Concordia Journal | Fall 2008

Concordia Journal

COncordia Journal

October 2008 volume 34 | number 4

October 2008 volume 34 | number 4

More than “Luther’s English Connection” Preaching Sermons That Will Be Remembered Christological Trinitarian Theology in the Book of Revelation

COncordia Journal (ISSN 0145-7233)

publisher

Dale A. Meyer President Executive EDITOR

William W. Schumacher Dean of Theological Research and Publication EDITOR

Travis J. Scholl Managing Editor of Theological Publications EDITORial assistant

Melanie Appelbaum assistants

Carol Geisler Theodore Luebkeman James Prothro William Rhea Travis Sherman

Faculty

David Adams Charles Arand Andrew Bacon Andrew Bartelt David Berger Joel Biermann Gerhard Bode James Brauer Kent Burreson William Carr, Jr. Anthony Cook Timothy Dost Thomas Egger Jeffrey Gibbs Bruce Hartung

Erik Herrmann Jeffrey Kloha Robert Kolb Reed Lessing David Lewis Thomas Manteufel Richard Marrs David Maxwell Dale Meyer Glenn Nielsen Joel Okamoto Jeffrey Oschwald David Peter Paul Raabe Victor Raj

Paul Robinson Robert Rosin Henry Rowold Timothy Saleska Leopoldo Sánchez M. David Schmitt Bruce Schuchard William Schumacher William Utech James Voelz Robert Weise Quentin Wesselschmidt David Wollenburg

All correspondence should be sent to:

Travis Scholl CONCORDIA JOURNAL 801 Seminary Place St. Louis, Missouri 63105

Issued by the faculty of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri, the Concordia Journal is the successor of Lehre und Wehre (1855-1929), begun by C. F. W. Walther, a founder of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. Lehre und Wehre was absorbed by the Concordia Theological Monthly (1930-1972) which was also published by the faculty of Concordia Seminary as the official theological periodical of the Synod.

The Concordia Journal is abstracted in Internationale Zeitschriftenschau für Bibelwissenschaft unde Grenzgebiete, New Testament Abstracts.Old Testament Abstracts, and Religious and Theological Abstracts. It is indexed in Repertoire Bibliographique des Institutions Chretiennes and Religion Index One: Periodicals. Article and issue photocopies in 16mm microfilm, 35mm microfilm, and 105mm microfiche are available from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346.

Books submitted for review should be sent to the editor. Manuscripts submitted for publication should conform to a standard manual of style. They will be returned to authors only when accompanied by selfaddressed stamped envelopes.

The Concordia Journal (ISSN 0145-7233) is published quarterly (January, April, July, and October). The annual subscription rate is $15 U.S.A., $20 for Canada and $25 for foreign countries. Periodicals postage paid at St. Louis, MO and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes to Concordia Journal, Concordia Seminary, 801 Seminary Place, St. Louis, MO 63105-3199 © Copyright by Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri 2008 www.csl.edu

COncordia J ournal CONTENTS

EDITORIALs 247

Editor’s Note

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Concordia Journal Now Available on ATLAS as Library Provides New Service for Alumni

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More than “Luther’s English Connection”: Robert Barnes and the European Reformations

ARTICLES

Korey D. Maas

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Preaching Sermons That Will Be Remembered: Unleashing the Spirit’s Power in the Brain Allen Nauss

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Christological Trinitarian Theology in the Book of Revelation Louis A. Brighton

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GRAMMARIAN’S CORNER On the Subtleties of Hebrew Verbs, Part II

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HOMILETICAL HELPS LSB Series A—Epistles to Series B—Gospels

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BOOK REVIEWS

October 2008 volume 34 | number 4

editoRIALS

COncordia Journal

Editor’s Note “…And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?” (Rom 10:14). This was the text for President Dale Meyer’s sermon at Concordia Seminary’s Opening Convocation for the new academic year, and forms the theme for the Seminary’s current How Will They Hear capital campaign. “How will they hear?” It is a question we see and hear quite often on campus these days. It is becoming a more urgent question amid the cacophony that only seems to get louder with each passing day. By the time you read this we will likely already know who the next president of the United States of America will be, but the sound bites and commercials and robocalls of this election season have been deafening. And as this country goes through its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression (or at least that’s what I keep hearing), I still have trouble wrapping my mind around what things like derivatives and credit default swaps actually are, the simultaneous pronouncements of a thousand different economists notwithstanding.

There is a desperate need for clarity in these complicated times. For that reason, I will get straight to the point. We have a number of items that we are excited to share with you in this issue of Concordia Journal, and we pray you are excited to receive them.

Concordia Journal Currents This is the new video podcast to coincide with the print edition of Concordia Journal. Two episodes are already available at www.concordiatheology.org and the Seminary’s iTunes U site (itunes.csl.edu). The first was a writers’ roundtable convening the principal authors of July’s special issue on ecclesiology. The second was a follow-up roundtable discussion of The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod’s August theological convocation on church structure, and included the Synod’s First Vice President, Dr. William Diekelman. Concordia Journal Currents will run roughly on the same production schedule as Concordia Journal, with additional podcasts here and there. It will allow us to feature writers, scholars, issues, and events in a fresh way, allowing for more in-depth conversation. The current Currents available soon at the sites above will feature a preachers’ roundtable on preaching the upcoming church year (Series B in the Three–Year Lectionary of Lutheran Service Book), particularly the Gospel of Mark.

Concordia Journal on ATLASerials We are thrilled to announce that the American Theological Library Association now provides the full catalog of Concordia Journal on their fully searchable, online database, ATLASerials (ATLAS). The full announcement of this resource, including the free access provided to all alumni of Concordia Seminary, immediately follows this Editor’s Note.

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This particular issue of Concordia Journal also seeks to provide clarity to a potpourri of issues. The faculty is pleased to publish the historical clarity that Korey Maas sheds on the relationship between Martin Luther and the English reformer Robert Barnes. Allen Nauss brings recent research on brain theory to bear on the task of preaching, with the goal of equipping preachers to proclaim a clear Gospel word “that will be remembered” in the minds and hearts of their hearers. Finally, a professor who is long-known and well-loved by many, Louis Brighton, provides a theological study of the trinitarian and christological implications of the Book of Revelation, a text of Scripture with which he is well-informed.

True to our word, you will also find in these pages the return of Homiletical Helps.

After working through his series of urgent questions, Paul would conclude: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Rom 12:33).

Even in the midst of cacophony and chaos, such divine depths can still be heard. If you hear a few notes of it in these pages, “To him be the glory forever!” (12:36).

Travis J. Scholl Managing Editor of Theological Publications

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Concordia Journal Now Available on ATLAS as Library Provides New Service for Alumni Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, alumni are now able to access ATLASerials (ATLAS), an online database, including search engine and full text, of more than one hundred major religious and theological journals selected by leading scholars and theologians. On this platform, one can research the history of a topic from as early as 1924 to the present through a combined total of more than 212,000 articles and book reviews. As of this summer, the full run of Concordia Journal has also been added to the database.

The staff of Concordia Seminary Library are delighted to offer this most relevant and useful resource for our alumni. Technology continues to make access to theological materials ever more convenient. The research capabilities provided by ATLAS were unimaginable only a few years ago.

Access is open to all alumni of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. For more information or to request access to ATLAS, including the web address and an account name and password, send an e-mail request to Eric Stancliff, Public Services Librarian at Concordia Seminary Library: stancliffe@csl.edu Editor’s Note: It is our understanding that alumni of Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, have similar access through Rev. Bob Smith at their alma mater’s library.

List of selected journal titles (about 35% of the total) Journal of the Evangelical Theology Biblical Archaeologist (1938- ) Society (69- ) Biblical Interpretation (93- ) Liturgical Ministry (92- ) Bibliotheca Sacra (34- ) Lutheran Quarterly (49- ) Catholic Biblical Quarterly (46- ) Missiology (73- ) Christian Century (46- ) Novum Testamentun (56- ) Christianity Today (01- ) Presbyterion (75- ) Church History (53- ) Reformation & Renaissance Rev. (2000- ) Concordia Journal (74- ) Religion & American Culture (92- ) Currents in Theology & Mission (74- ) Review & Expositor (47- ) First Things (90- ) Semeia (74-2002) Harvard Theol. Rev. (08-2003) Theological Studies (40- ) Hebrew Union College Annual (24-2000) Theology Today (44- ) Interpretation (47- ) Tyndale Bulleting (66- ) Journal for Preachers (77- ) Vetus Testamentum (51- ) Journal for the Study of the NT (78- ) Westminster Theological Journal (59- ) Journal for the Study of the OT (76- ) Word & World (81- ) Journal of Biblical Literature (43- ) Journal of Pastoral Care (&Counseling) (69- ) Worship (52 - ) Journal of Pastoral Theology (91-2005)

Concordia Journal/October 2008

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ARTICLES

COncordia Journal

More than “Luther’s English Connection” Robert Barnes and the European Reformations Korey D. Maas

I. Half a century ago now, the British reformation historian Clifford Dugmore loudly lamented the fact that an overemphasis on the debt which English reformers sometimes owed their continental counterparts could—and often did—lead to the impression that Britain’s reformers “had no theological training, no knowledge of the Schoolmen or the Fathers and were utterly incapable of thinking for themselves.” 1 While Dugmore’s methodology and some of his conclusions have not gone without deserved criticism in the intervening decades, his underlying complaint nevertheless remains valid. When given due attention it has helpfully served as a salutary warning to historians who might otherwise be tempted to describe certain English reformers with unqualified labels such as “Lutheran,” “Zwinglian,” or “Calvinist.” And while students of reformation history perhaps no longer need to be reminded that, even on the continent, terms such as these were originally used as pejoratives, it is now more frequently pointed out that a term such as “Lutheranism” carried little real meaning before being given specific content with the presentation of the Augsburg Confession in 1530. Even the traditional use of the “Protestant” label—anachronistic if applied to men or movements before the 1529 Imperial Diet of Speyer—is increasingly giving way to the earliest self-designation of the reformers: evangelical.2 There remain, however, notable exceptions to this general movement away from anachronisms, oversimplifications, and unqualified assertions of influence.

Those historians of the sixteenth-century church who give even passing attention to the Henrician reformer Robert Barnes (1495-1540) rarely hesitate to describe him simply, and even essentially, as a disciple or protégé of Martin Luther. With regard to his theology of salvation, for example, Carl Trueman portrays him as the conscious and willing heir of “Luther’s Legacy.”3 On a whole range of loci, from faith and salvation to ecclesiology and temporal authority, James McGoldrick has concluded that Robert Barnes is best described as “Luther’s English Connection.”4 Korey D. Maas is Assistant Professor of Theology and Church History, and holder of the 2008-09 Harry and Caroline Trembath Chair in Confessional Theology, at Concordia University, Irvine, California.

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Even Barnes’ 1540 death at the stake has become more than the death of a martyr; his death should properly be considered, according to N.S. Tjernagel, that of an explicitly “Lutheran Martyr.”5 To be sure, there are very good reasons to judge Robert Barnes—perhaps more than any other English reformer—a Lutheran, at least to the extent that this label carries any objective meaning in the early years of the reformation. As the intent of this brief essay is not to argue otherwise, it is therefore worth making brief note of some of these reasons. Barnes’ contemporary at the University of Cambridge, the antiquarian and polemicist John Bale, later recorded in his short account of Barnes’ life and literary output that it was the illicit reading of Luther’s books that first converted Barnes to the evangelical cause.6 Similarly John Foxe, the sixteenth-century martyrologist and early editor of Barnes’ works, suggests that the 1525 sermon which first brought Barnes into open conflict with church authorities was largely reliant upon one of Luther’s previously published sermons.7 Despite the unmistakably hagiographical and providential themes discernible in such posthumous tributes to Barnes, early assertions of, and allusions to, Luther’s formative influence upon him cannot simply be dismissed. Arguing for their general reliability, for example, is the fact that, when Barnes later escaped the imprisonment resulting from his 1525 sermon, it was to Wittenberg that he made his way. By the summer of 1530 he had taken up residence with Luther’s own pastor, Johannes Bugenhagen,8 and three years later his name is found recorded in the matriculation book of the University of Wittenberg.9 Even the later life and writings of Robert Barnes betray an unmistakable debt to the unique theology of Luther and the Wittenberg reformation. Not only did he—in keeping with early evangelicals of nearly all stripes—consistently adhere to a doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone, but his earliest publication, the 1530 Sentenciae ex Doctoribus Collectae, also championed a doctrine of Christ’s corporal presence in the Eucharist not typically defended in the sacramental writings of his fellow English reformers.10 Documents pertaining to his later participation in various Anglo-Lutheran dialogues, his role in Crown commissions for the prosecution of English sacramentarians, and even his final confession of faith before dying all reveal that his unrepresentative views on the Eucharist underwent no significant change in subsequent years.11 It is therefore not the intent of this essay to dispute the thesis that Barnes’ theology might best be described as “Lutheran”; nor is it to suggest that he arrived at such doctrinal conclusions independently of Luther and his Wittenberg colleagues. The goal in the following pages is none the less to address the question posed in one of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s more provocatively titled essays: “Can the English Think for Themselves?”12 Most specifically, the question to be posed is: Could Robert Barnes think for himself ? Moreover, if indeed this lesser English reformer could exercise independence of thought, might he in turn even have

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influenced the thinking of fellow reformers on the continent, perhaps even that of Luther himself ?

II. In the light of what has already been said concerning the sway which Luther seems to have held over Barnes, a negative answer to both of the above questions might naturally be assumed. It must immediately be pointed out, however, that the evidence already presented—the evidence with which those scholars who turn their attention to Barnes most frequently formulate their conclusions about his life and thought—deals with the singular question of doctrine. Undoubtedly such doctrinal considerations are not only worthy of investigation, but are of real importance in determining Barnes’ place in and significance for the sixteenth-century reformations. Equally important, though, is a consideration very often overlooked by those having examined him through distinctively theological lenses: Barnes was not simply a translator, or even a formulator, of evangelical doctrine. To the contrary, it might reasonably be argued that Barnes was never primarily a biblical or doctrinal theologian. Unlike many of his contemporaries, and despite having studied at Louvain while the acclaimed humanist Erasmus was there establishing its “college of three languages,” there is no evidence at all to suggest that he ever mastered the biblical languages of Greek and Hebrew. Indeed, despite occasionally reaching questionable conclusions regarding the content of Barnes’ theology, William Clebsch was most certainly correct when he noted that Barnes “made no original study of the Bible.”13 Even in those works which might justifiably be called doctrinal treatises—the previously mentioned Sentenciae, and his two editions of a Supplication to Henry VIII 14 —Barnes’ modus operandi is often less that of biblical or systematic theology than it is of historical theology. Barnes enters his element as an evangelical theologian and polemicist when he turns his attention from dogma proper to such topics as the historical development of the Latin Mass, the slow growth of papal primacy in the temporal and spiritual realms, and the gradual imposition of clerical celibacy on the western churches. For this reason Rainer Pineas has quite rightly concluded that a great deal of Barnes’ writing, even his writing on distinctly doctrinal topics, “takes the form of the polemical use of secular and ecclesiastical history.”15 The soundness of this conclusion becomes even more evident when attention is turned from Barnes’ early works to his final publication, a treatise which has been all but ignored by those seeking to understand his place in the controversies of the reformation. The Vitae Romanorum Pontificum, first put into print in 1536, was not only his last work, but, despite its relative neglect, it was also his most popular and most influential contribution to the evangelical cause.16 It was not, however, an explicitly doctrinal work at all, but an historical offering; as its title suggests, it was an historical survey of the lives and acts of the Roman bishops, from St. Peter to

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the twelfth-century Pope Alexander III. The novelty of this project, which not only summarizes papal biographies but also surveys the development of ecclesiastical rites and highlights illustrative episodes in the history of papal-imperial relations, has long been apparent even to those scholars who have not examined it in any great detail. As such, it has not only been called “the first Protestant history of the papacy,”17 but also “one of the earliest excursions of the Reformers into Church History,”18 one of “the pioneer works in confessional historiography,”19 and the “first important contribution of the Protestant camp.”20 A further—and perhaps even more significant—indication that Barnes was indeed here thinking for himself is the fact that, despite his clear and sustained focus on the papacy, he never allowed himself to engage in the sort of apocalyptic speculation which was so characteristic of the anti-papal polemic of the late Middle Ages, and which would soon become a staple of the Protestant histories which followed his.21 The four monarchies of the prophet Daniel, which had provided a narrative and interpretive framework for many of his predecessors, are absent; the seven seals of Revelation are likewise ignored; and not once does the otherwise polemically effective term “Antichrist” enter the picture. Such observations are all the more noteworthy because some of the very sources on which Barnes had relied in composing the Vitae did in fact introduce these elements of apocalyptic interpretation.22 It is also well known that Luther himself, upon whom Barnes is so often believed to have been slavishly dependent, was an especially strong advocate of the view that Antichrist had been revealed in the office of the pope; the Wittenberg reformer was also not averse to engaging in the sort of apocalyptic speculation that Barnes seems studiously to avoid, especially in this context of the papacy’s identification with Antichrist.23 Barnes, then, seems not to have been simply an imitator, but, in this final work at least, very much an innovator. It would appear also that his contemporaries and successors recognized this fact. It has been previously noted that the Vitae, Barnes’ most original work, was also his most popular work. Unlike his English-language Supplication, which still receives the most scholarly attention in spite of its limited circulation in the sixteenth century, his papal history, having been composed in Latin, was instantly available to an international audience. The subsequent bibliographical history of this work testifies rather clearly to the enthusiastic reception it received by this audience. Whereas the Supplication went through only four sixteenth-century editions, the Vitae went into a total of eleven separate printings, more than half of which are comprised not simply of reprints in the original language, but of translations out of the Latin.24 Furthermore, not only was it translated and reprinted, but it was also continued by later historians. The Prague humanist Simon Ennius Glatovinus, for example, first translated Barnes’s work into the Czech language and then continued its papal biographies into the mid-sixteenth century. A similar case is that of the Frankfurt minister Johannes Lydius, who

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would republish the Vitae Romanorum Pontificum as late as the year 1615, printing it together with John Bale’s similarly titled—and heavily dependent—Acta Romanorum Pontificum, and bringing both histories up into the seventeenth century.

The perceived value of Barnes’s work is also made evident in additions to his text of another kind. Especially notable in the first reprint of 1555 is the inclusion of an extensive and newly compiled index, a clear indication that its publishers considered the Vitae not only worthy to be read, but also to be regularly consulted as a work of reference. Also included, before the text itself, are a number of testimonies culled from the works of historians who had already made fruitful use of the previous edition. Among these is the estimate of the Königsberg court preacher Johannes Funck, who proclaimed that Barnes “wrote an orderly history of the Roman pontiffs, so that another could scarcely have better judgment.”25 A newly added preface likewise declares that “the Englishman Robert Barnes presents this history, and no history which he has narrated, has he narrated better than that of the evil popes.”26 The inclusion of such introductory commentary was, one must assume, at least partially motivated by financial concerns. Early printing was not only a laborious and time-intensive endeavor, it was extremely expensive.27 Even in the sixteenth century, therefore, the benefits of advertising and endorsement were well understood. They were perhaps especially well understood when the work on offer was one of history, which, as D.R. Woolf has pointed out, “was certainly not a ‘major’ subject for either most readers or their booksellers” in that century.28 Nevertheless, the fact that the publishers of the 1555 edition of Barnes’ Vitae could so readily find historians who had already praised this work without personal financial motivation speaks loudly of its early popularity.

Indeed, the testimonies provided in this edition by no means exhaust the compliments paid to Barnes and his history. John Foxe, later compiling and putting into print a collection of Barnes’ English works, would describe him as a man endowed with “special giftes of fruitfull erudition, and plentiful knowledge.”29 The sixteenth-century German historian Friedrich Myconius, making use of Barnes’ work in his own history of the reformation, would call him “the truest, most learned, most able that England had.”30 Even as late as the seventeenth century, the Eton provost Sir Henry Wotton could still mention Barnes as one of only three “notable writers of Popes lives,” a title shared with the fifteenth-century Italian Bartolomeo Platina and the sixteenth-century Spaniard Gonzalo de Illescas.31 He was placed in even more esteemed company by the first evangelical bishop of Durham, James Pilkington, who recommended the Vitae to his Oxford brother-inlaw as the logical continuation of the ecclesiastical histories produced by Josephus and Eusebius.32 As such early and international estimates make plain, Barnes clearly exercised some influence outside the narrow confines of theology proper—and not only in his native England, but also on the continent. This point need not be labored, but

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it can further be substantiated with a partial catalogue of those historians who would rely on the Vitae when later compiling their own accounts of papal history: Englishmen such as Foxe and Bale, as well as continental reformers such as the German Christophor Hoffman, Jacob Revius in the Low Countries, the Spanish exile Cipriano de Valera, and even the more familiar figures of Heinrich Bullinger and of the Magdeburg Centuriators.33 None of the above is meant to suggest that the English reformers in general, or Robert Barnes in particular, avoided the influence of, or eschewed borrowing from, learned evangelical counterparts on the continent. There is no doubt that such influence existed or that frequent and heavy borrowing took place. Nevertheless, the point to be emphasized is that the flow of information between English and continental Protestants in the sixteenth century did not at all take place on a one-way street. More particularly, the evidence demonstrates beyond question that Robert Barnes was very much more than “Luther’s English connection.” In being one of the first to introduce and emphasize history as a major component of theological polemic, he was indeed thinking for himself; and the results of his historical-theological endeavors were much appreciated and often used by his contemporaries and successors—both in his native England and across the channel.

