• Trinity Seminary (ECLC): 64
• Bethany Theological Seminary (Brethren): 58 
• Pacific Lutheran (ELCA): 49
• Lutheran Brethren Seminary: 40 (2016)
• Free Lutheran Bible College: 25
• ALTS (AALC): 25??
• LTS Saskatoon (ELCIC): 20
• Bethany Lutheran Theological Sem (ELS): 16
• Concordia Lutheran Ontario (LCC): 14
• Concordia Lutheran Edmonton (LCC): 9

We look to the future knowing that it is fully redeemed and complete. May God grant that we at ILT continue to live that future today in creativity and faithfulness!    

Living without Tribes

I don't have a tribe.  I grew up in the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod (LCMS), migrated to the Lutheran Church in America (LCA), fell into the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and find myself now more (or less) identified with the North America Lutheran Church (NALC) and Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC).

I did not get there the way that others do.  There were no mentors saying to do this or that in order to get here or there.  In fact, no one told me where best to head. 

It didn't occur to me in my first five decades of life that I would establish a new Lutheran seminary and graduate school.  While I remember telling my Bethany College undergraduate students in the late1980s that the ELCA was essentially unstable and could not survive, I did not spend great lengths of time wondering about what life would be like after the ELCA.

I was not an insider and have never been one, so the thought of starting a new Lutheran graduate school could not occur to me.

As an undergraduate, I knew nobody seriously contemplating becoming a pastor.  I was busy playing music, and beginning about age 22, doing some more serious studying.  I read primary texts on my own because I did know anyone else reading them and they were interesting to me.  I notice that I liked philosophy, particularly philosophers dealing with theological questions.

While others were going to the seminary after college, I went to the farm and raised corn, soybeans, cattle and sheep.  It was during these farm days that I switched membership from the small LCMS church of my hometown to the larger LCA church 16 miles away.  There I found more exciting music, as well as preaching that actually connected to the contemporary horizon.  I was a LCA Lutheran that had no idea what "being LCA" really meant.  (Later I would say that I did not know the "identify conditions" of being LCA.)  I did learn that the LCA had bishops, but the question of bishops was of no concern to me.

My concern at the beginning of the 1980s was simply this, "How is theology possible given the intellectual assumptions of contemporary culture?"  It seemed to me that both my little LCMS congregation and the larger LCA congregation which I was attending did not deal with the questions about which I was concerned.  What evidence is there for God and the truth of revelation?  What kind of responses can be given to German higher criticism that seemed to me to undermine the reliability of the Biblical texts?   What could Tillich possibly be meaning by saying that Christ is transparent to the Ground of Being?

At this point I was still almost completely self-taught.  I had studied Latin on the farm and tried to read some primary texts. (I made it through Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation, Tillich's Systematic Theology and Elert's Structure of Lutheranism, and the first volume of Richard Feymann's Lectures on Physics when I was not outside actually working.)

When it came time to leave the farm in 1981, I thought again about going to seminary.  But when I looked at the catalogue at Luther Seminary and I visited Concordia Seminary, I did not see the intellectual challenges I wanted. In coming back from St. Louis I stopped at the University of Iowa, and considered what it would be like to go there. 

Nobody told me that the GRE score I received would have gotten me into most graduate programs at the time, and nobody told me about the advantages I might have had going to an east coast school.  If they had, I would not have listened anyway, because I liked the midwest and was always partial to the the Iowa Hawkeyes.  I had met Dr. George Forell at the LCA church I had attended and I knew Iowa offered both a Ph.D. in philosophy and one in religion, and figured either of these programs would be more challenging than the seminary.

At Iowa, I soon discovered that most of my classmates in the School of Religion already had M.Div. degrees from seminaries, and that having these degrees did not seem to help them do better in the classes than I was doing.  I liked taking classes both in the philosophy and religion departments at Iowa.  While I had not decided in which department to do my Ph.D., receiving the Teaching-Research Fellowship in the School of Religion made my mind up for me.  I took a M.A. in philosophy and a Ph.D. in Religion.

