scholarly journals “Seeking Refuge in God against God”: The Hidden God in Lutheran Theology and the Postmodern Weakening of God

Open Theology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 658-674
Author(s):  
Sasja Emilie Mathiasen Stopa
Keyword(s):  
Martin Luther ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Affective Experience ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Lutheran Theology ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Hidden God ◽  
Central Claim ◽  
Postmodern Thinking

Abstract Martin Luther emphasizes the affective experience of the living God rather than God as an abstract, metaphysical idea. Luther explains this experience of God by distinguishing between God as Deus absconditus in his hidden majesty and God as Deus revelatus suffering on the cross. According to Luther, sinners experience the hidden God as a terrifying presence causing them to suffer. Through faith, however, sinners are able to recognize that this wrathful God is one with the God of love and mercy revealed in Christ. Based on this paradoxical understanding of God, Luther admonishes Christians to seek refuge in God against God. In recent decades, Luther’s accentuation of the revealed God has inspired postmodern philosophers and theologians in their efforts to recast the notion of God in light of the Nietzschean outcry on the death of God and Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology. Hence, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo have weakened the notion of an omnipotent God in favour of an anti-metaphysical understanding of “god” kenotically denouncing his power and occurring as an ethically obliging event. Conversely, postmodern thinking have inspired contemporary Lutheran theologians to reinterpret the notion of God. In this article, Luther’s theology serves as a resource for critiquing these postmodern attempts at post-metaphysically rethinking God the central claim being that they are unable to proclaim the saving promise of a reconciliatory union between God hidden and revealed and between sinful human beings and Christ. As a result, theology is reduced to an ethical manifesto or to compassionate anthropology leaving despairing humans without a language with which to express their sufferings.

Moral Formation in Christ, the Beautiful Beloved

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Stewart-Kroeker
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Moral Formation ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
In Christ ◽  
Loving Relationship ◽  
Falling In Love

Christ’s healing of humanity consists, crucially, in forming human beings for loving relationship with himself and others. In this respect, Christ also takes the role of the beautiful beloved. Believers become pilgrims by falling in love with the beautiful Christ by the initiative of the Holy Spirit, who cleanses their eyes to see him as beautiful and enkindles desire in their hearts. By desiring and loving the beautiful Christ, the believer is conformed to him and learns to walk his path. Desiring the beautiful Christ forms a believing community shaped aesthetically and morally for a particular way of life: pilgrimage to the heavenly homeland. Formation is both earthly and eschatological, for so too is the journey and the activity of the pilgrim.

Allegories of Creativity and Territory

PMLA ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 118 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Bartra
Keyword(s):  
Aggressive Behavior ◽  
Ecological Niche ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Death Of God

Ecology defines territory as an area defended by an organism or a group of similar organisms with the purpose of pairing off, nesting, resting, and feeding. The defense of this space frequently brings about an aggressive behavior toward intruders and the marking of boundaries by means of repulsive chemical odors. Human beings, though they lack a precise ecological niche and are capable of adapting themselves to diverse spaces, also define territorial limits, from which emanate particular aromas that identify certain social groups. This is a question not of chemical perfumes but rather of codified cultural effusions that fill these groups with pride, even though they may, on occasion, strike others as repulsive. Many years ago, theories established that modern society impels a relentless process of deterritorialization and decodification, a process that tends to be ill regarded by ecologists, the populist left, fundamentalists, and conservatives. The proponents of this idea in the 1970s, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, stated in their renowned but forgotten book Anti-Oedipus (1972) that this process would end in the liberation of “desiring machines” and the dismantling of the oppressive state, in the same way that the death of God announced by Nietzsche was to be a liberating catastrophe. It is curious that these theories should end up hermetically codified and entombed beneath the seven seals of postmodernism and deconstruction, in the territory of an insufferable and unnecessary jargon.

