Tag: Masks

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The Shape of Christian Life Part 2: Fleeing from God not Preached to God Preached

Throwback Post Part 2:

Within this situation, what is the Christian to do?  Luther tells us that the revealed God of the gospel (the God of grace) is God’s real self, despite what might be considered evidence to the contrary!  When we approach God hidden, or God under his masks of law, we can only find condemnation—something actually alien to God in his proper nature (opus alienum).  Consequently, we should flee from the God of hiddenness and wrath, to the God of grace. In other words, we must flee from God not preached to God preached.  Nevertheless, if both are God, how do we know that God preached is the more authentic of the two?  In the Galatians commentary, Luther talks about God in his hiddenness and wrath condemning and destroying Jesus who bears the sins of the world.  The law (in a sense) tries to destroy the promise by condemning Jesus who has entered into solidarity with those under the God of hiddenness and wrath.  In spite of this, Jesus atones for sin, undoes the power of the law, and reveal God’s true heart.  Jesus (the revealed God of grace) has gone up against the hidden God of wrath and law and come out the other side victorious. Therefore, those who are united with him by faith can also share in his victory and therefore have nothing to fear from God not preached. 

Faith clings to the revealed God against the hidden God, and therefore the shape of the Christian life is one of trust and flight from one to the other.  This can be observed throughout the history of salvation.  God establishes his relationship with Adam and Eve through two trees—the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God attaches his promise to all the trees of the garden as means of mediating the good to Adam and Eve (“you may eat…”).  He gives them the tree of life as a sacrament of immortality.  Nonetheless, he also establish the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as an alternative to the means of his grace.  This was not a test (as John of Damascus and John Wesley have argued), or a means of earning their glorification (as Reformed Federal theology argues), but rather a manifestation of the irrationality of God not preached.  In other words, the tree is in a sense inexplicable.  Why put the possibility of becoming evil in the midst of the good creation?  It is a mystery, a manifestation of the hidden God.  Nevertheless, it was also formative of the obedience of Adam and Eve, which ultimately constituted a sacrifice of praise to God, as Luther argues.  Because Adam and Eve found God not preached in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the structure of their believing existence was the flight from God not preached (that is, the God of destructive condemnation) to God preached (that is, his manifestation in the other trees of the garden and the tree of life).  Adam and Eve only entered into sin and condemnation when they sought God not preached and ignored God as manifested to them in his Word.

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The Shape of Christian Life Part 1: God in His Masks

Throwback Post Part 1:

Before his death, Luther claimed that The Bondage of the Will (BOW) and the Catechisms were the only things that he had written that were worth reading.  What I’m interested in focusing on here is Luther’s constant refrain in the discussion of the Ten Commandments that “we should fear and love so that…”  How should we take this?  If we follow Luther’s own words as a hermeneutical key (namely that the BOW and the Catechism are his best works and therefore a definitive representation of his thinking), “fearing and loving” should be understood in terms of Luther’s own dialectic of the hidden and revealed God.

For those unfamiliar, in BOW Luther speaks of God preached and God not preached.  If we look at creation as a whole as a sphere of God’s activity, the logic of God’s action, especially during a pandemic, will appear incomprehensible to us.  Whereas God in his revelation in Word and sacrament states “I will not delight in the death of the sinner,” God insofar as he works all things certainly does work death to sinners.  Of course, he does this for good reason: All are born with original sin.  The difficulty is that through his electing will, God approaches some through Word and sacrament. He converts, justifies, and sanctifies them.  Yet he does not work faith within others (who are of course no less sinful) and actually works their destruction. 

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