My course work at Iowa was decidedly non-standard, even for somebody getting their Ph.D. in a program entitled, "Contemporary Theology and Religious Reflection."  Since I studied what was interesting to me, I took courses in Kant, Analytical Ethics, Christian Ethics, Chinese religions, Plato, Frege, Wittgenstein, Predicate Logic, Modal Logic, Sartre, Analytical Metaphysics, Heidegger, Rahner, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, and many courses in the history of theology and philosophy.  There were many seminars that I recall being helpful, particularly one in metaphysics that dealt with the nature of causation, a second in theology examining the nature of the dialectical method, and a third in the philosophy of science where I worked to understand the element of convention in all theory construction.   I had seminars dealing with numerous contemporary theological topics, and a two semester course called 'Theological Questions I and II" that dealt deeply with Tillich's thought, as read through the prism of Robert Scharlemann's Reflection and Doubt in the Thought of Paul Tillich.

My comp areas included the History of Theology, Theological (particularly analytical) Methods, Hegel and Tillich.  My dissertation was on Martin Luther, particularly his semantics as interpreted through his work in the disputations. 

Although my dissertation won the top prize at the University of Iowa for dissertations in the humanities, I realized that I simply did not know, and had not studied, the late medieval period sufficiently deeply to be able to speak confidently about much upon which I was writing.  I knew that knowledge of the original languages was holding me back.  While I knew some Latin, I did not know it well enough to do painstaking work in the untranslated Latin texts of Luther's Ockamist predecessors.  And while I knew some German, it was definitely slow work to read German articles and books dealing with the issues interesting me.  My French was in some ways more serviceable than my German in those days, but there was little reason to use it in the dissertation.  Dr. George Forell was my friend and Doktor Vater on the dissertation, and he made sure that I did not say anything too odd.

Coming out of Iowa with a Ph.D. in Religion and a M.A. in Philosophy, I headed to Bethany College in Lindsborg, KS, and soon understood that as Chair of the Department with an award-winning dissertation on Luther, it was assumed by all audiences that I had deep competence in Lutheran theology, and that I would surely have profound opinions on all matters theological of interest to Lutherans. 

But I found that I was not of any particular Lutheran tribe.  When I read in logic, semantics and metaphysics, people assumed that I was reading in Lutheran theology and interested in questions of scriptural interpretation, worship, and practical theology. (I actually was interested in these things, but one can only read so much.) I wanted to be part of a tribe and gain tribal acceptance, but sometimes felt I did not say quite the right things in the right ways.  Quickly, I learned that my life vocation was going to become much wider than my training.  I had to learn confessional Lutheran theology deeply and I had to learn it quickly.  I also had to acquaint myself with the contour of contemporary Lutheran theology.  After all, in my Ph.D. program, I had not read one article or book from an American Lutheran theologian outside of George Forell. 

My real orientation to Lutheran theology thus came primarily through reading the texts of Martin Luther.  While I did not know about Evangelical Catholics, Lutheran Pietism, First Form/Second Form issues, Forde, etc., I did learn a great deal at Iowa about Luther, Christian existentialism and the phenomenological approach generally, Hegel, Schleiermacher, and Robert Scharlemann.  Since I never was a member of a tribe, I had to learn about the other tribes from the outside, as it were.  I grasped what American Lutheran theologians were doing by understanding them as influenced by European Schools of thought generally.  I understood that theologian A was working with a phenomenological ontology, that B buys some of the assumptions of process theology, that C is beholden to the work of Hegel or maybe the dialectical theologians, while D is influenced by post-Gadamerian developments within hermeneutical theology, particularly those pertaining to an ontology of language.

Over the course of the next 10-15 years, I thought I actually had found my tribe.  After I became Head of Religion and Philosophy at Grand View College (now "Grand View University") and toiled there to increase Lutheran identity, I knew that I should become an ELCA pastor, teach and preach, and work hard to promote Lutheran identity within that denomination as well.

