peter krey\’s web site

This essay I published in Scholardarity derives from a rereading of Luther’s Bondage of the Will. Could evolution be the way God created life on this planet? Luther states that the hidden God has done and does things that are not revealed to us in Scriptures. Does science uncover more of the hidden actions of God and does God smile because humanity is coming of age? Honest to God, is our God too small? See Science and the Hidden versus the Revealed God.

Another essay called “The Garden of Eden: Eternity in Time” is about to be published in Scholadarity as well. It follows the reading of the Dobzhansky’s Biology of Ultimate Concern and this one about Science and the Revealed and Hidden God.

I believe that the naturalism and materialism rampant among some scientists has robbed many of their faith. It is especially mistaken to place the ultimate concern of faith on the same level as scientific knowledge, because from the get go, methodologically science operates by the exclusion of God as an explanation of natural events. When a methodology makes a claim to the totality of reality, it becomes problematic for faith but also undermines other valid human disciplines. “There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in science,” to quote Shakespeare (for my purposes).

But science has the big bang theory (for the origin of the universe), the theory of evolution (for  the origin of life), and an expanded view of natural and human realities in this universe that can become tantamount to a religious narrative for existence. But it remains a blind scientific method that does not provide meaning and purpose for life. Science left to itself undermines its own enterprise in its search for truth, because the source of human values does not come from science.

This essay of mine in Scholardarity goes beyond being a book review. I am struggling with a way to affirm evolution, but not allowing it to undermine faith. A Book Review: Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern and Other Issues between Science and Religion. It proceeds to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his evolutionary theology. But in the essays that follow this one, I will also use Nicholas Berdyaev, a Russian Christian existentialist philosopher, to modify evolutionary theology, which really does not take account the the Fall.

This essay on movement and change is in Scholardarity. See Luther and Heraclitus. I have a whole series of articles there that would have gone into this website. Scholardarity will make it possible to e-publish scholarly journals.

For Jason: God’s Word is the Living, Concrete, Historical Christ, who Encounters Us

by Dr. Peter Krey (November 17, 2010)

I just finished a blog about the campaign that atheists are planning this Christmas. They want to publicize some of the most blood-thirsty passages from the Bible in order to undo a believer’s faith in God. A point that they and many believers do not understand is that Christians do not “believe in” the Bible. That is a form of idolatry which can be called Bibliolatry. Immature Protestants want an inerrant Bible as an external authority to accommodate their faith much like the Roman Catholics have an inerrant pope and an authoritative magisterium. By the way, only a ministerium is appropriate to the teachings of Christ. We are forbidden by Christ to be masters and bidden to be servants. As Bishop Dolan told the nuns who came out in support of Obama’s health insurance reform, while the bishops took a stand against it: “We’re pastors and teachers, not just one set of teachers in the Catholic community, but the teachers.”[1] I guess that put the nuns in their place.

Both an inerrant pope and inerrant Bible compromise the meaning of faith. After Dietrich Bonhoeffer we have come to understand that we believe in the historical and concrete Jesus Christ, present and living amongst us because of his resurrection. Jesus Christ is the living Word of God, the Word become flesh, that is, the true God become a human being, promised in the Old Testament and witnessed in the New and his Kingdom will come on earth the way it is already experienced in heaven.

The evidence for our belief, our faith, our trusting in Christ comes from encounters we have with him, the Word-Person and the transformed lives we experience because of him. Such encounters with the living Christ in, with, and through his followers, send us on his mission of reconciliation, love, and compassion. Jesus is the Christ, the Prince of Peace, as opposed to a warlike Caesar, an emperor, a master of aggression and domination. The names, Kaiser, Tsar, Shaw, are merely translations of the same title Caesar. But Christ is the Prince of Peace. As opposed to military campaigns launched by earthly empires of the nations, he sent out his followers to do healing campaigns of both the mind and the body, to proclaim God’s reign on earth, so that God’s will is done here on earth as it is in heaven. Note: when we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” it sounds slightly quaint to our republican and democratic ears. Perhaps in its place we should use the “Beloved Community,” the way Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed it.

When writing a sermon I have always tried to uncover a little more truth and I pray for the courage to preach it. That also took place when in 1970 or 1971 I preached in the Wittenberg University Chapel in Springfield, Ohio for the students. The insight came from Gospel of John and it may well be the basis for what Bonhoeffer taught. This passage reads, “You search the scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life, and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me for life” (5:39-40). Isn’t it strange the way Jesus says that you think you have eternal life in the scriptures? Jesus is saying that we need to take the further step to himself, the living Word of God. Christ cannot be pressed between the pages of a book like a dried flower. Flowers grow all around us alive out here in the world. We have to come to the concrete Christ here amongst us alive in the Holy Spirit and leading us into further truths, dressing us up in the Beatitudes that describe the new persons we become in his name.

I believe that the theology of Martin Luther of old can help us get a hold on some of the thorny biblical issues, both the moral ones and the historical ones, the errors found in the 66 books, that library of books called the Bible. (It’s difficult for me to speak of these errors so explicitly, but the scriptures have their human side.) Luther said, “The scriptures are the cradle in which the Christ child was laid; don’t mix up the Christ child with the cradle, the baby with the straw.” Distinctions have to be made and for making them a theological approach is needed to the Bible. Luther speaks of the Old and New Testaments as the 39 and 27 books as well as the old and new testaments, in terms of the witness to and promise of the coming Christ (the old) and the witness of his life lived from the cradle to the cross among us (the new); as well as his last will and testament (the service), when he speaks the words of institution in communion, making us his heirs. Christ and the Gospel of the Beloved Community he proclaimed are the promises of God for us, and not the inhumanities, atrocities, and injustices that God’s law and Gospel contend against.

It is certainly true that the sanction of slavery, genocide, the inferiority of women, and punishment of people for what their ancestors did can be found in its pages. But in the latter case, we have to celebrate the prophet and the time when the immorality of that practice became clear: “As I live says the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used in Israel, ‘The parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge’” (Ezekiel 18: and 2), for “the righteousness of the righteous shall be his own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be his own” (20). Ezekiel declares that children will no longer be punished for the crimes of their parents and vice versa.

Now a Biblical literalist approach to scripture that cannot make the distinction between what the Word of God is against and what it is for, gets into outright moral confusion. In addition the problem arises that the biblical writers place these immoral commands, these bum-steers, so to speak, right into the mouth of God. Therefore the scriptures need to be read with the Holy Spirit as well as with a theological approach like that of Luther, in order to understand that the Gospel and the Christ, who proclaimed the Beloved Community and is thereby bringing it into reality, is fighting against these atrocities. This is what he taught his followers, the present-day Christs, the children of God, who are peace-makers, lovers of justice, who hunger and thirst for its realization in this sad world.

A case in point is the principle: “To all those who have, more will be given; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away” (Luke 19:26). In the spirit of Christ, “God fills the hungry with good things and the rich he sends empty away” (Luke 1:53). As a worldly principle, it is true enough, but it is not being championed by Christ as Gospel. It is against the mercy and compassion of Christ. We have to remember that because the devil also quotes scripture to his purpose, we have to discern the spirit in which the Bible is being cited. In addition, proof-texting, that is, using the scripture as if it were merely a series of independent verses without regard to context, its Sitz im Leben in the text as a whole as well as in its historical situation, usually violates the spirit in which the words were intended.

Biblical criticism in its higher and lower forms is also important for an accurate reading and use of the scripture – as much as believers have often rejected it, of course, if such a critical reading is done in the Holy Spirit and not used to reject the scripture’s witness to Christ. Lower criticism establishes the best readings of the text from the most trustworthy ancient manuscripts, while higher criticism in its many forms, can also help discern the spirit in which a text is read. If Christ himself was crucified and arose from the dead, then through all the forms of criticism, the Word of God will also once again arise from the crucified scriptures, full of grace and truth.

One time I remember with trepidation how I felt I had to preach against a text in Revelations, because I thought it taught the revenge of the martyrs. It was in the passage about the blood from the wine-press of the wrath of God that reached as high as a horse’s bridle. (See Revelations 14:20. The passage may well have another interpretation.) But Jesus said, “Father, forgive them they know not what they do!” He did not say, “God will get even with you for what you have done to me!” The higher criticism makes it possible for a believer to stand with the Holy Spirit against a text being used for evil purposes.

Just a word now about what seems like ancient plagiarism to us. “There are a number of books in the New Testament that claim to be written by people who did not write them.”[2] The ancients did not take the words of others and claim them as their own, but took their own words and wrote them under the name of an authority, some teacher or leader, much like Plato putting his words into the mouth of his teacher, Socrates. Perhaps thorough-going individuation had not yet taken place or perhaps people gathered together in a collective identity or it is possible that a school wrote under the name of its teacher. Thus our abhorrence for plagiarism can be anachronistic in some cases, while in others, like the Donation of Constantine and Pseudo-Dionysius, such plagiarism was as problematic for later history as today it is for us.

To reiterate, a theological approach to scriptures, reading them in the mind of Christ and under the influence of the Holy Spirit is important for believers. The theological approach of Luther also distinguishes between the law and the gospel, God’s commands and promises. (Scriptures speak to us in the structure of promise and fulfillment.) The many laws recorded in scripture are by and large, relevant to a particular time and place, one that varies immensely through the millennium in which the 66 books were written. But the Gospel, the promises of God and Christ, as the living Word of God with the Beloved Community he proclaimed, will always remain and that is what we believe in and can trust in forever and ever.

Considering the historical errors of the Bible, it must be said that the Bible is as little a text book in history as it is one for science. The Bible was not intended to be a history book and cannot meet Ranke’s historical standard of history as it actually happened. But don’t allow that to bury the pearl of great price that the Bible contains. According to Helmut Gollwitzer, the very unique character of the faith in scriptures is that, from the very beginning, it is derived from historical events.[3] Never is the faith, he continues, outside of the people’s history, or merely related to an unknown, end-time “God,” to whose providence one has to surrender, and such similar requirements, but here is an invitation to trust in a concrete, living God, who made himself known through concrete historical realities; a personal and compassionate power, able to be heard and called upon as the God of Israel (of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob).[4] Thus [the Bible is a book of theology] because it features a [growing] faith that is grounded in these historical realities and challenges us to respond with faith as well in accordance with the historical covenant God made in it.[5]

[The scripture is about the living God active in history and the one who also encounters us in our personal lives, as already described by Bonhoeffer.]

Gollwitzer continues: in the scripture, historical realities are always words and actions related together. Not only the prophets, but all the people understood that their God’s hand was in the historical events that rescued or thwarted them. So the scripture understands the historical event as the deeds of a doer, namely God, who does them, and addresses his people through them. History for the scriptures is not an impersonal causal chain, but the actions of the One who [God, who saves, because of his sense of justice and compassion.][6] Thus whether the Exodus was small and insignificant in the eyes of the world or whether King David had a grand kingdom or was merely a local chieftain does not make a difference to the significance of the faith that understood God really at work saving his people, as a God reigning through history.[7]

When Jesus the Christ is born in the reign of Augustus Caesar and becomes crucified under Pontius Pilate, “God’s Word and deed, become concentrated in this one historical and living Person,”[8] the Christ, who is the Word of God become a human being, who in the last days will lead all the nations through a universal Passover and Exodus into the Freedom of the children of God and the rebirth of mother earth. Amen.

My Lecture for for Reformation Day 2008 at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg entitled “Luther’s In Depth Theology and Theological Therapy: (Using Self Psychology and a Little Jung)” has been published in that seminary’s journal, Seminary Ridge Review vol. 11 No. 1-2 (Autumn 2008-Spring 2009): 97-115.

I take a rather great risk by presenting Luther’s theology as in depth and I project that therapy can issue from it. In Luther’s day psychology and sociology had not yet separated from theology in an intellectual “division of labor.” We have always known the personal and psychological strength of Luther’s theology, but I go farther and try to work out an in depth personality theory and therapy from it. Instead of intra-psychic ego states like the super ego, ego, and id; I posit internal relational stances before God, others, oneself, and the world. I associated Luther’s continually placing opposites together with Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of opposites, which have to be transcended for growth. This theory also helped me analyze Luther’s episodes of spiritual conflict. I also correlate Self Psychology with Luther’s theology to bring out Luther’s depth dimension. Check out the rapturous ascent in faith and descent in love (falling in love). I would covet a critique of what I here distill out of Luther’s “Freedom of a Christian.”

My brother Philip also has a lecture in this issue and I recommend acquiring it. Write to

Seminary Ridge Review

Lutheran Theological Seminary

61 Seminary Ridge

Gettysburg, PA 17325-1795

Subscriptions are free. Extra copies cost $10 each plus postage and handling.

The Complete Bibliography for the Four Lectures is at the end of Lecture four.

The Reformation Era and the Language of Social Change

Christ the Good Shepherd Church

San Jose, California

Monday, November 3, 1997 at 7:00pm

We are nearing the millennial year 2000, and historically, some kind of “end of the world” fervor has always accompanied such calendar changes. In our time, will it be some right-wing Christian fundamentalism which comes into power and uses the organs of the state to impose its particular brand of morality upon everyone, or can there be a different revolution, a revolution of hearts and minds,^[1] one that brings about responsible social change, with greater approximations of social justice?^[2] That means we have to learn to speak the truth to power and have to challenge the economic and political powers that prevail today to be law abiding – or actually make laws that have the common good at heart and not only private interests. Note how subtle a ploy the issue of family values can be if it is intended to divert us from unjust corporate, or other social, economic, and political structures we live in.

Looking back into history, the year 1500 had this kind of fervor, and that makes taking a look at it somewhat instructive for ourselves. But just relating the story of the Reformation again may not be too helpful. I want to look at it from a social-linguistic point of view. What do I mean by that? I want to look at the relationship of language and social change. And we will have to distinguish what kind of language has the power to bring about social change, and what kind of social change we desire. Things can change for the better or for the worse.

Although my point of view is controversial, both from a social and from a linguistic perspective, I am convinced that language plays a strong role in social change. Not much study of language philosophy and sociology is required to be able to discern such language. A statement by Luther to addressing Erasmus in The Bondage of the Will stands out:

For the Word of God comes, whenever it comes to change and renew the world.^[3]

Now that has always sounded to me like Karl Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach:

The philosophers have merely interpreted the world in different ways: the point, however, is to change it.^[4]

This language of command may be one sense of what Luther called “Word and Command.” It is like his language of address confronting society. It is related to what some philosophers call, “performative language.” I like to call it the executive use of language or the executive mode of speech.

The word, “performative,” comes from a new understanding of language as speech-act theory. In the performative mode, language does not only try to reflect realities of the world truly or falsely, but the language is doing something successfully or unsuccessfully. In one case the world has the power over the language; in the other, the language has power over the world, to bend the world into the shape it defines. The words grasp and mold us into their idea, rather than our merely expressing ideas with them. These kinds of words can destroy us and hurt us, or they can sustain us and give us new life. This mode of language is called the Theology of the Word of God in Lutheran parlance.

Now this linguistic approach is controversial, and some social and political historians disagree vehemently with it,^[5] because it undermines a somewhat Marxist materialistic position – which focuses on class conflict. If Luther and the Reformation, not counting some Anabaptists and radicals, like Thomas Müntzer, took a stand against the Peasants’ War, which after all, represented the uprising of the common man, then how can the Reformation be said to bring social change for them? Or can I be trivializing social change as that for the higher estates? I believe a failure of the Reformation is represented in the debacle of the Peasants’ War, but that change took place all the same, change which appears reactionary from our standpoint in history – although we have also not yet solved this historical problem even today – but which certainly represented movement out of the late medieval world onto the threshold of the modern one.

