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Luther

—rolls in grave?

by Dr. Dennis Bielfeldt (Professor, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD; WordAlone board member)

News: March 6, 2006

Lisa's e-mail stated her confusion about the Luther whom she was learning about in my class on Luther and the Reformation. (That morning we had gone line by line through Luther's 1517 "Disputation Against Scholastic Theology.") She wrote me that Luther seemed more medieval than modern, that he was more concerned with turning the clock backward than forward. photo of Dr. bielfeldtShe asserted that his opposition to the "new theology" of the 14th and 15th centuries was an exceedingly odd place to ground the "new theology" she had previously associated with the Reformation. "How," she asked, "can rejection of the new be itself new?" She finished with this startling question: "Do you think any Protestants today really know anything about the real Luther, and do you think Luther would accept much of contemporary Protestant theology, particularly the theology assumed in the church bodies that now bear his name?" She added, "I think he would roll over in his grave."

Lisa is working on a "Concentration in Religion" here at South Dakota State University in Brookings, and is on her way to a Methodist seminary or to a graduate school in religion. Like many Protestants, she came to the course with vague preconceptions about Luther as a heroic religious genius who single-handedly led a rebellion against an oppressive and controlling Roman Catholic hierarchy who had tried to keep Bibles out of the hands of common folk. She, like many students, believed that Luther was the first of a new breed of men and women who valued the worth and dignity of the individual in God's presence, who cherished the development of a personal relationship with God and who, consequently, rejected the institutional-sacramental structure of the medieval church.

Many Lutherans think like Lisa; they believe that Luther was one of the first modern men because he rejected the rigid, hierarchical, intolerant supernaturalism of the Middle Ages in favor of the implicit democracy (and associated tolerance) of the priesthood of all believers. Clearly they would be as surprised as Lisa to encounter the historical Luther.

So would Luther "roll over in his grave" with what he sees in a church body that carries his name: The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America? While I can identify no causal mechanism that would allow this, I think the answer to Lisa's metaphorical question is clearly, "yes." Philip Turner, a former dean of the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, recently said that despite the existence of historic confessional and constitutional documents of a church body, its public statements and declarations are in fact determined by its actual "working theology," such as taught by its teachers, assumed by its pastors and preached in its pulpits (www.wordalone.org/docs/wa-unworkable-theology.htm). I believe this is so, and that Luther would clearly react in horror to the working theology of the ELCA.

In fact, the degree to which Luther's theology is out of sync with working ELCA theology makes me pessimistic about the latter's re-formability. How can a thing be re-formed if it is no longer the kind of thing that one wants to actualize? Can an apple be re-formed into an orange? Does it even make sense to talk this way? For all the distance between Luther's "new" theology and that dominating the faculties at Erfurt, Sorbonne, and other centers of learning during his time, was not his theology more like that of the antecedent Catholic tradition than it is like the working theology of the ELCA? I believe that it was.

So what are the salient differences between Luther's views and those assumed currently within the ELCA? How are they different, and why are they so much different? How is it that the working theology of the ELCA is, in fact, further from Luther than was the Catholic theological tradition to which he responded?

The short answer is that contemporary Protestantism lives on the other side of the Enlightenment, and that the privileging of the self, which started in the Enlightenment, has significantly changed the theological assumptions of much of Protestantism, especially liberal Protestantism of which the ELCA is part. The Enlightenment has demanded that theology must ultimately be about the self within its concrete embeddedness, undergoing various existential and temporal trials and empowerments. Instead of referring to God, theological statements must finally be cached in terms of the horizon of human experience. We can see this exemplified in what follows:

  1. The Reality of God: While Luther and the antecedent Catholic tradition understood God as existing apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, the working theology of the ELCA assumes, in general, that God and self are interdependent. The question of God makes sense only upon the horizon of human be-ing. God is the mystery at the heart of being for those who, in their be-ing, have being at issue for them. Instead of God's extra-linguistic, extra-subjective existence, contemporary working ELCA theology follows the assumptions of much modern theology and locates God solidly upon the horizon of human existence and experience.
  2. The Causal Powers of God: While Luther and the antecedent tradition understood that God's will was causally determinative in the distribution of natural events—God could cause or prohibit natural events and often did so—the working theology of the ELCA assumes the Kantian-inspired perspective that makes a causal connection between God and the universe profoundly problematic. The ELCA's working theology would say that because God is not a substance that can be causally linked to the natural order, God's "mighty acts in history" cannot be understood apart from their reception in human experience. Simply put, the divine quot;creation" of the world is not causally construed, but rather it is an expression of profound existential dependency. Apart from human consciousness, no sense can be made of the claim that God is the artificer or inventor of the universe.
  3. The Semantics of Theological and Religious Language: While Luther and the antecedent tradition interpreted theological and religious language as meaningful in its denotation of divine objects, properties, events and states of affairs, the working theology of the ELCA understands such language as either expressive of the self in its cultural embeddedness, or as stipulating linguistic rules for the performance of communal-based religious language games. To claim that theological and religious language has cognitive content because its propositions mirror extra-linguistic reality is thought to be naïve and misguided by ELCA theologians who give privilege to the empowerment potential of theological language over its cognitive content. But, thankfully, most lay people realize that the empowerment potential of a language cannot be separated from its cognitive content.
  4. The Fallenness of Human Existence: While Luther and the antecedent tradition knew that human beings were deeply wayward and could make little progress towards God apart from grace—this is true even though the via moderna did claim that "God will not withhold grace to those who do what is within them"—the working theology of the ELCA stresses the goodness of creation and criticizes the socially oppressive structures that do not permit this basic human goodness to be actualized.
  5. The Necessity of a Savior: While Luther and the tradition knew that without God's salvific activity, human beings are lost, the working theology of the ELCA assumes that human beings are confused, not lost, and that they need guidance, not salvation.
  6. The Reality of the Life to Come: While Luther and the preceding tradition assumed that human beings shall be given new life out beyond their temporal deaths, ELCA theology concentrates almost exclusively on the questions of this life, and how salvation and healing can occur in the here and now. The notion that temporal existence is merely penultimate has come under heavy criticism since the Enlightenment and, accordingly, Lutheran theology and practice (and concomitantly ELCA theology and practice) have come to emphasize temporal existence and healing over salvation in the life to come.
  7. The Priority of Grace and the Associated Doctrine of Election: While Luther and the tradition understood deeply that human beings can only be saved if they are chosen by God—though there was considerable disagreement about the degree to which humans cooperated with that divine initiative—the working theology of the ELCA almost uniformly rejects predestination and election. After all, divine caprice seems to violate the democratic assumptions of early 21st century men and women about equal rights and human dignity.
  8. The Consonancy of the Problem of Evil with Salvation History: While Luther and the tradition knew something of the problem of evil—how could an omnibenevolent, omnipotent God allow evil—apparently, gratuitous evil was not considered to be incompatible with the assertion of divine omnibenevolence and omnipotence. The working theology of the ELCA, however, understands the problem of evil as so deeply problematic that no words of divine comfort can be spoken to men and women suffering from such evil. Luther's notion that God ultimately causes all events and that the devil is "God's devil" is clearly out-of-step with ELCA working theology.
  9. Theology is about God, not about Human Beings: While Luther and the tradition assumed that theology had to do with God and his creative and redemptive relationship to human beings, the working theology of the ELCA assumes, with much of contemporary theology, that theology functions mainly to empower the self, particularly the self marginalized by sexism, racism and classism. The working theology of the ELCA is sympathetic to various liberationist agendas that identify decreasing marginalization with God's progressive salvation of the world.

So perhaps Lisa is correct: Luther would roll over in his grave. What has happened in the last 200 years has been nothing less than a paradigm shift within Protestant theology. Instead of a theology's talking about a real God who has real causal redemptive powers who has saved sinful man (defined by his proclivity to want to be God) from death, the working theology of the ELCA assumes God is love, that precious human beings have basic autonomy and that God guides and empowers men and women to love more in the practice of that autonomy.

WordAlone is a renewing movement within the ELCA that unabashedly connects itself to the theology of the historical Luther. Ironically, by doing so, it discovers itself to have more in common with traditional Catholic theology and doctrine than some contemporary, yet ill-advised, Lutherans of the Enlightenment who profess the quixotic hope of someday "going home to Rome."