I took a position in philosophy and religion at South Dakota State University(SDSU) -- a position that turned out to be mostly teaching philosophy -- while simultaneously working with Wartburg Seminary to acquire those qualifications necessary to become an ELCA pastor.  I was ordained on All Saints Day in 1998 and served two congregations while teaching full-time at SDSU.  Shortly before my ordination, I read the Concordat and tried to explain to my Bishop that the lex credendi always follows the lex orandi, but she was not interested.   To my worries about Lutheran identity, she calmly pointed out, "It seems you don't have enough faith."  Yet, though my entrance onto the ELCA clergy roles did not progress precisely as I planned, I nonetheless thought that within the ELCA I had indeed found my tribe. After all, there were like-minded individuals with whom I felt comfortable.  Surely, I was home in the ELCA.

As theological coherence and consistency declined within the ELCA in the late twentieth century, I found myself within a group of those wanting to return the ELCA to a more traditional theological mooring.  I was not motivated in my opposition to ELCA theological laxity by the power of bishops or by sexuality issues per se, but simply by what I took to be the eclipse of theology within the ELCA. I believed that the situation was worse than that the denomination was heading in the wrong direction, it was a matter of there being no agreed upon way any longer within the ELCA to adjudicate what should be the right direction in which to go.  Simply put, there was no way to really do theology any more.  To my disconsolation and consternation, I found that increasingly within the ELCA, one had to say the right things in the right ways or one was really not accepted by many within ELCA leadership.  Tribalism was back, and I was outside again.

When the WordAlone Network conceived establishing a new House of Studies "committed to the traditional Biblical hermeneutic of the Lutheran Reformation" -- a phrase I wrote -- it was maybe natural for me to lead the effort.  Why?

Perhaps it is because I did not know the tribes deeply enough, and thus did not realize how difficult it would be to birth a project demanding that people from the differing tribes work together.   Maybe my absence of a tribe was an advantage because I did not naturally build the new school -- now called 'The Institute of Lutheran Theology' -- in a particular tribal tradition.  I simply wanted to establish a school in which people from all the tribes could come together and do Lutheran theology seriously and rigorously, where they could safely agree or disagree beyond slogans giving the "identity conditions" of their tribal participation, where the unity of the search for truth -- a unity naturally manifesting itself in the pressuring of boundaries of any particular tribe -- would trump the security of knowing which tribe was my tribe, which the right tribe.

So it is that the Institute of Lutheran Theology today has students, faculty and staff from the ELCA, LCMS, NALC, LCMC, ELS (Evangelical Lutheran Synod), CALC (Canadian Association of Lutheran Congregations), AFLC (Association of Free Lutheran Churches,  ALC (Augsburg Lutheran Churches), ELCIC (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada) and the Orthodox Lutheran Church.  (It has students from a variety of other Christian traditions as well.)

So why has the Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) formed if it is not a manifestation of a tribe?  Has it no home theology?  What is taught there?

ILT is committed to the search for truth in theology; it embraces a semantic realist construal of theological language: Theological propositions have truth-conditions; they are in principle capable of adjudication.  Moreover, ILT takes the Theology of the Cross motif within Lutheran theology deeply seriously.  The divine is hidden and we must be humble in the face of this hiddenness.  Finally, ILT believes that theology exists always dynamically, that its task is never complete.  Theology bridges the gap between the kerygma of our tradition -- and our changing understandings of this kerygma -- and the contemporary intellectual and cultural horizon.   Because this horizon changes, the theological task lies ever before us.  ILT is an institution living out the dynamics of the theological task.  We do not abandon the kerygma for the culture, nor embrace the culture in forgetfulness of the kerygma.