III. Having hopefully cast some doubt upon the widely held conviction that Robert Barnes is best described simply as a disciple and popularizer of Luther and his theology, it is now possible to ask whether something like the converse might, in any sense, be the case. That is, rather than simply being influenced by the Wittenberg reformer, is it possible that Barnes himself exercised some influence on Luther’s thought? The question is particularly worth asking because, where it has been previously raised, the answer has consistently been negative. Barnes’ attempt to sway Luther’s opinion on the question of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, for instance, very clearly met with failure. It was only the hope that Barnes might convince Luther and the Wittenberg faculty to look favorably on the royal annulment that had persuaded King Henry to call the renegade friar back from selfimposed exile late in 1531. Thus the king was not at all pleased when Barnes personally delivered Luther’s negative response in that year, and Barnes was forced to go into exile once again.34 Despite pressing the issue for the better part of five years, and even convincing the Lutheran theologians of Hamburg and Lübeck to support the king’s case for annulment, Barnes was never able to alter Luther’s opinion on the matter. Nor did he meet with any greater success in more explicitly theological enterprises. While Barnes on several occasions served as a representative of the English Crown, charged with the task of negotiating a theological agreement with the German Lutherans he knew better than did any other English theologian, none of the documents resulting from more than five years of dialogue and debate

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was ever judged acceptable by Henry.35 The assumption that Barnes had little or no influence on Luther’s thought is therefore not at all without warrant.

Again, however, the evidence examined with respect to this question has typically been restricted to these narrow fields of politics and doctrine—two areas in which Luther was notoriously reticent to accept counsel from anyone. But it must not be assumed that he was totally averse to considering, accepting, and even promoting ideas originating with others, and even originating outside of his beloved homeland. Early in his career, for example, he could speak quite highly of the Bohemian preacher and martyr Jan Hus, famously, if somewhat hyperbolically, confessing that he and his Wittenberg colleagues “are all Hussites.”36 He would also find time to praise—and, in fact, to republish—a work of English provenance: the Lollard Commentarius in Apocalypsin.37 There is also very good reason to believe that Luther was particularly appreciative of any author who might increase his knowledge of the history of the church. It was his brief but intense study of ecclesiastical history in preparation for the 1519 Leipzig Disputation, for instance, that first suggested to him the previously mentioned conviction that Antichrist was to be found in the office of the papacy.38 His subsequently increasing appreciation for works of history and for their authors is made most obviously evident in his preface to a work by the Italian Galaetius Capella; here he remarked that “histories are . . . a very precious thing,” and that “historians, therefore, are the most useful people and the best teachers, so that one can never honor, praise, and thank them enough.”39 The preface to Capella’s history, though especially revealing, was only one of many which Luther would append to a variety of historical works published in the latter half of the 1530s and into the 1540s. It might be rash to suggest that the very dates of such offerings—corresponding to and following on from the date of the Vitae’s publication in Wittenberg—is an indication that Luther’s keen interest in history was especially encouraged by Barnes’ work in this area. Yet Luther came close to making just such an admission when he himself penned the foreword to the first edition of Barnes’ Vitae in 1536. There he confessed that, In the beginning, not having much expertise in history, I attacked the papacy a priori (as is said), that is, from the holy Scriptures. Now I wonderfully rejoice that others are doing this a posteriori, that is, from history. And to me I seem clearly to triumph since, with the light becoming clear, I perceive that the histories agree with the Scriptures.

For that which I have learned and taught from the teachers St. Paul and Daniel, that the pope is the Adversary of God and of all, this history proclaims to me, pointing out this very thing with its finger, not revealing it vaguely (as they say), and not merely the genus or the species, but the very individual.40

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Contributing yet another preface to a Strassburg translation of excerpts from the Vitae nine years later, he would say much the same: Next to holy Scripture, it is very good to have as proof for oneself the histories of the emperors, wherein one sees how the Pope is certainly filled with the Devil.41 In the light of Luther’s high praise for Barnes’ “worthy and just” history of the popes,42 Ernst Schäfer, author of what remains the most extensive analysis of Luther’s historical thought, was undoubtedly correct when he stated: “We may regard it as certain that, from this point on [i.e., its first publication in 1536], Barnes’ writing was a particularly eagerly read component of Luther’s library.”43 Much more recently Cyriac Pullapilly has suggested even more pointedly that Luther, with his preface to the Vitae, had “outlined the general course of a new historical approach to Church history.”44 Some circumstantial evidence in support of this supposition is to be found in the fact that Luther very quickly went on to publish an impressive number of his own treatises addressing the very issues of papal, imperial, and conciliar history that Barnes had surveyed in his earlier history.45 It is also worth noting that the common estimate of these writings, in comparison with his earlier polemics, is that they are “richer and more sophisticated, for they have gained a historical dimension.”46 That it was Barnes himself who “pulled Luther deeper into history” is suggested both by the text and the context of these works.47 It was immediately following the publication of Barnes’ Vitae, for example, that Luther requested the Englishman’s participation in a Wittenberg disputation on the authority of church councils.48 It is particularly worth making note of Barnes’ role in this 1536 disputation because, as Mark Edwards has very perceptively observed, the arguments there put forward “anticipate many of the arguments Luther advanced in his 1539 masterwork, On the Councils and the Church.”49 In fact, the editors of the standard critical edition of that work have further suggested that it is the understanding of history first expressed in Luther’s foreword to the Vitae Romanorum Pontificum which “defines” this later treatise.50 And there has been little disagreement with the conclusion that On the Councils represents “the most sophisticated historical analysis to come from Luther’s pen.” 51 It also seems to be more than mere coincidence that Luther’s last great work against the papacy was taken up at the very moment that his attention had again been turned to Barnes’ history. It was while writing a preface to the 1545 German translation of the Vitae that he also began a treatise with the unsubtle title: Against the Roman Papacy, an Institution of the Devil.52 Though much less refined than On the Councils, this work still reveals Luther presenting “a persuasive argument using historical examples.” 53 Since he was presenting such an argument with the Vitae close to hand, it is almost certainly safe to assume that this was one of the works Luther

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had in mind when he declared it to be evident “from all the histories” that the bishops of Rome neither possessed nor exercised supreme ecclesiastical authority before the seventh-century pontificate of Boniface III. 54 As previously indicated, none of the above should be read as a suggestion that Robert Barnes was a wholly original theologian whose published works remained uninfluenced by Luther’s thought. Nor is it suggested that Barnes might in any respect be considered Luther’s intellectual equal. Barnes’ respect for the Wittenberg theology, and his related attempt to popularize this theology in his native England, is unquestionable. Equally unquestionable, however, is Luther’s great respect for Barnes, and especially for his history of the popes. Likewise beyond doubt is the popularity this work enjoyed among a theologically and geographically diverse population of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestants.

And while it cannot be argued that this popularity was due solely to the imprimatur provided by Luther’s two prefaces to the work,55 the recognition that such endorsements were not without some effect allows at least for the modest suggestion that the broad continental acceptance of the Vitae is not to be wholly disassociated from Luther’s high praise for it. Or, to express this thought more plainly, it might be said that Barnes was not merely Luther’s English connection, but that, in a very real sense, Luther was also Barnes’ continental connection.

Endnotes 1

C.W. Dugmore, The Mass and the English Reformers (London: Macmillan, 1958), vii.

See, e.g., Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (New York: Penguin, 2003), xx.

3 Carl Trueman, Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525–1556 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

4 James E. McGoldrick, Luther’s English Connection: The Reformation Thought of Robert Barnes and William Tyndale (Milwaukee: Northwestern, 1979).

5 N.S. Tjernagel, Lutheran Martyr (Milwaukee: Northwestern, 1982).

6 John Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium maioris Brytanniae . . . Catalogus (Basle, 1557), 667.

7 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, 8 vols, ed. J. Pratt (London: Religious Tract Society, 1877), 5:415.

8 Bugenhagen provides the evidence for this in his preface to Barnes’ pseudonymous Sentenciae ex doctoribus collectae (Wittenberg, 1530), sig. A2v, noting that that the Englishman had been at work on it that summer “in our house.”

9 See P. Smith, “Englishmen at Wittenberg in the Sixteenth Century,” English Historical Review 36 (1921), 423.

10 See especially article seventeen, titled, “In Sacramento altaris est verum corpus Christi.” For exceptions to the early English tendency to favor a symbolic view of the sacrament, however, see Alec Ryrie, “The Strange Death of Lutheran England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002), 69–73.

11 Contrary to William Clebsch, England’s Earliest Protestants, 1520–1535 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 68–69, who sees Barnes gradually departing from a belief in the real presence.

See, e.g., the statements on the Eucharist in the Wittenberg Articles of 1536 and in the Thirteen Articles of 1538; both can be found reprinted in Documents of the English Reformation, ed. G. Bray (Cambridge: James Clark and Co., 1994), 137, 192. For the anti-sacramentarian commissions, see, e.g., 2

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Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J.S. Brewer and J. Gairdner (London: Public Record Office, 1862–1932), 8:771 and 13/2:498. For Barnes’ last profession of faith, see Remains of Myles Coverdale, ed. G. Pearson (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1846), 417.

Finally, for a compelling though not exhaustive critique of Clebsch on this point, see Carl Trueman “‘The Saxons be sore on the affirmative’: Robert Barnes on the Lord’s Supper,” in The Bible, the Reformation and the Church, ed. W.P. Stephens (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 290–307.

12 Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Can the English Think for Themselves? The Roots of English Protestantism,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Spring 2001), 17–20.

13 Clebsch, 74.

14 Robert Barnes, A Supplicatyon Made by Robert Barnes (n.p., n.d. [Antwerp, 1531]), and A Supplicacion unto the Most Gracyous Prynce H. the VIII. (London, 1534).

15 Rainer Pineas, Thomas More and Tudor Polemics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 121. It is worthy of further note that, in this study of six Tudor polemicists, it is in the discussion of Barnes alone that the primary emphasis is placed upon historical argumentation.

16 Robert Barnes, Vitae romanorum pontificum (Wittenberg, 1536).

17 McGoldrick, 14.

18 E.G. Rupp, The Righteousness of God (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1953), 39.

19 Cyriac K. Pullapilly, Caesar Baronius: Counter Reformation Historian (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 50.

20 H.E. Barnes, A History of Historical Writing, 2d rev. edn. (New York: Dover, 1963), 123.

21 For late medieval English apocalypticism, see Curtis V. Bostick, The Antichrist and the Lollards: Apocalypticism in Late Medieval and Reformation England (Leiden: Brill, 1998), and for the later reformers, Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

22 E.g., the Chronica Carionis produced by Johann Carion and first published with Philip Melanchthon’s revisions at Wittenberg in 1532.

23 See, e.g., John M. Headley, Luther’s View of Church History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 195–265.

24 Latin printings include the original Wittenberg edition of 1536, two printings of a 1555 Basle edition, a 1567 Frankfurt edition, and a final edition published together with John Bale’s Acta Romanorum Pontificum, printed as Scriptores Duo Anglici, Coaetanei ac Conterranei; De Vitis Pontificum Romanorum (Leiden, 1615). Translations include a Czech edition printed as Kronyky. A ziwotuow sepsánij naywrchnegssých Biskupuow Kzijmských ginác Papezuw pilne a werne z mnohých Historij kratijcce wybráno a sepsáno (Nuremburg, 1565), and the selected lives published in German as Papsttrew Hadriani iiij. und Alexanders iij. gegen Keyser Friderichen Barbarossa geübt, published once in 1545 at Strassburg and twice more that year in Wittenberg, then being included in collected editions of Luther’s works printed at Wittenberg in 1551 and Jena in 1558.

25 Barnes, Vitae (1555), sig. b2v.

26 Barnes, Vitae (1555), sig. a1v.

27 For an overview of the economic factors involved in early printing, see especially Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1800, tr. David Gerard, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (London: N.L.B., 1976), 109–27.

28 D.R. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 322.

29 John Foxe, The whole workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith and Doct. Barnes (London, 1573), sig. A3r.

30 Friedrich Myconius, Historia reformationis vom Jahr Christi 1517 bis 1542 (Leipzig, 1715), 59.

31 Henry Wotton, The state of Christendom (London, 1657), 172.

32 James Pilkington, The Works of James Pilkington, ed. James Scholefield (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1842), 682.

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33 Anon. [i.e., John Foxe], A solemne contestation of diverse popes (London, 1560); John Bale, Acta romanorum pontificum (Basle, 1558); Christophorus Hoffman, De Christiana religione et de regno Antichristi (Frankfurt, 1545); Jacob Revius, Historia Pontificum Romanorum (Amsterdam, 1632); Cipriano de Valera, Dos Tratados (London, 1588); Heinrich Bullinger, Pontifices Romani, Zentralbibliothek, Zürich, MS Car I 161; Matthias Flacius et al., Ecclesiastica Historia, 13 vols (Basle, 1559–74).

34 See N.S. Tjernagel, Henry VIII and the Lutherans (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), 90.

35 See K.D. Maas, “The Henrician Reformation and the Anglo-Lutheran Dialogues of 1535–1540,” Logia 12 (2003), 5-10, and, for a fuller account, Rory McEntegart, Henry VIII, the League of Schmalkalden and the English Reformation (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 2002).

36 Luther’s Works: American Edition [hereafter AE], 56 vols., ed. J. Pelikan and H. Lehmann, (St. Louis: Concordia, and Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955–1986), 48:153.

37 D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe [hereafter WA], (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883– ), 26:123ff.

38 See, e.g., AE 48:114.

39 AE 34:275.

40 Barnes, Vitae (1536), sig. A4r-v.

41 WA 54:307.

42 Barnes, Vitae (1536), sig. A3r.

43 Ernst Schäfer, Luther als Kirchenhistoriker (Gütersloh, C. Bertelsmann, 1897), 87.

44 Pullapilly, 121.

45 See, e.g., the titles listed in WA 50:495–96, and the commentary in Mark U. Edwards, Luther’s Last Battles: Politics and Polemics, 1531–46 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 77–96.

46 Edwards, 96.

47 WA 50:498.

48 WA 39/1:184–97.

49 Edwards, 79. See the text of On the Councils and the Church in AE 41:3–178.

50 WA 50:498.

51 Jaroslav Pelikan, Obedient Rebels: Catholic Substance and Protestant Principle in Luther’s Reformation (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 53.

52 AE 41:257–376.

53 Edwards, 185.

54 AE 41:290.

55 Contra Clebsch, 73, who suggests the Vitae only went into as many editions as it did on account of Luther’s preface. That this is not the case is demonstrated by the simple fact that some later editions excised this preface; e.g., those of Simon Ennius Glatovinus (1565) and Johannes Lydius (1615).

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Preaching Sermons That Will Be Remembered Unleashing the Spirit’s Power in the Brain Allen Nauss

Introduction Many preachers have heard a parishioner tell them that he or she remembers well a particular sermon that was so very helpful. That might suggest that it would be good if all sermons could be so “memorable.”

Does this mean, then, that sermons that are not specifically remembered are perhaps better not preached at all? Not necessarily. If your sermon clearly and meaningfully projected the Word, it is still likely that the Spirit was able to establish a vital point in some person’s long-term memory. It would be worthwhile knowing, therefore, how to prepare either kind of sermon.

Our question would more appropriately be: How may we create a sermon through which the Spirit can reach the hearer’s heart and memory? And is it possible to replicate such a process time after time? Let us try to find out by beginning with the question: What is a memory exactly?

Memories in the Brain According to research on the brain, a memory is really a network of neurons located in the gray and white matter of the cortex.

All the gray and white matter of the brain in an ordinary three pound skull is made up of tissue that contains 100 billion neurons, hair-thin membranes about half an inch to an inch in length. At first sight and hearing all this can appear what to some looks like a stadium filled with a batch of spaghetti. Others call it an electrician’s nightmare, or a jungle.1 Our memories, together with the content for all our thinking and responding, are stored within this huge jumble of neurons. How is this done? We know a little about the process.

Allen Nauss is a 1948 graduate of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. He served the church at St. Paul’s College, Concordia, Missouri, Trinity Lutheran Church, Alma, Missouri, Concordia Theological Seminary, Springfield, Illinois/ Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and Christ College (Concordia University) Irvine, California.

He retired in 1988 and lives in Orange, California.

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Each neuron is like your forearm and hand, with fingers extending out from the side. Each neuron contains 10,000 of those tiny fingers (or dendrites) that attach themselves to the axon or central core of other neurons to form a network.

Such a single network or scaffolding of a number of neurons would represent a familiar face, a word, or in more complicated form, a belief or value. It is all established or consolidated throughout the brain in our long-term memory.

Neuroscientists call a single network an engram or memory trace.

But this all sounds a bit technical, even a little pedantic. And it still does not tell us how to provide a channel for the Spirit in which His power can be demonstrated. However, it does show that a memory is not just a vague form floating around in a vacuum, but rather a physical, observable network of neurons. If we can then follow and identify the process the Spirit uses to organize and reinforce that network, we should be able to come closer to answering our first question above. We should be able to create a sermon that serves as a clear channel for the Spirit. Perhaps we had better begin by explaining how this might fit with our understanding of the role of the Spirit.

The Preacher and the Spirit We know that the Spirit generates faith and sanctification. He enables the Word to be effective, despite what the preacher does or does not do. But his work is made more difficult if the preacher does not produce as clear a channel as possible in the hearer for the Spirit and his power. Sometimes, the preacher may not explain the message clearly. He may becloud the main point so that it becomes difficult to know what the sermon is about. At other times he may not make use of as many ways to present the message as are available and thus hampers the communication. All of these keep the sermon from being truly clear and effective. They restrict the Spirit.

It is helpful to remember that the Spirit works through human beings. This means, too, that He works with and through the neural structures and functions God has created within the brain to bring His power. And now we know a little more about the brain, such as the place where we do our thinking—the prefrontal cortex, and the storage of our memories (including knowledge and values) in longterm memory. These areas involve the use of several different functions of the brain.

By being aware of and following the functions in the hearer’s brain I believe you can provide a clear channel for the Spirit to operate in building faith and in sanctification. This is done in part by using a simple theme for the sermon and then etching it in a hearer’s memory. We would recognize, too, that we are not

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thereby “demythologizing” the Spirit’s work; we are merely clearing the way for the Spirit to operate more effectively. You can carry on your ministry without using this knowledge and even be somewhat effective. But, unfortunately, you would not be using all the skills and factors that God makes available to you.

New Knowledge Why haven’t we heard about this before? Because it is knowledge that has only recently become known. Much information about the brain has appeared just within the last decade. The well-known MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) process became affordable and available to educational institutions and research laboratories only in the mid 1980s. With the invention of still newer imaging techniques in the early and mid 1990s, the study of neuroscience (including research on the brain) has virtually exploded. Research study results have opened broad vistas of the brain for application to medicine, physiology, pathology and biology. Neuroscience has become a separate discipline along with other sciences, and has also joined itself to many subject areas. Its applications to ministry are also manifold, especially in the area of preaching.

What Good is All This?

You will note that you may currently be doing many of the things that will be suggested here for your preaching. You may therefore wonder what difference it makes to know what goes on in the brain. But now, knowing what is happening in the minds of people as you preach can give you a more effective role in reaching them. You can plan with a specific goal of generating a memory and following a clear path through the brain. Then you can preach a sermon with a few ideas of how to stimulate your people, and pray that the Spirit will produce the hoped-for results. You can now begin to take a still more active role in pointedly helping your message make its way through the hearers’ brains toward the goal of making the Scriptural ideas stick. The Spirit’s help, of course, is still needed, but you have made it a little easier.

The Brain and Its Functions Look first at the entire journey a sermon would take as it goes through the process of entering the brain, being considered, and finally boiled down to a memory being retrieved for action (see Figure 1). The five functions of the brain represent the channel taken by the Spirit in bringing His power. They are perceiving, orienting, working, establishing and retrieving. In Figure 1 you can see a rough visualization of the brain that displays the back-to-front process employed in our cranial structure.2 The Spirit’s process begins with the perceiving function of the brain. The words you use in the sermon are first channeled from the hearer’s ear to the auditory sensory lobe located in the back of the brain. The words represent a major part of the

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hearer’s sensory perceptions. What is perceived is then sent forward to the thalamus, a hub located near the center of the skull that serves as a small relay station.

From the thalamus the perceptions are transferred to two secondary relay stations for the orienting function. In these two tiny structures we make a selection of all that we perceive.3 We discard most of the data to keep ourselves from suffering information overload. We select only that which we consider to be important. We certainly cannot process everything that our senses perceive, so we concentrate only on what we most want or need at the time. The retained ideas are then sent on to our working memory located in the prefrontal cortex in the front of the brain, just in the back of our eyes. There lies the real “I,” the executive who works with the incoming data, consults with other related memories, analyzes and organizes information, and determines an appropriate response. Here the sermon is really worked through in the hearer’s mind and hopefully a basic element is distilled that can be established in the long term memory.4 Figure 1 Five Functions in the Brain

2. Orienting Thalamus

3. Working Prefrontal cortex

1. Perceiving through sensory lobes

5. Retrieving

4. Establishing

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If something is distilled from the sermon, it is formed in a network of small neurons. This is what is established and consolidated in our brain’s long term memory. The establishing function is one of the more complicated wonders created by God. It takes place in the white tissue matter and in what we have come to know colloquially as our “gray matter” (see the darkened area in the figure). Finally, a person can make use of those memories by retrieving them and putting them into action in every day behavior. The overall five-step process and its result display the POWER (an acronym for the five functions) that the Spirit brings to us. It causes a change in our life to bring it into accord with God’s ways.

First, we shall look at the core functions of working memory and establishing in long-term memory to see how one may deliberately select and hone a memory so that it can be firmly secured in the hearer’s gray matter. Then we shall return to the other functions to paint the full picture.