But surprisingly, I believe there is a commonality between Lutheranism and Marxism.  Marxism brought about an incredible social movement over the last 150 years, or even the last 50 years. Although it is collapsing today, the movement and its spread has been truly phenomenal. But Luther’s movement too, spread like “wildfire” in the same way almost 500 years ago. His was a religious movement that fought clericalism. Marxism was a secular anti-religious movement that fought capitalism unsuccessfully. But Marxism was a quasi-religion. In other words, it also had some of the trappings of a secular religion. A Russian philosopher, Nicholas Berdyaev called it the second Islam.

Here is something not many people know: between Luther and Marx we have the philosopher Hegel. Hegel systematized Luther’s dialectical theology into a universal, all-encompassing philosophy. Then Marx turned Hegel’s idealistic philosophy on its head, and worked out a dialectical materialism, which seems to have lost all the social benefits it promised, because something in its heart remained deceptive.^[6]

Now my controversial thesis follows: in the places where the Reformation took hold, and in part, even in countries that remained Catholic, the Reformation initiated a great deal of social change. It even began a successful systemic change from late medieval clericalism to an early modern form of secularism.

Note that the terms, “secularism” and “clericalism,” are notorious for having many different meanings. By clericalism, I mean taking and holding ecclesiastical positions for the sake of power and possessions. Clericalism entails religious “usage” for exploitation.  And the form of secularism posited here, is not one that is  anti- or irreligious, like the modern kind.^[7] I mean a very early kind of secularism in which lay people try to own their Christian faith and take it to heart in a new way; begin participating in religious matters directly. They no longer allowed the priests to have such a great portion if the mediation between themselves and God. The common people were beginning to take their first steps on the long road to their coming of age, their maturity.

Here the printing press really helped. Instead of only rich scholars being able to own books, suddenly common people could afford to buy and read them, or have them read aloud, if they were illiterate. Peasants would memorize pamphlets by a best selling author named Martin Luther, by singing them – and then reciting them for their friends and neighbors to hear. This prolific monk wrote one book after another. The authors for most books died long ago. But this was a living author, who did not write about stale issues, but about the burning issues of the day.^[8] After he had been kidnaped, it turned out for his own protection by Frederick the Wise, – everyone thought he had been killed – he translated the New Testament from Erasmus’ new Greek edition, constructed from the best manuscripts. That September Testament, as it was called, came out in 1522, and its revision, the December Testament, came out three months later. They were real hits. Sold out before they could hit the shelves. The common people were reading them everywhere, and the priests were busy trying to stop them. The common people were shocked by what they really found in the Bible compared with what the priests had said was in it.

That is when burghers and students started to revolt. First the knights revolted in 1523, and of course, the great Peasants’ War took place in 1525, the event I’ve been studying.   Erasmus told Luther:  It’s not right that you give all this information to the common people.  It will only lead to “tumult.”  They said that word because the word “revolution” did not get coined until about 150 years later.  Oddly enough, a recent study argues that “reformation” meant what we mean by “revolution” today.^[9] In any case, this is where Luther responds to Erasmus:  “For the Word of God comes, whenever it comes, to change and renew the world.”  Erasmus was an illegitimate child of a priest, like so many others. Sometimes as many as a thousand priests in a bishopric had concubines for whom they could purchase dispensation from their bishop – for a goodly price! Erasmus never spoke a word of Dutch or German.  He only spoke Latin.  He is supposed to have slipped back into German in the last word he gasped when he died:  “God.”^[10] But the language of the mass was Latin, that of the scholars was Latin.  Common people only understood the vernacular. You had to become part of an elite to learn Latin in order to find out what was going on – in the church, in the courts, the royal ones, as well as the courts of law – at the time, there were secular courts of law competing with ecclesiastical courts of canon law – but no matter, what was significant was said in Latin.  (You still find that scholars keep the spicy parts in Latin to keep you in the dark about significant or embarrassing facts.)

Luther was different.  He wanted the common people to be able to understand. To give an example: even today – you often see El Shaddai in the Old Testament, but it’s explanation usually remains hidden.  Not Luther.  He wrote plainly that it refers to God as the many breasted goddess.^[11] Luther does not mind being controversial.

But look at the social change involved in placing some of the most vulnerable religious issues and some of the most difficult struggles to ascertain the truth into the hands of the common people, who had not only been barred from it by their social class or estate, but also by an elite language, one spoken only by the elites, i.e., Latin.

Earlier bishops had condemned writing about theology and religious topics in the vernacular, in German, in this case, because the language had not developed sufficiently to be able to express the issues accurately. Only Latin was capable of such expression, according to the Archbishop of Mainz, Bertold v. Henneberg in 1484.^[12] Luther, had nothing if he did not have a command of the language.   (He also had a command of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He is one of the few great theologians of the church who had a command of Hebrew.  Augustine knew only Latin – he didn’t even know Greek.)  But Luther’s experience of justification by faith, or better, justification by grace through faith, took place in his dogged perserverance to interpret a passage from scriptures – and what he experienced was a language event, and that experience gives you a new command of the language. E.g.  The Isaiah passage:  Blessed are the feet of those who bear the glad tidings.^[13] Luther say:  Those aren’t his feet.  Those are the feet of the meters of sentence, – it means for example:  Blessed are the cadences – blessed is the poetry of those who come bearing the Good News.^[14]

Thus after Luther started writing in German, it was no longer the same language.  And he remained a translator of the scripture his whole life through.  The Old Testament finally came out in 1534. He kept a whole team of people searching for the right words.^[15] He tells Spalatin: Go see how they speak in the market place.  How do the common people say that?  That’s how it has to be put in the Scripture.  They say the Reformation was a language event – and Luther’s translation of the Bible was also a language event. All seventeen of the earlier translations were left behind.  No translation – matched Luther’s.  Even Catholic anti-Luther Bibles really used his translation – and condemned him rather then giving him the credit for it, about which he complained.^[16]

Now to touch upon the clericalism of the time in an altogether too abbreviated a way: The clergy were an estate. Gathering social data is difficult. But perhaps they make up from 8 to 14 percent of the population; we can even include the majority of the students, because they belonged to it, even many non-students who longed for benefices and would never receive them. A whole estate were clergy – bishops monks nuns, prelates, canons (they elected the bishops and were organized in cathedral chapters), cardinals, (who sometimes traveled with a retinue of 160 – 170 horsemen!), legates,  mendicant friars, beguines, etc., etc.  Then it is necessary to consider the large percentage of the total property that the church owned and controlled.  A benefice system brought the tithes of rich monastic holdings and parishes to ecclesiasts.^[17] A nobleman might give his son a monastery and all its income as a benefice.  They fought over the real profitable plums.  For a slight charge the pope would reserve them for someone else before the holder of the benefice had even died.^[18] The papacy had a lucrative income on expectancies of benefices as well.

A social fact I am not taking into account is the inheritance issue involved in the celibacy of the clergy, which counteracted the powerful drive of passing property on to one’s family. Even if priests took concubines, their progeny were cut off from inheritance. That way the church could always newly administer and redistribute church property. Thus kings also loved investing bishops into their fiefdoms in earlier days, because they never had to worry about a son wanting to inherit the position. The king could always reassign a new bishop of his choosing.^[19]

Clericalism could also entail the ontological superiority that the priests felt they had over lay people.^[20] Luther maintained the priesthood of all believers and that the priests had only a different functional role, but clergy and lay alike received the same holy calling, had the same holy orders, the source of which was their baptism.^[21]

The priest could change the bread and the wine into the real body and blood of Christ. No slight shift of emphasis is involved in changing the terms to “Word and Sacrament” from “Church and Sacrament” or “Priesthood and Sacrament.” The priest had the authority to excommunicate you with a small or a large ban – no laughing matter in those days.  No one could have anything to do with you. You could only leave and start life over where they did not know you. The church could go further and try you as a heretic after, if you had the misfortune to be accused by the inquisition. The church could torture you and burn you at the stake, or let you die in a dungeon under suspicious circumstances, as happened in England.^[22]

If you had the small ban, a large fine and reconciliation with the priest was required. You had to go to mass, you had to go to confession, no matter how much control the priest received over you by means of it. To Lucien Febvre the church dominated  every aspect of the people lives.^[23]

The priests mediated religion between God and the people.  Luther displaced them. It was not the “church and sacrament,” nor the “priest and sacrament,” anymore, but now the “word and sacrament.”  The church did not control the Word, although it proclaimed it – if it took religion and faith seriously. Many bishops were much too busy with power politics and the accumulation of possessions.  Luther taught that they did not represent the church. “The church is where the Gospel is preached and the sacraments are rightly administered.”^[24] The church itself is the creation of the Word of God.  Now in the sacrament, the Word of God is the basic necessity, not the priest.  Anyway, because the priest interfered with every aspect of peoples lives through the seven sacraments, Luther reduced them to 3 – leaving in confession.  Then he reduced these to two – only baptism and  communion. (If that was not his intention, it certainly was the effect.)

If we want to continue describing clericalism, then imagine if our governor of California was really an Archbishop, or even a Cardinal, because California is such an important state,  and answerable to the pope.  Theoretically, he could be elected by a Cathedral Chapter of Canon lawyers or be appointed by the pope. California would have been comparable to the Archbishopric of Mainz, where the ecclesiastical prince was also an elector of the emperor, and that office being so important, the pope would probably reserve this appointment for himself.  Every time a new Bishop – governor was elected, the Pope would ask for about twenty million dollars, even if the last office had not yet even been paid for.^[25] That would require a new indulgence campaign designate to bring fifty million into he ecclesiastical coffers.      The pope wore a tiara – a triple crown.  One crown represented his being the king or mayor of the city of Rome, the second represented his being the territorial monarch of a large principality in Italy, and the last represented his being the universal pope.  That in Latin was called, the pontifex maximus, which was the title of Caesar – so he sometimes also thought he was the emperor, and he had the fraudulent Donation of Constantine to prove it.  Thus because he was a territorial king, he played politics with the king of France against the Emperor Charles V.  In this way the emperor’s spiritual leader and pastor, kept making alliances with his deadliest enemy, steeping the empire into one war after another.

It was that kind of clericalization which had to be reformed in head and members – and a long history of frustrated attempts to reform the state of affairs of the church preceded the success of Luther’s movement.

In very important ways, Luther took the matters of faith out of the hands of the priests, and said that by the Word of God, people were justified by grace through faith, and not by all the works that the church of the day required. They could extricate themselves from the whole treasury of merits, the cult of the saints, the whole penitential system, and the sacrifice of the mass (considered as the offering of the priests to the people, rather than God’s offering to the people, God’s work and service for the people).  Faith gave the laity direct access to God. The hierarchy no longer defined the church, but the communion, the community the people, who shared in and around the Word and Sacrament, did.  The people of God defined the church not the hierarchy.

It is difficult to see how a historian can claim that the Reformation did not represent social change!  Luther tried to strip the church of it’s pretensions to power and wealth by his two kingdom theory. He taught that ministers could marry, and he himself married a runaway nun. That certainly scandalized the old guard of the day.  The monasteries lay alongside the real inner-worldly calling of all baptized Christians.  Therefore imagine the social change resulting from the dissolution of all the monasteries in England!  In Protestant Germany they became schools, orphanages, hospitals, or a community chest for helping the poor, giving scholarships to bright young students without means and dowries to young women from poor homes.  The Language in the churches slowly changed from Latin to German, i.e., the vernacular, and that over 450 years before Vatican II.  Slowly over the centuries, the vernacular languages began to replace Latin as Language of scholarship. But the vernacular languages flared up like Roman Candles, with a brightness in the Reformation anticipating the future displacement of Latin.

Next time I will go into some of the teachings of Luther’s. For justification by faith I will explain how it relates to our economic and social experience today.  Are CEO’s a new version of medieval lords like bishops and other benefice holders of the nobility, and does the teaching about justification by grace through faith relate to our situation?  You’ll see that it does.  In my third session, I would like to show that performative language and speech act theory helps us understand how Luther’s concept of the Gospel became so dynamic.  The promise is one of the basic performative speech acts – and Luther discovers that the Gospel is really in the  Old Testament, too, in the form of the promises of God – the promises that God makes to us for our lives.

In the last session – we will be speaking about what a revolution of hearts and minds might look like today – a socially responsible revolution. It will have much to do with language and the faith that comes by hearing it, and the way we are addressed in the speaking of it.

Dr. Peter Krey

---

^[1]The concept of “a revolution of hearts and minds” comes from Helen Caldicott, “Technology, Spirituality, and the Future of the Planet” a speech given in Portland, OR 3/28/95 and heard on Alternative Radio, David Barsamian, Boulder Colorado, 1995.

^[2]The concept of “approximations of justice” comes from Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. II, (New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1964), p. 193.

^[3]Helmut T. Lehman, ed., Luther Works, Vol. 33, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972),p. 52.

^[4]Karl Marx, Selected Works, (German) Ausgewaelte Werke, Erster band, (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), p. 200.

^[5]I am hesitant and anxious about proposing it as my dissertation thesis.

^[6]A joke: If Marx had said, “Workers of the world, in God’s name unite!” then he may have been successful. He thought you had to be an atheist to be scientific. But atheism distorts science, and such a requirement is now recognized to be patently false.

^[7]William Lazareth, A Theology of Politics, (New York: Lutheran Church in America: Board of Social Ministry, 1965), 12.

^[8]Bernd Moeller, “The Reception of Luther in the Early Reformation,” A Lecture for the International Congress of Luther Research, Oslo, August 14-20, 1988. Helmar Junghans, ed., Luther Year Book, No 57:1990, p. 61-62.

^[9]Maximilian Lorenz Baeumer, Die Reformation als Revolution und Aufruhr, (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991).

^[10]From a Thomas A. Brady, Jr. lecture.

^[11]It certainly means the Omnipotent, the Pantocrator, but Luther openly derives this name of God from the Hebrew “Shad” for “breast.” Luther writes, “In this passage [Genesis 48:3], however, it has only one meaning, as though you were to speak of God as ‘the Nourisher,’ as the Greeks called Diana, ρολύμαστος (polymastos), ‘many-breasted,’ because she was the nurse of Asia and the whole world – the nurse who supplied nourishment for all living beings. And the name fits God alone; for He alone is the Nourisher, Sustainer, and Preserver of everything He has created. We have translated it with ‘God Almighty’” (LW 8, page 152 and WA XLIV:689-690).

^[12]Peter von Polenz, Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart,v. I, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), p. 277.

^[13]Isaiah 52:7. In Luther: Lecture to the Romans, edited by Wilhelm Pauck, (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1961), p. 300, Luther is really working with the “feet” of several other verses here but the “glad tidings” of the Isaiah passage definitely also fits his description. Luther is being very primitive: words must have feet for their sound to go fourth, and for them to trample people under, and but also very advanced ostensibly conceiving even linguistic acts: “This can be done only by the word.”

^[14]I am taking the liberty to interpret Luther here. He says, “The spoken word runs and therefore has feet, and they are the diction and sounds of the words.” Ibid.