Perhaps not being in a tribe is precisely the best way to lead the theological life.  I never thought it would be so important not to be in a tribe.  Perhaps being an outsider is precisely what it is to live life under the Cross.  We can never be secure.  As Christ's feet were raised off of the ground on the Cross, so are all of our aspirations for certainty.  The search for foundations is the originator of the "identity conditions" which confidently demarcate tribal members.  But in the face of eternity, such demarcation is, as Thomas Aquinas said about his completed Summa, "merely straw."  

Ultimately, we pilgrims of the Cross are forever outsiders.  My prayer is that ILT will continue to live the tension of the Cross, that it will continue to bring together particular people into a project bigger than the being of particular selves.  After all, when Christ snares us, our particularity comes to an end.  At the end of the day, "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).  We at ILT live this oneness in Jesus Christ each day, in the midst of the tribes which threaten at times to pull us apart, but which will continue to exist as long as theology itself remains.

Studying Classical Lutheran Theology with Vigor and Rigor

I am driving back from the Association of Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) Annual Convention where the Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) was just granted candidate status towards full institutional accreditation.  ILT is dedicating all the resources necessary to acquire initial accreditation extremely quickly.

ILT is known, of course, for its innovative pedagogical model that uses video conferencing resources in an on-line format that allows almost all of our M.A., M.Div., STM and D.Min. curricula to be delivered directly into student's own home.  I was a tenured professor for many years at a state university, and often tell people that the only difference between teaching at the university or with ILT is that with ILT I don't have to find a parking place before class.  We do distance education very well.

Just because ILT is innovative pedagogically, however, does not guarantee its long-term success or viability.  Many other schools, even state universities, are beginning to use the technologies we have used since inception.  Lutheran seminaries are getting into the act as well.  So when all the Lutheran seminaries learn to deliver on-line like ILT has done, what is left to be distinctive about ILT?

The answer is easy: ILT is much more rigorous than most Lutheran seminaries now are; we prepare much more deeply in the discipline of theology itself.  The following compares the Institute of Lutheran Theology's Master of Divinity program with that of Luther Seminary's in St. Paul.  Luther Seminary once had a very fine curriculum, but changes over the last decades in the trajectory of theological education in North America have profoundly affected that curriculum.  The ILT curriculum comes from the 2017-18 ILT academic catalog.  The Luther Seminary information can be found in the Luther Seminary 2016-17 academic catalog found at www.luthersem.edu.  Below are the classes that students must take at each institution.

Biblical Theology

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Introduction to Greek
• Readings in NT Greek, Biblical Hebrew 
• Lutheran Evangelical Methods
• Lutheran Biblical Interpretation
• The Pentateuch
• Wisdom and the Histories
• The Gospels
• Paul and His Legacy
• Epistles and Formation of the NT
• OT or NT elective 

Luther Seminary

• Biblical Hebrew
• New Testament Greek
• Scripture & Witness I
• Scripture & Witness II
• Biblical Exegesis for Ministry 

Historical Theology

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• History of Christian Thought I: Origins to 1500
• History of Christian Thought II: The Reformation
• History of Christian Thought III: 1700 - 1900
• History of Christian Thought IV:  20th Century
• History of the Lutheran Church
• The Theology of Martin Luther
• The Lutheran Confessions 

Luther Seminary

• Reform and Expansion of Christianity
• Either History of Christianity since 1800 or Apostles to the Reformers
• Lutheran Confessional Writings or denominational option

Systematic Theology 

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Creation and the Triune God
• Christology 
• Christ, Spirit and the Two Kingdoms
• Three from the following:  
• Theology and Science
• World Religions and Theology
• Christian Sexual Ethics
• Philosophy of Religion
• Religious Interpretation of Films 

Philosophy

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Faith, Knowledge and Reason
• Critical Thinking for the Theologian (doctrinal track) 

Luther Seminary 

• None 

Pastoral Theology 

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Pastoral Theology I
• Pastoral Theology II
• Pastoral Theology III
• Parish Administration
• The Teaching Shepherd
• Theology and the Practice of Worship
• Homiletics I 
• Homiletics II
• Homiletics III
• Pastoral Theology elective
• Internship (no credit) 