The research we have been able to look through to date suggests quite clearly that there is a fivefold tier in the process that occurs in trying to establish something within the long-term memory (see Table 1). These tiers refer to the types of content that the speaker may select to serve as the expected memory trace. We shall focus on the final three tiers as most suited to sermon content.

Table 1 Fivefold Tier of the Establishment of Memories 5 Working Memory 6

Establishing in Long-Term Memory 7

Types of Memory

Learning Target

Learning Mode

Storage Formation and Location 8

Events

life experience

emotion

hippocampus

Skills

skill behavior

practice

motor cortex

Knowledge

statement of fact, definition, explanation

repetition

temporal cortex

Rules

concrete behavior

reinforcement

posterior prefrontal cortex

Values, beliefs

abstract guide, strategy

reconfiguration, emotion

anterior prefrontal cortex

We begin by listing the type of objective you will want to communicate to your hearers to secure it in memory. You would regularly select one or more of the final three to include as a goal for your sermon. The fact that all five of these types of memory are formed and stored in various parts of the cortex suggests that you should present and explain them in different ways in your sermon (learning target).

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In addition, to establish them in the long-term memory requires unique learning methods (emotion, practice, repetition, reinforcement and reconfiguration).

However, the methods are closely linked and can be used in combination with each other.

1. Events We hold many memories in our brains that consist of personal life events tied to a special experience in a particular context or location. They are events that were highlights and can be recalled easily. They include experiences associated with major festivals such as Christmas and Easter, celebrations like baptisms, weddings, funerals and birthdays, or other occasions unique enough to remember. Each person also has many other autobiographical memory-experiences, such as what they were doing at the time of 9/11, or what happened on their last visit to the doctor’s office. The event type of memory would also include special Bible stories that you have been secured in memory—Adam and Eve in the garden, Moses with the tablets of the Law, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, His crucifixion and resurrection, or St. Paul’s experiences on his missionary journeys. We remember them because they have a special cognitive and emotional appeal to us.

2. Skills The skills tier refers to our ability to use the alphabet and the multiplication tables, as well as the ability to read. These are memorized and practiced so that they may be used without the need to understand the underlying meaning. They also include skills like riding a bicycle, driving a car, and typing, all procedures that are performed almost automatically once they are practiced enough. As a pastor, you, as well as many parishioners, would likely know well, and almost automatically, the various forms of worship services, and even know when to bow your head, to sit or stand, or to speak or sing an appropriate response.

3. Knowledge Our memory of knowledge is made up of facts and information. It includes data that tell us how things are, like knowledge of Jesus and the Bible, as well as facts about our current home, our friends, our work and our activities. It would include also such definitive statements as those we find in the Apostles’ Creed and in explanations of doctrine. This information is held in the temporal cortex. The pastor may easily introduce a descriptive word, phrase, or even a concept such as “Jesus is God” by defining and explaining it carefully so that it makes sense. Then, to develop a network in the long-term memory all that is needed is repetition.

Just repeating an idea or statement, such as we do in reciting the Apostles’ Creed, can help establish it in our long-term memory. This is what we did in learning the alphabet, and the multiplication tables, and in learning to type. Although

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development of an effortless habit is useful in these basic areas, a danger lies in rote memorization and recitation of religious rituals so that the learned items become automatic and even meaningless. However, combining the informational items with rules and values from the next two tiers can make these items much more significant to the hearer, and of course, worth being remembered.

4. Rules Rules let us know how things should be, and what we need to do to meet our goals and fulfill our desires. For example, we hold in our mind common guides, like “take one step at a time,” and “still waters run deep.” They can help guide our behavior or explain it. More recent researchers have used the term “rules” to designate a specific type of memory.9 These are processed primarily in the back part of the prefrontal cortex. Earlier neuroscientists10 had labeled this type of memory prescriptive knowledge, in contrast to the previous tier of information which was called descriptive knowledge by some, semantic memory or declarative knowledge by others. To establish such a statement in the memory, we need to know why and how it should be used (although as children we may have learned to follow concrete rules without knowing why, such as “don’t run into the street,” “share your toys,” and “clean your plate”). The more applications that are provided, the more securely it is reinforced in one’s long-term memory.

For the preacher, rules would include the Ten Commandments and others such as the Golden Rule and “pray without ceasing.” You begin by stating the rule and then, to help the hearer understand it, you explain it so that it makes sense, including identifying its purpose. Finally, you show exactly how it may be applied to one’s life. You follow a simple process of answering the hearer’s presumed questions of what, so what, and then what.

For many sermons you may assume that your hearers have a prescriptive statement, such as the Fifth Commandment, firmly established in memory. You can then reinforce a theme that refers to that statement by suggesting positive applications like helping one’s neighbor in a particular way, as Luther suggests in his explanation of the commandment. This can help your hearers, and even though it may not be spectacular enough to earn a unique place in their memory, it may still reinforce the original memory. A danger lies in using only rules in the content of your sermon. Such statements represent the Law and could suggest moralistic preaching.

There is, of course, more to God’s Word than Law. 5. Values I have taken the liberty of adding values as a fifth tier. They are based on what neuroscientists have recently identified as higher-order rules based on abstractions.11 Daily life, with its complex environmental demands, requires more than a reflexive response from lower- order, concrete rules. It takes cognitive flexibility to

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be able to respond to novel situations with goal-directed, volitional behavior. They may be called higher-order patterns, strategies, or more preferably in my opinion, basic values. It is important to recognize that values are formed by integrating information from knowledge and rules.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) has been found to play “a central role in guiding complex goal-directed behavior.” 12 It also performs particular tasks in developing values. These tasks include detecting stored experiences, knowledge, and rules that may aid in forming values, evaluating them and selecting those that are pertinent, preparing an appropriate model of the value, rehearsing the plan to put it into operation, and coordinating thought and action (retrieval). This is accomplished by the PFC within an associative network of brain structures located near it.13 The PFC first directs a “top-down” development of abstract rules (or values) in contrast with the formation of “bottom-up” stimulus-driven concrete rules that are first learned in the basal ganglia, a cluster of structures located near the PFC.14 An example of concrete rule behavior initiated immediately in a stimulus-response manner would be responding almost automatically to the colors of the street light signals. Another example could be learning not to kill or harm others. More abstract rules would refer to a generalized appreciation of life and also a desire to express that understanding in one’s behavior. The Christian, of course, would recognize that his values derive from the Bible as God’s revelation to humankind.

In the New Testament age, the Ten Commandments and other rules lead into the more general values the Scriptures offer us. For example: “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” Love, courage, patience, self-control, confidence, mercy, and trust are a number of Scriptural values that comprise this fifth type of memory.

Faith in Christ may also be considered a primary value, with its basis in knowledge of specific events recorded in Scripture and of one’s own spiritual condition, along with rules such as repenting of one’s sins and worshipping God. Before suggesting implications for preaching we must see how the processes used in establishing an item in long-term memory (such as long-term potentiation and consolidation)15 help a memory persist over time.

What Helps a Memory Persist?

If an item is not held in memory, or does not persist, it cannot be called a memory. Only a few of the myriad things we hear and perceive throughout the day can be retained for consideration and eventually established. Much discussion has concerned this question of what distinguishes such memories from all the rest of our perceptions that are here today and gone almost immediately.

Researchers have pursued the concept of distinctiveness of memory and have identified such characteristics as novelty, incongruity and significance, or something that implies an important consequence to the person.16 They have also found that an event or idea that evokes an emotional reaction such that it elicits

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some degree of fear, wonder, sadness, surprise, or love will often help most strongly to fasten the point in a person’s long-term memory.17 Traumatic experiences, of course, represent a negative form of such emotional memory. The brain’s processes for values and their persistence suggest implications for preaching in four areas— developing values, making applications, evoking emotion, and finding the power behind the values.

Implications for Preaching – Developing Values A basic descriptive statement, such as “Jesus is God”, can be registered as an item of knowledge which even the devils believe, but it becomes a value, one that is integrated in one’s behavior, when we absorb it into our being and life. We come to trust Him in whatever He tells us. Such a value does not become personalized just by learning its definition or explanation or even evidence of how it is to be applied.

Through the Spirit’s work it must reach a person’s “heart” so that he accepts the value for himself.18 The value must then undergo a process of development.

Therefore, for the establishment of values, such as trust or faith in God, patience, mercy, genuineness, confidence, or self-control, you often need more than simple repetition or reinforcement. This requires a reconfiguration of the entire network. It means making a trait out of a state. You can help show through explanation and through application how a temporary state of mind that results in the display of showing love and concern to one other person at a particular time can be expanded to a lasting trait of showing love and concern for a variety of other persons across time, place, and culture.

For example, each of us can remember in our early home life being taught to be responsible to carry out certain tasks. This extended to our school experiences and then to our work life. We developed the trait of responsibility. This is the process of a state becoming a trait, from an event requiring effort to an effortless activity, from needing to be told what to do to responding automatically on the cue of sensing a need in the area of our responsibility.

It is a challenge for you to help a new convert who has accepted the simple but vital belief in Jesus as Savior to extend the initial belief to one of fuller trust in and reliance on the Lord during future trials and opportunities. This would result in a more comprehensive value, a reconfiguration of the belief ’s original neural network so that it is joined with other networks of trust and reliance.

You need to help a hearer broaden his view of a particular value to extend it from state to trait—from one of wearing blinders and restricting his concern to one other person, such as a spouse, to discarding the blinders to include others in the family, and even to using night vision goggles to show love to others outside the family, to sensing a variety of situations in which love can be demonstrated.

You can facilitate this broadening by illustrating how it can be done through story, metaphor, and application.

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Implications for Preaching – Making Applications Developing a value and establishing it in memory is often best accomplished by following a principle of attaching your descriptions and explanations of a value to items already in the hearer’s current long-term memory. It is like using a Velcro strip.19 One strip of the Velcro is covered with a thousand little hooks, while the other is covered with a thousand loops. The two connect with each other in a most secure way. Each application in the sermon helps you reach other loops in the person’s memory and makes the learning target stick more tightly. Finding the loops is therefore accomplished first by using words of explanation already familiar to the hearer in his memory and then by making an application to the hearer’s life.

Another extremely effective and appealing way of making a connection with the hearer’s memory is to use picture-language—metaphors, similes, analogies.

Besides giving a dictionary or catechetical definition, the preacher can draw a word picture and more readily ensure understanding. Picture language offers a lot of hooks that explanations cannot. They can be connected to pictures and experiences already in the memory. It adds still more neurons and reconfigures the original understanding. The resulting network is stored near the front of the prefrontal cortex and contains links with both the left and right brains.

Reconfiguration is the method used in the Bible to help us learn values and secure them in memory. An effective technique to reconfigure memory is to use a metaphor. Daniel Pink has remarked that if a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor equals a thousand pictures.20 For example, the psalmist used a metaphor when he wrote that God is our rock and fortress (to help establish our values of confidence and trust in God). The metaphor transfers a meaning from one familiar picture in a person’s memory (e.g., the solidity of the rock and fortress) to a concept that may be somewhat vague (God). It adds a picture that is often clearer and more meaningful than a definition. The picture’s hooks reach more loops than the use of words like “strong,” “solid,” “omnipotent,” or a “higher authority.”

In addition to metaphors, you can employ stories, similes, and analogies.

This is not a new style suggested here. Jesus probably could not have gone a week without using one of his thirty-eight parables, or a variety of similes and metaphors. As Rossow notes, the Scriptures are replete with metaphors and images that the preacher may use to help find attaching loops in the hearer’s long-term memory.21 Though the metaphors and stories in the Scriptures were applicable especially to the people of those days, they are still often meaningful to us even now. But you can find many others that suggest pictures more in line with our present day world and activities.

Implications for Preaching – Evoking Emotion As a preacher you experience the challenge of avoiding two extremes—one, a purely objective presentation devoid of any feeling—and the other, a highly emo-

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tion-driven sermon reminiscent of pietistic influence, or of “hell and damnation” preachers. If there has been any deviation from a balanced presentation among LCMS clergy, some may have at times been inclined more toward the former.

But even with our objective, substantive Scripture-based beliefs, various emotions, such as sorrow in repentance, relief and satisfaction in forgiveness, wonder at an omnipotent God, and joy in regaining a lost sheep are all parts of the Gospel message. Unfortunately, it may be that some clergy have not been able to recognize and develop the inherent gift in their brain of displaying and using emotion appropriately in their sermons. Others have intuitively learned to employ this cortical function in their ministry.

It was in 1991 that “mirror neurons” were discovered, by accident, in monkeys in an Italian laboratory, and several years later these neurons were recognized in humans.22 Neurons, found in several areas of the brain, allow us to sense deep emotions and intentions in others and then even urge us to feel and act in the same way. It is a humanizing translation of the familiar adage —”Monkey see, monkey do.”

Mirror neurons have a number of applications for clergy. For example, ministers are able to use them to display empathy in their personal counseling. In preaching you can give opportunity to your hearers to use their mirror neurons in sensing the emotions you display and thus capture a deeper application of the sermon text. Goleman explains: Our mirror neurons fire as we watch someone else, for example, scratch their head or wipe away a tear, so that portion of the pattern of neuronal firing in our brain mimics theirs . . . . Mirror neurons make emotions contagious, letting the feelings we witness flow through us, helping us get in sync and follow what’s going on. We “feel” the other in the broadest sense of the word; sensing their sentiments, their movements, their sensations, their emotions as they act inside us.23 But the question would arise: How might I show my emotions in the sermon presentation? This would be done through your use of metaphors, stories, and forms of word usage that seem best able to reflect emotions.

It is possible, of course, to offer an objective exegetical explanation of the text without expressing any real emotion. It requires only using concrete terms to explain other words in a simple logical way, which certainly is a necessary element of a more complex process. To ensure memory persistence, it would appear to be effective to identify the emotions that are a part of the sermon text and then to find metaphors and stories that would reflect those feelings. For example, Jesus used this approach as He related the parable of the prodigal son to His hearers.

You can sense the selfish desire and ambition of the younger son, the shallow pleasure derived from satisfying his desires, the humiliating degradation of living

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with animals, the hopelessness and despair, the trembling anticipation, and finally the unconditional love that wipes out all the earlier feelings. Thus the substantive, conceptual conclusion of forgiveness is still retained.

If the preacher can give at least an inkling of such feelings with more than a simple unfeeling recital of the story, he can lead the hearer’s mirror neurons to catch a significant glimpse of the story and its message that will certainly reinforce the picture in his long-term memory. He can do this by using metaphors and stories that reflect feelings through their pictures and movement. Movement or activity in the left PFC, Craik found, “occurs more strongly in verb generation than in noun repetition.” 24 By expressing himself in this way, the preacher can do so much more, it seems, than by using only concrete, explanatory terms.

In this way, then, emotion can be used appropriately to communicate a substantive message that will certainly persist in long-term memory.

Implications for Preaching—Finding the Power behind the Value Evangelical preachers recognize how necessary it is to present the Gospel as the answer to all who value eternal life and to those who admit to sin. But the Gospel also serves as the basic foundation and dynamic for all Scriptural values.

Knowing that we belong to God through the sacrifice and life of Jesus, we commit ourselves and our lives to Him and His way of living. The Gospel dynamic can and must be related to all parts of our life.

You hold an additional advantage in assuring your hearers of the power that the Spirit offers through Word and Sacrament in keeping their values alive and functioning within them. Reference is often made in our pulpits to keeping the true Word and Sacraments, but unfortunately not always including explicit reference to how the Spirit works through them. We need to hear regularly how the Spirit’s power must replace exclusive reliance on our own efforts.

Using the Left and the Right Brain Unfortunately, some preachers, in attempting to help hearers try to preserve some of the sermon for their memory, feel somewhat limited in thoroughly using all the learning modes. This may be because they are not using all the gifts that God has supplied to them in their brains. They may be limiting themselves to using only the left brain.

We return to the picture of the brain. If you draw a line from your nose to the top of your head and to the back, you divide the brain into two hemispheres, separating the left brain from the right brain. On each side, strangely enough, there are the same three dozen or so smaller structures that display the brain’s functioning. It is helpful for you as the preacher to know how you function with either or both hemispheres, since they work somewhat differently.

To help the Spirit’s power become fully operative in the hearer’s brain, you

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must deliberately employ the different functions of the two hemispheres in your own brain. In Table 2 you can see the different functions displayed by each side of the brain.25 Essentially, the left side is more literally-minded and orderly as it operates with familiar things in our life, while the right side can seem disorganized as it copes with any newer environments. As a result we usually feel more comfortable and happy with the left side operations and a bit anxious and unsure with the right side.

Table 2 Operations of the Left and Right Brain Hemispheres Left (Familiar)

Right (Novel)

analyze, use logical steps

synthesize, use pattern (Gestalt, big picture)

read the text

see the context

listen to what is said

listen to how it is said

define terms clearly

embrace ambiguity

speak a thousand words

draw a picture (use a metaphor)

organize stimuli and think

be open to stimuli (their effect on you)

inside the box

think outside the box

Between the two sides of the brain and extending from front to back is a narrow strip of tissue called the corpus callosum. Through God’s singular creation of this unique part of the brain, the two sides are able to communicate with each other.

We have been accustomed in our theological training to concentrate on a well-ordered development and collection of biblical doctrine, based upon a careful exegetical understanding of the Word. This has required intensive left brain analysis and organization, together with exercising care to avoid undue speculation and philosophizing.

This doctrinal orientation has enabled us to maintain a religious belief system based upon substantive historical events. Equally, or yet still more important, it also enables a life for the believer that displays freedom in Christ. But if we really want that freedom, we must develop scriptural values that will allow us to function in an ever-changing society. Prescriptive statements are not always suited to make the judgments needed for fluid, ambiguous relationships. They are often limited to particular situations or are over-generalized. We need values, and values require the use of our right brain to embrace the ambiguity of our circumstances, and the left brain to overcome anxiety and make deliberate judgments.

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Implications for Preaching As a preacher, you help your hearers develop general Scriptural values that can guide them in fluid, rapidly changing situations. You cannot possibly give them an answer or solution to every individual problem or challenge they face. You use your right brain when you generate picture language to establish a broad value in the hearer’s memory and to help him reconfigure it once it is secure.

You will also usually adapt your approach to fit left and right brain preferences of your hearers. For example, a group of college student may seem more amenable to a logical, ordered left brain presentation. However, some students may be inclined more toward artistic, spatial right brain interests. Although a congregation may lean more to one preference than to the other, hearers usually will include both. Your preaching should, therefore, include appeals to both left and right brains.

Putting It All Together How can you pull all the operations of your own brain and that of your hearers together so that the Holy Spirit’s power is effectively displayed? We have already explored the core of the functions in Working Memory and Establishing. In addition, the Spirit also operates within the hearer’s brain in its functions of perceiving, orienting, working memory limits, and retrieving.

Each of the five steps needs to be followed as you use both your left and your right brain (see Table 3).

1. Perceiving This step occurs at the back of the brain where outside stimuli are processed.

The stimuli usually originate in the front—coming through a person’s eyes, ears, nose, mouth and fingers. But God has created us with our sensory lobes located toward the rear of the brain, where they serve as a filter to admit only a limited amount of all that goes on outside of us. 26 The Left Brain It has been the traditional pattern in churches that a preacher uses his voice to produce audible stimuli that can be admitted to the hearer’s sensory lobe. To present ideas and beliefs the preacher uses words that originate primarily through the left brain.

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Table 3 Five Power Operations Used by the Brain in Preaching P O W

Perceiving Orienting Working Memory A: Limits B: Plan of Action

E

Establishing

R

Retrieving

Begin by using the senses fully and appropriately Introduce the theme so that it will be retained Recognize the time and overload limits of the working memory Use specific strategies to help form memories that will be stored Repeat and reinforce previous memories, and reconfigure others Enable the hearer to retrieve the memory and put it into action

The Right Brain Modern-day preachers are almost all aware of technology that allows the use of a projector and screen to admit pictures and printed text. Many make use of the visual sense to aid in impressing the message upon the hearer. The preacher’s facial expressions and gestures also help amplify and explain the message.

The beautiful stained glass windows and symbols of other kinds in the church show how the visual sense is already being used to help create and reinforce biblical pictures and concepts. With the right brain you may use your creativity to find ways to use other senses, such as sound (with the use of music), or even smell (cf. use of incense). At the same time, the left brain is needed to impose limits so that the hearer does not become overwhelmed with too many stimuli.

2. Orienting A 10 to 30 second interval is available as the stimuli are processed through the first relay station (thalamus) and on to the second orienting points. The person’s attention is directed and focused on an item of interest. Whatever does not strike the hearer’s interest is immediately discarded. Interest, of course, cannot be forced on the hearer. It takes more than a spur-of-the-moment decision on your part to see how such interest can be generated.27 Using the Left Brain Finding an item that is of interest to all hearers in the assembled congregation is not a simple matter. You need to locate that item of interest in the text you use for your sermon. This step, therefore, begins with determining the core meaning of the message you are to present, evidenced in the homiletical principle of

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identifying the underlying scriptural principle or idea in the text that is used as the basis for the sermon.

Careful reading and study enlist the deliberate and analytical ability of your own left brain first before you engage the hearer’s orienting function. You must generalize from the passages before you form a statement that portrays the entire set. See the text often used for Transfiguration Sunday (Lk 9: 28-36 NIV): 28

About eight days after Jesus said this, he took Peter, John and James with him and went up onto a mountain to pray.29 As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. 30 Two men, Moses and Elijah,31 appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus. They spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem.32 Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him.33 As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said to him, “Master, it is good for us to be here.

Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” (He did not know what he was saying.)34 While he was speaking, a cloud appeared and enveloped them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud.35 A voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.” 36 When the voice had spoken, they found that Jesus was alone. The disciples kept this to themselves, and told no one at that time what they had seen.