^[15]Not to mention the many printing presses he kept humming and printers working.

^[16]Peter von Polenz, p. 252 and 278.

^[17]Gerald Strauss notes that it was “not unknown for a cardinal to hold three metropolitan and cathedral churches in commendam (enjoyment of the income from a benefice by someone who cannot or does not discharge the duties connected with it), and have ten abbeys, six priories and archdeaconates, and four parish churches as well.”  Manifestations, p. 51.

^[18]Gerald Strauss, p.50.

^[19]Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300, (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988), p. 25.

^[20]George Herbert Mead has an interesting discussion of caste, or in medieval terms: peasants, princes, or priests, separate estates versus functionalizing differences which would prevent “segmenting” society into such estates – “segmenting” is a term from Durkheim, with which Mead is probably familiar. See On Social Psychology, edited by Anselm Strauss, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 273. Lutherans also speak of the functionality of the distinction between the laity and pastor as opposed to the ontological, indelible mark of the priest.

^[21]Perhaps one could argue that industrialization is the secular internalization of monasticism. Weber’s immanent monasticism, or inner-worldly asceticism, may thus have found an outlet in England after the vacuum left by the dissolution of all the monasteries. Very problematic, historically, for this argument is that the Henrician dissolution took place between 1535-1540 and the Industrial Revolution, over two centuries later (1760-1780). From a sociological sense of time, which lies between that of biological evolution and historical development, it is a reasonable thesis. The connection is worth exploring.     Interestingly, Heinz Schilling cites Thomas Nipperdey’s concept of “interiorized transcendence” of work, family, nation, and revolution; and Schilling himself speaks of the “religious charging of the political and social realm,” by which he may well include the religious charging of the economic realm. In the same place he cites Gerhard Dilcher concerning “a kind of translation of ecclesiastical institutions and values into the non-ecclesiastical world.” Factory systems, needing colonial intake of raw materials and markets for international distribution of products, may well have been a secular resurrection of international monastic chains, but now ordered by economic doctrines. Heinz Schilling, “The Confessionalization of Church, State, and Society,” from Reinhard and Schilling, Die Katholische Konfessionalisierung, (Guetersloh und Muenster, 1995), in the last three pages. Brady Reader, Confessionalization in Europe ,

1550-1700, p. 34-35.

^[22]I refer to the Hunne Affair which scandalized England. A.G. Dickens, The English Reformation, Second Edition, (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p.114.

^[23]Lucien Febvre, The Religion of Rabelais: the Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 325ff.

^[24]Article VII of the Augsburg Confession, Book of Concord, p. 32. Freely cited.

^[25]G. Strauss, p.45-46: Jacob Wimpheling refers to these exorbitant fees. Total fees for the Archbishopric of Mainz came to about 20,000 gulden, and had to be paid again before a previous fee had been completely paid for.

Second Lecture

The Social Impact of Luther’s Teachings for Today

November 10, 1997 (Martin Luther’s Birthday)

It would be possible to present a very traditional introduction into some of Luther’s teachings: He was not a systematic theologian, because he was a doctor of the Old Testament, a professor who developed his theology from exegeting and studying Scripture. That is what composes his Word of God Theology, which firstly, is declared as justification by faith, alone. The effect of the Word, secondly, comes about in the distinction of the law and the gospel, God’s commands over against God’s promises. The civil use of the law creates order and checks evil outwardly, the theological use of the law drives us to Christ for life. And thirdly, the Word is always hidden in the flesh. This scandal is called the Theology of the Cross. It means far more than that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. The Theology of the Cross is a whole way of knowing and perceiving God’s way with us. In the last chapters of Genesis, Joseph receives the promise from God to become a king, and God fulfills it by having him sold down the river into Egyptian slavery. God’s good things are found under the cross.^[26]

But first of all, that kind of a presentation is not appropriate for a group that calls itself Concept 2000. And secondly, Prof. Robert Goeser from PLTS, is convinced that these terms like justification by faith, law and gospel, first, second, and third uses of the law, Theology of the Cross, have all become Lutheran slogans that prevent us from understanding their personal and social impact for today as well as what Luther really meant by them in yesteryear for his social and historical context. And Luther has subsequently been run through Scholasticism, Pietism, Rationalism, Liberalism – and some of these commentators even read some of his writings.

What can be accomplished in this short lecture? Let me tell about an interpretation of the Reformation as the first modern ideology, try to deal with the historical distortion entailed in the argument that the abuse of power which the Reformation took away from the church was merely handed over to the state. That misses the new attitude of the Reformation that attributed integrity to the secular realm and replaced monastic detachment with a new level of religious penetration of the world.^[27] Let me just touch upon studies that interpret Luther’s theology as a theology of liberation, and personal and social considerations involved with the complexity of change, and the problem of “completing” it. Finally I would like to end with three modern correlations of three of Luther’s teachings for today. That is a bit much, but if necessary we can finish next time.

Euan Cameron argues that the Reformation was the first modern ideology, here still a religious one. The Word of God Theology seems to fit nicely into that interpretation. The Reformation, he argues, took a core idea, like justification by faith, and subjected it to public debate, used it to test the validity and correctness of any religious act – whether public or elite, it still had to be in conformity to this teaching – and finally, by means of the core idea, it simplified religion by completely rebuilding the structures of Western Christianity. Catholics could of course leave the Middle Ages and popular pre-industrial world by other routes, but the Reformation gave large groups of people across Europe their first lesson in political commitment to a universal ideology.^[28]

There is an uncanny way the core idea of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin gave a unity to belief, teaching, religious practice, and social impact in the various realms their polemics influenced. The social impact is still controversial. In how so far the Reformation succeeded in redefining the state,^[29] is thinkable to some, but unthinkable to those historians who see the basic momentum in society coming from a class struggle, and see the Reformation playing right into the hands of the aristocracy which controlled both the church and the state, in their perspective. But Cameron seems to be on my side, when he notes that the Reformation took some countries out of the Middle Ages into Early Modern times. It took the medieval world to the threshold of the modern one.

To set this socio-economic class argument aside and to deal with the political argument against the Reformation: it only delivered the abuse of power from the church into the hands of the state. That seems to agree with my point that a kind of clericalism changed into a religious secularism. But what does that mean? I believe the Reformation brought a new foray of faith into the inner-worldly of secular realm. Weber and Troeltsch call it inner worldly asceticism. I noted Weber’s concept of immanent monasticism. An hypothesis might be investigated that the dissolution of the monasteries in England created a vacuum in which secular industrialization originated. (This is possible only if one is permitted to view the latter from a broader sociological, rather than purely historical, perspective.) But I consider it unfair to argue that the Reformation merely replaced higher clergy with a political elite.^[30] To be sure, the Reformers had to institutionalize and establish their religious beliefs and practices, or their work would have been extinguished and all but forgotten today.^[31] The political order of the day, left very much to be desired, but because of the Reformation religious conviction began to engage these economic, social, and political realities in a new way. Initiates faded and died in many places, but Holland and England show places where these initiatives blossomed, despite the Philip II of Spain, the Duke of Alba, and the Spanish Armada.

That perspective that finds the Reformation taking the power away from the church and playing right into the hands of the secular lords – misses something significant. From a Protestant view, of course, the other-worldliness, detachment, and escapism of monasticism^[32] was replaced by an inner-worldly vocational faith which Patrick Collinson called “centripetal.”^[33] Although he uses the word for Calvinism, it applies to Luther also, who wrote he wanted a theology “which goes to the meat of the nut, the kernel of the grain, and the marrow of the bone….”^[34] Luther experienced faith as a force that tended toward total involvement and engagement with the world. It is another paradigm altogether from detachment, distance, and objectivity where lineal logic is used to communicate to subjects outside each other. Luther’s dialectic penetrated to the inside, required a total immersion, way out over Luther’s head, an intimacy that massaged each nuance into more conviction and faith. Luther does not have a system so much as a language, a consciousness embodied in words, a dialectic with fluid concepts capable of transforming a great number of institutional structures.^[35] See the catalog that Steven Ozment draws up in terms of the religious institutions that the Reformation left behind: celibacy, monasticism, the Latin mass, canon law, five sacraments, papal and territorial episcopal government, etc.^[36] He notes that these were massive changes in the religious life-world of the people enfolded by the Reformation.

The political argument misses the significant point that the Reformation gave the secular its own integrity, and released it from external ecclesiastical trappings designed to create dependency to clerics who confused religious conviction with external ecclesiastical worldliness. The people of the Reformation felt violated by the canon law and the papacy. They wanted a more intrusive and deeper religious penetration of the world along with a commitment and responsibility for the matters of the world, a point of view from which monastic detachment seemed sinful.^[37] In other words, it was not the church that God so loved that He gave his only begotten Son, etc. Not the church reconciled to God in Christ, but the world, so loved and reconciled. Luther’s centripetal theological thrust intended to transform a medieval religious externalism into a religious internalism.

What a distortion to only avow that the Reformation merely replaced the higher clergy with a political elite! Martin Heckel notes that that misses the incarnational dimension,^[38] as well as the theory of vocation and office. Because of the internal dimension one can begin to speak of roles: the society in the role of the church, the society in the role of the state, and the society per se. Or think of a person in the role of a priest, in the role of a subject of a prince, and later of a citizen. That internal dimension and its religiously charged core is what the Reformation was about, and it is capable of any number of revolutions.

To us a religious secularism is an oxymoron. In those days it took faith out of abstract universals and moved it into concrete particulars…and the point is not to escape the particulars in the universal, but to go through and beyond the particular to the concrete universal.^[39]

I am engaging in an argument with those who read our problems with secularism, which are very real, back into those more clerical days. It cannot be argued that the Reformation represented a full blown social revolution. The problem of a top down versus a grass roots movement is very problematic, as is the failure to provide political structures in which the “common man” could have a voice. But the charge that the Reformation was incomplete needs much more thought and further distinction. A change of social structures can be as futile as a narrow focus on personal transformation alone. Talk of changing a system does not realize the exorbitant complexity of modern society, and even the society in the days of the Reformation. And it is an aberration to believe that an ideological change can bring completeness to a movement. Even should changes in social, economic, and political structures and personal transformation be accomplished, Weber notes that a moral challenge will still confront a real person, and no change will take away the challenge to the person to respond humanly, for the good and not evil.^[40] No revolution can relieve people from responsibility. There is no system given whereby we must be saved,^[41] although some can prevent very much human fulfillment because of their injustice.

For example, using Emile Durkheim’s theories, we could try to bolster some intermediate commission between communities and corporations. They represent sheer social anarchy, because no conscious human agency is directing them nor does such an agency provide a watershed of information for them.^[42] He argues that the government should not take this role, because it would be corrupted by it. And these commissions should not dominate business, but be a head to that dynamic body, so to speak. Such a conscious center could begin to address the social distress concomitant with great economic changes over which the many who are affected have no control.

Such a democratic economic structure might be helpful, but in no sense would it be complete without people responding to their convictions, their religious calling that bids them choose life even at the cost of it, should they need to stand because they can do no other.

I submit that Luther did set a religious revolution into motion. Several authors in face of Luther’s cry for the “Freedom of the Christian Person,” try to ascertain in how so far Luther is doing liberation theology.^[43] Some of the similarities between Luther’s theology and liberation theology are striking. Luther’s theology is occasional, (working with a concrete historical situation rather than realities in general). Thus it does not become guilty of universal assertions proscribing “the” reality, the way many dominant western systematic theologies do. (In his Table Talks, Luther said, “The doctors try to make me a fixed star, while I am a [wandering] planet!”)^[44]. Like liberation theology, Luther was trying to overcome structural oppression, more particularly, that of the church. But much of the injustice of the day was rooted precisely in the clericalism of the church. The character of Luther’s theology was not systematic but dialectical. The hierarchy of concepts entailing systematic theology grasps and dominates and controls, while Luther’s dialectic attempts to be drawn into the divine Word, be grasped by it, surrender to it, and become part of its dynamic movement for social change. Luther’s theology also centers around St. Paul’s Galatians “Manifest of Christian Freedom.”^[45] To bring up his Bondage of the Will, fails to understand that in his dialectics, bondage before God (coram deo) means freedom among people (coram hominibus), while freedom before God, brings bondage on the horizontal plane. Beyond liberation theology, Luther’s theology is also performative, in the sense of using language to bring social change. I concur with a Lutheran Marxist speaking to clergy in Berlin in the early seventies: Luther did not merely want to reform theology and personal lives. The title of his work read: “An Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation concerning the Betterment of the Christian Estate.”^[46] And perhaps he gave us some guidelines helpful for even today.

Let me touch upon three teachings of Luther for which I would like to present correlations that impact our society today. Of course I am not being traditional. I should take the time to explain what his teaching are in the first place. But here is my excuse: these lectures are for Concept 2000. I would like to show how the theory of Juergen Habermas concerning the life-world against the encroachments of the economic and political systems is a very sophisticated two kingdom theory for today. Secondly, consider a dialectical internalism of the different fora, (the plural of forum in Latin). And thirdly, let me explain how justification by faith works in our social and economic situation today.

I

Justification by Grace versus Works-Righteousness

Listening to Public Radio makes me feel guilty because I have not contributed as I should. 94.1 FM featured three women psychotherapists speaking about shame and poverty in America. They noted that our social classes were shame based, and this shame represented a very destructive force in our society. Having just studied Luther’s attempt to relegate the congruent and condign merits of Scholastic theology to oblivion, when they started talking about the myth of meritocracy in our society, my ears perked up. Luther would not grant that some had merit and others not, but everybody equally needed to look up to Christ for grace. Suddenly I realized that Judith Jordan, Jean Baker Miller, and Janet Surrey working from the Stone Center in Massachusetts, were speaking about an inner-worldly justification by faith.

In our society, if you are rich, you are considered intelligent, industrious, and virtuous. And you certainly deserve the millions that you get, especially if you are a C.E.O. taking your ship through troubled waters. You are a one man show, and thousands of workers depend on your decisions in the empire of your multi-national global corporation.

Now if you are poor you should be ashamed of yourself. Poverty is a crime per se. You have no merit, no validity. You are lazy, stupid, immoral, or worse. You must want to be poor or you wouldn’t be. You deserve a life that is nasty, brutish, and short. (I got carried away. They stopped slightly short of that.)

Those remarks are rather harsh – but they reflect the climate in these days in our country, sometimes, quite faithfully. And this attitude is completely without grace – as you notice, I selected that word carefully.

Because not only is God insulted by those who discount divine grace, but this ideology is highly deceptive, and designed to control people and exploit them, who can never stop working, but who also find no security through working. They know they could be downsized tomorrow no matter how hard they work. (That is the failure of works-righteousness in a new sense.)

What a deception! That the C.E.O. accomplishes something does not preclude that the real initiatives are actually taken elsewhere in the company, and he merely receives the credit for them, the way Hoover got the blame for the depression. Perhaps some democratization could be introduced into a corporation, because after all, it is not a ship, but may be a community of sorts, even if it is instrumental. But further, many rich people have climbed over dead bodies to have the power they do, and a virtuous billionaire may be an oxymoron. Most often you hear about vipers in a viper pit in their board meetings. And in how so far does one deserve an inheritance of great wealth just because one was born into a rich family? And what makes such a person intelligent? Or look at a homemaker. Not a popular job these days! Job. Who ever got paid for it? “Do you work?”