Luther Seminary 

• Christian Public Leader I & II (half courses) 
• Congregational Care and Formation
• Foundations of Biblical Preaching 
• Public Worship
• Clinical Pastoral Education
• Internship (counts as two courses) 

Electives 

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Two courses (OT or NT elective and Pastoral Theology elective, as noted above) 

Luther Seminary 

• 12 courses 

Notice the difference in the emphasis between ILT and what Luther Seminary now offers.  We don't teach leadership as an end in itself, but believe that if our students humbly know Scripture and the theological tradition profoundly, they will be formed with servants' hearts so that they might preach, teach and lead boldly.  Evangelical leadership is a function of Evangelical servanthood; such servanthood is not a function of leadership.  

Given what I have just said, it might be useful as well to contrast the Institute of Lutheran Theology D. Min. program with that of Luther Seminary.  Here it is: 

Topic

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Reaching the Unreached

Luther Seminary

• Congregational Mission and Leadership

Residency Requirement

Institute of Lutheran Theology

• None

Luther Seminary 

• Total of 38-42 days over four years

Method of Course Delivery

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Live multi-feed video conferencing one evening per week for a total of 45 contact hours per semester

Luther Seminary 

• On-Campus one-week intensives, with work before and after

Required Courses

Institute of Lutheran Theology

• A Secular World
• Models of Engagement
• Proclamation in the 21st Century
• Catechesis
• Methodology and Approaches to Graduate Study 
• Two student-designed independent projects

Luther Seminary

• Integration of Theology and Ministry
• Pastoral Theology, Identity and Spiritual Life
• Missional Church
• Missional Leadership
• Congregational Practices 

Thesis/Project

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Work independently at own pace

Luther Seminary 

• Four visits to campus during fourth year for research and guidance

I have made a comparison with Luther Seminary simply because I take what has happened at Luther to exemplify general trends in theological education within North American Lutheran circles.  Please know that I have nothing against Luther Seminary; many of my good friends once received a very fine theological education there.   

Horizons and Proper Theological Education

Good theology is always involved in mediation.  I am not here directly talking about the Vermittlungstheologie of the nineteenth century, a theology inspired by the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), and associated with such names as Isaak Dorner (1809-84), Julius Mueller (1801-78), and Richard Rothe (1799-1867).  A look at Vermittlungstheologie is, however, important to clarify what it is that I don't and do mean when talking about theology as mediation.

Historically, Vermittlungstheologie commenced with the 1828 founding of the Heidelberg theological journal Theologische Studien und Kritiken.  The founding editor of the journal was obviously thinking Hegelian thoughts when he wrote:  "Mediation is the scientifically tracing back of relative oppositions to their original unity, through which an inner reconciliation and higher standpoint is gained by which they are transcended, the intellectual position arising out of this mediation being the true, healthy mean."  [See Roger Olsen, The Journey of Modern Theology: From Reconstruction to Deconstruction, p. 242.]  

As practiced, however, Vermittlungstheologie was less concerned with making proper Hegelian moves, and more interested simply in carving out a bridge between two apparent opposites, e.g., between the Gospel and the secularized culture, between rationalism and supernaturalism, between Hegel and Schleiermacher, between theology and the life of the church.

Dorner was perhaps the most famous of the mediating theologians, trying as he did to mediate faith as Christianity's subjective standard with Scripture as its objective standard.  He also wanted to combine aspects of the "feeling approach" of Schleiermacher with the deeply rational intellectual approach of Hegel [Olsen, p. 243].  In his reflection upon God, he searched to mediate between transcendent immutability and immanent changeability.  His "progressive incarnation" attempted to mediate orthodox and kenotic Christology.  