The Scriptural and theological idea of the divine nature of Christ is frequently used as a core meaning of this passage, but the core meaning is not what you should communicate by itself.

Using the Right Brain Most preachers would recognize that a statement of a theological doctrine or abstract scriptural principle at the beginning of the sermon would ordinarily not elicit the interest that would pass through the filter of the secondary relay stations.

It could possibly interest theologically-minded persons, but many hearers would set that presentation aside and look for something more pertinent to their daily lives, or they may immediately tune out the preacher.

It is necessary that you develop a simple and inviting theme out of the core meaning. This is a major challenge because it determines both the content and the organization of the rest of your sermon. In order to make an idea or belief that will stick in the hearers’ minds after the worship service, and even into the next day, it is necessary to develop a simple theme that can be etched into their long term memory. It must be one they can take home with them, one they will remember, one that could perhaps even be written on a refrigerator magnet. However, it must still retain the core meaning.

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This requires creative right brain dreaming and experimenting on your part to find the one best suited to the people in your congregation. Rossow suggests a very helpful way to find a theme by using what he calls “Gospel-handles.” 28 You can develop an intriguing question or problem by using such a Gospel-handle, a word or phrase in the sermon text that can communicate the Gospel. To catch and retain the person’s interest with the transfiguration passage as the text requires more than a compact summary of the core meaning, such as “Jesus is God.” The phrase would best present an idea or picture that is not yet complete or absolute. Some possibilities are “Seeing God’s Glory,” “Finding and Sharing Peak Experiences,” “Listen to Him,” and “Why Should We Listen to Jesus.”

The theme may pose a meaningful personal problem or unresolved question, something that connects to the hearer’s curiosity, but without reflecting gimmickry.

It may be a concern or question that needs more information and exploration to obtain an answer or resolution. Putting it in the form of a simple and attractive theme is a major necessity, if the hearers are to remember what you preach about.

The inquisitiveness of your right brain is tested to find a theme that the hearer may effectively consider in his working memory.

3. Working Memory Limits Once the theme sparks interest, it is retained for the hearer’s working memory. Now you face the real challenge. It requires facilitating the memory process within the hearer’s brain. But there are limits imposed by the human brain as it has been created by God, and you must be aware of them if you are to deliver a sermon that is to be remembered.29 Using the Left Brain You should think first of what the hearer’s mind is going through as he listens to the ideas you are sending out. Handling the ideas and thoughts offered by the preacher is, for the hearer, a little like juggling. One ball he can toss easily and catch with the other hand, two make the task a lot harder, and with three it is almost impossible for the average person. You need to listen to what the hearer is thinking: “Please tell me the one idea you want me to think about.”

At this point you meet one of your greatest hazards. It is generated by what is sometimes called the “curse of knowledge.” From your earlier seminary study and your current word studies you have unearthed a multitude of intriguing and highly interesting issues and items of information. If your left brain had its way, you would share them all, but you need to remind yourself constantly of the principle of “one thing at a time—and stay with it.”

If the hearer is faced with a lot of the preacher’s interesting and worthwhile points, he can begin to wonder which one to concentrate on. He cannot absorb them all in the short span of the sermon (he has not had the time that you have

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had in collecting and mulling them all over). You need to abide by the triage statement: If you say three things, you’ve said nothing. And if you are intent upon securing the theme in the person’s long-term memory, you must continue to focus only on one theme. You must set limits.

Another working memory limit is necessary as you set the length of the sermon. The suggested time length for a small child is probably a period of a few minutes. It is eight to ten minutes for pre-adolescents and up to twenty minutes for adolescents and adults. This is what is called a person’s “attention span’ and it limits the time available to you. You may be able to inspire a few people to last longer, but you will likely lose many others in the process. This period of time is very critical to the hoped-for outcome.

Using the Right Brain It takes deliberate and creative effort on your part to hold your own mind to just a single theme. And then you must present the theme as thoroughly as possible. You should remain focused on that one theme together with the hoped-for result of making it stick. With your eye on the big picture, you see the hearer captivated by the one theme and rising above the waves where he would otherwise be drowned in an ocean of ideas.

4. Retrieving Retrieving is the process of recovering an item from long-term memory and translating it into behavior (by voicing the remembrance or by transforming it into other behavioral action).30 Roediger is quoted as saying that retrieval is the key process in understanding memory, for while a memory does not exist unless it persists, it also appears true that the memory also does not exist unless it can be retrieved.31 But even repressed traumatic experiences and their associated feelings can be retrieved with special expertise.

Retrieval is essentially the same as the transfer of learning in education, which is the traditional aim of educators. Education must be transferred to life, both for practical as well as intangible, self-fulfilling reasons. As McDaniel asserts, retrieval is therefore a central concept of both learning and memory.32 There are two questions that need to be considered: First, what must you do to retrieve a memory? And second, how may we explain why retrieval of knowledge-of-action does not result in retrieval of knowledge–for-action? In different terms, why are remembered rules or values not turned into actual behavior?

Mechanism for Retrieval Cortical structures are heavily involved in retrieval. According to Miller and Bushman the process requires the active involvement of the PFC “to act on, not just react to” the situations in the environment; first by retrieving memories.33 They

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state that the translation of values into behavior is a deliberate process. The PFC is used to coordinate thought and action. It also helps determine what outcomes are possible and which might be successful to achieve one’s goals.

To become more specific regarding the structures involved, McDermott reports that “regions in the anterior prefrontal cortex, lateral and medial parietal cortices are all found to be more active during successful retrieval attempts than when such attempts fail.” 34 And Badre states that the VLPFC (ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) is involved in the retrieval of both knowledge-for-action as well as knowledge-of-action.35 Although no specific neural mechanism has yet been identified for the retrieval process, researchers have tried to spell out general methods. Early explanations posited the existence of “association factors” or “attractors” connected to neurons that comprise the memory and are activated by a cue in the environment.36 More recently, Edward Thorndike’s theory of transfer (theory of identical elements)37 proposed in the early 1900s has been recalled and revised. Now it is noted that elements or characteristics of the new situation need be only similar (not exactly identical) to those in the original memory in order for it to be retrieved.38 The current theory is called “transfer-apparent-processing.” 39 Retrieving Knowledge and Action With regard to the second question, the sociopath exemplifies the distinction between knowing and doing. For him, knowing the difference between right and wrong and carrying it out are really two different things.40 He has descriptive knowledge that enables him to know what is right and what is wrong. However, he has a deficiency in the memories of rules and values that appears to make him unable or unwilling to use the knowledge in guiding his behavior. His conscience seems barren. We know that both of these items of memory are located in different parts of the brain; they invoke different activities with different neural circuits.

The Apostle James presaged this distinction between behavior and knowledge by writing that faith without works is dead, or, as Maxwell points out, “a believer is shown to be righteous (justified) by his works” (such as Abraham’s offering of Isaac on the altar), and not by idle words that claim to be faith.41 Implications for Preaching by Using the Left and Right Brain Although we still do not know exactly how a value stored in long-term memory is retrieved and translated into motor activity, we do know a few particulars that have implications for preaching, as well as for the use of both sides of the brain.

Using the mechanisms In a preliminary vein, it must be noted that if the memory is to be retrieved, it must have persisted. This would have required the use of adequate metaphors,

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stories and emotional complements in your sermon to make sure that the memory is meaningful and that it will be consolidated in storage. Then, to lay the groundwork for retrieval through preaching, you would need to suggest cues that the hearer may use to arouse the original memory. Such cues need to be specific, i.e., applications to the life of the hearer that are very similar to those of the actual life-situations in which the hearer is already involved or may be in the future. For example, teenagers would likely be more readily attracted to applications involving peer pressure than to a political issue, and adults would probably find more appeal in coping with stress than in a national energy problem.

Facilitating retrieval for action As the preacher, you will be constantly aware of the differences in memory types, and that knowledge is separate from rules and values. This distinction explains James’ assertion that faith without works is dead. In his context, faith is regarded only as knowledge of the way to salvation and does not include works, which represent a necessary but separate outflow from faith.

You will also be aware of the distinction between rules and values. This would explain why some people may follow the “rule” of attending church or “assembling together” without owning the necessary complementary value of deep spirituality and devoted worship. This indicates clearly that, for them, the rule needs to be broadened to include the motivational part of the value of worshiping God. It is necessary that the isolated state be developed into a trait.

This distinction would also seem to explain why some confirmands defect in late adolescence and early adulthood. During their adolescent years, their prefrontal cortex is still in the process of developing (until about age 20).42 Their instruction might not have reached enough of their cortical deliberation processes to enable them to develop values, or the instruction may not have touched on the life situations that were meaningful for them.43 Finally, it is necessary to recognize that values are derived from knowledge and rules. Faith, when it is accepted as a primary value, must include the devoted acceptance of oneself as a sinner redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice and possessing the freedom to worship and serve God. All other Christian values require this Gospel as their motivation. The Gospel, therefore, would be a necessary part of every sermon, but it must be readily relatable to the theme.

In this connection, it is important to remember that a believer’s values do not result in perfection in his behavior. Rather, he continues to experience the inner struggle that St. Paul knew in his battle with Satan, and still does the things he should not do (Rom 7: 19-19). Therefore, each believer continues to need the empowerment of the Spirit to enable him to continue confidently in the inner struggle to the expected final victory.

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It is clearly evident that both the preacher and the hearer need to make a committed and thorough use of their PFC. This requires that they distinguish among the types of memory, together with recognizing cues in the environment that would generate the pertinent memory. They also need to give careful cognitive attention to discern the environment so that the appropriate behavior would be selected and put into action. It will take your right brain to look at the broad picture to make sure you see the relationship among the parts, and your left brain to see more clearly how each piece (those that we know about to date) fit into the process.

Conclusion The past decade has revealed information and insights about the brain that illuminate this part of God’s creation in a most spectacular manner. And the newly developed imaging techniques will continue to amaze us with still more research findings from month to month, and even week to week. At the present, though, we are able to derive a number of significant implications for preaching, one of the more important of the ministerial functions.

If preaching may be considered from two angles – getting the message straight, and communicating it clearly and effectively – the implications of brain research touch on the second phase, lending it both significance and definitive detail. The communication becomes much more than an exercise, since you are using the PFC which Peter Steinke calls “holy tissue.” That is the area of the brain in which spiritual values are developed and revised. We are certainly treading on “holy ground,” like Moses on Mt. Sinai, but we are also helping the Spirit mold and reshape it.

The challenge to help the Spirit mold and reshape in this way greatly increases and intensifies the preacher’s task. That challenge requires more of the preaching ministry than our traditional view of it did. The brain research has first pinpointed the objective of communicating a message as one that hopefully will be consolidated in the hearer’s long-term memory. To get the message to persist in one’s memory is no simple task. The preacher needs to focus on building, reinforcing, and reconfiguring the neural network of the spiritual value. To do this, he must carefully and creatively select words and language that will not only help the memory to persist, but also to be available for retrieval.

To establish a memory and enable it to be retrieved, he must also immerse himself in the daily life of his hearers. For example, in communicating the spiritual value of trust in the Lord, with a selected theme such as “God’s providence will rise in the morning before the sun,” he would focus on a young mother making a seemingly easy and brief mid-morning trip to the market for groceries. He would picture her with the retrieved memory on her lips as she backs her van out the driveway, loaded with two preschoolers strapped in their car seats in the rear. She is

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getting ready to take precious lives in her hands as she traverses several potentially dangerous heavily-trafficked city streets. She invokes her trust in God’s providence.

To preach a sermon that will be both remembered and retrieved by such a young mother as well as by others requires essentially four items: 1 – a simple theme derived from the Scriptural text 2 – appropriate picture language that clarifies the theme, including specific applications, metaphors, and stories, all bearing an emotional complement 3 – focus on establishing a persisting memory of a spiritual value, the least understood of the five types of memory 4 – focus on retrieval of the value, the ultimate test of the preaching 44 Some preachers are already using these signature characteristics of an effective homily. Now the intentional use of the implications for preaching can help unleash still more of the Spirit’s P.O.W.E.R. in dramatic and consistent form (through the cortical functions of perceiving, orienting, working memory, establishing and retrieving).

Notes and References 1 Jeff Hawkins with Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines. (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 34.

2 For more detailed information see Robert Sylwester, How to Explain a Brain: An Educator’s Handbook of Brain Terms and Cognitive Processes. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc., 2005) 3 The top structure is called the cingulate, while the lower one, labeled the amygdala, is also known as our “panic button.” The route in this direction follows what is termed the “low road” that helps us respond immediately and without thinking to what is seen as a threat to our person, such as a car that is bearing down rapidly upon us, or a snake in the path in front of us, or an insult to which we want to respond with an angry retort. This is the route taken by demagogues such as Hitler and “hell and damnation preachers” to take advantage of fears and guilt. For our purposes in following the sermon we shall take the “high road” that requires a little longer response time, and also takes deliberate thought.

4 Working memory and establishing appear to be two reasonably well-defined functions of the brain. Working memory comprises the system operation in the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate that “holds information in temporary storage during the planning and execution of a task” Yadin Dudai, “Working memory,” in Science of Memory: Concepts, Henry Roediger III, Yadin Dudai and Susan Fitzpatrick ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 144. It would engage the processes of encoding and representation in which the memory trace is formed in the brain’s neurons with a “representation” as a message that can be sent from one part of the brain to another (like the dots and dashes of the Morse code).

The establishing function enables the process of consolidation, the “post-encoding stablilization of the memory trace.” Yadin Dudai, “Consolidation,” in Roediger, Dudai, and Fitzpatrick, 165. It is also a dynamic process in which the memory trace can be updated, strengthened and reinforced. At this point neuroscientists introduce the term persistence. If the change in neural representation does not persist, we cannot call it a memory. The neuronal network, or structure, must exhibit a lasting existence (or persistence) following the initial experience analyzed in the working memory.

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5 The memory system within the brain has often been described by researchers in dichotomous form. The labels used vary according to types of content (episodic vs. semantic memory, habit vs. memory, procedural vs. declarative memory, descriptive vs. prescriptive knowledge), types of processes (shallow vs. deep, automatic or effortless vs. effortful), familiarity vs. recollection, perceptual vs. reflective), and types of structure (hippocampal vs. striatum). See Marcia Johnson, “Memory systems: A cognitive construct for analysis and synthesis.” in Roediger, Dudai, and Fitzpatrick, 353.

The organization listed in Table 1 is a practical hybrid that has used Kesner’s three fold system as a beginning—see Raymond Kesner, “Neurobiological views of memory.” in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 2d ed. ed. Raymond Kesner, and Joe Martinez (Boston: Academic Press 2007), 273–276.

6 WORKING MEMORY Elkhonon Goldberg, The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older (New York: Gotham Books 2005), 111–181.

Ran Hassin, “Nonconscious control and implicit working memory,” in The New Unconscious, ed.

Ran Hassin, James Uleman, and John Bargh (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 196–222.

Kumar Narayanan, “The neurological scratchpad: Looking into working memory.” Brain Connection August 2, 2006. Retrieved from http://www.BrainConnection.com/Library.

Joaquin Pfuster, Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 168–175.

Daniel Siegel, The Developing Mind (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 134–140; David Sousa, How the Brain Learns 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc. 2006) 45–47, 109–131.

7 ESTABLISHING IN LONG-TERM MEMORY Gerald Edelmann, Wider Than the Sky (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2004), 23–25.

Goldberg, The Wisdom Paradox, 110–159.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (New York: Random House, 2007), 99–247.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2002).

James McGaugh, Memory and Emotion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 117–161.

Arnold Modell, Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 27–79.

Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future (New York: Riverhead Books 2006), 103-139.

Daniel Siegel, The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being (New York: WW. Norton 2007), 127–195; 249-262.

Laurence Tancredi, Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality (New York: Cambridge: University Press, 2005).

8 The formation and storage of each type of memory may occur in different parts of the brain. The structures listed in Table 1 represent the most prominent location for the listed type. For other locations see Raymond Kesner, “Neurobiological Views of Memory.” in Kesner, Martinez, 273–276; 297–298 .

9 See the 19 articles collected by Silvia Bunge and Jonathan Wallis, Eds., Neuroscience of Ruleguided Behavior (Oxford: Oxford: University Press, 2008).

10 See, for example, Elkhonon Goldberg, The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Goldberg, The Wisdom Paradox.

Yadin Dudai, Memory from A to Z: Keywords, Concepts and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 59–61, 148–151.

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11

Higher-order rules and patterns are introduced by the following contributors to Bunge and

Wallis: Aldo Genovesio and Steven Wise, “The neurophysiology of abstract response strategies,” 101–101; Kalina Christoff and Kamyar Keramatian, “Abstraction of mental representations: Theoretical considerations and neuroscientific evidence,”112; Marcel Brass, Jan Derrfuss, and D. von Cramon, “The role of the posterior frontolateral cortex in task-related control,” 177; Paul Lipton and Howard Eichenbaum, “Binding and organization in the medial temporal lobe,” 337; Earl Miller and Timothy Buschman, “Rules through recursion: How interactions between the frontal cortex and basal ganglia may build abstract, complex rules from concrete, simple ones,” 419–424.

Although it is relatively easy to distinguish between knowledge and rules, there may be some overlap in looking at rules and values.

12 David Freedman, “Exploring the roles of the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes in visual categorization,” in Bunge and Wallis, 394.

13 Earl Miller and Timothy Buschman, “Rules through recursion: How interactions between the frontal cortex and basal ganglia may build abstract, complex rules from concrete, simple ones,” in Bunge and Wallis, 422–424.

The neurotransmitter, dopamine, is also influential in rule and value formation by providing the stimulus to increase activity in the pertinent cortical structure.

14 Ibid., 424.

15 Theorists have labeled the processes used in establishing a memory as long-term potentiation and consolidation. The neural substrates for these procedures seem to include what is called synaptic strengthening of the connections between the neurons that make up a network. This strengthening is undoubtedly facilitated through reinforcement by the neuronal firing from continued practice, repetition and application in different situations. In addition, electrochemical substances called neurotransmitters and an electrophysiological form called P300 are processed through the synapses and their neurons. Detailed procedures are yet to be identified through ongoing research.

(See Goldberg and Dudai) 16 See Fergus Craik, “Distinctiveness and memory: comments and a point of view,” in Distinctiveness and Memory, ed. R. Reed Hunt and James Worthen, (New York: Oxford University Press.

2006), 425–442.

17 Ibid., 426–428.

See also Stephen Schmidt, “Emotion, significance, distinctiveness, and memory,” in Hunt and Worthen, 61.

Susan Sara, “Integrative comments—Consolidation: From hypothesis to paradigm to concept,” and Howard Eichenbaum, “Persistence: necessary, but not sufficient,” in Roediger, Dudai and Fitzpatrick, 194.

18 The heart has traditionally been considered to be the source of one’s motivation, because it provides emotional power. It is thought to be quite separate and removed from the mind. The heart and mind seemed to be two distinct entities. The seeming contrasts between the two have led to someone saying, “The distance between the heart and mind is a thousand miles.” Really, the two are only several inches apart. The emotional or limbic system (the “heart”) is located with its several structures in the posterior part of the brain. And it maintains a strong neural contact with practically every other function, including the mind in the prefrontal cortex. As the Spirit works to etch knowledge and value in the long-term memory, He is undoubtedly operative in both of these areas.

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Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003), 93, 158-159.

Richard Davidson, “Cognitive neuroscience needs affective neuroscience (and vice versa),” Brain and Cognition 42 (2000), 89–92. Online at .com.

Richard Davidson, “Seven sins in the study of emotion: Correctives from affective neuroscience,” Brain and Cognition 52 (2003), 129–132. Online at http://www.ideallibrary.com.

Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (New York: Bantam Books, 1994), 27.

Richard Resta, The New Brain (New York: Rodal, 2003), 37.

19 Heath and Heath, 111.

20 Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future (New York: Riverhead Books 2006), 50.

See also Arnold Modell, Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press 2003), 27–79.

21 Francis Rossow, Preaching the Creative Gospel Creatively (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1983), 32–50.

22 In the early 1990s, a small group of Italian neuroscientists happened upon a class of neurons in a monkey brain that fired when they just saw someone else perform a simple act like grasping a piece of fruit. After further experimentation in humans revealed the same observation, they applied the name of “mirror neurons” to the cells. See Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese, “Mirrors in the mind,” Scientific American, November 2006.

A prominent American neuroscientist, V. S. Ramachandran, later predicted that mirror neurons would do for teaching and learning what the discovery of DNA did for our understanding of genetics. See V. S. Ramachandran. “Mirror neurons and the brain in the vat,” Edge the Third Culture, 2006, online http://www.edge.org./3rd_culture/ramachandran06; Robert Sylwester, “Mirror neurons,” Brain Connection August, 2002, Online at http://www.brainconnection.com/ Content, 181.

For further references and applications, see Sandra Blakeslee, “Cells that read minds,” The New York Times, 10 January 2006.

Marco Iacoboni, Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, Vittorio Gallese, Giovanni Buccino, John C. Mazziotta, and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Grasping the intentions of others with one’s own mirror neuron system,” Public Library of Science Biology, 2, 3 March 2005, 1–18.

V. S. Ramachandran and Lindsay Oberman, “Broken mirrors: A theory of autism,” Scientific American, 16 October 2006, 62–69.

Siegel, The Mindful Brain 166–171.

Laurence Tancredi. Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality (New York: Cambridge: University Press, 2005). 40–41.

23 Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (New York: Bantam Books, 2006) 42& 24 Fergus Craik, “Encoding: A cognitive perspective,” in Roediger, Dudai and Fitzpatrick, 134.

25 Gazzaniga, Michael, The Ethical Brain (New York: Dana Press 2005), 148–151.

Goldberg, The Wisdom Paradox, 186–207, 211–216.

