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.
God, therefore, works within his creation through many divine masks (larva Dei). He redeems through some and he destroys through others. There is no “thinking into” revelation (as in many Christian theologies influenced by Neo-Platonism: Augustine, Barth, Aquinas, Calvin, etc.) to see why this is the case. God is not just incomprehensible, but actively hides behind his masks and (to use Forde’s phrase) “shuffles” them at will. This reality is a natural outgrowth of the dialectic of law and gospel: In some masks, God comes to us as law and in others as gospel. Since the law and the gospel are opposed, there is no “thinking into” them. Both are the will of God, but we actually can’t see how they are internally coordinated in God’s mind. The best we can do is to see from the perspective of faith how the law drives us to the gospel and how Christ has fulfilled the law on our behalf. Nevertheless, these are not realities latent in the law itself and so the mystery of the divine hiddenness remains.
Within this situation, what is the Christian to do?…..
Part 2 will follow.
Original version first posted by Jack Kilcrease, “Fleeing from God not Preached to God Preached: The Shape of the Christian Life,” Crux Sola Est Nostra Theologia, July 15, 2013.
Image from Travis Jamieson, “God’s Mask” Beacon Hill, https://beaconhillgr.org/2020/06/05/gods-masks/