The Universe Is on Our Side

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Ledewitz
Keyword(s):  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Process Philosophy ◽  
Bernard Lonergan ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
The Universe

There has been a breakdown in American public life that no election can fix. Americans cannot even converse about politics. All the usual explanations for our condition have failed to make things better. Bruce Ledewitz shows that America is living with the consequences of the Death of God, which Friedrich Nietzsche knew would be momentous and irreversible. God was this culture’s story of the meaning of our lives. Even atheists had substitutes for God, like inevitable progress. Now we have no story and do not even think about the nature of reality. That is why we are angry and despairing. America’s future requires that we begin a new story by each of us asking a question posed by theologian Bernard Lonergan: Is the universe on our side? When we commit to live honestly and fully by our answer to that question, even if our immediate answer is no, America will begin to heal. Beyond that, pondering the question of the universe will allow us to see that there is more to the universe than blind forces and dead matter. Guided by the naturalism of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, and the historical faith of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we can learn to trust that the universe bends toward justice and our welfare. That conclusion will complete our healing and restore faith in American public life. We can live without God, but not without thinking about holiness in the universe.

John Calvin

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
John Calvin ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Union With Christ ◽  
In Christ

This chapter describes John Calvin’s theology of salvation. Calvin champions the work of the Spirit’s indwelling, transforming, and glorifying human beings in Christ, as well as his understanding of the gospel as the double grace of justification and sanctification accessed through union with Christ, received through faith.

Thomas Hobbes and the Divine Politics of Anarchy

2020 ◽  
pp. 129-156
Author(s):  
William Bain
Keyword(s):  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Human Action ◽  
International Order ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Divine Action ◽  
Dominant Discourse ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Central Claim

This chapter presents Thomas Hobbes as a theorist of imposed order. The central claim is that Hobbes’s conception of political order, an artificial arrangement arising from will and consent, reflects the intellectual commitments of nominalist theology. Uncovering the theological presuppositions of his thought opens space for an understanding of international order that is quite different from what the ‘Hobbesian’ tradition portrays as a domain of endemic violence. Hobbes is correctly imagined as a theorist of interstate society. The chapter examines the unity of philosophy and theology in Hobbes’s thought, focusing on a recurring analogy between divine action and human action. Human beings make and unmake their world, including the commonwealth, as God created the universe. Modern theorists reproduce these theological ideas when they invoke Hobbes to illustrate the character and consequences of anarchy. Hobbes, conceived as a theorist of imposed order, exemplifies what has become the dominant discourse of international order. The implication is that modern theories of international order might not be as uniquely modern or purely secular as contemporary theorists typically assume.

scholarly journals Pentecostal talk about God: Attempting to speak from experience

2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Nel
Keyword(s):  
Faith Community ◽  
Theological Method ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Pentecostal Theology

Pentecostals have their own ethos to bring to the theological table. Although they represent a diverse spectrum of beliefs, they share a basic preference for experience co-determining their theology, along with their interpretation of Scripture. Their hermeneutical viewpoint since the 1970s that links them with that of early Pentecostals allows them to regard the Bible as the inspired Word of God with authority for their lives although they qualify that statement by adding that encounters with God within the faith community in ways similar to those recorded in the Bible is conditional for understanding and interpreting biblical accounts of God and God’s faith community. It is proposed that Pentecostals need to develop a perspective on the all-inclusive difference made by their experience of God in all areas of their lives. Their experience of God through his Spirit shifts their  loci communes and theological method. It is argued that Pentecostal theology should rethink every aspect of theological enterprise through the lens of the reality of God’s encounter with human beings as experienced in the faith community. In the last section, this is demonstrated in terms of one subject, of God as the object of theology.

scholarly journals The World as a Theological Problem

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-46
Author(s):  
Martin Koci
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Proper Sense ◽  
Experience Of God ◽  
Theological Turn ◽  
Christian Worldview ◽  
The World ◽  
Theological Turn In Phenomenology

Abstract We have no other experience of God but the human experience, claims Emmanuel Falque. We – human beings – are in the world. Whatever we do, whatever we think and whatever we experience happens in the world and is mediated by the manner of the world. This also includes religious experience. Reflection on the possibility of religious experience – the experience of God – suggests that the world is interrupted by someone or something that is not of the world. The Christian worldview makes the tension explicit, which is perhaps why theology neglects the concept and fails in any proper sense to address the world. Through following the phenomenologist Jan Patočka, critiquing the theologian Johann B. Metz and exploring the theological turn in phenomenology, I will face the challenge and argue for a genuine engagement with the world as a theological problem.