Wendy Heller, Nancy S. Koven, and Gregory A. Miller, “Regional brain activity in anxiety and depression, cognition/emotion interaction, and emotion regulation,” in Kenneth Hugdahl and Richard Davidson, The Asymmetrical Brain, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2004), 533–564.

Andrew Newberg, and Mark Waldman, Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth (New York: Free Press 2006), 60-67.

Joaquin Pfuster, Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003), 188–189, 244–245.

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Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future (New York: Riverhead Books 2006), 25.

Daniel Siegel, The Developing Mind (New York: Guilford Press 1999), 143–144, 181–185, 203–207, 304, 327–332.

26 Yadin Dudai, Memory from A to Z: Keywords, Concepts and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 187–188.

Sylwester, How to Explain a Brain, 141–144.

27 Yadin Dudai, Memory from A to Z, 21–22.

Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence, 70–79.

Heath and Heath, 1–99.

Richard Restak, Poe’s Heart and the Mountain Climber (New York: Harcourt Books 2004), 80, 105–108.

M. Rosario Rueda, Michael Posner, and Mary Rothbart, “Attentional control and self-regulation,” in Handbook of Self-Regulation, ed. R. Baumeister and K. Vohs (New York: Guilford Press, 2004), 283–300.

Daniel Siegel, The Developing Mind, 121–152.

Robert Sylwester, How to Explain a Brain, 25–27, 46.

28 Rossow, Preaching the Creative Gospel Creatively, 32–50.

Francis Rossow, Gospel Handles: Finding New Connections in Biblical Texts (St. Louis: Concordia, 2001).

29 Ran Hassin, “Nonconscious control and implicit working memory,” in Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh, 202.

Sousa, 45–47.

30 John Bargh, “Bypassing the will: Toward demystifying the nonconscious control of social behavior,” in Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh, 37–58.

Tanya Chartrand, William Maddux and Jessica Lakin, “Beyond the perception-behavior link: The ubiquitous utility and motivational moderators of nonconscious mimicry,” in Hassin, Uleman, Bargh, 334–361.

James A. Coan and John J. B. Allen, “The state and trait nature of frontal EEG asymmetry in emotion” in Hugdahl and Davidson, 565–615.

Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (San Diego: Harcourt, 1999), 80.

Richard Davidson, “Seven sins in the study of emotion: Correctives from affective neuroscience,” Brain and Cognition 52, 129–132.

Richard Davidson, “The privileged status of emotion in the brain,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 17 August 2004, 101, 33, 1–2.

Gerald Edelmann, Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 123–156.

Goleman, Social Intelligence, 41–44, 327–328.

Peter Gollwitzer, Ute Bayer, & Kathleen McCulloch, “The control of the unwanted,” in Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh, 485–515.

William Hirstein, Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 180–181.

Eric Jensen, Brain-Based Learning (San Diego: The Brain Store, 2000), 215–225.

Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (New York: Penguin, 2002), 222, 323.

Chad J. Marsolek, “What is priming and why?” in Rethinking Implicit Memory, ed. Jeffrey S. Bowers & Chad J. Marsolek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 41–68.

Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman, Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological

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Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth (New York: Free Press, 2006), 163, 189–190.

Joaquin Pfuster, Cortex and Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 80–81, 132–134, 186–187, 246.

Elizabeth Phelps, “The interaction of emotion and cognition: The relation between the human amygdala and cognitive awareness,” in Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh, 61–76.

Giacomo Rizzolatti, Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese, “Mirrors in the Mind,” Scientific American (November, 2006), 54–61.

Steven Rose, The Future of the Brain: The Promise and Perils of Tomorrow’s Neuroscience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 162–166, 210–213.

Daniel Siegel, The Mindful Brain, 158, 166–169, 218–226.

David Sousa, How the Brain Learns, 106–107.

James Uleman, Steven Blader, and Alexander Todorov,”Implicit impressions,” in Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh, 362–392.

Daniel Wegner, “Who is the controller of controlled processes?” in Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh, 19–36.

31 Norman Spear, “Retrieval: Properties and effects,” in Roediger, Dudai, and Fitzpatrick, 219.

32 Mark McDaniel, “Transfer: Rediscovering a central concept,” in Roediger, Dudai, and Fitzpatrick, 267.

33 Miller and Bushman, 419–420.

34 Kathleen McDermott, “Integrative comments—Retrieval: Varieties and puzzles,” in Roediger, Dudai, and Fitzpatrick, 229.

35 David Badre, “Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and controlling memory to inform action,” in Bunge and Wallis, 370, 382.

36 Goldberg, The Wisdom Paradox, 144–149.

Joaquin Pfuster, Cortex and Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 80–82, 132–134.

37 See Pedro Orat, The Theory of Identical Elements (Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 1928.

38 Henry Roediger III, “Integrative comments—Transfer: The ubiquitous concept,” In Roediger, Dudai, and Fitzpatrick, 280.

39 Alice Healy, “Transfer: Specificity and generality,” in Roediger, Dudai, and Fitzpatrick, 274.

Kathleen McDermott, “Integrative comments—Retrieval: Varieties and puzzles.” in Roediger, Dudai, and Fitzpatrick, 226.

Henry Roediger III, “Integrative comments—Transfer: The ubiquitous concept,” in Roediger, Dudai, and Fitzpatrick, 280.

40 Goldberg, The Wisdom Paradox, 166–167.

Goleman, Social Intelligence, 42.

41 David Maxwell, “Justified by works and not by faith alone: Reconciling Paul and James,” Concordia Journal 33, 4 (October, 2007), 376–377.

42 Robert Sylwester, The Adolescent Brain: Reaching for Autonomy (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, Inc. 2005). 32–36.

43 It also suggests that though the catechetical method along with memorization may be effective in some cases, to be so it needs to be related to the life and behavior of the confirmand along with an emotional attachment.

44 You may wonder whether a “teaching sermon” might not also be effective. To be sure, it can, but its objective would operate on the principle of sowing many seeds in the hope of having one or several take root. In such a case, there is just too much for a person’s working memory to keep in mind at one time. But in listening to a reading and discussion of an extended passage of Scripture, a hearer may well be struck with one of the thoughts that seems to apply more readily to his life. He may separate that out for his long-term memory. Other hearers may identify with other parts.

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An Annotated Selected Bibliography For Clergy The following books offer excellent pictures of the brain and its functions. They reveal attempts to apply neuroscientific research to several different areas. The discerning clergy reader can readily make suitable applications to the work of the ministry.

Goldberg, Elkhonon. The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older. New York: Gotham Books, 2005. A renowned neuroscientist uses the elegant structures of the brain to show how we can develop “wisdom” as we grow older.

Goleman, Daniel. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships. New York: Bantam Books, 2006. Goleman shows how conscious awareness and application of brain functions can lead to social intelligence.

Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. New York: Random House, 2007. From their own study and wide experience in speaking before groups, the Heath brothers explain how six key qualities can make an idea stick (simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, stories).

Newberg, Andrew, and Mark Waldman. Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth. New York: Free Press, 2006. An intriguing study of how imaging technology pictures the brains of nuns, Buddhists, Pentecostals, and an atheist as they pray, meditate, and speak in tongues.

Siegel, Daniel. The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well- Being. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. A well-known psychiatrist explains the need for “mindful awareness” (harnessing the brain’s social and emotional circuits) and reflection (the “fourth R”) in order to achieve well-being.

Sitze, Bob. Your Brain Goes to Church: Neuroscience and the Congregational Life. Herndon, Vt: Alban Institute, 2005. An ELCA staff member relates neuroscientific knowledge to the activities of people who gather for congregational worship, service, and fellowship.

Sousa, David. How the Brain Learns, 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, 2006.

Application of the brain’s functions to the work of educators (and, by extension, to preachers).

Sylwester, Robert. How to Explain a Brain: An Educator’s Handbook of Brain Terms and Cognitive Processes. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Corwin Press, 2005. Sylwester defines terms used to describe the brain and its functions in easy-to-understand language. This is an excellent reference tool that also includes 11 schematic illustrations.

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Christological Trinitarian Theology in the Book of Revelation Louis A. Brighton

Within the prologue itself (1:1-8), an important theological truth can be deduced concerning the Christology of Revelation and the trinitarian doctrine of God. In verses four through six there is presented “a trinitarian imprimatur by which God himself confirms the validity of the prophetic message of Revelation.” 1 For the prophetic message comes from the “One Who Is and Who Was and Who Is Coming, and (secondly) from the seven Spirits that are before the throne, and (thirdly) from Jesus Christ” (vv. 4–5).

The “One Who Is and Who Was and Who Is Coming” is an expanded expression of the tetragrammaton, hwhy (Yahweh), the holy name for God (Ex 3:13–16). This holy name is based on the imperfect Qal form of hy‘h‘, hy,h.y,. In Exodus 3:14 the full expression of the holy name is hy,h.a, rv,a} hy,h.a, (I Am Who I Am). The Septuagint translates this full expression as evgw; eivmi o` w;n (I Am the One Who Is).2 John, here in Revelation 1:4, states that this evgw; eivmi o` w;n is the o` w;n now in the present and who was the o` w;n in the past (o` h=n, “Who Was”) and the o` w;n in the future (o` evrco,menoj, “Who Is Coming”).3 The “seven spirits that are before his throne,” that is, the throne of the “One Who Is and Who Was and Who Is coming,” is a numerical symbol of the Holy Spirit. He is designated as “seven spirits” because the number seven symbolizes God. “It is the sum of the number three, which symbolizes God himself (cf. Gn 18:1–2; Is 6:3), and the number four, which symbolizes creation (cf. e.g. Ez 37:9; 1 Chr 9:24).” 4 The number seven then designates the true God, the triune God, who is the God of all creation. The number is used to refer to the Spirit of God because it is through the Spirit that Yahweh is present with his people. This usage of the number seven in reference to the Spirit is already found in the Old Testament. For example, in Zechariah 3:9–4:10 seven lamps “represent the Spirit of God, by which God sees the whole earth.” 5 And in Moses’ tabernacle the menorah, the sevenfold lampstand, represented God’s holy presence with his people by his Spirit (Ex 25:31–40). In Revelation the number seven then represents God’s presence with his people through the Spirit, the sevenfold presence of the Spirit.6 Louis A. Brighton is Professor Emeritus of Exegetical Theology (New Testament) at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri.

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The third entity from which comes the prophetic message of Revelation is Jesus Christ, who is spoken of as the one who made God’s people a kingdom and priests by means of his blood (1:5–6). In Revelation 1:7 the Lord Christ’s parousia is also referred to with the words, “Behold, he is coming with clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn over him. Yes, amen!” 7 And his death is brought to mind by the fact that he had been pierced (cf. Zec 12:10; Ps 22:16; Jn 19:33-37; 1 Jn 5:6).

The grammatical construction of Revelation 1:4–5 indicates that the “One Who Is and Who Was and Who is Coming,” that is, God the Father, is in the holy Trinity the first among equals. For this holy name of God, Yahweh, is in the nominative when in standard Greek it should be in the genitive after the preposition avpo, (from).8 In the cases of the “seven spirits” and “Jesus Christ,” which also follow avpo,, they are correctly in the genitive. The fact that Yahweh, God the Father, is in the nominative seems to suggest that the Father is the first among equals. “The Father, while equal in essence with the Spirit and Jesus Christ, is nevertheless the primus of the three persons (cf. 1 Cor 15:28; Jn 14:16-17, 26).” 9 Throughout Revelation the holy name is always in the nominative and never in an oblique case such as the genitive.

Another anomaly is the order in which the three persons in Revelation 1:4–5 are listed, Yahweh (the Father), the Spirit, and Jesus Christ. The usual familiar order is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Mt 28: 19).10 Why is Jesus Christ mentioned last, here in Revelation 1:4–5 (c.f. 1 Pt 1:2)? It is because he is described as the one person of the Triune God who made people to be a kingdom and priests to God by setting them free from their sins by his blood (Rv 1:5–6). This suggests that it is only through the redemption of Christ that a human being can view the Spirit and Yahweh. That is, it is only through Christ that mankind can receive the Spirit and thus be able to look to God as the Father. God can be received, believed on, and worshiped only through Jesus Christ. And only through Jesus Christ can the Father grant his Spirit for such faith and worship (cf. Jn 14:15–17, 26).

This truth is presented and affirmed also elsewhere in the Scriptures. For example, in John 14:6 Jesus says that he is “the way and the truth and the life,” and that “no one can come to the Father except through [him].” Jesus further says that if anyone knows him, he will also know his Father, and he who has seen him has also seen the Father (Jn 14:6–9; cf. Jn 12:45). The apostle Paul says that Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, is the visible icon or image (eivkw,n) of the invisible God (Col 1:15, cf. 2 Cor 4:4), and that God has through Jesus Christ reconciled all things to himself through the blood of his cross (Col 1:20). The author of

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Hebrews (1:3) states that the incarnate Son of God is the radiance, the shining rays (avpau,gasma); of God’s glory (do,xa) and the exact likeness or impression (karath,r) of God’s being or substance (u`po,stasij).11 Throughout Revelation this Christological focus is held up before John as the only way in which the Father and the Spirit can be viewed and worshiped. For example, the prophetic message itself of Revelation comes from God to his people only through Jesus Christ (1: 1–3). The Lord Christ is the mediator of the message.

Even when he uses angels as his mediating servants, he is still the mediator (cf. Rv 21:16).12 Also, the exalted Lord Christ as the victorious Lamb is the only one who can receive the scroll from the heavenly Father and reveal it to John (Rv 5:1–5).

The scroll, and the receiving of it, illustrates that Christ alone, on behalf of the Father, is Lord and Master of the human race and of all history. He has earned the right to be the Lord under the authority of the Father because he shed his blood to ransom and redeem a people from the human race and thus made them to be a kingdom for God (Rv 5:9–10).13 And in the epilogue (22:6–21) again the three persons of the triune God are present. God the Father himself is the source of the prophet message of Revelation (v. 6). Jesus again is referred to as the mediator of the message (v. 16). And the Holy Spirit motivates the bride of Christ, God’s people, to pray that the Lord comes soon (vv. 17, 20).

Thus in Revelation a Christological trinitarian theology of God is presented.

Yahweh, the heavenly Father, is viewed and recognized only through Jesus Christ.

He can be approached and worshiped and honored only through Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. And the Holy Spirit is known and received from the Father also only through Jesus Christ. In the Old Testament this truth of such a Christological trinitarian theology of God is also present, for example, in the role that the high priest performed. Only he could represent the people of Israel before God. Only he, on the day of atonement, could offer up on the ark of the covenant and its cover—and thus before God cover the judgment of the law—the blood that had been shed for the sins of the people (Ex 30:10; Lv 16:2, 11–15; cf. Heb 9:6–7).14 In the New Testament Jesus Christ, as the result of his death on the cross and the shedding of his blood, is called a “blood covering, an atoning blood covering” (i`lasth,rion, Rom 3:25; i`lasmo,j, 1 Jn 2:2; 4:10), and thus is this high priest as culticly and prophetically pictured in the Old Testament. Since Jesus Christ is such an “atoning blood covering,” as pictured in the Old Testament and described in the New, he is the only way that a repenting sinner can come to the Father for mercy and forgiveness.15 Another feature of the Old Testament that lends itself to a Christological view of trinitarian theology of God is the concept of the Angel of the Lord (hw’hy. %a;l.m; = a;ggeloj kuri,ou in the LXX). Because of the sinful and unholy nature of man, God could not appear or speak to him face to face (see Ex 33: 18–20). As a

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result, God always appeared and/or spoke through natural means such as a burning bush (Ex 3:2), a cloud (Ex 19:9; cf. Mt 17:5), a pillar of cloud (Ex 13:21; Ps 78:14), and even in a pillar of fire (Ex 13:21; cf. Ex 14:19–20). But when God wanted to appear and/or speak to someone in a personal way, he did so through an angel, or by a heavenly figure in human form (e.g. Gn 18:1–2). In particular, it was by means of the Angel of the Lord that he did so. For example, in Exodus 3:1–4 this angel of Yahweh, as God’s spokesman, identified himself as God (~yhiloa/) and as Yahweh (hw’hy.), something no created angel would ever have done. It was usually by way of the Angel of the Lord that God appeared to his people when he wanted to deliver them or save them (Ex 3:4–8; Jgs 2:2-2). This Angel of Yahweh was the angel, the messenger of God’s saving covenant with his people, which covenant would be realized in Jesus Christ (Mal 3:1; cf. Is 42:1–9; Mt 12:15–21). The New Testament identifies this Angel of Yahweh with the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ (Rv 10:1-11).16 Revelation thus concludes this truth that the triune God is to be received and understood only through Christ by exhibiting the exalted Lord Jesus in all of his glory at the right hand of the heavenly Father (e.g. Rv 5:1–14; 11:15; 14:1–5, 14–16; 19:11–16). It can be said then that Revelation presents its prophetic Christology in order to comfort and encourage Christians, in their earthly suffering, to know and worship the heavenly Father only through the victorious Christ, and that through the exalted Christ the Holy Spirit will always hold them in their faith unto the End. As Bauckham states, “Christ cannot be an alternative object of worship alongside God, but shares in the glory due to God. So the specific worship of Christ (5:9–12) leads to the joint worship of God and Christ, in a formula in which God retains the primacy.”17 As a result, the totality of the Christian’s life by faith as an act of worship is governed by this grand Christological trinitarian theology of God. The necessity of holding to this truth of a Christological trinitarian theology of God is of the utmost importance in the defense and teaching of the Christian faith as expounded in the Bible. In one way or another, most, if not all, false teaching and doctrine comes from not knowing and applying this truth. Any view that suggests that God can be known apart from the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ, as prophetically proclaimed in the Old Testament and explicitly taught in the New, gives way to all sorts of heretical thoughts, not to mention false religious systems. The end result of such a non-Christological trinitarian view of God is an apostate Christianity. For example, the notion that God can be believed on or worshiped apart from and through Jesus Christ leads to idolatry. To think of God and to describe him without the focus lens of Jesus Christ through which to view him creates an idolatrous god that does not exist. To address prayers to God which bypass or ignore Christ means to address a god that exists only in the human mind, a god that has been created by such a perverted mind (see e.g. Is 45:20; Jer 10:5).

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To believe that one can call upon God for mercy and salvation apart from Jesus Christ leads to works-righteousness. To postulate the notion that God created the universe and all life through some blind evolutionary force results from ignoring that fact that God created everything through the Logos, the pre-incarnate Son of God (Jn 1:1–5; Col 1:13 16; Heb 1:1–4, 10–12). To deny that Jesus Christ is the only mediator between God and man results in the denial of the bodily resurrection and the creation of a new heaven and earth, for all ideas and notions of a god apart from the God who reveals himself through Jesus Christ know of no resurrection or the restoration of the created world.18 When a Christological trinitarian theology of God is expounded and believed, the truth of God’s judgment over the human race can correctly be taught, and then especially the comforting truth of God’s love and saving mercy. Only by teaching a Christological view of God can sinful man be held responsible for his sins and moved towards genuine repentance and contrition. And then, only by teaching a Christ-centered theology of God, can the contrite sinner come to the saving grace of God for life and hope. Peace, joy, comfort, and the certainty of eternal life result from such a Christological trinitarian theology of God. All to the praise and honor and thanks of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit (Rv 4:1–5:14).

Endnotes 1

Louis Brighton, Revelation (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 39.

It is interesting to note how often Jesus in the Gospel of John calls himself the evgw, eivmi (e.g. 6:35; 8:12;10:7-8; 10:11; 10:14; 11:25; 14:6).

3 For more on this holy name as given in Revelation 1:4, see Brighton, Revelation, 39–40.

4 Brighton, Revelation, 41–2.

5 Brighton, Revelation, 42. In Isaiah 11:1–2 the sevenfold gifts of God are given through the Spirit.

6 The church universal is represented by the seven churches because they and she are under God’s inspiration through the sevenfold presence of his Spirit (Rv 2–3). In Revelation the Holy Spirit is designated also by seven lamps (4:5), by seven horns and seven eyes (5:6; cf. Zec 3:9–4:10).

7 Verse seven of the prologue is reminiscent of what Jesus said before Caiaphas, “You will see the Son of Man ... coming on the clouds of heaven” (Mt 26:64).

8 The preposition avpo, is used to point out the source of something.

9 Brighton, Revelation, 41. Possibly John also kept the holy name in the nominative because to have put it in an oblique case would have necessitated a change in vocalization, which by custom was not to be done (R. H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, vol. 1, The International Critical Commentary (reprint, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1989–94), 10).

10 However, this may not be such an anomaly, for Mt 28:19 is the only place where the three names of the divine persons are listed together, aside from here in Revelation 1:4–5. Although elsewhere in Revelation the three persons as individuals are seen together (e.g. 5:1–6). Also, in 1 Peter 1:2 the three persons are mentioned together with their gifts, by which God’s chosen ones (evklektoi,) have been made his possessions: according to the foreknowledge of God the Father (kata. pro,gnwsin qeou/ patro,j); by means of, or in, the sanctification of the Spirit (evn a`giasmw|/ pneu,matoj); for the 2

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obedience and the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ (eivj u`pakoh.n kai. r`antismo.n ai[matoj VIhsou/ Cristou/). Here the same order of the three persons is given as in Revelation 1:4–5.

11 One can also cite the whole story of Christ’s incarnation, life, death and resurrection, which so vividly demonstrates that he is tile only way to God, tile only one who reveals God to tile human race and through whom alone mankind can be brought into the grace and love of the heavenly Father. That truth Paul so aptly states in 1 Timothy 2:5, that there is only one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ (cf. Gal 3:19–20). The author to the Hebrews, when describing the priesthood of Christ, states that as our high priest he entered the holy of holies, having offered up himself as the one sacrifice to take away all sins (9:23–28).