“No. I only raise the children, and run the household, do all the cooking, wash, and cleaning. I do not work.”

What is wrong with this picture?

Thus with St. Paul and Luther we have to conclude that we are justified by grace through faith. It is a gift of God, and not attained by our work, and thus no one can boast economically or theologically. That we are all sinners who have fallen short of the glory of God gives a commonality to the C.E.O. as well as the most humble homemaker, and the hierarchical walls in the corporation, the class walls in our society, held up by the myth of merit, have to fall. All of us stand equally before God in the need of grace. (Note that I am aware that in the systems we do have an opposing principle, the principle of justification by work. But this instrumentality cannot colonize the life-world, where human relationships obtain, and persons are not a means to an end, but are all ends in themselves. (Kant)

Interestingly enough Judith Jordan argues that shame is designed to silence people and take away their voice, make them silent. She distinguishes guilt from shame in that the latter comes from involuntary action, while the former stems from voluntary acts of commission or omission against our conscience. Shame assaults our very being!^[47] Here she provides Luther with some modern language to explain his passive stance before God who refashions his very being, dressing it in a new integrity, the righteousness of Christ, thus overcoming all guilt (proper sin) and shame (original sin), and giving the person a new voice. “I saw the gates of heaven open, and a whole new face of the Scriptures! The righteousness of Christ is that by which he makes us righteous.”^[48] We become the good trees who bear good fruit. When those who control us shame us they lock us out of relationship, take away our own ability to trust that we have a say so over our own reality. They want to silence all other voices so that their dominant reality becomes the reality.^[49] And all voices are reduced to silence by shame, and one C.E.O. has thousands depending upon him for their livelihoods.

II

Uncoupling of the Systems and Colonizing the Life Word

Habermas has been called one of the two greatest sociologists in the world today, along with Pierre Bourdieu. In his theory about the life-world and the two systems of today, I see a sophisticated two kingdom theory, one so very misunderstood today. He argues that the life-world is based on communication, agreement, and consensus. The economic and political systems require instrumental rationality for the sake of control. In his theory situations are embedded in broader “horizons” which are in turn grounded in the life-world.

From a linguistic angle, “communicative actors always move within the horizon of their life‑world” ‑‑ a life‑world which now can be defined as “a culturally transmitted and a linguistically organized reservoir of meaning patterns.”^[50]

The added complexity of this definition need not detain us now. But everyday praxis yields three life‑world spheres: 1/ culture 2/ society 3/ personality.

Where culture denotes a reservoir of shared knowledge and pre‑interpretations, society a fabric of normative rules, and personality a set of faculties or “competences” enabling an individual to speak and to act.^[51]

Modernization, roughly, is the replacement of implicit by explicit meaning patterns.

When Luther speaks of being able to distinguish the law from the gospel, and notes how the devil wants to confuse the kingdoms in order to destroy the creation, Habermas speaks about the colonization of the life-world by the systems. Modernization does not entirely coincide with the differentiation of communicative structures or components for Habermas, according to Dallmayr, because material production cannot be discounted. Long range social development involves not only the internal diversification of life‑world components but also the growing segregation of symbolic‑communicative patterns from productive endeavors governed by standards of technical efficiency.  This is a process which can be described as an “uncoupling” of the systems and the life‑world, to use difficult Habermasian language, needing more explanation: Once systems are no longer merely coordinated with communicative patterns but begin to invade and subdue these communicative patterns of the life-world, then the uncoupling of the systems and life‑world is converted into the direct “colonization of the life‑world.” That means it is subjugated to alien standards of technical control.^[52] The life world begins to be eclipsed and absorbed in instrumental rationality, making persons become means to political and economic ends not in their interest, nor under their control. A climate of communal agreement is necessary in the life‑world, whereas systemic imperatives prevail in the systems. In the life-world, force [in the sense of coercion] and discourse cannot be connected. The life-world is at no one’s disposal. As the higher value it needs to be guarded from the systems.^[53]

Habermas can be used to see the marketplace colonizing the academy, basic information, and news, entertainment, government. Does a university turn out products? Are we products who have to sell ourselves? Have things become ends in themselves, and human beings become disposable? That resembles, I submit, in modern social theory, the evil wreaked by the confusion of the two kingdoms, according to the theory of Luther.

III

Life before the Eyes of Others, Oneself, and God

The third helpful corollary for today from Luther’s theology concerns the coram deo, hominibus, meipso, and mundi fora, each a different internal personal stance. On my own journey becoming a person in some quite difficult inner‑city ministry, I came to the conviction that ultimately I am not the person others see me to be, nor the one I think I am, but the person God calls me to be, the person God calls into existence. Thus I cannot give others the power to define my identity, nor feel that my self‑definition is the last word. Who I am is defined by the Word of God.

Gerhard Ebeling presents Luther’s extensively developed fora,^[54] and, surprisingly enough, Luther’s thought takes my undeveloped schema much farther. The fora also explain Luther’s virtuosity of simultaneously held inner roles, and his nuanced dialectic, which is capable of thinking out of these various positions and the mutual relations they presuppose.

Coram deo is standing before God, in the sight of God; coram hominibus is the forum in the sight of others; coram meipso, standing before myself, myself in my own eyes; and coram mundi is my image, my public image in the world. Turning one’s back to others, on one stage, is required in order to turn toward God and live one’s life in God’s sight, before the face God, coram deo, the higher stage. Living in God’s sight we have conscience, because when God looks at us with disfavor, we know we have done wrong. This conscience relativizes the “looks” we get from others or even the esteem we hold ourselves in. To live in the definition of others and in the sight of others, in the sense of becoming determined by them, e.g., “keeping up with the Jones’” or “What will the neighbors think?” is a life lived with one’s back toward God. One might think that having the privileged inner perception into one’s own self, would give one a real advantage in self knowledge. But truthfully, we are as ignorant of ourselves (in self‑knowledge) as we are blind to the character of others, until coram deo, we begin to see and know ourselves, even the way God knows us.^[55] It is God who knows our naked self as we really are, and God who accepts us as we are, before we can accept ourselves. And it is quite a harrowing experience, if a great disjuncture exists between our ideal self and our actual very inadequate and unacceptable self.

Now these fora are all simultaneously within us, and one is in the foreground while another is in the background, or one is dominant, while another is secondary, or we focus on one and not  the other. Some persons are determined or defined by other persons; they find their existence in the sight of another or others, in this parlance. Bismarck, the German chancellor, is said to have been quite the opposite. He had such a strong sense of identity in his own eyes, that when the Reichstag went into an uproar, shouting and remonstrating about the shamelessness of his statements, he would calmly take out a news paper and read it until they became quiet, then continue his speech where he had left off.

With these fora Luther opened a new internal personal and social dimension. To repeat, as internal stands or places, they are not mutually exclusive, in the sense that one can be in only one forum at a time. A person can have all the fora in mind at once and be reacting differently for each. Sometimes “turning around” means coram hominibus has to be excluded for coram deo, but because of that, the right relationship, value, and perspective will obtain in coram hominibus, as well as in the other fora, meipso, et mundi.

Whether Luther inherited these categories or invented them himself, I do not know. Luther was a great scholar, and often because we first encounter ideas reading his work, we think he invented them. But whether he coined these fora or not, he certainly put his own stamp on them by his meditative insight of (what I call) his depth theology. The relationality and mutuality these categories bring to his thought are very helpful for today, when disconnection dissolves relationships and communities. The fora require nuanced dialectics, which speak within to those who are becoming involved. Linear logical and non‑dialectical thinking, however, is required for those on the outside, who still try to understand what they still deem external to themselves.

^[26]Wilhelm Pauck, Luther: Lectures on Romans, p. 300.

^[27]Again, in a letter from Prof. Scott Hendrix, I am reminded that Asecular@ here does not refer to an autonomous non-religious realm, which the word certainly brings to mind in its meaning today. Prof. Hendrix felt that for Luther and Melanchthon such a secular society, outside of corpus christanum, was still unthinkable. Thus perhaps the word could be understood in the Roman Catholic sense of a Asecular@ priest among the lay people, as opposed to a regular one detached from them. Thus in the same way a Asecular@ society as opposed to a Aregular@ society in the ecclesiastical sense of the terms could help sharpen the definition. Prof. Hendrix=s suggestion of the term Adeclericalized society@ still leaves the clergy in too predominant a role.

^[28]Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 422. Note the scope of the social change here. There is a school of sociologists who hold that the modern rise of Europe and its dominant position in the cultures of the world was achieved because of the break-through of the revolution of the Reformation, or more precisely, that central political and ecclesiastical power bungled defeating it.

^[29]The power of definition can be very great or seem to have little relevance. Luther relegated the competence of the state to property and bodies as externals, and it was to be excluded from spiritual and religious matters, those matters that pertained to the soul and the internal. Luther defined and delimited the state theologically and distinguished it from the church. That certainly did not democratize his Saxon principality, but, in any case, he did not allow the state to define the church. Problematically, in the course of history that ensued, he could not enforce his definition on the state and exclude it from religious matters.

^[30]Steven Ozment, Age of the Reformation 1250-1550, (New Haven: Yale University Press,1980), p. 436.

^[31]In the Question and Answer period of his October 30, 1997 Lecture at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Heiko Oberman hammered this point home. He listed many names of reformers, some of them martyred, whom no one remembers, because their theology was not established, and have been almost completely forgotten.      Without achieving some political niche and juridical inroads, a reformer willynilly becomes one of Troeltsche=s individual mystics who cannot leave a lasting social structure behind.

^[32]Ozment, Age of the Reformation, p. 262.

^[33]Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church and English Society 1559-1625, (Oxford: Carendon Press, 1982),

p. 181-2.

^[34]Gerhard Ebeling, Lutherstudien,vol. III, (Tübingen: J.C.B.Mohr, 1985), inside frontal page.

^[35]Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classification, (the University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 6. They are speaking of mythological consciousness, but Luther=s dialectic changed social forms one into another Awith a more or less complete absence of definite concepts.@

^[36]Ozment, Age of the Reformation, p. 435.

^[37]Martin Heckel, Das Problem der ASaekularisation@ in der Ref,@ in Irene Crusius, Saekularisation geistlicher Institutionen in 16. Und 18./19. Jahrhundert. , p. 45.

^[38]Ibid., p. 36.

^[39]Judith Jordan writes: Awe move past the particular to join in a place of commonality.@ Women=s Growth in Diversity: More Writings from the Stone Center, (New York: Guilford Press, 1997), p. 144. N. Berdyaev sees the universal in the particular. AThe age-long dispute between the nominalists and the realists reveals an insufficient grasp of the mystery of the particular.@ The Meaning of History, (New York: Meridian Books, the World Publishing Company, 1968),p. 25. If Luther had a philosophical bent of mind, and he didn=t, he would see it in, with, under and through the particular.

^[40]Max Weber, Soziologie, Weltgeschichtliche Analysen, Politik, (Stuttgart: Alfred Kroener Verlag, 1968), p. 188. Weber first instigated many of my thoughts here.

^[41]From St Paul and Acts I have conflated two verses as the basis for this statement. AThere is no law given whereby we must be saved.@ from AIf a law had been given which could make alive, then righteousness would indeed be by the law.@ Galatians 3:21b. And Athere is no other name under heaven given whereby we must be saved.@ Acts 412b. I searched and searched Scriptures for the first verse here, but it must be my own conflation of the former and latter verses.

^[42]Syndicalism may have already been tried in France, but it may still throw light on different aspects of this issue.

^[43]Walter Altman Luther and Liberation: a Latin American Perspective , (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992) and Richard Shaull, The Reformation and Liberation Theology, (Westminister: John Knox Press, 1991).

^[44]WATR 5, No. 5378. (Fifth Volume of the Weimar Edition of the Table Talks).

^[45]As a manifesto, the AFreedom of a Christian@ should not be related to the Bondage of the Will, but to the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, written just before it in 1520. The Bondage of the Will was written five years later.

^[46]LW, vol. 44, p. 115.

^[47]Judith Jordan, Women=s Growth in Diversity, p. 157.

^[48]Wilhelm Pauck, Luther: Lectures on Romans, p. xxxvi,

or WA 54, 179-187.

^[49]Judith Jordan, Women=s Growth in Diversity, p. 150.

^[50]Fred R. Dallmayr, “Life‑World and Communicative Action,” Working Paper #20 ‑ Scott Mainwaring, editor, (University of Notre Dame, Helen Kellogg Institute, June 1984), p. 14.

^[51]Ibid., p. 15.

^[52]Ibid., p. 16‑17.

^[53]Ibid., p. 15‑17. These short descriptions have been gleaned from the concise pages of E.R. Dallmayr’s study.

^[54]Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: an Introduction to His Thought, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), chapter 12, pages 192-209.

^[55]1 Corinthians 13:12b.

Lecture III

The Impact of Language on Society

Revision of Original (12/23/1997)

What is the impact of language on society, and what role does language play in social change? Although Jürgen Habermas calls language the medium of the life-world, the way money and power are the media of the economic and political systems respectively, can language be so powerful to play a role in changing the systems as well? Robert Bellah notes that people have often tried to bring the world closer to the life-world by making it a more human place, and they have tried to do so through language,

because on the whole they do not have a great deal of worldly power, but only the words they speak. But through the words they speak and the practices they inaugurate, they create community.^[56]

In this way Bellah supports the controversial position I am taking: language can change society. But even if I do not want to short change the media of money and power, I believe the role language plays needs more focused attention, and could reward such analysis and investigation in helping to understand how it is involved in societal change. To discount what Emile Durkheim calls the linguistic culture would be a mistake.^[57] He places it along-side of the scientific and historical cultures. If a historicization of totality brings reward, introducing evolution into the study of nature and biology, for example; and the scientific examination of totality also brings untold benefit, then despite the reductionism involved, the investigation of the linguistic totality might also bring reward. Reality is more than the verbalization of it. Thus what role does language play in social change and personal growth?

Language is a very complex phenomenon, and it is easy to become overwhelmed by its complexities. One can move from grammar to logic to linguistics to the philosophy of language. In the latter case, one may delve into J.L. Austin and John Searle’s speech-act theory, especially as it concerns performative language. But all these subjects cannot be dealt with in this short lecture, even if I have expanded it.^[58] Within the given limitations here, it will be possible only to mention some insights and observations first in an analytical regard, and then move toward the performative and how it relates to Luther’s peculiar sense of language and his Word of God Theology.  Hopefully this newer insight into language will depict reasons why Luther’s language introduced a world-changing momentum into early modern history.

To begin with an observation: one can look up the word “thing” in any dictionary, but seldom is its derivation known. Of course, it is as useful and recurrent a word as one that teachers have militated against,^[59] because it is allegedly empty. But a “thing” was an Icelandic or Scandinavian legislative assembly, analogous to a German “diet” or a Russian “duma.” And “things” were the matters considered and the decisions handed down.^[60] In German the spelling is “Ding.” Thus the word is like a fossil in our language, quite certainly overused as a word to avoid thought, but unbeknownst to school teachers, it has quite an important history.

But another observation about the word is intriguing. Its meaning extends from an object of consciousness to a form of personal or social being. There are many examples,^[61] but it is like the word “system:” one may speak of a philosophical and social system. A Thing is an ancient German assembly or group, and “things” are objects of thought in the emblem of the group. Perhaps the extension of meaning from the group to the thought emblem was first unconscious. But in some cases a conscious extension then went back from the thought emblem to the group, in the word “system” for example. A social system is a very late achievement in thought, while philosophical systems are early, and the latter’s derivation from the former is unconscious.

