Forde Lives

Stanley Goodspeed: You’ve been around a lot of corpses. Is that normal?
John Mason: What, the feet thing?
Stanley Goodspeed: Yeah, the feet thing.
John Mason: Yeah, it happens.
Stanley Goodspeed: Well I’m having a hard time concentrating. Can you do something about it?
John Mason: Like what, kill him again?
–from The Rock, 1996

Simple question: after the second use of the law kills the sinner, what’s the law going to do now? As Mason said, “Kill him again?”

It used to be said of Hinduism that there were as many gods as there are people^*. I sometimes wonder if that’s how people actually view the “Uses of the Law” in practice.

So the question I have is: how many uses do you need the law to have? People really get exercised about the debate regarding the Third Use. I tend to fall (fairly hard) into the Two Uses Only camp, and from that point of view, I just don’t understand the Third Use of the Law. I mean I grasp the plain meanings of the words, and pretty much understand the Solid Declaration, Article VI. I just don’t “get it.”

The Formula of Concord—in a classic rendering that sets the tone for all future Lutheran policy debates—doing nothing to “definitively settle” anything writes: “In order to explain and definitively settle this controversy, we unanimously believe, teach, and confess that, although truly believing Christians, having been genuinely converted to God and justified, have been freed and liberated from the curse of the law, they should daily exercise themselves in the law of the Lord.”

Yeah. There’s just enough qualifiers in there to render it a little less “definitively settled” than it seems.

What is a “truly believing Christian” as opposed to just a “believing” one?

What does it mean to be “genuinely converted to God & justified” as opposed to “converted and justified”?

And do these post-Luther interpreters turn their back on the original explosive energy of the reformation challenge? (So soon after the old man’s death, natch). If we take seriously Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, I argue we have to reopen this debate. And I mean like, woah. (and fair warning: I aim t’ win)

Thesis 23: The law works the wrath of God, kills, curses, accuses, judges, and damns everything that is not in Christ.

Forde (oh yeah, this blog is in his honor) wrote on that subject in On Being a Theologian of the Cross:

Thesis 23 announces flatly that in spite of all the glorious hot air, God is not ultimately interested in the law. The real consequence of such wisdom is laid bare: The law does not work the love of God, it works wrath; it does not give life (recall thesis 1!), it kills; it does not bless, it curses; it does not give comfort, it accuses; it does not grant mercy, it judges. In sum, it condemns everything not in Christ. (pg. 95)

So yeah. AWESOME.

What, exactly is this so called “Third Use” worth, now? I’m pretty sick and tired of the endless roundelay trying to puff up this 3rd Use garbage. Far as I’m concerned, it’s the theologians of the third use who should be defending themselves. Not the other way around. You guys need to get your poop in a group and explain to the rest of us where you get off saying there’s more than two uses of the law. Because plain reason can see that once the law does its work putting the sinner to death, it can’t touch the person resurrected in Christ.

^* This business about 330 million gods is kind of a wild exaggeration.

In our classes, Gerhard often talked about his approach to preaching a text. I think it’s an intriguing one. It wasn’t any kind of hard and fast “method” or anything, but it provided a good starting point, for when you were stuck. So I’d like to take that approach. Again, strictly as a student of his. He often talked about finding the hardest thing about a text, the most difficult moment in a given scripture. The preacher, he said, needed to preach right at the heart of that difficulty. It was part and parcel of Gerhard’s radical presumption for preachers to stare the fearful moment in the face. He and Nestingen both liked to refer to the text working you—for some texts I thought of a boxer in a meat locker (I was the meat)—and that it had to work on you if it was going to work through you to proclaim God’s victory in Christ to the people.

So what I’m going to do is pull out something from the lectionary, and find what I think is the hardest part of the text. We’ll try to look at it the way Gerhard taught us to, and if you like, you can use this in your prayerful preparations for next Sunday. We’ll try to get something posted every Tuesday, starting now.

Here’s the ELCA lectionary. In each of these posts we’ll run through some or all of the verses with a “Fordean eye” open for the hard parts. Normally we’ll put the whole thing behind a “read more” cut link, because it’s going to be long some weeks. This week, as the first one, we’ll include it here.

Series A: Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

September 21, 2008 (Lectionary 25)
“Complementary Series” Jonah 3:10-4:11, Psalm 145:1-8 (8), Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16

Jonah 3:10 “God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”
This starts things off right away doesn’t it? God changed his mind? What kind of God changes God’s mind? Aggh! The kind who can do whatever God wants to, that’s who! The God who works all in all! It’s rough enough God toys with Jonah with the whole bush and worm scenario. But that’s par for the course, that’s miracles and wonders. God does wonders like that all the time, and especially in Jonah—ol’ Jonah’s being thrown all over the countryside and God’s whipping up storms and casting him in the sea, tossing him into the maw of a fish. (Dr. Throntveit liked to joke that this was the text to use whenever former students asked teachers to come to their ordinations because it used to read “God ordained a worm“) But God doing miracles is one thing, out in the open. God changing God’s mind, even if it’s to the benefit of the people, should set your teeth chattering and your spine tingling. There is one of those lacunae in the text (lacunae is my favorite word this week) wherein you see through the gap a vast and terrible gulf, you see the footprints, the long-cast shadow of the unseen God, all in the implications. A God who can change God’s mind is a word that kills.

