Madre's Missives

Theology is great, but it's not the Gospel

Despite whatever complaints and commentary that I may express about my classes at the ELCA seminary, I am forever grateful that I got to study under the late Dr. Gerhard Forde...

What are we to do about God not preached?  Nothing.  We are to leave the not-preached God alone and pay attention to the God clothed and displayed in the Word.  But how can we do that?  Only, of course, to the degree that we are grasped by the preached God. In Luther's terms we cannot -- will not -- do it by ourselves, not apart from the proclamation.  To put it bluntly, everyone theologizes here as they must.  A veritable battle is being fought over us between God not preached and God preached.  God not preached devours sinners without regret, but the preached God battles to snatch us away from sin and death.

All that, though difficult to swallow theologically, is understandable and perhaps acceptable.  What puts everyone off, however, is the last sentence: the assertion that God hidden in majesty "has not bound himself by His word, but has kept himself free over all things." (LW 33:140 - quote below)  The usual objection is this: if God not preached (God hidden in majesty) is not bound by God preached (by the Word of promise) but is free over all things, then there is no basis for certainty or confidence that the promise of the preached God will stand.  The fearsome specter of a God hidden in majesty who can arbitrarily wipe out the promise has haunted theology every since.

The driving impulse of this haunted theology has been the persistent attempt to banish the specter of this terrifying absolute God (deus ipse) from sight, to try to bind this God not preached to theology's understanding of the revealed Word.  But the only result of this attempt has been to forsake proclamation for explanation.  Ironically, such theology abandons the real weapon it has against the unpreached God.  For the point is not that theology, but God preached is the only defense against God not preached.

What prompted Luther to leave the specter of a God who has not "bound himself by his word, but has kept himself free over all things" to haunt us?  There are at least three major reasons that should now be obvious.  First and foremost, Luther recognized the primacy of the oral, spoken word, that particular type of discourse called proclamation, the living voice of the gospel.  The burden of the passage quoted above is his insistence that we must take explicit theological note of this primacy and observe careful distinctions in our speaking between God not preached and God preached.  Luther let the absolute God be, precisely to make room for the proclamation.  So we have the remarkable circumstance that the argument Luther used to save the proclamation is the very one most systematic theologians since have thought would endanger it.  The antithesis could hardly be more clear.

This is the classic illustration of how a theology that understands the place of proclamation will make certain moves and refuse to make others.  Luther knew that only the proclamation -- only the preached God, the living Word here and now -- could save us from the God not preached, the absolute God.  A theology that intends to save us by attempting to remove or render the God not preached harmless in the system makes just the wrong move.  It fails to recognize the nature of the battle for the human soul.  It maintains that it can bind God not preached to the Word and so "save" us.  It makes the fatal assumption that it can accomplish more than the living Word.  Theology must recognize its limits.  It must understand that only the concrete address, the "I absolve you," the "I baptize you," will save us from the threat of the absolute God.  Absolution is the only solution to the problem of the absolute!

The second major reason why Luther did not banish the absolute God from his theology is already implied in the first.  Such banishment cannot be accomplished by any kind of theological artifice.  Luther left the absolute God there in his theology because he knew he could do nothing about it.  Nothing can be exalted above the absolute God.  It simply is not true that God in general is bound even to an abstraction called the revealed Word.  As Luther put it, "God does many things that he does not disclose to us in his word; he also wills many things which he does not disclose himself willing in his word." (Ibid.)  What would happen if we were to claim that the absolute God is bound and limited by the Word?  We would revert to the situation in which the preached Word -- "I desire not the death of the sinner" -- becomes a general statement by which God is bound and limited.  But that is not true, nor does it accord God any particular honor.  For sin and death continue, and nothing -- certainly not theology -- alters the reign of the absolute God except ("when and where it pleases God!") when the concrete proclamation interrupts and creates faith.  Not even God can do anything about wrath in the abstract.  Not even God can somehow unmask God in the abstract.  The proclamation of the concrete, incarnate word set against the absolute God so as to create faith is the only way out.  Faith means precisely to be grasped by the proclamation in the face of the terror of the absolute God, in the face of tribulation (Anfechtung), as Luther put it.  Theology, no matter how sweetly done, does not cure tribulation.  Theological opinion may provide momentary relief, but rarely does it survive the heat and evil of the day.

The third reason that prompted Luther to leave the specter of the absolute God alone is his knowledge that we as sinners live under the wrath of God.  Our efforts -- even the best of them -- afford no escape.  Theology, no matter how cleverly devised, cannot deliver us from the wrath of God.  It may twist and turn to remodel God, try by every artifice to fashion less frightening masks, but in the end such masks only turn on us.  We are sinners confronted by the masks we cannot see through.  We cannot see God.  Luther was not merely stating opinions at this point.  He was describing as honestly as possible the actual state of things.  No doubt only faith can risk such honesty.

Faith itself is endangered when the attempt is made theologically to bind the hidden God to the Word as abstraction.  The nature of faith is transformed.  Faith strives to become sight, to render the hidden God visible.  Faith's object is not the proclaimed God, not the sacramental deed of God "for you" in the living present, but certain alleged truths about God in the past tense.  Indeed, the very freedom of faith is consequently lost.  Theology becomes a tour de force, an attempt to induce or perhaps even subtly force belief in the God one has conjured up.  But faith is a matter of being set free from the God of the past tense.  It is not a matter of deferring to the authority of this or that theologian, but a matter of being set free by the proclamation itself, by an actual word from God.  Faith comes by hearing and being grasped by the proclamation.  God speaks to you.  Faith is the Spirit-fired free flight from the hidden to the revealed God.

The fact is that the terror of the absolute God reigns until the proclamation that creates faith announces its end and liberates the believer from it.  Theology must learn to speak the truth about this.  Theology must know its own limitations and speak honestly about the way things are.  It must not tell sweet lies about God.  It must assess the true nature of the battle so that it can be joined in proper fashion.  Ironically, a theology that sets out to protect the proclamation by tying the absolute God to the revelation only undercuts the proclamation itself and bowdlerizes God.  Small wonder that we find ourselves today with only tenuous belief in a platitudinous God and little consciousness of what God wills to say to us.  So we talk mostly about ourselves.

*  "God must therefore be left to himself in his own majesty, for in this regard we have nothing to do with him, nor has he willed that we should have anything to do with him.  But we have something to do with him insofar as he is clothed and set forth in his Word, through which he offers himself to us and which is the beauty and glory with which the psalmist celebrates him as being clothed.  In this regard we say, the good God does not deplore the death of his people which he works in them, but he deplores the death which he finds in his people and desires to remove from them.  For it is this that God as he is preached is concerned with, namely that sin and death should be taken away and we should be saved.  For "he sent his word and healed them." [Ps. 107:20].  But God hidden in his majesty neither deplores nor takes away death, but works life, death, and all in all. For there he has not bound himself by his word, but has kept himself free over all things." (LW 33:140)

Forde, Gerhard O.  Theology is for Proclamation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1990) 27-30.