Many of the moves of historical mediating theology can be associated with the tension between rationalism and romanticism, between objectivity and subjectivity.  While this dialectic remains with us today - - I am thinking specifically of views of scriptural authority advocating a causal relationship between God and Scripture versus views that claim authority arises in the meaningful confrontation of text and reader  - - I am not thinking primarily of objectivity/subjectivity or thinking/feeling when conceiving mediation, but rather the the poles of message and context, kerygma and cultural situation.   All good theology is contextual because all effective theology must start with the historical proclamation of the particularity of Christ and the constellation of events so linked, and connect this to the universal human situation - - or at least that which is considered universal within a particular cultural trajectory.  Theology mediates the horizon of the proclaimed Christ event with the intellectual and cultural horizon of its reception.  

As I look at the current situation within Lutheran churches within North America, I see a general attempt to avoid effective mediating theology.  This is no surprise in this.  This type of mediation is very difficult work.  The problem is that one pole of the mediation seems often to be cancelled, redescribed, or otherwise assimilated by the other.   This seems true of theological education in particular.  

In order to see this, consider one antipode of the dialectic to be the proclaimed Christ event, the kerygma of Christ and Him crucified for our salvation, and the other pole to be the present intellectual and cultural horizon, the sum total of received contexts of significance and meaning, the assumed cannons of rationality, the intellectual/cultural ethos.   Thinking about theological education, it is easy to see that Lutheran seminaries have a tendency to concentrate upon one of the poles and, accordingly, seek to understand the other pole on the basis of the former.   For instance, there are a number of Lutheran seminaries that know deeply the intellectual and cultural horizon of the present and, upon this basis, seek to articulate the relevance of the historic kerygma for the contemporary horizon.   Although it is dangerous to generalize, I will do so nonetheless simply for the sake of illustration.  (I am not seeking to establish here or in the next two paragraphs that particular seminaries have a particular orientation.)

The ELCA seminaries seem sometimes to be engaged in assimilating the particularity of the proclamation to the generality of the cultural standpoint.   For instance, the faculty and students at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago clearly know what positions are just, right, compassionate and loving with regard to same sex relationships and same sex marriage.  Their position on this issue is not one that they assume needs profound argumentation; it is clearly and immediately experienced as just and loving.  Its rectitude is in the cultural air, following facilely from vague and inchoate cultural intuitions about natural rights.  Something so clearly known must be given theological legitimation as well, of course, and thus appeal is made to the prophetic element within the theological tradition to do just that.  Kerygma and context are thus not mediated, but rather the general context tends to assimilate the particularity of the proclamation.  Here the contour of the intellectual/cultural context trumps that of the traditional kerygma.  

One might regard the LCMS seminaries as occasionally emphasizing the other pole to the exclusion of the former.   Here the effort is to hold on tightly to the particularity of the kerygmatic proclamation against the horizon of the cultural context.  While it is important to understand deeply the particularity of the proclamation, sometimes the focus on this risks ignoring the subtleties of the intellectual/cultural horizon.  This can, occasionally, lead to an effort to repristinate the past articulations of kerygma at the expense of being open to more deeply understanding the contemporary horizon.   Now the kerygma can trump the context.

At the Institute of Lutheran Theology we want profoundly to explore both the contemporary cultural/intellectual horizon and the tradition's proclamation of kerygma.  Why?   It is because we believe that effective theology must mediate proclamation and context, kerygma and the contemporary situation.   In this way there is a mediation between the horizons that keeps in tact the contour of each while yet bridging between that which might prima facie appear as disparate.  The goal is never to reduce one to the other; never to understand the kergyma as a movement upon the horizon of the cultural context, nor to understand the cultural context as a movement brought forth from the determinate contour of the proclamation.   Ultimately, God's work in creation, obscured by the Fall, is nonetheless still dimly palpable within the contemporary situation.  It is therefore always "addressable" by the kerygma.  Good theology always mediates kerygma and context, forming, as it were, an isometric between the two hands of God.