Although Durkheim and Marcel Mauss in Primitive Classification, do not deal with words but with logic, they add light to this peculiar extension. They find that social distinction had much to do with thought distinctions and a “close link and not an accidental one [exists] between the social system and the logical system.^“[62] Ideas are organized on a model furnished by the society.^[63] Thought is like the abstraction of the social, and society is like the concretion of thought. But to speak about thought is abstract. The concrete word and the spoken or written language need to be placed as the mediating agent between the thought emblem and the personal or social being and the process of abstraction or concretion involved. The way almost everything can be turned into money and money can be converted into almost anything again, so language can absorb the world and then reissue it, or extend it back into social reality again.^[64]

Thus for Luther it was a very important move to change the basic paradigm of the medieval ecclesiastical world from Church and sacrament, or even priest and sacrament to Word and sacrament. Luther began what Weber later called a religious form of rationalization in his Word of God Theology. In order to instigate change, the social reality of the church and the personal reality of the priest was not fundamental, but the word was. Luther held that the word was not the creature of the church, but the church was the creature of the word.^[65] Luther took back the social institution and reality of the church to its basic building block, the word. Not the abstract idea having been  stripped down and disembodied from the concrete word, but the word as a social organic building block, in the physicality of its sound. In addition, Luther did not mean words denuded of power, but a word of command that destroyed to create anew.^[66]

John Searle brings other evidence to support this executive mode of language. He describes language itself as a social institution, broadly speaking.^[67] And some language is peculiar in that it does not “match the world,” but the world matches it. Such language does not first of all have a true or false proposition, but makes its proposition true. Scattered through his books, Searle has many places where he refers to this characteristic of performative language.^[68]

Searle never enters into the dynamic logic of change brought by language, but he does for it an analytic service. Not only does he describe language broadly as a social institution, but it is a crucial component of all social institutions. In a recent study he opposes the sociological concept of “the social construction of reality” with the linguistic construction of social reality.^[69] What seems to be a nuance is much more than a slight shift. It is a move from sociology to linguistics, marking the latter as crucial. His shift resembles Luther’s from the church and the hierarchy to the word. Luther’s faith involves personal, social, and even divine forces initiating movement. But Searle seems to analyze language in a great social and institutional stasis, even if his analysis is replete with the give and take of conversation. I also imagine Searle would be averse to dialectical logic. These basic differences between the two thinkers obscure the similarity of their positions, but Luther went from the ecclesiastical construction of reality, i.e., by the Church, to the linguistic construction of the reality of the church. He reverted to words as the basic linguistic building blocks of the social reality of the church, i.e., the church is where the Gospel is purely proclaimed and the sacraments are rightly administered (Art. VII of the Augsburg Confession).

Searle argues that all institutions, including language, operate by constitutive rules, and the simple linguistic rule that supplies the formula which constructs social realities is “X counts as Y in context C.” e.g., a package of cigarettes (X) counts as money (Y) in the collapse of public confidence in the Russian currency (C).^[70] We will not detain ourselves further with Searle’s analytical theory here. But he gives some support to the basic argument of these lectures. If language escapes a static and abstract logic and enters a dynamic, concrete, dialectical logic, then it becomes the demolition, reconstruction, and emergent source of all social institutions.

Turning to the characterization of Luther’s Theology: according to Prof. Robert Goeser of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Luther’s theology or language is occasional and performative. Because the former is a technical term and the latter is controversial, some explanation is necessary.

By “occasional” Goeser meant that Luther’s theology was non-systematic.^[71] Luther reacted to issues in each occasion of crisis with a theology derived from Biblical study. Systematic thinking seizes a measure of control and necessitates some detachment. But Luther is centripetal. He himself becomes totally involved in the crisis. He becomes seized, grasped, and moved by his language-like theology. Drawn in he becomes moved and acted upon, rather than acting.^[72]

Secondly, that Luther’s theology is performative should not be controversial. To say that performativity is merely a technical designation for a trivial class of speech acts is misguided. Searle can give this impression. But his last article about “How Performatives Work” corrects and criticizes his own previous analysis and description of the inner working of performatives.^[73] In this definitive work on performatives, he notes that the performative utterance is both self-referential and executive.^[74] An event is achieved by way of making an utterance. A particular class of actions are carried out by the mere manifestation of the intention in the utterance. Although an assertion takes some commitment to the truth-value it is saying, a performative also bears the obligation for the intention to do an action named by the verb. And in the central thesis of his essay, Searle argues convincingly that assertions are derived from performatives and not conversely.^[75] These descriptions of the performative do not seem to relegate it to the trivial.

But in a peculiar way, performatives are often considered earth-shaking in importance, and then almost in the same breath, felt to be of disappointing significance.

In How to do Things with Words J. L. Austin first feels he has made a powerful discovery by isolating performatives, and then apologizes for the very technical and trivial examples he offers.^[76] After his definitive article on performatives of 1989, Searle continues his independent work in The Construction of Social Reality in 1995 presenting them as not at all trivial.^[77]

While reading J.L Austin’s How to do Things with Words,  a funny thought came to my mind: “There seems to be something wrong from the beginning to the very end of this!” A looseness of thinking can unfortunately accompany the elusiveness of ordinary language.

Such a looseness of thinking can hardly be ascribed to John Searle, however. Although even Searle first made do with a very inadequate, not to say misleading, analysis of the linguistic act called the performative.^[78] When he finally comes to terms with it in “How the Performative Works” he discovers it to be self-referential and executive. These features do not seem trivial. And if a taxonomy of performative verbs is worked out, then they would include many very crucial to theology: promise, command, baptize, name, marry, confirm, etc.

Permit one more observation in this digression which has been trying to refute the argument of the triviality of performatives and that they are merely a technical class of verbs in language. Perhaps it is only loosely related to this subject: but when focusing on what language is referring to, language almost vanishes from consciousness. When focusing on language itself, what it is referring to vanishes. One can dissect the performative oblivious to the personal, social, cultural, and religious role it plays in language events. When Searle finally comes to the surprising result that performative verbs have no common semantic property that marks them and sets them off from others, that any verb which names the intentional action can be uttered performatively,^[79] then he finds that performativity reflects how the world works, and not how a small class of verbs work.   Theologically this insight is significant, because how God works in the world through language can thus be perceived by the faithful. God is not only executive, but also self-referential. (“I am who I am.” is self-referential.) God works through language, and does not need to choose only those verbs which name an intention and are simultaneously capable of being an act. God creates out of nothing, but via the Word.

Now let us return from this excursion and attempt to characterize Luther’s theology. Whether promises are highly regarded in Protestant culture, as John Searle observed among Oxford professors,^[80] or a promise is merely considered a verb from one technical class of speech acts; it is a promise, and it is one of the earliest performatives discovered, and it still brings home the telling point: “to speak about a promise is not the same as making one.” Now those versed in Luther’s theology know how Luther identified the Gospel itself with God’s promise. Luther discovered that the Gospel was also present in the Old Testament in the form of the promises of God, and that actually, even in the New Testament the word, “Gospel” is interchangeable with “promise.” Even the word, “evangelical” derives from the word for Gospel in Greek, and thus the preponderance of the performative can be seen in Luther’s as well as other Protestant theology. Now the Law and the Gospel is the dialectic with Luther’s “key-signature.” But Luther uses the terms “command and promise” as well as “law and Gospel.”^[81] That Luther’s writing is not so much literary as it is recorded speech makes his theology even more intensely performative. In addition, in his writing he addresses the reader with direct speech dialogue, encountering the reader with a dialectic of performative speech acts. Thus there can be no question that Luther is operating with a performative mode of language and speech.

The question now revolves around whether it is deceptive to hold that this language induces social systemic change; whether that kind of power really inheres in language. The question about God acting in the world via language is an additional consideration for those who believe in God. Luther, of course, certainly champions this controversial conviction.

II

Luther’s language “takes in the reader.” In one sense that can mean that the reader is deceived, or taken to a place where another leads, even against the reader’s interest. But one can also be taken into the immanent dimension as opposed to speaking to another outside, worlds communicating outside one another. The latter requires a linear logic, while the former uses a dialectical one. But when language takes the reader in, then it can also mean that it  absorbs the reader, strikes home, moves the heart, and gets into the inmost heart, the very center of the whole responsible self.^[82] The person is moved but is also carried in a larger movement.

Luther writes, and he must also have spoken, in an executive mode of language. His words ended institutions and traditions that had existed for many centuries, in some cases, for over a millennium: monasteries, clergy celibacy, ecclesiastical courts, canon law, cult of the saints, purgatory, the Latin mass, etc. In a study that tries to argue for the similarity between the English and the German Reformations in respect to the lack of a rural following, C. Scott Dixon unwittingly illustrates the executive mode of Luther’s writings. (And note that in his writings, Luther always takes a stand.) Since marriage was lacking in its Scriptural basis for being a sacrament, Dixon explains, Luther emphasized its earthly estate: “In one fell swoop, centuries of ecclesiastical law amounted to nothing. Luther’s reinterpretation of marriage thus suspended the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, but no similar institution emerged in the Lutheran lands as a replacement.”^[83]

Where did Luther derive the authority to suspend the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts? From my point of view it needs to be explained paradoxically. Luther always spoke of the Word of God, and was an extremist for the eternal, and that brought proximate changes. If one was not in touch with the ultimate, no proximate change was possible, none that was an improvement, according to Luther, in any case. Human change need not mean improvement. Indeed it might make matters worse.^[84] With that in mind, this study takes seriously Luther’s stand on the Word of God and the language of God. Because Luther was an extremist for the eternal, social changes became rampant in the Reformation, changes or reforms that the church had struggled with for centuries but had found itself impotent to accomplish.^[85]

Luther has often been represented as taking religion from superficial externalism into genuine internalism, as religion that placed a total claim upon the person, becoming a matter of the inmost heart. This move sets people into motion. It is the escape from the centrifugal detachment into the centripetal involvement mentioned earlier. In an earlier version of this lecture I entitled it, “Getting into It.”

Luther is into another form of knowing by means of inner involvement. Thus he goes “within”  a “world” which is not simply his to manipulate, but in which language (or creative art) takes hold of him at the deepest level. Those who stand outside the “world,” created by a work of art, for example, are never seized by its reality. They view it as a mere object of scrutiny, or source of theoretical concepts. Wittgenstein draws a contrast between interpreting something “from the outside” and entering into something as a participant. “It’s as if…we looked at a picture so as to enter into it and the objects in it surrounded us like real ones; and then we stepped back, and were now outside it; we saw the frame, and the picture was a painted surface.”^[86]

Wittgenstein helps understand the movement Luther engages in. If one looks at a painting from a detached and distant perspective, one is a subject looking at an object. One does not get beyond the externals of the picture. In such an “Erasmian perspective of disinterest,” if I may coin such a phrase, the viewer is abstracted out. Manipulation, instrumentality, and scientific observation can be associated with such centrifugal abstraction. But when the “world” of the picture is entered, the frame disappears, the space within opens up, and the objects within the picture act upon the viewer. A subject-object reversal takes place.

III

The Dialectical Style of Thought

Several times already I have noted the difference between dialectical and linear logical thought. Dialectical thought moves by a different logic from that logic which is very much controlled by the principle of non-contradiction. The logic of dialectical thought is dynamic and is a logic of life, of concrete living thought, and of social movement and development. Dialectics open the world from within, while the detachment of linear thought, which is often static, communicates between two subjects outside one another.

Gerard E. Caspary takes a very close look at medieval dialectics when he makes a contrast between two styles of thought. He calls them sequential and symbolic, but these styles or “grammars of thought,” as he calls them, have a family resemblance to what we have been distinguishing in Luther’s theology before. Sequential thought is objective, linear, causal, and very much controlled by the law of non-contradiction. The grammar of circular or dialectical thought does not function by the exclusiveness of contradiction, because there are so many shades and nuances between positively or negatively charged polar concepts when they are kept in tension. In the life of an organic logic, the reverberation and oscillation of dyadic terms in the dialectic are endangered by a collapse into a false unity (identity), or an exclusive isolation into externals, which forfeit relationship and violate the commonality they share.^[87]

Examples of the charged dyads he is speaking about are Church and world, Old Testament and New, spirit and flesh, letter and spirit, law and grace, etc. Now the term “world” has a positive charge if it is “the world that God so loved,” while it has a negative charge when we read, “keep yourself untarnished by the ‘world.’” These very basic polar terms can generate new dyads in their own image, pairs which are not at all arbitrary. The “Church and world” can generate the “Church and state” dyad and the “clergy and laity” one, that St. Paul, for example, may never have thought about.^[88] Caspary notes that there may be a sharp distinction between Jew and Gentile, but “what could be more incongruous than a God that becomes man and dies an ignominious death of the Cross or a Jew whose message is ultimately accepted by the Gentiles?”^[89] Certainly, it is only a dynamic and dialectical logic which has the capacity to think meaningfully in such concrete and contradictory historical realities.

In the grammar of dialectical thought, some words have positive and some have negative charges, and may be reversible, partially reversible, or they may be out in the unassimilated non-dialectical pairs: God and the devil, for an example of the latter. Genuine dialectical pairs echo or reverberate in a network of thought.

Caspary identifies four parameters which balance, reconcile, and exert forces on the polar terms of the dyads. He devised a schema depicting the various regions of what he calls the symbolic, and we call the dialectical, style of thought. The dyads, or the polar terms, climb the schema through four parameters, if their movement is centripetal. He likes to call these parameters the rungs of “Jacob’s Ladder.” The dialectical pairs ascend through these parameters or rungs of the ladder toward unity or descend toward antithesis.

These four parameters are of different kinds and exert either centripetal or centrifugal forces on the dialectical pairs moving in their polar tension. He defines the first parameter as one of ethical polarization, in which the flesh and the spirit, the Old and New Dispensation are opposed to each other as good and bad. This rung of the ladder is balanced by that of hierarchical subordination. These parameters or rungs of the ladder through which polar terms ascend or descend exert a centrifugal pull on the moving terms. These parameters ensure against a false unity, on the one hand, and a loss of unity, on the other, and also insure that newly generated dialectical pairs remain in the archetypical pattern.