Psalm 145:1-8 “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; his greatness is unsearchable.” and “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”
There’s some law and gospel, quite present. The unsearchable greatness and slow anger hints at a much wilder world of God’s power. The abundant steadfast love is how we might come to praise God, to look on that face and not despair.

Philippians 1:21-30 “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.”
But but but…? What? Wait, what are we supposed to do Paul? And then you start talking about “living in a manner worthy”? We’re just trying to figure out so dang hard what that means, Paul! You just throw out these phrases and it drives us crazy! Would you turn dying into a task? You don’t mean we have to die do you? This Jesus program you’re going on about? Die?

Matthew 20:1-16 “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?”
Well, this is right in Dr. Forde’s wheelhouse—my memory is that a sermon on this topic appears in Captivation of the Will (we’ll check that and get back to you). But it’s hard to get more obvious than that. Am I not allowed to do what I choose? Oh. Oh my. This is hard. This is a granite spike jutting out of the earth. Here Jesus points a finger directly at the unimpeachable majesty of a God who elects. Argh! Madness! Death and madness! There’s your opening, preachers. May you have the temerity to mine the grace in it and do it to your congregants.

(Hint: you get to say “And this God who does what God chooses with that which is God’s own chooses to raise Jesus from the dead for you. God who does what God chooses with that which is God’s own chooses right now to grab you and hold you in the very heart of love from now on. Really! You, you hearing me speak you are now claimed by this audacious Jesus who is the very lifeblood of the living God. You are God’s own and no power in the kosmos will take that away from you now.”)

Now you try it: Here’s the “Semicontinuous Series” Exodus 16:2-15, Psalm 105:1-6, 37-45 (1, 45), Philippians 1:21-30, Matthew 20:1-16

In Theology is for Proclamation, Dr. Forde wrote

The preacher must claim the audacious and unheard-of authority to say who is intended to actually speak for God. The answer to anticipate, is always you: ‘You, now that you are in earshot.’

Supposedly this answers the ‘problem of God.’

Well, I suppose. If you search a bit on “problem of God” you get some interesting results. My favorites are links to Richard Dawkins and a link to a student paper on The Brothers K. In this they quote Ivan: “It’s not God I don’t accept, understand this, I do not accept the world, that He created, this world of God’s, and cannot agree with it.” The problem of God in a world like Dawkins’ or in the world of people who think the way the Brothers K do, is that God doesn’t seem to be around to defend God’s self in the matter of these problems. It’s a heck of a deal.

What Forde suggests we do is a little bit crazy, a shift of the ground everyone is standing on. (more…)

Here’s google results for the four candidates (President and VP of each major party) and the phrase justification by faith: Barack Obama and Joe Biden vs John McCain and Sarah Palin.

The news cycle is such that it was Sarah Palin’s name who had the most relevant hits related to Justification. The second search result for Sarah Palin justification by faith, at the time of this writing, turned up with links to Time magazine articles, actually about justification! At first you get excited that the doctrine of justification has some bearing on current political events. But you realize quickly that they’re items linking to articles from 1963 and the other plops you into the midst of one from 1967!

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I’m rereading Justification by Faith: A Matter of Death and Life because it’s just so good. I think it should be required reading somewhere. I’m not sure where, maybe if you’re thinking about a career in ministry. Maybe if you’re an angsty teenager who needs to read something good for you (this book is post-confirmation goodness, folks!). Maybe if you’re an old salt who needs a balm for your weary theological muscles. Anyway, I’m going to write a study guide for it, mark my words. (more…)

Thoughts for church leaders:
Do you use a confession of sins in your worship?
Do you use terminology like “we are in bondage to sin” “what we have done and what we have left undone” ?
Is confession corporate?
Do you feel like we lost something in not naming particular sins?

This writer agrees with the reformers’ sentiments “who can enumerate all his errors?” because that is a cry of confession against the whole of sin, the many powers that devastate us. But I wonder if also we (from the reformation tradition) have misplaced our ability to confession actual sins when we have begun to confess Sin.

There’s something in Forde’s language around the specificity of love and proclamation, the reality of it, that I think we can also acknowledge in sin. In their preparations for worship, perhaps leaders can take time to address a particular sin, or ask the community to speak a particular sin in the act of confessing.

I found this book called “Luther & Cromwell” at the sem library the other day. It’s from 1850 (and looks like that may be about the last time it was checked out.

Obviously the Stephenson is getting to me if I’ve suddenly got an interest in Cromwell. But if I were more of a church historian I might be interested in drawing up three parallels: Luther, Cromwell, fin de siècle USA.
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