Reformation Day, 2012

Personal note: I told you a while back that the Viking Age Club and Society of the Sons of Norway, my reenactment group, was being considered as the subject of a reality TV show. We got the final word today that the production company has not been able to find a buyer for the project. So that’s that.

I told another member a while back that my feelings on the whole thing were mixed. For my own sake, I’d like it to happen so I’d get exposure for my novels. But for the sake of the young people in our group (and we have a fair number now), I hoped it wouldn’t happen. Because fame in your youth is one of the worst disasters that can happen to you.

All for the best, then.

Today is Reformation Day, so as the Lutheran caucus of this blog, I think I ought to say something about it.

I direct you to this post at Anthony Sacramone’s Strange Herring blog, if you have a taste for tall grass theology. Anthony is underappreciated as a theologian, and I think he nails the point of the discussion.

In overview:

It starts with a link to a post from Russell Saltzman, a Lutheran pastor, over at First Things. He considers a recent article by Carl Braaten, a noted theologian of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Braaten sees no reason why Lutherans should not be allowed to commune in Roman Catholic churches, giving a long list of things that Lutherans and Catholics now agree on. Saltzman, taking exception, points out that women’s ordination is a serious and sufficient disagreement.

Then, in the comments, a Catholic priest points out further, more fundamental differences in how Lutherans and Catholics understand the very nature of the church.

Finally, Anthony himself notes that all this still misses the point. He expounds a number of differences from the Lutheran point of view. Especially in terms of the doctrine of justification.

I agree with him entirely.

But what amazes me is that, as a conservative Lutheran, I even agree with the Catholic priest far more than with the ELCA theologian. I far prefer an honorable opponent to a shifty ally.

I think Luther would have agreed.

0 thoughts on “Reformation Day, 2012”

  1. The gentleman at the link misunderstands the claim of infallibility. Urban II didn’t make any claim to it — the idea that the Pope rather than the Church is in some sense infallible is a much later doctrine (formally, 1870). Although that formalization does apply to earlier declarations, it limits them to very specific cases — in fact, I think there are usually said to be only seven declarations meeting the criteria throughout history, and the Crusades are not among them. The Assumption of Mary is one; the Immaculate Conception is another.

    A third example is the doctrine of the vision of the blessed. This is something that theologians of very high standing have disputed about for centuries. There are scriptural reasons as well as logical ones to think that it is impossible to see and to know God as God really is. (For scripture, see 1 Timothy 6:16, but also Old Testament writings that no one could see God and live; even the vision of Ezekiel is not an actual seeing of God, but is described as a vision of the likeness of the spirit of God.)

    For logical reasons, there is the problem of human reason being finite and inadequate to the perfect unity of God. Thomas Aquinas says that human reason simply isn’t adequate to the task; but that, as this vision is the whole purpose of our soul, we must believe that God will make a way for us to attain through grace what logic says we cannot possibly obtain. Meister Eckhart, by contrast, lays out a path for obtaining it even in this life. Nicholas of Cusa, though impressed with Eckhart in some ways, says that a genuinely full vision of God simply cannot be obtained even by the blessed — but that this is OK, because the experience of trying will be like attending a feast at which you are always hungry, but always being satisfied, without ever losing the pleasure of hunger or of satiation.

    So there’s an official pronouncement by Pope Benedict XII, who lived in the fourteenth century; but Nicholas of Cusa was still writing about it in the fifteenth. All the formal declaration established was that it was possible and that it didn’t have to wait on Judgment Day; the rest remained an open question.

  2. But what amazes me is that, as a conservative Lutheran, I even agree with the Catholic priest far more than with the ELCA theologian.

    This is the world. You can also agree with a Catholic priest over a Jewish Rabbi, a Jewish Rabbi over a Hindu, and a Hindu over a state worshiper.

    You share a common history with the ELCA theologian. I am not so sure you share a religion.

  3. True, the irony is there. But does the reformation matter on the liberal side of the house? Is there any important difference between the ECLA and religion of, say, Nancy Pelosi?

  4. I hardly call using the same words to describe something unity. The first point of agreement, that salvation is by grace, sounds good until you realize that protestants define grace as a free gift of God’s favor given by faith to unworthy recipients while the RC church (as I understand it) defines grace as God giving us the ability to do the good works to earn our salvation.

    Both say salvation is by grace, but they mean very different things when they say it.

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