The third and fourth parameters are centripetal. The third opposes the inner to the outer and is more complex. Now flesh and spirit are not only opposed to each other as bad and good, inferior and superior, but also as the sign to the thing signified, the shadow to reality, the envelope to the inner life.^[90] The inner is closer to the governing center than the outer. This concentric parameter is more basic and explains the two previous linear parameters, especially because the inner and outer already presume a center, a governing geometrical point. The fourth parameter is also centripetal involving time or the temporal, the old versus the new. Here two principles of time oppose each other, which ascertain that, what is earlier, e.g., the Old Testament, or the flesh, and superior, ends up becoming inferior to the New or the young, and the spirit. Caspary points to a reversal taking place in which natural order and natural time becomes reversed by the eternal. What is chronologically before becomes logically after, a principle that Hegel often invokes. What comes afterward precedes what came before it. E.g., spirit and flesh, New Testament and Old. Thus the New becomes superior to the Old, the spirit prior to the flesh. “Amen, amen, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am!” (John 8: 58)

The Symbolic Style of Thought in Caspary’s Schema^[91]

Please note that I had to scan in the diagram; it would not come in. Some of the words in it follow:

Centripetal forces

Tending toward unity

(Collapsed terms are             Four Parameters or

Monophysite.          Jacob’s Ladder with four rungs

Concentric,

Reconciling, IV___    ___ IV Temporal Parameter

and

Centripetal. III ____     ____ III Inner/Outer

Dialectical Region—–Complementary Region

Centrifugal forces II _____        _____ II Hierarchical

First rung  I   _______             ______ I Ethical

Antithetical Region_____Polar Antithesis Non-dialectical

E.g., Light                               Darkness

Good ___________      Exclusion  ____________     Evil

of opposites (my label)

(Loss of tension between terms: Manichean dualism)

Centripetal    ¸   forces or pulls

Centrifugal    ¸   forces or pulls

Now in the ascent upward into a kind of mutual indwelling,  the centripetal forces are overcoming the centrifugal ones, and the shades and nuances of thought within communication are taking place among those who share common assumptions. In sequential thought which is using a formal logic, the law of contradiction is gaining force, and challenges the dialectical grammar of thought with an opposing one. These two styles of thought seem to need each other, and become dominant in intervals. A revolution of thought in the early part of the High Middle Ages replaced a symbolic style of thought with a scholastic one. In Luther we have the scholastic style of thought becoming replaced by a dialectical style of thought. The way symbolic thought had continued in the monasteries in the early part of the High Middle Ages, when scholasticism had begun its historical career, now dialectical thought made an early modern foray into a religious secularism, in the places where Scholasticism ended its career, where the Reformation took hold. In Lutheran territories, a new scholasticism soon replaced Luther’s powerful dialectical style of thought, and this detached sequential style of thought not only made the polar terms fly apart by enforcing the strict and abstract law of contradiction, but also separated thought from affect and emotion. Lutheran Scholasticism was then followed by the Pietist reaction, which detached the intellect and featured the emotions. In Luther’s intensely centripetal dialectics, neither intellect and affect flew apart, and nor did abstract contemplation become detached and disconnected from concrete application.

Caspary throws light on Luther’s centripetal dialectical style of thought. In the third parameter, i.e., the inner and outer reconciliation. Luther takes sin and righteousness into the heart of the believer. Sin is certainly negative and righteousness positive, but when righteousness is attributed to the self, it becomes negative, and when sin is attributed to the self, sin becomes positive. Such identification with sin, magnifies the righteousness and the grace of God. Abundant grace covers the sinner, who does not confuse himself or herself with God. Self righteousness is sin, and identifying as a sinner is righteous. Because of concrete “situations” and who attributes what attributes to whom, the terms receive different values, and righteousness can bring forth sin, and sin can bring forth righteousness. For example, sin is separation from God and neighbor. Now a person uses righteousness for separating him or herself from others. Such righteousness is sin. It is thinkable that sin can be used to assert solidarity. In this sense sin is righteousness.^[92] The reversibility of the polar terms may be partial, but in the shifting situations of the attributes or terms in concrete relationships and contexts, sin can mean righteousness, and righteousness can mean sin. E.g., a private perfectionist morality imposed unrealistically on a public and legal policy can be a good illustration of righteousness bringing forth sin. But because this thinking appeals to the emotions and intellect simultaneously, and requires common assumptions to be brought to the apparent contradiction, one must be well versed in this style of thought to understand it. E.g., “Oh Life that is death! Oh death that is life!” Refers to Christ who died that the believer might live. And that life, before Christ entered the believer, was death. After Christ enters the heart of the believer, death changes into the newness of life. Thus Luther exclaims: “Let us perish that thou mayest save us!”^[93] in his inimitable centripetal dialectical grammar of thought.

IV

Let us continue with Luther’s unique sense of language. His whole theology has been characterized as Word of God Theology. Because the spirit for Luther is embodied in the word, his Word of God Theology is also his theology of the Holy Spirit.^[94] He did not believe that the Holy Spirit was disembodied and abstract.^[95] Luther considered the word as the vessel which carried the spirit.^[96] The physical sound of the very syllables of a word were important for Luther. For him the word seemed to have a body and soul. The way the Word became flesh and dwelt among us,^[97] in the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, in that same way the Word was a personal and social incarnation.^[98] Words should not be stripped of their physical sounds and left as abstract ideas. Words had to be enfleshed. Words had to have a body.

Luther would have no use for consciousness as such. The language of a people was their embodied consciousness. And although logic functions to constrain language for the sake of correct thinking, and, intellectually, discourse emerges within language as disciplines of fields of knowledge, whose craft, criteria, and contribution cannot be dissolved into the vagaries and notorious ambiguities of ordinary language; still a language is an organic system, a verbal world, containing the distinctive cultural heritage of a people, a nation, or the peoples, English, for example, speaking that language, because they have also become formed and shaped by that language. To bring up the reversal again, people not only express themselves in their language, but they are also an expression of their language.^[99] It is like the effort required to get into a book, when the reversal suddenly takes place, and it starts moving and reading you.

At this point let us bring up the sociological guideline of Durkheim’s, which also holds true for linguistics:

“At first we manage only to achieve what are sometimes gross approximations, but they are not without usefulness; for they constitute the mind’s initial grasp of things and, as schematic as they may be, they are a necessary precondition of subsequent specification.”^[100]

First of all, in terms of Luther’s theology, we try to characterize it to be like a language. It is not a theological system, but like an organic system, i.e., like a language. That must be distinguished from a language as such, German, English, or Latin, for example. To understand different kinds of theology as different languages, needs to take Paul Ricoeur’s insight into account: the structure of a discourse or discipline of knowledge has emerged within the language and cannot be brushed aside and reduced to a language as such. To say that Luther’s theology is like a language,^[101] is to say it is not like a philosophical system with a hierarchy of concepts designed to further human instrumental rationality. Perhaps a Wittgensteinian language game is what George Lindbeck has in mind. Perhaps it is a language within a language, the way a system of thought can be within language.

But if we characterize language as an organic system, what distinguishes the latter from the society as such? What meaning can the term “social language” have in contrast with “social system?” What is the linguistic construction of social reality? It appears that a distinction needs to be made between a verbal society, world, universe and a society, world, and universe per se, although they must be closely related. That consciousness is embodied in a language may mean that language is embodied in society. In Durkheim’s inspired conclusion of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he describes societies to be

“these vast syntheses of entire consciousnesses! A society is the most powerful collection of physical and moral forces that we can observe in nature. Such riches of various materials, so highly concentrated can be found nowhere else. It is not surprising, then, that a higher life develops out of them, a life that acts on the elements from which it is made, thereby raising them to a higher form of life and transforming them.”^[102]

Here Durkheim is comparing the creativity of an individual thinker with that of the society as a whole. Society as the vast syntheses of consciousnesses (includes consciences, because the word translated from the French has both meanings) seems to overwhelm language, even if the latter is considered organically concrete. Perhaps the horizons of meaning, and our earlier discussion of the Habermasian life-world needs to be factored in between this society and language. But language also makes up one of the physical and moral forces shaping the society as defined by Durkheim.

What makes new questions arise for us is our attachment to more concrete considerations than merely abstract ones. And Luther consciously relegated philosophy to the abstract and his theology to concrete questions.^[103] And in terms of movement and intensity, the abstract does not penetrate into our inmost being, the way the concrete does. Luther notes that it is “with my bodily voice [that] I bring Christ into your heart,…”^[104] in order for Luther to enter the inmost heart of his hearers, he was convinced that the physical sound of the syllables of the words were important, for the very same reason that only through the incarnation could God come and save human beings. Luther took the body of the word one step further and spoke of clinging to the “naked word.” The naked body has power. It may be vulnerable, if merely looked at, as if it were an object. But if in their nakedness embodied words or human bodies become subjects, they spell personal and social force and power, and repelling or attracting, they can set a movement afoot.

Luther does not analyze forms or being in stasis. He is not only concrete, but involved with movement. Kierkegaard notes that for Luther “faith is a restless thing.”^[105] He derives his insight from a line in one of Luther’s sermons: “Here you see what a living, powerful thing faith is”.^[106] If faith is a restless, moving, forceful thing, then it is never idle. Thus, in the same vein, William Lazareth extends St. Paul, “Faith becomes active in love and love seeks justice.”^[107]

In bringing out the characteristics of language that make it moving and “suasive” (from “persuasive”), logic need not be played off against rhetoric. This act of persuasion is for the sake of the truth, for the sake of persons becoming ends in themselves, and not a means to any other purpose. Christ requires the truth from his followers. The way the word is a vessel carrying the spirit, so it can bear Christ, the Truth, into the hearts of the hearers and move them.^[108] The self of the speaker can be in the spoken word, or the written one, for that matter, and can enter into the reader or hearer.^[109] Thus some terms are required for more powerful speech acts which share selves or new being with their hearers or readers. Luther naturally speaks of Christ entering the heart of the believing hearer through the Word of God. To use direct speech: “No longer is it I who live, but Christ lives in me. Now I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” What is humanly impossible is accomplished by the divine initiative continuing the creation.

James Samuel Preus traces Luther’s development of the sense of words and the Word of God through his early commentary on the Psalms.^[110] In Psalm 115:10 the Psalmist asserts: “I believed, therefore I have spoken.” [Luther questions why it does not relate action with belief, e.g., "I believe, therefore I acted."] He observes that we receive our goods only in words and promises, because heavenly things cannot be spoken of as present; they can only be proclaimed by the Word. Therefore it does not say, “I see, therefore I show it by a work,” but “I believe, therefore I speak.” (I do not think Luther implies the false alternative here between speaking and acting, as if he was unaware of speech-acts, but implies that speaking can be more than action. It can be the source of action, and that of personal and social being, to boot, as well as the source of some historical events.) Luther continues that those who boast of their own good works, and glory in something present, do not have the faith of those things, but the sight [of them]. “But,” Luther continues, “we believe and cannot show it by a work. That is why we speak and only bear witness. For faith is the reason why we cannot do other than to show our goods by the word, since faith rests on what does not appear, and such things cannot be taught, shown, and pointed to – except by the word.”^[111]

Luther is speaking about God continuing the creation and carrying out the promise of salvation, but language philosophy now discerns personal, institutional, and social actions that are also impossible without language. In Searle”s constitutive rule for institution building, X counts as Y in context C, the change of status function in the Y term is a linguistic move that is only possible because of language. To baptize, to marry, to absolve or forgive are likewise language acts.

Preus notes how Luther becomes overwhelmed by awe before what seem to be this insight into language: “God is speaking. God is promising. God is threatening! Who I ask would not be threatened to the very depths? This is a great word, a great sound, and one to be feared, ‘Behold, the Word of God!’”^[112]

Luther suddenly grasps and appreciates how realities become “translated” into words and words “translate” into new realities; how a language absorbs a world, and how that language “translates” into a new world. Faith translates into sight and sight needs to translate back into faith.

Often the executive mode of language is ignored and a vestigial, disembodied and dis-empowered mode of language is only recognized. “I want action, not words!” is often heard in this context. But words and actions are thus set into a false alternative, because, given the new insights of speech-act theory, words are also actions. To be sure, sometimes they function to throw a cover over what the speaker or others are really doing, what stand they are really taking, how disingenuous they are really being. There are also “mere words” that hardly reflect realities, let alone take an executive mode in changing them. But language, the medium of the life-world, needs to take command of money and power, the media of the systems, rather than vice versa.

Mere words plus money and power, even coercion, are one thing, while executive language reinforced with living bodies making their stands inside their language, are quite another. When Martin Luther King, Jr. had to discover that his oratory alone would not accomplish the changes required by the downtrodden Black folk in the civil rights struggle, then he joined the students in their sit-ins and demonstrations. But far from military force or armed struggle. These actions were actually object lessons illustrating his speeches. The people in the civil rights struggle placed their bodies inside his and their language, instead of contradicting their language with their bodies. They had no money or power, but only their language, and the omnipotent and vulnerable One who translates such faith into sight through language.

Hoping to effect social change by the word alone, or solely by means of language, has sometimes been considered ideological. That is understandable if language is considered to have the other media, i.e., only money, power, and, of course, coercion, as an alternative. But if an intensification of language is considered, which in its executive or performative mode, can induce a social movement and personal response, then another possibility presents itself.

There is more support for this mode of language as a source of action. Within a particular verbal climate many incidents occur that this climate fosters. Mostly we are more aware of the negative than the positive dimension here, but both are highly effective. Taking gossip, for example, it is obvious that words spoken in its ugly tone are the source of many fights. A fight itself can be stopped, but while stopping one fight, gossip can start five others before anything can be done to root it out. Here the word is more powerful than the naked act, because the act has its source in the word. Many actions have their source in the word. But not only actions, but persons and societies, and worlds, as well, as the prologue of John states: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. All things came into being through [the Word], and without [the Word] there was nothing that came into being.”^[113] Naturally the word has to be capitalized because we are speaking about the Word of God, the divine source of light and life.

When we now turn to Luther’s “language of address,” we are moving into the performative that transcends mere actions. Here there is a call into existence, a person who is fundamentally placed into question, a person, encountered by the truth. Luther’s word of address strikes home and creates change in the addressee. In a numinous study Daniel Erlander prepared, called Baptized, We Live, he notes that language of address is like a marriage proposal made by a woman to a man, to give his illustration a Sadie Hawkin’s twist. How the man responds will change the rest of his life. So Christ addresses you and me with the words, “Follow me!” and, in the same way, how we respond will change the rest of our lives.^[114]

It is possible to relate language of address and language acts and events. Philosophically, R.G. Collingwood notes that actions have an inside and an outside. On the inside actions are thoughts, and on the outside they are events.^[115] Then several times already, we have noted a peculiar reversal taking place upon entering linguistic space. And an increased command of language is attained by having experienced a language event. In such an enhanced command of the language, in the intensity and virtuosity of its usage, speakers and hearers become the referents of the words. Often referents are considered to be non-subjective objects: the word “hat” stands for a hat, for example. But when direct speech is involved, the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ can be subjects as well as objects, acting or acted upon. In language of address, the hearer or reader becomes conscious that the language refers to him or her, and inescapably, when spoken with the afore-mentioned skill, it strikes home, it goes to the heart, it places into question, it declares guilt, it offers forgiveness, it opens up new life.

The reversal takes place upon entering into the language, the way Wittgenstein explained entering into a picture. Acts are internal to events, and in the force-field of the linguistic space entered, the language of address is inside the language event. If we try to see Caspary’s schema in our mind’s eye, then the centripetal force, moving into the immanent, internal space, seems to overcome the transcendental, detached, and objective, centrifugal force of separation and outside space, once more. Perhaps the reversal which takes place entering the immanent is a form of the transcendent entering in. Another form of transcendence is bursting through and out. The directionality of one transcendent is centrifugal, while the other is centripetal.^[116]

Sometimes in Luther and other writers who have a heightened command of language, it is possible to see how they also consciously communicate with their grammar,^[117] while for most writers, grammar remains unconscious however integral it is to their meaning. Let me try to experiment with this skill: we are people who speak the truth, or we can be moved by the power of the truth. We can hold the Word of God, or we can be held by the Word of God. The way a subject in the grammatical passive is acted upon by the verb, we can be acted upon by the integrity, truth, and gracious compassion of God. God is such a verb acting upon us. We are the subjects of the sentences that are our lives. But what is that sentence? Not death, but life forevermore, if we are subjects within the subject, the I am who I am of God.