12 In Revelation 2–3 it is the Lord Christ who speaks to each of the seven churches in turn, though he uses angels who actually receive the letters on behalf of each of the churches. For further information see Brighton, Revelation, 205–09. Notice also the role that the Spirit plays, as Jesus, the Son of Man, gives each letter to the angel of the particular church.

13 The Spirit is also present with the victorious Lamb, as he receives the scroll, in the form of the seven horns and seven eyes (Rv 5:6). This points out that the Spirit of Yahweh is now present with his people through Jesus Christ (cf. Jn 14:16–17, 26; 15:26: 16:7).

14 The Hebrew word for the cover of the ark was tr,PoKi, from the verb rpk, “to cover.” The LXX used the word i`lasth,rion (e.g. Lev 16:2) and i`lasmo,j (only twice, Lev 25:9; Num 5:8) for the word ~yripuKi, also from rpk. The LXX’s influence on tile New Testament when referring to the ark and its cover when the atoning blood was sprinkled on it can be seen in Hebrews 9:5 (cf. Rom 3:25) in the case of i`lasth,rion. In 1 John 2:2, Jesus Christ is called the i`lasmo,j, which covers the sins of the world (cf. 1 Jn 4:10). In the above instances the words have the sense of “blood covering,” an atoning blood covering.

15 It is interesting to note in Luke 18:13 how the tax collector, in contrast to the Pharisee (Lk 18:11–12) asked God to i`lasqhti, moi tw|/ a`martwlw/; (i`lasqhti, is the aorist passive imperative of i`la,skomai which in the noun form is i`lasth,rion). The prayer of the tax collector thus has the meaning, “Cover my sins with atoning blood and thus be merciful to me.”

16 Other subjects in the Old Testament which point to such a Christological trinitarian view of God are the promise of a greater son to Abraham (Gn 12:7; 13:15; 17:7; 22:1–2, 10–14; 24:7; cf. Gal 3:15–16); the promised son of David who would rule God’s kingdom forever (2 Sam 7:12–16; Is 9:6–7; cf. Lk 1:32–33); the suffering servant (Is 53: 1–12; cf. Ps 22); and the shepherd of God’s people who is identified with Yahweh himself and with his servant David (Ez 34:11–16, 23–24; cf. Jn 10:11, 14–15).

17 Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993), 139.

18 Other heretical doctrines could be mentioned, such as the denial of the importance of the means of grace, through which and on behalf of Christ the Holy Spirit works in the hearts of people.

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Grammarian’s corner

COncordia Journal

On the Subtleties of Hebrew Verbs, Part II In our last article (January-April 2008), we discussed the simple yet sophisticated nuances of Hebrew verb syntax, noting particularly the function of the socalled “perfect waw consecutive” as a contextually determined “wild card,” carrying forward the aspect of the verb form with which it is in sequence. We gave examples of the perfect waw consecutive continuing the force of an imperfect, of an imperative, and of a participle. In this article we will highlight another nuanced use of verbal aspect (“tense”), including the use of an unmarked verb form (i.e., without w/c).

In fact, we will look at three possible imperative “sequences” (see FBH, chapter 24.5, p. 231).

(1) The first is the simple coordination of two imperative verbs, which indicate two commands without any strong sequential relationship: EG 1, Isa 7:11

^yh,l{a/ hw,hy. ~[ime tAa ^l.-la;v. hl'[.m;l. H;Beg>h; Aa hl'a'v. qme[.h; “Ask for yourself a sign from YHWH your God. Make it deep to Sheol or make it high to above.”

To be sure, the second imperative follows upon the first, but there is no emphasis on the order or sequence; these are simply two commands.

(2) However, the use of the perfect waw consecutive, as noted in our previous “Grammarian’s Corner,” continues the force of the imperative with a clear sequential relationship. We noted Deuteronomy 5:1: EG 2, Dt 5:1

...

~yjiP'v.Mih;-ta,w> ~yQixuh;-ta, laer"f.yI [m;v. ~t'f[]l; ~T,r>m;v.W ~t'a{ ~T,d>m;l.W

“Hear, O Israel, the statutes and the judgments . . .

And then learn them, and then observe to do them.”

The sequential sense of the “waw consecutive” suggests an intended order to these commands: first “hear,” then “learn,” then “observe by doing.”

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(3.a) Moving further into the nuanced syntax of an otherwise simple verb system, at least in regards to the relative paucity of verbal tenses/aspects (cf.

Greek!!), we observe the following imperative sequence: EG 3, Gen. 47:19b

tWmn" al{w> hy,x.niw> [r;z,-!t,w>

“(and) Give [us] seed, (and =>) so that we may live and not die.”

Here the imperative (or jussive or cohortative) is followed by an imperfect, not marked as a waw-consecutive form, but coordinated by the simple conjunction waw. (Note: readers may wish to review the distinctive pointing of the waw consecutive with an imperfect [technically preterite] form as patach + dagesh forte. In the form above, the waw is connected to the verb by simple shewa, marking it as imperfect, not “waw consecutive.”)

The force of the imperfect as future, following the imperative, suggests that what follows (also in real time!) is connected to the command itself; i.e., the command is given with the intent of the future action happening. Thus, this unmarked use of the imperfect, within the specific context of a command with reference to the future, can actually serve as a nuanced purpose clause, not otherwise obvious to a “literal” translation. Many of these are missed in English translations.

That even this grammatically simple yet nuanced translation itself depends on a certain “sense” of the language, context, and “usus loquendi,” is suggested by the first half of the same verse, Gen. 47:19a: EG 4, Gen. 47:19a

Wntem'd>a; ~G; Wnx.n;a]-~G: ^yn,y[el. tWmn" hM'l' ~x,L'B; Wntem'd>a;-ta,w> Wnt'a{-hneq. h[{r>p;l. ~ydIb'[] Wntem'd>a;w> Wnx.n:a] hy,h.niw>

“Why should we die before you— both we and our land?

Buy us and our land for food, and [so that ?] we and our land will become slaves to pharaoh.”

Here the same idiom, imperative (hneq.) followed by the imperfect (hy<h.nIw>, with the conjunction, not waw consecutive) might better be rendered as a true future.

Or, it could be argued that this, too, suggests a purpose clause, “so that we and our land will become slaves ...” It is interesting that a quick check of major translations (NIV, ESV, RSV, NRSV, NASB, NRSV) notes that all take v. 19a (EG 4) as two coordinated clauses but translate v. 19b (EG 3) as a purpose clause.

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(3.b) Another example is Isaiah 55:7b, where the imperative/jussive exhortations of v. 6-7 conclude: EG 5, Isa 55:7b

Whmex]r;ywI hw<hy>-la, bv{y"w>

“(and) let him return to YHWH, so that He may have mercy on him.”

Here NIV, NASB, and NKJV coordinate the clauses (“and He will have mercy . . .”), but ESV, RSV, and NRSV translate as a purpose clause.

(3.c) Finally, consider Hosea 6:1, where the imperative/cohortative force of the first line carries over into the indicative of the second, followed by the conjunctive use of the imperfect: EG 6, Hos 6:1

hw<hy>-la, hb'Wvn"w> Wkl. WnaeP'r>yIw> @r;j' aWh yKi WnveB.x.y:w> %y: “Come, let us return to YHWH, for He has torn, so that He may heal us; He has stricken [reading as imperfect waw consecutive (see critical apparatus), or, as written, ‘let him strike’], so that He may bind us up.”

Here the translations vary. NRSV translates the coordinating conjunction in both v. 1b and c with “and.” NIV, NASB, and NKJV use “but,” which is certainly a legitimate translation of the waw, often used as a contrastive, but here it is obviously affected by the context. Better would be the recognition of a purpose clause, picked up by ESV and RSV (though only in 1b).

Frankly, this translation has nuanced implications regarding God’s alien work of judgment. This is not simply coordinated or randomly juxtaposed with his “proper work” of deliverance and salvation; it is actually purposeful. God punishes in justice so that He might heal us, sola gratia!

Hosea 6:2 continues, “He will revive us after two days; on the third day He will raise us up, ‘and’ (hy<x.niw>) we will live before Him.” Again, the better translation, understood through this idiom of verb sequences, should be a purpose clause: “. . . on the third day He will raise us up, so that we may live before Him.” Andrew H. Bartelt Concordia Journal/October 2008

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homiletical helps

COncordia Journal

Homiletical Helps on LSB Series A—Epistles to Series B—Gospels Proper 28 • 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11 • November 16, 2008 “Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you” (v. 1). Indeed, we do not need to be told that our world is in crisis. Global and local events cascade into a rapid succession of actions and reactions. Some of these events are intentional; some bring on the inevitable. There is deep fear in these “times and seasons.” They bring us to the verge of an unknown future.

But when we are brought to the point of the unknown, our hope is in the One who meets us there: “For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (v. 2). The times and seasons may belong to crisis, but the day belongs to the Lord! However, even that day forces us to confront another unknown. We do not know when Christ Jesus will come to culminate all things under his Lordship. Yet because this unknown is left in the scar-healed hands of the crucified and risen One, it becomes a source not of fear, but of hope.

Here, in Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, is eschatology par excellence: the juxtaposition of fear and hope, judgment and salvation, darkness and light, drunkenness and sobriety. All of which signal the labor pains of a new reign of God breaking into this hung-over world. (The new-year season of Advent is just around the corner, after all.)

As an aside, the theme of drunkenness and sobriety could be a fertile one, considering that our current president’s most famous line regarding the economic crisis was “Wall Street got drunk.” In a sense, we all have.

But, for the preacher, the question remains: how do we get from fear to hope? Or, better still, how does this Word of God move us from fear to hope?

Perhaps we should first note Paul’s irony: our certainty is in the uncertainty of Christ’s return. Thus, we need not concern ourselves with reading tea leaves for clues to the eschaton. This makes our certainty in uncertainty a liberating knowledge.

We do not need someone to tell us “There is peace and security” (v. 3). We already have it by the faith that trusts him of whom we proclaim, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” All of time is taken up within his Lordship—both “night” and “day”—and by that same Lordship Christ makes of us, in water and Word, “children of light and children of the day” (v. 5). Our end, in more ways than one, is in Christ, and that is all we need to know. Our “surprise” then is not because Christ is a thief (v. 4). We are surprised by the joy (to paraphrase C.S. Lewis’ title) of what we already know, of which Paul does not have to tell us. There is a paradox here. We are surprised by the fact that all this time we already knew the end of this story.

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This is why when we are surprised by joy, we are surprised by hope (to paraphrase N.T. Wright’s title, paraphrasing Lewis). And this hope compels us to “keep awake and be sober” (v. 6). Notice how this hope equips our whole person: “Put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation” (v. 8).

Our Lord Jesus fortifies both heart and mind with faith, hope, and love. To preach this hope means to preach it to the whole person as well.

Finally, how does hope express itself in the “everyday” of those who await the Lord’s coming? It is the same in good times and in bad: “Encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing” (v. 11). The preacher here has a choice either to exhort his hearers to encourage others, or to encourage them directly. We could do little better in these bewildering times than to preach an encouraging word to discouraged people.

Travis J. Scholl

Proper 29 • 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 • November 23, 2008 Is there any better way to preach on the last Sunday of the church year than to preach Christ “raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (v. 20)?

This pericope falls in the middle of Paul’s great resurrection chapter. What precedes it is his theological argument for why Christ’s bodily resurrection is necessary for salvation. What follows it is his discussion of the nature of the resurrected body. This text deals with the purpose and goal—the telos, if you will—of Christ’s resurrection, and ours, in the economy of God’s saving action in the world. Just like last week’s epistle, Paul sees God’s salvation with an eschatological perspective: Christ, the “firstfruits” of the resurrection life that becomes fully ours “after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power” (v. 24). The telos of God is victory over everything that is against God, the last of which is death itself (v. 26).

Paul’s proclamation echoes with the Old Testament distinction between “life” and “death.” As Kathryn Tanner points out, the OT view does not see life and death simply as biological facts but as metaphors for entire ways of living, “Where life refers to fruitfulness and abundance, longevity, communal flourishing and individual wellbeing, and death is a catch-all for such things as suffering, poverty, barrenness, oppression, social divisiveness and isolation” (Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity, 104-105). Moses, setting before the people of God the choice between life and death so that they may choose life, stands in the shadows of Paul’s discussion (Dt 30:19–20).

Or, as the character Andy Dufresne puts it in The Shawshank Redemption, “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.”

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Here, though, standing at the edge of another Promised Land, the resurrected Christ pronounces the final victory of life over death. Thus, we are no longer forced into a zero-sum choice between life and death. Life is already ours, even as we wait for its consummation, in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We endure the “deaths” we suffer now in our daily living (“I die every day!” Paul exclaims later in v. 31) knowing that they have already been “swallowed up” in the victory of Christ (v. 54). Moreover, all our living and dying is subsumed within the daily dying and rising of our baptism; the waters that make his victory ours, right here, right now.

It would seem difficult from the pulpit to try to untangle verses 27 and 28 without a few lost strands along the way. To fully explicate who is subjected to whom, and where and when, might be better left to the classroom. But the underlying theological claim is foundational. The culmination of the resurrected Christ’s kingdom, the reign that will bring about our own resurrection from the dead, is brought to its ultimate fulfillment in the Three-in-One and One-in-Three. For God to be “all in all” is for all creation to be brought under the “authority and power” of Father, Son, and Spirit. The One (Son) who was given all power on earth gives it back to the One (Father) who gave it to him. Then the perichoresis of God will “make alive” all who are “in Christ” (v. 22). And this is how “those who belong to Christ” enter into that dance.

At Concordia Seminary’s recent Symposium, one of the keynote responders, Gary Simpson, made a case for the church to renew its emphasis on the perichoresis of the Trinity (his presentation is on the Seminary’s iTunes U: itunes.csl.edu).

Preaching perichoresis effectively is not the easiest of tasks, and I am not going to pretend to know how. Perhaps, though, we need only extend Luther’s insight about our faith in Christ’s word that he gives himself “for you.” The perichoresis of God is nothing if not “for you,” and for me. Christ’s resurrection makes it so. By his rising, I rise and enter the dance. The steps of the dance are often a mystery. But we don’t need to know the steps to move to the beat. Indeed, my joy is in seeing the One who dances with me, who encircles me with a love supreme.

Interestingly enough, our last reading in the Gospel of Matthew for this year is the Great Judgment, where Christ separates the sheep and the goats. There is a similar naiveté at work there: “Lord, when did we see you…?” (Mt 25:37–39).

When we worship the resurrected Christ—to whom “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given” (Mt 28:17–18)—the steps of the dance become obvious.

Feed the hungry. Quench the thirsty. Welcome the stranger. Clothe the naked. Care for the sick. Visit the imprisoned. This is how we dance life with Jesus.

We are only dancing steps that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have already danced for us. They are dancing still.

Travis J. Scholl

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Advent 1 • Mark 13:24-37 • November 30, 2008 One of my greatest Advent frustrations over the years has been an ongoing encounter with a fundamental misunderstanding of the season’s purpose. Whether introducing the season to people unfamiliar with it, searching for materials to use in the classroom, or planning our own family Advent celebrations, I have for years seen, and continue to see, Advent presented as the Christian alternative to a December of malls, mayhem, and maxed-out credit cards. It is presented as “the better way to prepare for Christmas.” Advent, we are to believe, is best used to create family traditions, to bring meaning back to our Christmas celebrations, to find “special moments,” to prepare to celebrate Jesus’ birth, or to learn to treasure Christmas in our hearts. From here it is a very small step toward regarding Advent as nostalgic (recovering lost traditions or remembering better times) or even sentimental (making this the best, most meaningful Christmas ever). And, of course, in the pastor’s study these sentiments manifest themselves in thoughts like: “Is it already Advent again?” and “What are we/am I going to do this year?”

The Gospel from Mark 13 (the Lectionary also allows for the account of Jesus’ royal entry from Mark 11 to be used) rouses us from these dancing–sugarplum visions of Advent like a shot of eschaton espresso. The first Advent voice that speaks to us is the Advent Voice—not the hopeful voice of the prophet, not the awed and exotic whispers of foreign sages, not the cooing of a sweet baby, nor the lullaby of a tender, young mother. It is the voice of the Son of Man, a voice that speaks of tribulation and darkness, a voice of warning and command. And what he said to them then he says to us now: “Stay awake!”

A Thematic Jumble?

The ESV divides the pericope into three paragraphs, each with its own heading. Nestle-Aland 27 divides the reading into five paragraphs, reflecting even more carefully the constantly changing topic of Jesus’ discourse. The passage contains prophetic warnings, an extended quotation of an anthology of Old Testament verses, two parables, instruction concerning the eternally reliable nature of His word, a provocative Christological statement, and a closing one-word application for the hearer/reader. How is a preacher ever going to do justice to a text like this—especially when he wants to introduce a unifying theme for a season already too full of distractions?

In what follows, I am going to make a daring gamble, departing from my usual homiletical principles and betting on your ability to approach these four Advent Gospels from a new perspective without losing your sermonic center of balance. What I mean to say is this: our unifying theme for the season and for this message is most easily found by focusing on the implications for us, as God’s Advent People, than by launching a direct assault on what these Gospels are telling

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us about Jesus. However, even with my trust in your ability to make the best of this, I wouldn’t risk so much unless I thought that, in the end, we will hear again and anew what these four Gospels are telling us about our Advent Lord as well.

Exegetical Problems as Exegetical Keys I have often found in my study of a particular text that the key to unlocking the meaning of the entire passage often lies in the word, phrase, or verse that is giving me the most trouble. I suggest that this is also the case with our text from Mark 13. Mark 13 presents a number of exegetical challenges, but the preacher— thanks be to God!—does not have to address them all on Advent 1. The text graciously begins after the passages about the Abomination of Desolation and the shortening of the days in Mark 13:14-23. The exegetical problem I see in our text is much less dramatic and may not have even caught your eye on a first reading. Look again at 13:34. In a manner typical of this kind of parable, our Lord describes a variety of servants being given a variety of assignments at the departure of their master. What seems atypical is a concluding singling out of the doorkeeper. If the servants represent collectively Jesus’ followers or the church, then who is the doorkeeper? Why should he be given a special command to stay awake?

As tempting as it might be to explore the identity of the doorkeeper over against the rest of Jesus’ followers, such a temptation is immediately overcome by the words of Jesus that follow. To his hearers he says not: “Therefore I am putting you in charge,” but “stay awake.” That is, everyone who hears or reads this parable is to see him/herself as a doorkeeper. The question we are left asking is not: “What do I do while the doorkeepers watch the door?” nor is it: “Why do I have to stay awake and watch the door while everyone else gets to go about his/her normal business?” The question is: How is my life during these Advent days like that of a doorkeeper watching and waiting, alert and awake, night and day, for the return of his master?

Though I rarely use outlines in writing sermons, I am going to propose a quasi-outline here as the most economical way to explore the theme and make some connections.

Doorkeepers of the Lord and for the World I. We know what we watch for For those of you who begin your preparation early enough, I strongly recommend that you start by reading R. T. France’s treatment of this section in his commentary on Mark for The New International Greek Testament Commentary, especially pages 497–505. France argues, rightly and persuasively, that this section of Mark shows the same sort of double focus that we are familiar with from Matthew 24–25. In this case, however, the shift from the discussion about the destruction of the Jerusalem temple to the Parousia of Jesus is more abrupt—and takes place in

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the middle of our pericope. The shift occurs in v. 32 with the reference to “that day or that hour.” What precedes this shift should be read as referring to the destruction of the temple in history and the “end of the old order” (to borrow France’s term)—the turning point of history brought about by the incarnation, birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and session of the Son. For the original doorkeepers, these words were prophecy; for us, they are historical review.

But that is precisely the point. We, the elect who have already been gathered in, know the world’s story. We are no longer watching for the signs leading up to Jerusalem’s destruction, but we do understand that chapter of history as “the beginning of the end,” as the transition from the old order of Jerusalem and its temple to the new of Golgotha and its cross. What people are better qualified to serve as “doorkeepers for the world” than those who have been trained to see the world from the divine perspective, who watch the unfolding of its drama with the Playwright’s script in our hands?

II. We know whom we watch for (Part 1) There are really two ways the text answers the question: “For whom are we to watch?” It is perhaps this twofold responsibility that makes the doorkeeper’s position crucially unique and uniquely crucial. What, after all, is the significance of the door, if not that it separates outside from inside? First of all, then, the doorkeeper watches for the sake of the others who are “inside.” The image our Lord gives us in this parable of the household includes the activities—and the existence—of many other servants. The picture here is not of the individual, alone, watching at the door of his/her own house/heart. There is a community within which depends on the doorkeeper for their own state of alert. If he/she is found asleep at the door, it is not only the returning Lord outside who has been let down, it is also all within who were failed by the doorkeeper. The house in this brief parable is beginning to sound a lot like the church, but the text as a whole will not allow us to stop there.

What is the lesson of the fig tree that we are to learn? The primary lesson is, of course, that we are not to ignore the “signs of the seasons” that God surrounds us with. At the same time, the fig tree can serve as a good reminder to us that being aware of the seasons and making the appropriate changes doesn’t come as naturally to us human beings as it does to the rest of nature. We cannot count on fallen humanity “feeling the sap rise in its branches.” When the Son of Man appears again, that is, the next time the world sees this sign, he will come to gather in his elect—and there is no mention here of preaching and healing and teaching and warning. This angelic ingathering will stretch to the four corners of the world and even from the farthest reaches of earth to the farthest reaches of heaven. Who can number those “within” who depend on the service of us doorkeepers?