THEN AS NOW, WHY NIEBUHR?

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 761-771
Author(s):  
K. HEALAN GASTON
Keyword(s):  
Human Beings ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Reinhold Niebuhr ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Central Claim

The literature on the life and legacy of the American Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr has long been driven by questions about Niebuhr's continued relevance. Like other contributions to the recent “Niebuhr revival,” each of the three books under consideration here raises this question—John Patrick Diggins's Why Niebuhr Now? (2011) by offering a series of “sympathetic reflections” on Niebuhr's central claim that human beings are both creatures and creators of history (ix); Daniel F. Rice's edited volume Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited (2009) by inviting a cadre of top Niebuhr scholars to make the case for Niebuhr's relevance to a new generation; and Rice's own Reinhold Niebuhr and His Circle of Influence (2013) by contending that close attention to Niebuhr's formative relationships sheds light on his ongoing relevance.

Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Political Theologies

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. DeJonge
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Social Ethics ◽  
State Power ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ◽  
Lutheran Theology ◽  
Two Kingdoms

Contemporary political theology often defines itself against Lutheran social ethics, which is portrayed as politically disengaged and overly deferential to state power. At the same time, contemporary political theology often embraces the Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an exemplary political theologian. This incongruity is generally resolved by distancing Bonhoeffer from his tradition, at least on matters of political theology. But Bonhoeffer’s political theology was thoroughly Lutheran. Throughout the years of his political-theological engagement, from the Nazi rise to power in 1932–1933 to the drafting of Ethics and related writing in 1940–1943, he participated in ongoing conversations within Lutheran social ethics on the issues of, among others, the two kingdoms and the orders. In the process, he critically appropriated these elements of Lutheran thinking into an especially dynamic and christocentric framework that in turn informed his positions on various issues such as the church’s proclamation against the Nazi state and the ecumenical church’s witness for peace. Bonhoeffer is an example of Lutheran political theology, one that suggests the need to revise at least the more sweeping judgments about Lutheran theology as inherently incompatible with political engagement.

Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, and Their Wittenberg Colleagues

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy J. Wengert
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
Theological Method ◽  
Emerging Church ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Lutheran Theology ◽  
The University ◽  
Early Phases

The German Reformation, sparked by the publication of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517, unfolded parallel to another intellectual phenomenon then sweeping centers of higher education throughout western Europe: the development of a new way to read classic literature of the humanities, philosophy, and theology, often called Renaissance humanism. At the University of Wittenberg, this resulted in the development of a sodality of professors in the arts and theology faculties, initially including Andreas Bodenstein (Karlstadt), Nicholas von Amsdorf, Martin Luther, and the court’s university advisor, Georg Spalatin, but quickly spreading to include, by the early 1520s, Philip Melanchthon, Justus Jonas, and Johannes Bugenhagen, among others. Any attempt to understand the early phases of Wittenberg’s Reformation without taking into account this sodality will ultimately fail to catch the breadth of this movement and the commitment of these teachers to one another and to their cause. After an early skirmish over theological method resulted in Karlstadt’s distancing of himself from the university, the other faculty members remained committed to reforming the curricula of the arts and higher faculties at the university along humanist, evangelical lines. This reform influenced the theology and practice of the emerging church in Saxony and elsewhere, witnessed among other places in the 1527–1528 Visitation Articles, and led to a uniquely Wittenberg reform, one that always blended the highest regard for good letters and the most ancient sources with a developing Lutheran theology.

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