Here I shifted the meaning of the word “sentence.” That was not using the grammatical for meaning, but otherwise, – perhaps you recognized this as a rendition of Luther’s justification by grace through faith, I was consciously interweaving the verbal, grammatical, and the personal together.

Now with a brief summation, a caveat, and one after-thought I will draw this lecture to a conclusion.  A very interesting book of essays on socio-linguistics has appeared, called Language and Power, edited by Muriel Schulz, Cheris Kramarae, and Dale Spender, sponsored by the Rockerfeller Foundation at its Study and Conference Center in 1980 in Bellagio, Italy. In Dale Spender’s contribution she notes that

language is a means of organizing and structuring the world, a means of symbolizing and representing experience, and a vehicle for constructing reality.^[118] Her words put much of this study into a nutshell.

She continues by defining power as the capacity of some persons to produce [intended and foreseen] effects on others, effects sometimes contrary to their interests.^[119] My study has argued for the power of language to change society, and this book certainly concurs.

But it brings up a very important point that can easily be overlooked because of the focus of my argument. Language can also be used to mark social strata as inferior, and others as superior, and as an effective instrument to control and oppress people as well. Language is not only the means of communication, but also a major barrier to communication.^[120] Reality is defined to silence the realities of the oppressed, and the structure of language itself stacks the cards in favor of men, for example, and against women.

An exciting parallel was observable between the use of English in India and that of Latin in Medieval Europe. Both languages developed elites and functioned to place a communication barrier in the way of the masses of people, shutting them out of the important decisions which controlled their lives. English opens the linguistic gates for an elite in India, giving them access to international business technology, science, and travel.^[121] And like Latin of old, English is considered to be a tool of “civilization” and “light.”^[122]

These observations revert back to our first lecture. Latin was considered a tongue to be learned, which would civilize the northern European barbarians.^[123] Latin was of course a high language created in a high culture, a civilization quite highly developed when compared with that of feudal Europe. Thus the medieval lights turned to Latin, the classical language, to gain access to the classical civilization, which the Latin language still contained in its vocabulary, grammar, and literature. But the early modern West began to overtake the ancient classical civilization, and its stature  waned as its external authority. The Reformation, especially Luther, represent a new authority, one of the word, of religious ideology, which admitted of no external authority, for the fresh new ground western civilization was breaking. No external authority outside of faith, that is, for salvation. It would certainly take centuries before the classical cultures were really overtaken.^[124]

Peter D. S. Krey

Addendum:     Some Speech Act Theology: See my post of Feb. 7, 2008 on Speech Act Theology

^[56]From a Lecture given in the course: Sociology of Religion, April 12, 1996.

^[57]According to Emil Durkheim, there are three distinct educational cultures: a scientific, a historical, and a linguistic one. See Emil Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1977), p. 348.

^[58]I have expanded on the problem of performative language as such, and on the nature of a dialectical style of thought.

^[59]An English teacher militated against the use of the word “thing” in our essays by saying, “It doesn’t mean anything.”

^[60]Astrid Stedje, Deutsche Sprache Gestern und Heute, (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1989), p. 10.

^[61]E.g., an “order” of monks and an “order” in the sense of a command, or in the sense of a monk taking “orders.” A “canon” as a ecclesiastical lawyer and a law; and “convention” the assembly and the custom. There are many such examples of the various senses of words and a systematic investigation of them might deliver internal evidence for conclusions about the inter-relationship of society and language.

^[62]Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Primitive Classifications (University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 40-41.

^[63]Ibid., p. 32.

^[64]Here of course, I am still trying to distinguish the role language plays in social change and thus I am not yet qualifying issues sufficiently. But perhaps the Niebuhr Serenity Prayer might fruitfully be extended here as well: to learn the difference between what language can and cannot change, and have the wisdom to know the difference.

^[65]I realize that the ontological issue is involved in the decision not to capitalize “word.” To capitalize it would make the Word be Christ. But I want to focus on another sense of language: one in which the reality is bent to the word and not the word to reality; language that does not merely reflect reality like a mirror, so to speak, but changes it.

^[66]Hegel’s characteristic polysemous, or more precisely, three-meaning-word, “aufheben,” here comes to mind. It means annul, save, and lift up, and seems to be transparent, allowing us to see what words as the building blocks of society do. For Hegel this word is rooted in his  Christology: Good Friday, death; Easter, resurrection; and lifted up in the Ascension inherent in all social and even natural life. Such a dialectic has a logic that does not reflect the distinctions in society, the way Durkheim noted, but the dynamic movement and development of life in its concrete personal and social forms, and under certain conditions, it is capable of changing the face of the earth.

^[67]John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, (Cambridge University press, 1969), P. 52. He also mentions it in  The Construction of Social Reality, (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 2.

^[68]For example in his book, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 16.

^[69]John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, (New York: The Free Press, 1995).

^[70]The Third Lecture I gave in San Jose was called “Speech Act Theology” and concerned itself with the different kinds of speech acts as well as a very brief explanation of this rule. It is attached to the end of this lecture, i.e., see the post, and thus I will not go further into the technicalities of this linguistic formula. He first mentions it as a constitutive rule in his Speech Acts, p. 35. He develops the rule much further in The Construction of Social Reality.

^[71]For Goeser Luther’s theology was not abstract and systematic but concrete and organic like a language.

^[72]Perhaps Luther is occasional in a more philosophical sense still. Following William of Ockham, who had a sharpened sense of the sovereignty of God because of his emphasis upon God’s potentia absoluta instead of potentia ordinata, made Luther’s theology more occasional than systematic.

^[73]Compare his explanations relying so heavily on his “illocutionary force device” in Speech Acts, p. 62; Expression and Meaning, p.14; and “How Performatives Work,” in Linguistics and Philosophy 12:535-558, 1989, p. 556, where he does not even mention such a “device.”.

^[74]“How Performatives Work,” Page 557.

^[75]Searle concludes: “What my argument attempts to show is how the statement is derivative from the promise and not conversely.” Ibid., p. 557.

^[76]J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words , (Cambridge, Mass: A Harvard Paperback, 1955). A revolution in theology on page 3 becomes “the examples now to be given will be disappointing.” p. 5.

^[77]See page 52.

^[78]A methodological dictum of Durkheim’s is also helpful and for linguistics as well as sociology: At first “we manage only to achieve what are sometimes gross approximations, but they are not without usefulness; for they constitute the mind’s initial grasp of things and, as schematic as they may be, they are a necessary precondition of subsequent specification.” From Mark Traugott, ed., Emil Durkheim On Institutional Analysis, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 19 ), p. 153. J.L. Austin’s constative/performative distinction, even if it did not hold, is a case in point. See How To Do Things with Words, p. 133, 150.

^[79]“How Performatives Work,” p. 557.

^[80]In class Searle told many humorous anecdotes about one professor there who could not bear the responsibility of making a promise, and always couched his promises in less committed words, “I intend to….”

^[81]The speech-act analysis of the promise throws more light on Luther’s Word of God Theology, and is included in Speech Act Theology at the end of this lecture, i.e., see the post in my website.

^[82]Robert Goeser defines the “heart” in modern terms as the “center of the whole, responsible  self.” In “The Doctrine of the Word and Scripture in Luther and Lutheranism” The Report of the Lutheran-Episcopal Dialogue: Second Series 1976-1980, (Philadelphia: Forward Movement, 1981), p. 100.

^[83]C. Scott Dixon, The Reformation in Rural Society: the Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, 1528-1603, (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 54.

^[84]Dass Ändern und Bessern sind zweierlei. Eines stehet in der Menschen Händen und Gottes Verhängen; das andere in Gottes Händen und Gnaden. To translate: “It is one thing to change and quite another to make an improvement; the one stands in human hands and God’s ordaining, the other in God’s hands and gracious favor.” “Exegesis of Psalm 101,” H.H. Borcherdt and Georg Merz, editors, Martin Luthers Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 5, Zweite veränderte Auflage, (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1936), p. 428. Also see LW 13: 217. The English is my translation.

^[85]Søren Kierkegaard is perhaps better described as an “extremist for the eternal.” In his individualistic existentialism he mentions society: “Suppose the temporal order was a homogeneous transparent medium of the eternal….” But on the following pages he determines that it is not. The social order needs to be changed to reflect the eternal. Kierkegaard notes that when volition enters the eternal then a ripple effect is set into motion, like a stone dropped into the water, whose waves change the individual. The waves resulting from touching the eternal also result in societal change, because paradoxically the concern for the ultimate in Luther overcame the impotence for reform, i.e.,  proximate social change. (Kierkegaard, I believe, would not agree with me here, because he does not factor the social component into his individualism.) Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1957),pages 135- 136.

^[86]The Rev. A.C. Thiselton, “The Parables as Language-Event” Some Comments on Fuch’s Hermeneutics in the Light of Linguistic Philosophy,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 23, 1970, p. 337-468, here page 443.

^[87]My first experience of Caspary’s description of these two styles of thought came from his lectures in Medieval Intellectual Hiastory, ca. 1050-1275: Symbolism versus Scholasticism, Spring Semester at the University of California at Berkeley, 1994. He noted that he himself developed this analysis of these grammars of thought, but had help from Henri Lubac. I have not found a source in the latter’s works. But Caspary has presented his analysis in his work, Politics and Exegesis: Origen and the Two Swords, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 110-122. The schema comes from his lectures.

^[88]Ibid., p. 110.

^[89]Ibid., p. 112.

^[90]Ibid., p. 113.

^[91]Caspary notes that the exaggerated dualism is in danger of a Manichean type, and the exaggerated linkage tends to degenerate into Monophysitic pantheism. (Page 121.) The human and divine natures of Christ are here either separated or mingled. Luther’s law and gospel, as well as other central polar terms of his theology, seem to also share this pattern. For example, to explain Luther’s two kingdoms, William Lazareth writes: “The two kingdoms are sharply distinguished from each other, which means that the realms of law and gospel are to be neither separated (in secularism) nor equated (in clericalism).” Theology of Politics, p.14.

^[92]For a good example of this dialectical style of thought read his sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, February 1, 1517, Luther‘s Works vol. 51, Helmuth Lehmann, editor, (Philadelphia:Fortress Press, 1959), p. 23-26: “The greatest security is the greatest temptation, the greatest wealth the greatest poverty…the greatest sin the greatest righteousness,” etc. p. 24. In our inner-city Day Camp, exuberant in the spirit, we awaited the coming of the children and prayed: “Oh Lord, send us your worst, so we can do our best!” and as soon as the real trouble with the kids began, we’d pray: “Lord, we didn’t mean it!”

^[93]Ibid., p. 25.

^[94]Citing Ephesians 6:17 and admonishing councilmen that languages needed to be prominent in the curricula of schools, Luther states: “The languages are the sheath in which the sword of the spirit is contained.” Timothy Lull, editor, MLBTW, p. 717. Also note that Hebrew is considered sacred because “What God spoke is contained in that language.” or because “the holy Word of God is comprehended (written) in them.” See the footnote on the previous page 716.

^[95]According to Ulrich Asendorf, Hegel’s concept of the concrete spirit was the signature of Luther’s theology:

Luther und Hegel: Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung einer Neuen Systematischen Theologie) (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1982), p. 162.

^[96]James Samuel Preus, From Shadow to Promise, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 252-253. And Wilhelm Pauck, p. 300.

^[97]John 1:14.

^[98]Hegel took this to its philosophical consequence, and considered the creation to be an incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. If the creation is considered the body of Christ, it may not have to be considered panentheism. The negative and positive polar terms are involved here and no confusion need result. Not the world as the contradiction in itself, but the world that God loves and with his truth, his Son, has overcome the contradiction. Thus the natural body of Christ is the New Creation, while the Kingdom of Heaven is the social body of Christ, and Jesus is the personal body, the Christ.

^[99]Latin and other classical languages still contained the high civilizations of classical antiquity, and learning them gave access to this authoritative model after which medieval Europe was attempting to fashion itself. Perhaps this is the real meaning of the name, “the Holy Roman Empire.”

^[100]See footnote 72 earlier in this lecture.

^[101]George Lindbeck uses the language paradigm to distinguish four kinds of religious theologies in his work, The Nature of Doctrine, (Philadelphia: The Westminister Press, 1984). The language model can be considered exclusive for those who do not know the language.

^[102]Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Karen E. Fields, trans., (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 447.

^[103]In his “Disputation on the Divinity and Humanity of Christ,” (of 1540) Luther argues at one point: “This does not follow in the abstract. But I concede it in the concrete.” from WA 39/2: 92-121. In explanation of thesis XII[a].

^[104]“The Sacrament of the Body and Blood – against the Fanatics,” Martin Luther‘s Basic Theological Writings, Timothy Lull, ed., (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), p. 319.

^[105]S. Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination/Judge For Yourself, H.V. and E.H. Hong, editors, vol. XXI, (Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 17ff.

^[106]Ibid., p. 273.

^[107]Galatians 5:6. William Lazareth,  A Theology of Politics, (New York: Lutheran Church in America: Board of Social Ministry, 1965), p. 20.

^[108]The usage of the words, “truth, freedom,” and “logos,” in the Gospel of John share philosophical as well as religious meaning.

^[109]Note the mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity, of Christ in his followers, and the followers in each other here.

^[110]James Samuel Preus studies Luther’s hermeneutic development in Dictata super Psalterion, of 1517 in From Shadow to Promise, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1969).

^[111]Ibid., p. 247.

^[112]Ibid., p. 253.

^[113]John 1:1-2.

^[114]Daniel Erlander, Baptized, We Live: Lutheranism as a Way of Life, (Chelan, Washington: Holden Village, 1981), p. 12. Erlander has the old fashioned man proposing to the woman. But the feminist new way is more exciting.

^[115]R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 118.

^[116]When the immanent is entered, the reversal must be the transcendent. The transcendent is immanent. There is an external and an internal transcendent.

^[117]See Wilhelm Pauck, p. 122. But this case is quite prosaic.

^[118] Cheris Kramarae, Muriel Schulz, and William M. O’Barr, editors, Language and Power,(London: Sage Publications, 1984),p. 194.

^[119]Ibid., p. 194-195. See page 11 for the words “intended and foreseen” added to the definition.

^[120]Ibid., p. 279.

^[121]Ibid., p. 176.

^[122]Ibid.,p. 183.

^[123]Luther complains that the universities and monasteries have so corrupted the Latin and German languages that the miserable folk have been fairly turned into beasts, unable to speak or write a correct German or Latin, and have well nigh lost their natural reason to boot. Timothy Lull, MLBTW, p. 717.

^[124]Peter von Polenz in Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart,v. I, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), has some very sophisticated concepts to analyze and consider bi-lingual conditions, as those between Latin and vernaculars in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

A Revolution of Hearts and Minds

San Jose, November 24, 1997

In the latter section, we considered speech-act theology. Such an analysis of linguistic action and the linguistic component in institutions was only intended to help us take seriously the important role language plays in social change. But analysis is one thing; actually visiting the construction site where language is tearing down the old buildings and raising up new structures of the assembly of institutions of a new society is very different.