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III. We know whom we watch for (Part 2) The second answer to the question brings us back to the heart of the Advent message. We know whom we watch for in the sense that we know who it is that’s coming. And we know much better than the original hearers of these words. Although we are not the blessed ones who lived and worked with, learned from and marveled at Jesus, who beheld him with their own eyes, who knew the sound of his voice, and the touch of his hand, we are the ones who have believed through the word of those who were with him. We know the whole story of incarnation, birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and session. We have seen him vindicated by the Father and given all authority in heaven and on earth. We have been buried with him and with him have risen to new life.

Knowing our Lord as we do should be all that it takes to keep us awake and watchful through this world’s long Adventtide. Still, our Lord knows us even better than we know him—even better than we know ourselves. His warning and command are no less compassionate than they are earnest. He knows our vulnerability with regard to distraction, boredom, fatigue, despair—with all that might keep us from being His faithful doorkeepers.

At this point, your hearers will certainly be hoping for some word of Advent encouragement, some reason to hope that the favor of the Lord and the fate of the world do not rest solely upon their shoulders. But at this point, the text ends.

The gospel, however, does not end here, and this is one of those occasions where the preacher must import good news from the larger gospel story to prevent misrepresenting one small piece of it. Very natural possibilities that come to mind are the “Look! I am with you always” from Matthew 28 and the “I will not leave you as orphans” and the promise of the Paraclete from John 14ff. A transition to the latter may come more smoothly, since it would not involve explaining how the Lord who leaves us never leaves us. What the text will not allow is some sort of “gospel comfort” that lulls us back into dreamy drowsiness and dulls the edge of our Lord’s advent charge. The promise of his coming, the world’s Savior for a world in need of saving, should rather renew us in our vigilance, filling us with a joyful anticipation that simply won’t let us sleep.

Jeffrey A. Oschwald

Advent 2 • Mark 1:1-8 • December 7, 2008 Advent 2 presents us with the New Testament doorkeeper par excellence: John.

This should make it very easy for the preacher to connect this week’s message with the previous week’s and so build on the theme. Instead of using the same format for these “Helps,” however, I would like to focus on several key questions concerning this text, allowing the preacher the freedom to choose which to address with his people.

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1. What does Mark mean by his opening words: “The beginning of the gospel”?

If you own more than one commentary on Mark, you will almost certainly encounter disagreement on how to interpret these words. The question, stated baldly, is simply this: Is Mark 1:1 the title of the book or the heading for the prologue (variously regarded as 1:1–13 or 1:1–15)? Here again, I find a great attractiveness to the response of R. T. France in his contribution to The New International Greek Testament Commentary, The Gospel of Mark. He argues on pages 50–51 that verse 1 is syntactically connected to vv. 2–3; it does not stand alone as a modern title does.

He adds, however, that the function of the verse “is broader than its immediate syntactical status.” He explains: In these words Mark is alerting his reader to the significance of all that is to follow. But it is typical of his urgency and lack of formal concern that rather than constructing a neat self-contained ‘title’ he cannot wait to ‘begin’ with that which he has so effectively signaled in the few breathless (and verbless!) words of v. 1.1 The same point could be made concerning Luke’s beginning to the book of Acts, although few would suggest that he suffered from a “lack of formal concern.” Luke is so eager to continue the story that it is impossible to say precisely where the prologue ends and the story proper begins. Nowhere does Mark pause later on to tell us that was the beginning of the gospel, this is the gospel proper. It may be worth recalling here, too, that Mark’s gospel has a very clear beginning but no clear end.

2. To whom do the pronouns of the Old Testament quote refer?

Mark presents the words of 1:2b–3 as “standing written in Isaiah the prophet,” which immediately suggests two things. First of all, we know the words have been removed from their original context, and we do not expect necessarily to have the grammatical antecedents of the pronouns transferred for us to the new context in Mark. Secondly, the natural place to look for those grammatical pronouns should then be in Isaiah, right? Wrong. At least, partly wrong. The words given by Mark are a kind of Biblical-theological synthesis of at least three Old Testament passages. The most efficient way to see the connections is by laying out the texts in question side-by-side.

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Mark 1:2b-3 Mal. 3:1

Ex. 23:20

Is. 40:3

Behold, I am sending my messenger before you, who will prepare your way: A voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight His paths.”

Massoretic Text

Septuagint Text

Behold, I am sending my messenger, That he may make clear the way before me, and suddenly the Lord will come to His temple…

Behold, I am sending out my messenger, and he will fix his attention on the way before me, and suddenly the Lord will be present in His temple…

Behold I myself am sending a messenger before you, in order to protect you on the way, and to bring you to the place that I prepared for you.

And behold, I am sending my messenger before you, so that he may protect you along the way, that he may lead you into the land that I prepared for you.

A voice of one crying out!

“In the wilderness make clear the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God!”

A voice of one crying out in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord; make straight the paths of our God.”

Notice how Mark blends the original referents of the pronouns so that they now refer to a person who may not have appeared clearly at all in the original passages, but a person who will be both Yahweh and Israel. To borrow even further from Isaiah, we can say that the “you” of Mark’s Old Testament synthesis is Immanuel. God comes to his people in the person of his Son, and Israel finally and forever ends her wilderness wandering through the person of Jesus, the Christ. It’s no wonder Mark can refer to this as the beginning of a new story and then start with excerpts from an old one, for the pieces of that old story are arranging themselves in new configurations to reveal a picture that no human eye could have foreseen or human mind imagined.

3. What is the significance of John’s baptism?

It is my recommendation that a full exposition of the John’s baptism be saved for the celebration of the Baptism of Our Lord in January. Most of our most important questions do not have to do with what the baptism means in and of itself, but with what it means for Jesus to receive this baptism.

In our Advent proclamation of Mark 1, however, an important part of the answer to the question does find a place. Notice how Mark connects John’s actions Concordia Journal/October 2008

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with the Old Testament introduction to John in vv. 2b–3. A voice crying out in the wilderness is promised, and John appears on the scene as one preaching in the wilderness. This prepares for the parallel that explains the more difficult figure in the Old Testament passage. What exactly does it mean to prepare a way for God? John’s answer to that is to call people to repentance and, through his baptism, to show them how desperately in need of a thorough cleansing they are. This is how the obstacles are to be cleared away. This is how the perversely crooked ways of relating to each other and to God will be made straight. Repentance and the confession of sins are the bulldozers and road graders of this Advent highway project.

4. Can you make straight an application for our text?

The temptation I always have to battle in turning this text into a sermon is the temptation to make it almost wholly historical, that is, past tense. Please don’t misunderstand. There is certainly a time and a place to rehearse and to celebrate all that God has done in the past for us today. But this is Advent, and the eyes of all should be turning toward what’s coming.

One of two possibilities that readily suggest themselves is to simply apply John’s call to repentance to ourselves. There is clearly a strong “underlying reality” that links our situation with that of John’s original hearers. We can no more take for granted our status as the new Israel than John’s hearers could take for granted their status as Israel. Are we ready to meet our Lord? We saw in last Sunday’s Gospel that the “messengers” announcing his imminent return are all around us.

Now is the time to prepare. Every day brings us closer to Immanuel’s sudden appearance among us.

A second possibility is to see the underlying realities connecting our situation with that of John himself. This would allow for a closer parallel with last Sunday’s theme of being doorkeepers of the Lord and for the world. Let me illustrate with a personal anecdote.

When I was quite young, it was still more common for my dad to listen to the Cardinals games rather than to watch them. Though I never quite inherited that aspect of my father’s faith, I was amazed at the ability of certain announcers to create the whole glorious (or disastrous, depending on the season) picture of what was taking place in the stadium. A good announcer was able to make the listener fully experience the tension, excitement, wrath, and ecstasy of the fans physically present in the stands. Even after my dad took to watching the games on television, he would still often turn the television sound off and listen to his favorite radio announcer. A good announcer was that important.

The Advent Gospels call the church not simply to be silent doorkeepers for the Lord and his world. We are also to be announcers. We are to be the voices— collectively and individually—that draw the world into the drama that is unfolding around us, to help them see and understand the full significance of the events in

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these closing Advent innings, to do everything we can to help them see how “late in the game” it really is.

The world needs to hear, and perhaps they are more ready to hear this year than most, that the Advent announcement is not “Game over!” John pronounced judgment upon an unfaithful Israel in terms that few could misunderstand or ignore, but the call to repentance is always a message of hope. The road that was being built now stands paved, and the way that God’s own Son cleared still stands as the Way between us and God. I’ll close with a thought that came to me when preparing to preach on this text several years ago in Taiwan.

More than anything else, wilderness in the Bible is the place you want to journey through. It’s not the place you want to live. It’s the place that God’s people pass through on their way from slavery to freedom.

When the gospel writers speak of wilderness they want you to have that story in mind. When Isaiah speaks about wilderness he wants you to have that story in mind. Wilderness is the place of danger. It is the place of temptation and testing. It is the place where it is easy to lose your way and spend the rest of your life wandering. It is the place where you could easily die, and your dreams and hopes could die with you. . . . It is the place where there are no homes, the place where you cannot make a home. The place where the things you need to live are not easily available, perhaps not available at all. . . . It is the place where things are beyond your control, where beauty can lure you to your death, the place where you would give anything for the strengthening hand of a friend, or a simple cup of water.

In the wilderness of our lives, a voice now calls. In this wild mess that we have made of our life, a wilderness that constantly wants to turn us back into beasts—beasts of prey or beasts of burden—one voice cries out: “Prepare a highway! A highway in the wilderness! Someone is coming to you! He’s not waiting ‘in town.’ He’s not waiting until you can find the way out, until you can make your way to him. He is forging his way through the wilderness in which you live. And his road in will be your road out.”

That’s why the road needs to be smooth and level. Your king will walk this road; that is true. But on this road, he will lead you and all his lost ones out of the wilderness to his Promised Land.

That’s news worth announcing. May God bless you as you prepare yourself and your people to be God’s Advent Announcers.

Jeffrey A. Oschwald 1

R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark (NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 51.

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Advent 3 • John 1:6–8, 19–28 • December 14, 2008 The Gospel for Advent 3 from John seems to overlap extensively with the previous Sunday’s Gospel from Mark. Both provide an introduction to John the Baptist, and both describe details of his ministry. Our goal this week, then, will be to discover the ways in which this text builds upon the last one, furthering our Advent preparation. If this pattern hasn’t become tiresome yet, a theme like “We are Confessors for the Lord and to the World” might help highlight some of the distinctive features of John’s account of John. I intend to take full advantage of the two common meanings of the word confess.

We confess for the Lord and to the world that we are not the Christ.

John the Evangelist will leave the reader in no doubt concerning the identity of this “man sent from God.” The fact that he should even be mentioned on the same page with the Word who was God and the Light that shines in the darkness gives him an importance that is difficult to exaggerate. He may not have been face-to-face with God, but he was from God. In John’s Gospel in particular, it is no small thing to be called “sent from God,” a description usually reserved for the Son. Equally important for the reader to know is that John the Baptizer realized this. It is difficult to think up a way to add greater emphasis to a point than the evangelist’s language does in 1:20—”He confessed and did not deny, and confessed that . . .” Commentators have often pointed out the significance of the theme of recognition in the Gospel according to John. To truly recognize Jesus as the Christ (cf. 20:31), we also have to be certain about who is not the Christ. Thus, John’s confession that he is not himself the Christ, prepares the reader to hear John point out the Lamb of God when He appears. John is a voice; he is not the Word.

Though we might allow for someone in “Bible times” to mistakenly think of himself as the Messiah, we tend to regard anyone making that claim today as about the same as someone claiming to be Queen Elizabeth, Friedrich Barbarossa, Elvis Presley, or Mickey Mouse. This is a matter for medical or psychiatric attention or even a case for law enforcement officials; it hardly seems worth wasting pulpit time on it. Yet, if we paraphrase John’s confession as “I am not your way, truth, and life; I am not the one who will or even can save you,” we begin to see how there may be a reason for some Advent reflection here, even on our part. If John, “greatest of those born of women” (cf. Mt 11:11), took such great care to make it clear that he was not the one who could save, perhaps we need to take a little more care.

The irony here for us, of course, is that the Advent season is all about us becoming more and more like Christ, “living as children of that True Light” (cf. the Epistle from 1 Thes 5), speaking the truth in love (confessing), growing up in every way into Christ, putting off the old self, being made new, putting on the new

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self created after the likeness of God (cf. Eph 4). As Thomas Merton has said, “The Advent mystery is the beginning of the end of all in us that is not yet Christ,” 1 and yet, for us that growing and renewing must always begin with the honest confession that we are not the Christ. We, even all of us together as the Church, have not become the savior. We are not the way. The lost are not to be renewed by becoming like us in every way. This can, of course, be overstated, but I think you get the point. Our Advent confession begins with an honest appraisal (i.e., an appraisal based on God’s self-revelation in Christ and empowered by His all-knowing Spirit), and that honest appraisal confesses, does not deny, but confesses: “We are not the Christ.”

We confess for the Lord and to the world that Jesus is the Christ.

The first part of our Advent confession, important as it is, cannot bring anyone to salvation. The best it can do is to keep someone from following a wrong path to its dead end. Like the world of John, our world needs more than a negative confession. The world needs confessors who, like John are not afraid to attract attention to themselves in order to be heard. They need confessors like the Baptizer in the great medieval paintings who stands there for all to see, with his finger— rudely but unflinchingly—pointing out the Christ.

And John’s confession in vv. 26–27 is especially appropriate for Advent-inthe-Year-of-Our-Lord-2008 confessors. “There is someone standing right in the middle of you all, and you don’t even recognize him!” We are not introducing someone new, someone who has just appeared on the scene. He’s been standing there all the time! (Note the perfect tense of the verb.) This verse foreshadows John’s riddle in v. 30, but that’s not the main point for us here. John is asked to defend his novel ministry in the only categories his opponents could operate in.

John responds, however, by saying, “I’m not innovating at all. I’m simply doing what Isaiah, so long ago, said needed to, and one day, would be done. I’m simply trying to draw your full attention to the One you’ve been ignoring, failing to see, avoiding. But He’s still there, right in the middle of you all.” And if he is right in the middle, that means he’s standing right next to each and every one of you.

The second part of John’s confession here is just as important for us and makes something of a thematic inclusion with the first part of the text. So clearly does John want to distinguish himself from the Christ that he here confesses that he is not even worthy to be his slave. Craig Keener reveals the force of this confession: The most demeaning tasks performed by a household servant involved the master’s feet (washing the feet, carrying sandals, or unfastening thongs of sandals); to do such work was to be a slave. Thus although ancient teachers usually expected disciples to function as servants, later

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rabbis entered one caveat: unlike slaves, they did not tend to the teacher’s sandals. But could John really claim himself unworthy to be the coming one’s slave? If so, he exalts the coming one in virtually divine terms.2 This picture is especially important in John’s Gospel, where taking care of a person’s feet plays such an important role in indicating the depth of love and the nature of relationships. We have become and we do call ourselves “slaves of Christ Jesus,” but this Advent confession removes all doubt that we have somehow come to merit such a high honor.

A closing thought: it is difficult to overcome the temptation to see an almost tongue-in-cheek play on words in this text. We grow weary in treating this passage because we are dealing with two men named John and must constantly distinguish them as “John the Baptist” and “John the Evangelist” or “John the Apostle.”

Strange, isn’t it, that this should be the one Gospel where the Baptist is simply “John”?

The Fourth Gospel provides no list of the names of the Twelve, so our author cleverly avoids the need to ever refer to himself as “John.” He is, you recall, always and only “the disciple Jesus loved.” Still, everything said about the Baptist in John 1:6–8 would apply perfectly to the Evangelist as well. Our author is so far from being the Christ, so far from even being worthy to be His slave, that he won’t even give posterity his name. Clearly John is providing us with multiple examples of what it means to be Christ’s Advent confessors. Advent calls us to join in that great crowd of pointers and shouters. I have said more than once that I would truly be able to rest in peace if, on my tombstone, were inscribed the words of John 10:41—“He did no sign, but everything that he said about this One was true.”

Jeffrey A. Oschwald 1 Originally from Merton’s 1965 Seasons of Celebration, I am quoting it from Thomas J. O’Gorman, ed., An Advent Sourcebook (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 1988), 57.

2 Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary (2 vols.; Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003), 1:448.

Advent 4 • Luke 1:26–38 • December 21, 2008 Year B is far and away the most evangelically diverse Adventtide of the threeyear series. Years A and C are devoted entirely to their respective Gospels, Matthew and Luke. In Year B, on the other hand, we have readings from every Gospel except Matthew (whose Gospel does provide the reading for Christmas Eve). This means that the preacher is going to have to help his hearers jump from the themes

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and moods of one Gospel to the next during this season. Perhaps the easiest of those “jumps” will be the one to Luke 1 for this final Sunday of Advent. By December 21st everyone will be in the mood for Christmas,1 and, with all due respect to the first evangelist, when it comes to Christmas, just about everyone thinks “Luke.”

There is a very clear link and an easy segue from the previous Sunday’s Gospel from John to this passage from Luke, which seems about as unlikely as a duet featuring the brash baritone of the Baptist and the gentle soprano of the Virgin. However, it will likely be missed entirely if the traditional analogy for this text is allowed to become a controlling metaphor. I will explain.

This is the Sunday of Preparation. What better analogy could the text provide than that of a mother receiving confirmation that she is with child and then, with purpose and resolve and a barely containable joy, setting about making all the necessary preparations to welcome the newborn into heart and home? Everything lines up perfectly until we get to the “baby part.” We are not preparing to welcome a baby, but to welcome the Lord of Heaven and Earth. He will come not in need of our nurture and protection; He will come to judge the world. In short, when He comes again, our Lord will not be in need of “mothering.”

The perfect segue does come from the mouth of the mother herself, though, and it shows that she already realizes that, even at His first coming, her Son will have a claim on her that far exceeds the normal claims of sons upon mothers. In a gentle voice that should have brought some needed silence to later battles over her, this mother does not boast in the vaunted titles that the theologians would argue about. She will be a slave—in the most mysterious way possible—a domestic servant to her son and Lord. What John—greatest of those born of woman—was not worthy to be, this young girl—most blessed of all those who bear sons—has become: the slave of the Coming One. How can this be? “Nothing will be impossible with God” (v. 37).

To our list of doorkeepers, announcers, and confessors, we can, at last, add slaves. Your development of this theme will be greatly aided by a quick review— strike that—by the slow reading and serious contemplation of Luther’s sermon on this passage, easily accessible in Martin Luther’s Christmas Book.2 In his sermon on the Annunciation, Luther (hearkening back to St. Bernard) speaks of three miracles that take place here, and greater than the miracle of the Incarnation, greater than the miracle of a Virgin Birth, is the miracle that this maiden should believe this word from the angel. If she had not believed, Luther declares, she could not have conceived. And this, he adds, is the hardest part for us as well, not to believe that He could be God and Man, or even to believe that He could be born of a virgin, but to believe that this Son of God is ours.

If our Advent prayer is that the Son be “born in us today,” and if Christ dwells in our hearts through faith (Eph 3:17), we are slaves to the Lord and for the

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world by being His faith-full Advent people. As Mary did, we submit ourselves whole and entire to the word of the Lord. We cling to His assurance that nothing is impossible with Him, that He makes no impossible promises.

Verse 37 could be translated “no word is impossible with God” or, even more woodenly, “Every word [that God speaks] shall certainly not be impossible [for Him to fulfill]!” Although such a translation strays more than a little from English idiom and even requires a second or third hearing to be understood, it does reflect an emphasis on word that stretches throughout the rest of the chapter. Mary repeats the same word in her response in v. 38: “Let it be to me according to your word”— and no one suggests translating “according to your thing/matter.” And Elizabeth finally removes all ambiguity with her blessing in v. 45, where she switches vocabulary to make the point even more clear: “Blessed is she who was brought to the faith that there will be a fulfillment for what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

It is difficult to imagine a more complete servitude than bearing another’s child. What is not risked? What is not involved? The men in the room are at a definite disadvantage in trying to express what they have, at best, only witnessed, never experienced. Still, graphic delivery room descriptions are not needed to make the application that our service to the Lord is no less demanding. It is also no less important. Our submission to this word, our willing enslavement to this Lord, is also service for the salvation of the world. Advent 3 reminded us that we are not the Christ, but Advent 4 calls us to be His presence, His light, His body once again in the world—a world rushing aimlessly through the darkness toward the last and unending night.

So then, we are slaves of the Lord in our submission to and faith in His word, and we are slaves for the world, the house where the voice of the Lord can still be heard, the people among and through whom His presence is still made manifest. Three days after you preach this sermon you will celebrate with your people the Nativity of our Lord. Are they different people as they head into this Christmastide and this New Year? Has hearing these Advent Gospels changed them? Has it changed us? What will happen when the “holidays” are over for another year? There was no “back to life as usual” for John or Mary; will we be content with that or even comforted by it? Or has a renewed awareness of our somber responsibilities, our sacred privileges, the holy purpose of our life and calling changed forever the way we look at ourselves and live for the Lord in this world? May God richly bless all your Adventtide preparations this year, filling minds and hearts, mouths and ears, church and world with the wondrous gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Jeffrey A. Oschwald 1

this time.

Unless, of course, your people have already been celebrating Christmas for four weeks by

2 Martin Luther, Martin Luther’s Christmas Book (ed. Roland Bainton; Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997).

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First Sunday after Christmas • Luke 2:22–40 • December 28, 2008 Liturgical Setting The Gospel reading for the First Sunday after Christmas observes the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple.

Textual Comments 2:22–23 After Mary’s forty-day purification is completed, she goes to the temple with Joseph and the infant Jesus. The couple offers sacrifices in keeping with the law, but the centerpiece of the pericope is Jesus’ presentation and dedication to the Lord (cf. Ex 13:12–13) and the recognition of the child by Simeon and Anna as the Christ.