When language comes to speech in its executive mode, after it has already reflected realities truthfully, then it shapes these realities to match the sense of the language. In Searle’s vocabulary, now the words do not match the world, but the world changes to match the words. The question is not whether the proposition in the speech act is true or false, but the linguistic declaration makes its proposition true, brings a new state of affairs into existence.

For an example of what I am talking about we do not have to refer to Luther’s words to Erasmus about the tumult of the Peasants’ War again. We can already find him using the power of words to squelch the Wittenberg Disturbances three years earlier (in his Eight Invocavit Sermons). For him, religion is like a language “behind” his language, or better, “in, with, and under,” his language, and to trust in the agency of the Word is the crux of faith. To substitute force or the law spells the shipwreck of faith. In a famous passage from the third sermon he states:

In short, I will preach [the word], teach it, write it, but I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept [cf. Mark 4:26-29], or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip [Melanchthon] and Amsdorf, the Word so weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything. Had I desired to foment trouble, I could have brought great bloodshed upon Germany; indeed, I could have started such a game that even the emperor would not have been safe. But what would it have been? Mere fool’s play. I did nothing; I let the Word do its work.^[1]

Now this remains controversial to social scientists who want to be objective, an attitude so inimical to Martin Luther, who operated with a driving faith. They note the discovery of the printing press, and the political window of opportunity given the Reformation at this time: Emperor Charles V had to continually contend with the alliance between Francis I and the Pope Leo X against him, as well as the threat of Suleiman, Sultan of the Turks, in the East, and could not deal with the Lutherans until it was too late.

The first argument cannot hold, because although the printing press gave more vehicle to the Word, it was still language doing the work, but now with a greatly enlarged scope – reaching the masses. Secondly, in the short term, physical or military force overcomes a new consciousness embodied in language, but what becomes of that force if the army itself is converted? An army is no match for a revolution of hearts and minds! Recent examples of the candle-light revolution in East Germany, and the fall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines come to mind. The truth action campaigns^[2] of Mahatma Gandhi are another example, the diversion of Britain in WWII, notwithstanding.

In such a “revolution of hearts and minds,” (an expression I heard Dr. Helen Caldecott of Physicians Concerned used on public radio),^[3] it is important that the ends do not justify the means. In a proleptic or anticipatory sense, the means have to be glimpses, fragments, and examples of the justice or good that is the end. In this case if we speak about being the “bad guy” for the sake of the good, then this badness can only be projected upon the agent, it cannot really describe the agent for justice and peace.

When Luther tells Melanchthon to “sin boldly, but more boldly still believe!” we have to remember it is the diffident, paralyzed, and indecisive Melanchthon, whom he is addressing. Carlstadt is out there running roughshod over all kinds of people and trying to force the issues to such an extent that Luther believed him to have had a “shipwreck in faith.”

Now cable TV, global messages by satellite, as well as the information highway on the Internet are analogous to the invention of the printing press in Reformation times. They may make communication instantaneous, but they do not get to the soul of the matter, because of the overload of information and the superficiality necessarily inherent in such immediacy and spontaneity. Mass movements in which the individual becomes dissolved in tribalism will only repeat the historical aberrations of fascism and NAZIism. There is no way around the individual. In, with, and under the individual we cannot do without the real presence of the community – to use Luther’s words in an inner-worldly sense.

It takes but a little imagination to take Searle’s mode of language into a language event. Actions are inside events, or a series of actions, with their agents inside the language, in the Wittgensteinian sense, make a language event. For our purposes of course, we are invoking the Good News eventuating from the language of God, the way Luther did by his Word of God Theology.

What is worship but the place where the Good news is proclaimed purely and the sacraments are rightly administered?^[4] In Luther’s sense the sacraments are also part of the language event, because they are visible words, while the audible ones are heard in preaching. In worship, a community and its members, or persons, individuals, are in the womb of a divine language event. Nested within this event we need Luther’s Language of Address, language designed to move the heart. For us today the “heart” means the “center of the responsible self.” Thus language needs to get into the heart so that individuals “live, move, and have their being” in it. Nested within the language event is the language of address, and nested within the language of address is the embodied word.

Before explaining these language forms briefly, let me describe how the new language of the gospel is brought to speech. In the liturgy the Scriptures are brought into the congregation, and the way a herald of old read a letter filled with news for all the villagers to hear, who could not read, we read the gospel lesson. Now that lesson may really be Good News or a confrontation of the people with the law, but in the real presence of Christ, when the Gospel is preached the Good News is in the making, the Good News is breaking upon the people. First it may well be the eyes of faith witnessing the news, but faith becomes sight, i.e., eye-witness news. Bringing the Good News to speech makes it happen, making the people witnesses of the mighty acts of God.

But faith comes by hearing. We have to listen to each other, and listen to those who have been injured by the injustices of our social structures. We have to listen to each other beyond the edge of where our language can even go. Into the sighs and the tears and the reaches where we struggle to find the words, if any there be, to say what is happening to us, what we are going through; and the new language, the new words, the new realities in the making, get launched from here. In the language of Judith Jordan the silence and oblivion brought by shame, is overcome, as a self is brought to speech, receives a voice, overcomes the dominating reality, “the” reality of the ones in control, by trusting their own reality they themselves recognize and perceive.

Tim Lull, now the President of PLTS, likes to point out that in the Smalcald Articles Luther held that the Gospel did not counsel us and help against sin in only one way. No,

God is surpassingly rich in his grace: [we] First [receive it] through the spoken word, by which the forgiveness of sin (the peculiar function of the Gospel) is preached to the whole world; second through baptism; third, through the holy Sacrament of the Altar; fourth, through the power of the keys; and finally, through the mutual conversation and consolation of brethren. [the brothers and sisters].^[5]

It is the last way Luther mentions that becomes the way new reaches of our experience can become verbalized so that the experience of this, the most intimate language event translates into a new command of the language.

Let’s not forget that Luther’s experience of justification by grace through faith was a language event. How in the world could he shape his life according to the Word of God? He is being seized by the Word. This “seizure” he is having is a matter of death and life, to quote Gerhard Forde.^[6] And a conversion of his heart and mind takes place, later followed by a revolution of hearts and minds in the Reformation renewal.

What is Luther’s Language of Address? Daniel Erlander puts it well:

Luther’s word is “address” that creates change. Living word is like the plea of an old fashioned young man [or woman if we plug in a Sadie Hawkins’ twist] on his knees asking a young woman [mutatis mutandi unless we have a new fashioned relationship!] to marry him. [etc.] She realizes that her affirmative response to this “address” will change the rest of her life.^[7]

The Gospel proclaimed, therefore, lays claim to the people addressed, and the “follow-me!” hearing event changes the rest of the people’s lives.

Now people will not allow any words to enter their heart. Words that enter the inmost being of a person are embodied. “It is with my bodily voice that I bear Christ into your heart!” Luther declares. He seems to personify words. The naked word will get into the heart with ample power to move the person. Luther is very cognizant that speech is action. But he goes farther. Words are the vehicles to carry oneself into the heart of the other, to bear Christ into the heart of the believer. And when this language event takes place, in the purity of faith by grace, a beautiful new incarnation of Christ takes place in the believer.^[8]

Perhaps the most revolutionary act possible is prayer, because what seems to constitute the revolution of hearts and minds is the continuing story of the Word becoming flesh, and with that, the expanding incarnation, the continuous creation of God. When we spoke of the centripetal force, saying with Wittgenstein, let us get into it! Then the word becomes an incarnation and by language, the new creation, the body of Christ, is brought to speech, is brought into being by speech.

Walter Wink does a new paradigm of Bible study. He encourages us to act out stories we read in the Bible. Acting out a story first feels artificial and the dissonance between ourselves and the roles we are supposed to play make us not want to take such an exercise seriously. But get into it! As in the Greek Passion by Kazantzakis, you will suddenly be overtaken by a new reality, in the spell of old words that can recreate and become the new living edition of the old story in our times. To read a play is one thing. To see it acted by performers is a kind of enfleshment of the words. To actually play it yourself is a wonderfully creative experience. But to understand the plot of the story of your own life, to figure out the acts of the play of your life, when the climax comes, and when the denouement sets in, is quite another thing, especially when it is a matter of death and life, and you yourself are a baptized witness of Jesus Christ our Lord, who changes you from an actor into a real child of God.

I have gone to the limit very quickly with Walter Wink’s idea, but acting out Bible stories gives us a very important embodied understanding which touches us in a more basic way than another cerebral rendition of words that merely spin their wheels in our brain, but do not move us anywhere.

We may also experiment with the liturgy of worship and go around and around, but not get into the revolution of hearts and minds, the metanoia, transformation and renewal of our minds according to the Word of God. The purpose of the liturgy is to conform to the mind of Christ rather than conforming ourselves to the world.^[9] The Word of God, the Holy Gospel, will make the mind of Christ as well as the body become really present.

Roughly speaking, liturgy is between the word and the actions outside the church. Because we are aware of speech-acts, we already understand that some words are ritual themselves, and some ritual is the embodiment of words.

A recent master’s thesis by James Oerther called Movement and Gesture in Worship: a Celebration of the Embodied Word (GTU, April, 1997) is helpful in pointing out how our bodies learn of their own account through the ritual enacted in the liturgy of worship. Often performative contradictions – if I can use this word loosely, occur. For example. Lutherans do not equate the Bible with the Word of God, the Gospel lesson with the Gospel. But we stand for the gospel lesson, as if it were the Gospel, when it harangues us and threatens us and is anything but the Gospel. The lessons about John the Baptist, are a case in point. We remain seated when in the Old Testament, God throws the rainbow over Noah’s ark, and promises that Abraham’s seed will be an eternal blessing for all the nations. That is pure Gospel. But because it is difficult to distinguish between law and gospel, we should at least tell the people that they were standing for the Gospel, even if the gospel lesson this Sunday happened to be an outburst of the law, for example, when Jesus calls us whitéd sepulchers, hypocrites, vipers, snakes in the grass!

I believe James Oerther is on to something. Our worship is filled with ritual, but also the body language of gestures – or the lack of them. One theory of language by George Herbert Mead discovers the origin of language in gestures, and calls a word a vocal gesture. Imagine if the words spoken in worship, the thoughts within the words, the gestures accompanying the words, the liturgy, the ritual, and the action, all became the body language of God? What divine suasive forces could be unleashed to counter destructive social, economic, and political forces in the community, what divine suasive strength would be at hand to rescue persons from being overcome and destroyed by them!

Just as an aside in this place, because I am focusing narrowly on the liturgy, it does not mean that we are allowing ourselves to be trapped into leisure time, avocational, and private space in the church. The social suasive forces need to come to terms with social conditions and structures that are unjust. The structure of the liturgy can be compared with the structures of society. Do the systems, both the economic and the political, serve the life world, of which the church is the center, or is the life-world being undermined and colonized by the systems? Is an economic individualism undermining any possible sense of self with the desperate pursuit of money. (Robert Bellah) We believe in the sacredness of the individual. But without the social coherence of a healthy community, the individual will not make it. Thus the way the liturgy centers life in communion and the individual become sacred before God, the systems have to center in and pro-exist for the life-world. That means that the structures also have to be rearranged for the sake of the revolution of hearts and minds, where they prevent the blossoming of new life.

We are struggling with a new phenomenon where after a moving solo or choir performance, the congregation applauds. Does this change the service into a performance. Does it confuse the worship with theater? If we applaud do we become spectators rather than getting into it as participants? I’ve not been able to stop the applause. But perhaps if a more suitable gesture of praise could be exercised it might help keep our body language from contradicting what we are about. Why not raise our arms in praise and shout “Hallelujah!” and “Praise the Lord! Amen.” If we have difficulty with so uninhibited a gesture, then, we ask ourselves, why?

It would be too much to try to investigate how the liturgy of communion brought about real communion with God and community one with another. How the reading of the word, its proclamation in the sermon, followed by prayer is structured in the liturgy to issue into communion. But to limit ourselves to forgiveness of sins: the brief order may be read or not, and the forgiveness may be declared. But in the sincerity condition of this speech act, if we believe it we have it. If we cannot believe it then our sins, our guilt, and shame will still silence and burden us, or perhaps cause us to act out. Belief comes from hearing. Now according to Oerther, some people do not do well with the audible word. Some only learn by the visible approach. Others learn and can take something in only kinesthetically: by that he means that they have to allow their body to learn something, and through a hands on, or movement of their body, they can learn what they could not take in visually or audibly. It is as if they had to say something and hear it said for example, by dancing or playing it. Thus Oerther is very conscious of our bodies in worship and their being in it or excluded from it, being active or mostly inactive.

Where does this leave a person who needs to be forgiven! Role playing forgiveness stories in the Bible could be helpful to such a person. Jesus forgiving Peter’s denial, or the woman taken in adultery, or the parable of the unforgiving servant, among others.

But would not the best pronouncement of forgiveness ensue on the very life story of a unique and individual person, and does not the rubber have to hit the road directly where this person needs the help in overcoming the resistance to hearing God’s forgiveness, to being lifted out of shame, out of a low self-esteem, a low self-image, if that happens to be a person’s lot. But this approach is merely an attempt to reach the person, the outcome is not in our hands. We cannot control the consequence, we can only address the person, who may not yet be reachable whatever approach we use. They will only learn something somewhere else later in their life-journey.^[10] But you can be sure, that such a person, who has captured God’s heart, and whom God pursues with love, will not be able to shake Gerard Manly Hopkin’s “Heaven’s Hound” until they realize they were fleeing life, and turn around and receive the blessings.

We’ve been through four lectures together: From the Word of God coming to change and renew the world, to the social impact of some of Luther’s teachings out in the economic and political systems; From finding Luther’s two kingdom theory in the sophisticated sociology of Habermas: his life-world amid the two systems; we continued by analyzing linguistic acts and the linguistic component of institutions; the performativity of the word, a word like the cell of an organism, the little building bricks of all institutions; to the reconstruction of persons and communities by the Word of God, as a divine language event.

For the revolution of hearts and minds we desire, for the responsible social revolution, the judgment needs to begin in the house of the Lord, so that salvation may also flow to the four corners of the world from that house.

The following footnotes are nos. 125-134 in the original. The Bibliography is for all four lectures.

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^[1]T. Lull, ed., MLBTW, p. 421-422 and LW 51:70-100. With Melanchthon he refers to his friend, Nicholas von Amsdorf (1483-1565).

^[2]Non-violent action does not characterize what Gandhi was about, because it is worded in the negative; but the work of the truth, doing the truth, in the agency of truthful speech acts, pinpoints Gandhi’s idea better.

^[3]The concept of “a revolution of hearts and minds” comes from Helen Caldicott, “Technology, Spirituality, and the Future of the Planet” a speech given in Portland, OR 3/28/95 and heard on Alternative Radio, David Barsamian, Boulder, Colorado, 1995.

^[4]Article VII of the Augsburg Confession, Book of Concord, p. 32. Freely cited.

^[5]Book of Concord, p. 310.

^[6]Justification by Faith – a Matter of Death and Life. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.

^[7]Baptized, We Live: Lutheranism as a Way of Life, (Holden Village, Chelan, Washington: 1981),p. 12.

^[8]“When faith is preexistent, a beautiful incarnation can take place.” Luther’s Galatians Commentary of 1535, Luther’s Works Vol. 26, page 272.

^[9]Romans 12:2.

^[10]T. Lull, p. 427.