2:25–27 Simeon, waiting for the consolation of Israel, is moved by the Spirit to go to the temple where he finds the child Jesus and his parents. For the second time in the Gospel, Luke refers to the child Jesus as the ‘Christ’ (the first instance is in the angel’s proclamation of Jesus’ birth to the shepherds in 2:11).

2:29–32 The Song of Simeon, the ‘Nunc Dimittis,’ is a hymn of blessing and thanksgiving to God for fulfilling his promise to send a Savior.

2:34–35 Simeon prophesies to Mary about the Christ-child.

2:36–38 The prophetess Anna praises God for the child and tells of him to all those waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.

Suggested Outline I. Narrating the Narrative.

Beginning with a simple paraphrase of the Gospel account may be a helpful way of approaching the text. The story is compelling and central to the overall theme of the day. A creative retelling of the events in the temple may engage the hearers, allowing them to be the receivers of the message, as they are virtual onlookers in the temple with the holy family, Simeon, and Anna. Key emphases of the narrative retelling may be: 1) God’s keeping of his promises by sending the Messiah; 2) that the Savior has come also for Gentiles; 3) that Christ has come to bring comfort and consolation to all people; and 4) that Jesus would raise up those who believe in him, but would also be a stumbling block to those who opposed him.

II. God’s Old Testament Promises For generations, God had promised that he would send a Messiah, one who would save his people from their sins. In spite of the frequent unfaithfulness of the Israelites, God would be faithful to them; in spite of their sinfulness, God would provide One to be sinless in their place; in spite of their repeated waywardness,

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God would lead his people on the way of salvation. God had long foretold that the Messiah would bring comfort to his people, proclaiming peace to their troubled lives. God would bring consolation and hope to those who had none. The problem of sin was common to Israelites and Gentiles alike, but God Himself promised a solution to that problem.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God proclaimed that he would send a Savior and the ‘day of salvation’ would dawn (Is 49:8). Yet this salvation would not merely be for the people of Israel. God had given his Word: those walking in darkness would see a great light (Is 9:2), and the Christ would be a light to the Gentiles so that his salvation would be brought to the ends of the earth (cf. Is 42:6; 49:6).

III. God’s Promises Fulfilled in the Jesus Christ God promised to send a Savior, and in the little Christ-child presented in the temple, he kept his promise. This is what Simeon and Anna saw—God’s Word fulfilled in the flesh—and their joyful proclamation is reason for all people to give thanks to God. God’s salvation had been prepared; the Messiah—God’s own Son—had come. But more was to be done before God’s plan was completed. That work would be accomplished thirty-three years later, on a hill, just beyond the walls of the Jerusalem temple. There, the Jesus who had been held safely in Simeon’s arms would be cruelly held by the outstretched arms of a rough wooden cross. The baby boy presented at the temple, hailed and celebrated by Simeon and Anna as God’s salvation, a light to the Gentiles, the glory of the people Israel—this promised One would die the death of a criminal in darkness, amid jeers and insults, rejected by Israelites and Gentiles alike. Jesus’ body was buried in a tomb, yet, this was not the end of God’s plan of salvation. On Easter morning Jesus rose from death to life.

His resurrection testified to the truth of God’s promises. Jesus Christ is indeed God’s Son, the promised Savior. But more than that, through this risen Jesus God was keeping his promise of consolation, comfort, and salvation for all people.

IV. As God’s People We Wait for Our Consolation Recalling the promises of a Savior which God made to his people through the prophet Isaiah (that those walking in darkness would see a great light, and that Christ would be a light to the Gentiles revealing his salvation to the ends of the earth), we remember that these promises are for us today, too. God kept his Word and sent the Messiah. God kept his promise to the Israelites, to Mary and Joseph, to Simeon and Anna, and God kept his promise to us. He sent us a Savior. God’s infinite, unconditional love is revealed to each of us through the Christ-child. We rejoice and give thanks during the Christmas season because God sent his own Son to save us from all our sins and sorrows, all our grief and pain. In the end, to those who believe in him, Jesus makes death itself of no consequence, because he gives us his own resurrected life as our certain hope.

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Christians today are really not that different from Simeon and Anna. We are waiting for the Savior to come, but not as a little baby. We have seen Jesus with our eyes of faith, and we are waiting for his return, waiting for our eternal consolation, the everlasting comfort and peace that Jesus will bring at his second coming. God promises that the day will come when we will see Jesus. With our own eyes we will see his face and look into his eyes. We will see God’s salvation then, even as we see his salvation now, in faith and joy.

Gerhard Bode

Second Sunday after Christmas • Luke 2:40–52 • January 4, 2009 Liturgical Setting The Gospel reading for the Second Sunday after Christmas again locates Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in the Jerusalem temple—twelve years after Jesus’ presentation there as an infant. The boy–Jesus’ return to his “Father’s house” re-identifies him as the promised Messiah in the person of God’s own Son, and anticipates the revealing of himself as Savior to the world highlighted during the upcoming Epiphany season.

Textual Comments This text, recorded only in Luke, is unique in the Gospels as the sole narrative of events in Christ’s early life between the Flight to Egypt (Mt 2:13ff.) and the start of his public ministry.

2:41 The imperfect verb tense indicates that Mary and Joseph customarily went to Jerusalem for the Passover festival. As evidenced by the previous pericope, they were attentive to the requirements of the Law. 2:42 Jesus is twelve years old, the age at which youth began advanced instruction in the Jewish religion and participated more fully in its festivals. The ascent of the group to Jerusalem for the Passover looks ahead to Jesus’ later entrance into the city on Palm Sunday when again he will go to his “Father’s house” and accomplish his work as Savior.

2:44–46 Understandably, Jesus’ three-day absence would be of great concern to Mary and Joseph. Their anxious searching for Jesus typifies their efforts at grasping his true identity and purpose.

2:46–47 Jesus comes to the Jewish religious teachers as a pupil, hearing them and asking questions, but he also assumes the role of teacher, amazing them with his understanding and answers. The setting here is key: the temple is the place where the Word of God is proclaimed and service to God is rendered. Jesus’ activity here is linked to God and his Word, in a sense, setting the theme for his future work and ministry.

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2:48 The nature of Mary and Joseph’s amazement does not appear to be the same as that of the religious teachers, as indicated by Mary’s question and statement to Jesus. Her question: “Son, why have you done this to us?” may reflect a combined feeling of relief and irritation. The question is understandable given that Mary appears focused on the parent-child relationship which she and Joseph have with Jesus. At the same time, it may be that Mary was astonished by Jesus’ apparent lack of concern for the ordeal she and Joseph had endured for the last three days, and was amazed at the boldness of a mere boy engaging the learned teachers of the law.

2:49 Jesus’ first recorded words in Luke’s Gospel speak succinctly, both to the purpose of his mission and his relationship to his Father (implying his divine Sonship). His initial question to his mother, “Why is it that you are seeking me?” is closely connected with the question that follows. Jesus seems to suggest that their searching for him was unnecessary; they should have known where he could be found. Jesus’ phrase “of my Father” contrasts with Mary’s previous statement to Jesus: “Your father and I, greatly distressed, are looking for you.” While recognizing the parent-child relationship existing between Mary and Joseph and himself, Jesus implies that they do not fully understand the nature of the relationship between him and his divine Father, his identity, and the work of salvation he will accomplish.

2:51 Jesus returns to Nazareth with Mary and Joseph and is obedient to them. Mary treasures these words and events in her heart—perhaps still trying to grasp the fact that her child is both a human being and at the same time God’s own Son. 2:52 In these few words, Luke summarizes the next 18 years of Jesus’ life.

Suggested Outline I. Narrating the Narrative Beginning with a simple paraphrase of the Gospel account may be a helpful way of approaching the text. (See notes for the Suggested Outline for the First Sunday After Christmas.) Given the uniqueness of the text as the sole pericope detailing events in the life of Christ between his early childhood and adulthood, a retelling of the events may be helpful. Key emphases of the narrative retelling may be: 1) the journey to Jerusalem for the Passover in fulfillment of the Law; 2) Mary and Joseph’s anxious search for Jesus; 3) Jesus engaging the religious teachers in the temple; 4) Jesus’ explanation to Mary that he must be at his “Father’s house”; and 5) the family’s return to Nazareth and Jesus’ subjection to Mary and Joseph.

II. The God-Boy Jesus Christ This pericope lends a unique perspective to the Incarnation. The Christ child is also the Son of God, fully human and fully divine. He is God who obeys the 326

Law’s command to observe the Passover feast. He is a boy who refers to the Jerusalem temple—the house of God—as “my Father’s house.” He is both God and human, increasing “in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man” (2:52 ESV). Key here is Jesus’ awareness of himself as the Son of God with a specific mission.

III. God’s Promise is being Fulfilled The God-Man Jesus Christ, the Promised One, arrived to bring reconciliation between God and humanity. Christ came to bring his people into a right relationship with his Father and accomplished that work just outside the walls of the Jerusalem temple—on Calvary. There God the Father would forsake his obedient Son and lay upon him the punishment of all our disobedience. After three days, God would raise his Son from death to life again to ensure our victory over sin and death. Christ’s reconciling and victorious work for us means that we too may call God our “Father,” not in the same sense as Jesus does, but in a very real and enduring way, since the relationship between God and humanity restored by Christ is now perfected and complete. Christ is the perfect fulfillment of God’s promises of redemption, celebrated during the Christmas season.

Gerhard Bode

Baptism of Our Lord • Mark 1:4–11 • January 11, 2009 Jesus Christ, the Son of God—that is who Mark identifies in the opening title verse of his gospel (1:1). As such, of course, Jesus was in no personal need of the “repentance and the forgiveness of sins” attached to John’s baptism (1:4). Yet, there he is, going down into the water with a crowd of sinners.

It is characteristic of the way Mark tells the gospel story that we, reading the gospel, know more about what is going on than the characters in the story. Mark stated his theme in the very first verse of the gospel, but John, the disciples, the crowds, and the other characters in the story seem to be quite confused about who Jesus is. John himself knows and announces that he is preparing the people for someone else, someone incomparably greater than he is (1:7–8). John preaches and baptizes in anticipation of the Greater One, but here is a significant point: Mark gives us no hint that John recognized Jesus at the time of his baptism (or even afterward!). We often read John’s recognition into the baptism text as we have it here in Mark, influenced especially by the parallel in Matthew 3:13–17 (and also John 1:29–34).

Those other texts portray the baptism of Jesus as a very public display of Jesus as the Son of God. But the text as it stands in Mark does not emphasize that public display; in fact, it almost seems like a private revelation. It is Jesus who sees Concordia Journal/October 2008

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the Spirit descend like a dove; it is Jesus who hears the voice of the Father addressing him as his beloved Son (1:10–11). This and a number of other features in Mark’s gospel are sometimes described as the “Messianic Secret” (see also 1:25, 34; 43–45; 5:43; 7:24, 36; 8:26, 30; 9:9, 30–31; and 10:48), and are seen by some as a “problem” in interpreting the gospel, especially in comparison with Matthew and Luke.

The “problem” of knowing who Jesus is, of course, exists for the characters in the story, not for us as readers of Mark’s gospel. If the identification of Jesus as the Son of God at his baptism is portrayed almost as a secret, then we are in on the secret. All along the way in his gospel, Mark gives us a privileged perspective on the events he describes. As such, we know and see the events even better than eyewitnesses. We are told from the outset who Jesus is, while those who saw with their own eyes only gradually, haltingly, and imperfectly began to understand and connect the dots. In the present text about Jesus’ baptism, we see, hear, and understand more clearly than John the Baptist did.

It is tempting to get distracted by the “puzzle” of harmonizing Mark and Matthew and John, but preaching is not puzzle-solving. Reading Mark on his own terms is very helpful. The readers (and our hearers) are “in on the secret” in a way that others in the story are not. John and the bystanders may or may not hear the voice and see the Spirit, but Jesus does, and so do we. Those others may or may not know who Jesus really is; but we do, because Mark tells us in 1:1 who he is. The very act of reading and hearing the story which Mark tells, draws the reader into a particular stance toward Jesus. Jesus is revealed to us readers more clearly and fully than he was recognized by those who walked with him and saw him with their own eyes and touched him with their own hands.

In this light, the crucial thing in preaching the baptism of Jesus is not to sort out all the information—least of all the details of how Mark’s account relates to Matthew’s—but to let the text accomplish with the hearers what the text does to the readers. As Robert Fowler put it, “An utterance means what it does, not what it says” (Let the Reader Understand: Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark). How does the preacher aim for such an effect? A dramatic turn may capture some of this, with the preacher speaking as one of the eyewitnesses, whose own understanding is incomplete, but whose lingering confusion invites the hearers to fill in the gaps with what we know (but what the eyewitnesses could not).

William W. Schumacher

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Editor’s Note: we are pleased to reprint the following Homiletical Helps from two of the Seminary’s distinguished faculty, one of whom is retired, and both of whom are still very active.

Second Sunday after the Epiphany • John 1:43–51 • January 18, 2009 Context Jesus has begun to gather his disciples. John the Baptist’s advertising of this “Lamb of God” has attracted the curious (1:15–37). Simon and Andrew have come to Jesus, and Simon has already begun to experience what it means when Jesus takes over a person’s life. Jesus changed his name, gave him a new identity—even without Simon’s asking (1:37–42). That is what one has to expect when one encounters Jesus.

Textual notes 1. The simplicity of the story in the text is most impressive. The dramatic details are spare. Jesus simply says, “Follow me.” He does not try to persuade or make an attractive offer. He commands. His Word creates a new reality. After all, he is the Word who in the beginning made all things. Making new, recreating, is just in his blood.

2. Nathanael’s first reaction to Jesus is the typical reaction of the sinner who wants to remain in charge of life. His prejudiced reaction—nothing good in Nazareth—was a defensive reaction against the claims that could come from the One who really was the One of whom Moses and the prophets had written.

Nathanael thought he knew better: no good from Nazareth, and with this judgment he protected himself from Jesus’ call and command to follow, from Jesus’ dethroning Nathanael as lord of his own life.

3. Then Jesus turned Nathanael’s judgment and life around. It is not clear why Jesus’ seeing him under the fig tree so impressed Nathanael; nevertheless, he was impressed. He decided that Jesus must be the very best that God had to offer.

He must be the Messiah, Israel’s King, and that special Son of God that David had been. Nathanael was still trying to be in charge, identifying Jesus and placing this Messiah in his own box. The Lord exploded Nathanael’s noblest conception, that this man was the chosen Deliverer from David’s line.

4. Jesus told Nathanael that that was not the half of it. Without being wrong, he was not right. For Jesus is even more than the Messiah. He is the Son of Man. With this reference to the tradition that goes back to Daniel 7:13–14, Jesus identified himself with that figure in human form who has the characteristics that God alone can claim: “He was given dominion and glory and rule, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, his kingdom one that will not be destroyed.” God was coming in human form, Daniel prophesied, and Jesus claimed to be this one like a Son of Man, who had

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been described in intertestamental tradition as having angels ascend from him and descend upon him. For that reason Caiphas found him guilty of blasphemy (Mt 26:63–65; cf. Acts 7:56). This image of the angels ascending and descending was combined with the title “Son of Man” against the background of Genesis 28:12, where angels create a picture and place of God’s promise and presence.

There God spoke to Jacob from heaven; now God speaks in these days through his Son. 5. The stark simplicity of John’s telling becomes evident here at the conclusion of the story too. Jesus claims to be God in human flesh, and John follows up with “On the third day there was a wedding.” No pious comment, no fond sentiment can add to the simple claim of Jesus to be our God. We cannot add or subtract anything to/from his Word as it cuts into the heart of our lives, stabbing our Old Adam to death, snipping off the wild growth of unpruned desires, liberating us from the chains of our false conceptions of God and human life, and telling us who is in charge and who we are. Like Simon, we are given a new identity, a new life, and a new way of life; and all that we can do is go to a wedding and live as the new creatures he has made us to be.

Suggested outline A New Identity Introduction: Nathanael was minding his own business when Philip interrupted his life with word about Jesus.

I.

Like us, Nathanael wanted to be in control. First, his prejudices simply dismissed Jesus: no good from Nazareth. We categorize in this way, as well, to try to stay in charge of life.

II. Jesus impressed Nathanael, but Nathanael still wanted to be in control.

He recognized Jesus as Messiah. Jesus had to tell him that this man from Nazareth was more than an earthly deliverer, he was God. III. Jesus is the Son of Man, of whom Daniel prophesied. He is God in human flesh, who brings the presence and promise of God to us.

IV. Once he has taken control of our lives and given us a new identity in himself, Jesus sends us to serve him in the context of weddings and the other events and situations of everyday life.

Robert Kolb

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Third Sunday after the Epiphany • Mark 1:14–20 • January 25, 2009 Sermon notes 1. Like our text, the Epistle for this Sunday (1 Cor 7:29–31) has something to say about time. Paul’s comment that “the time is short” echoes the urgency of our Lord’s announcement, “The time has come” (v. 15)—the only difference being that Paul is speaking of the quantity of time (brief), whereas our Lord is speaking of the quality of time (special). Our Lord is not discussing a mere chronological unit, “any old time”; the word he uses is καιρός, not χρόνος. The Good News version captures the distinction by translating it as “the right time.”

2. How the fishermen of our text responded to Jesus’ invitation (vv. 18 & 20) provides another point of contact between our text and the Epistle. Certainly these men would qualify as people “who use the things of the world [e.g., fishing nets], as if not engrossed in them” (1 Cor 7:31). Paraphrasing the language of the Epistle, one might describe Simon, Andrew, James, and John as “those who fish, as if they fished not.”

3. Also like our text, the Old Testament reading for this Sunday (Jon 3:1–5, 10) describes momentous results from simple causes with crisp understatement.

Jonah’s message was a simple one: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be destroyed” (Jon 3:4). The outcome? “The Ninevites believed God” (Jon 3:5)!

Paralleling this remarkable (but understated) result is the response to Jesus’ simple invitation in our text: “At once they left their nets and followed Him” (v. 18). Only the powerful Gospel, in either case, could account for such momentous result from so seemingly simple a cause.

4. The Old Testament reading informs us that “the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time” (Jon 3:1; emphasis mine). Similarly, the call of the Lord to the fishermen recorded in our text is coming to them “a second time,” so to speak.

The encounter in our text was not the first meeting between Jesus and these fishermen; John 1:40–42 describes an earlier contact between our Lord and Andrew and Simon. The fishermen had come to know and believe in Jesus prior to the incident in our text. Lenski suggests that Jesus’ first invitation to the fishermen was intended for their personal welfare but that the second invitation (the one in our text) was intended for the public welfare; in short, the disciples were to share with others the relationship with Jesus that they themselves already enjoyed. The call in our text is a summons to mission work, not to faith.

5. Between the temptation of Jesus alluded to in the verse immediately before our text and the incident of our text, there is a gap of over a year. With his customary economy, Mark simply leaps into the Galilean ministry of Jesus.

However, while there is no chronological tie between our text and the preceding context, there is certainly a logical connection. No matter how adverse the circumstances—whether it is a temptation in the wilderness from Satan, an encounter

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with “wild animals” (v. 13), or the imprisonment of a close friend and co-worker (John the Baptist, v. 14)—Jesus’ conduct in our text makes clear that the work of God’s kingdom must go on; its urgency supersedes all other demands.

6. Note that the preceding and the following contexts, when taken together, provide a frame for our text. In both contexts there is a reference to a demon: the Prince of devils, Satan himself, in verse 13; and one of his evil cohorts in verse 23.

Given this frame (a common—and effective—literary device), the message of our text comes into sharper focus—even as a portrait is highlighted by the frame surrounding it.

7. “Repent” in verse 15 has no object, but “believe” has a specific object, “the good news.” We may infer from this syntactical arrangement truths made explicit elsewhere in the Scriptures: 1) Repentance does battle with sin (singular), not merely sins (plural). Sin is a condition we carry around with us, not a mere catalog of evil deeds. We repent, therefore, not merely of the things we do but, above all, of what we are; thus we repent not merely of this or that sin, but we repent— period, with no specific object. 2) On the other hand, believing has a specific object: the Gospel, the person and work of Jesus. We are not saved through “believing” or “faith” in general, but only through a very specific faith. This is why the text mentions a specific object for faith.

8. “Believe the good news” (v. 15) should be literally translated “Believe in the good news.” The addition of the word for “in” in the original broadens the meaning. “In” means “in the sphere of ”; we “believe in the sphere of the good news.” That is, we believe in the Gospel (object) because we are under the influence of the Gospel (source). The Gospel is not only the goal of our faith but also the cause of our faith. That is good news indeed! The well-known snowball effect of alcohol might serve as an illustration. The more one is under the influence of alcohol, the more he craves alcohol—and the worse the consequences in his life. Let this negative aspect of alcohol remind us of the positive aspect of the Gospel: it too has a snowball effect. The more one is under the influence of the Gospel, the more he craves the Gospel—and the more blessed the consequences of that Gospel in his life. “Whoever has will be given more” (Lk 8:18).

9. Our Lord adapts his gracious invitation to Simon and Andrew to the situation in which he finds them. “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (v. 17; emphasis mine) is addressed to the two men as they are engaged in fishing.

Be it reverently said, our Lord exploits the situation; he uses a metaphor, “fishers of men,” instead of the more general terms “missionaries” or “evangelists.” (See John chapters 4 and 6 for similar examples.) In his preaching Jesus was “all things to all men so that by all possible means [he] might save some” (1 Cor 9:23—a precedent for us in our evangelism efforts).

10. Note carefully the wording of Jesus’ promise, “I will make you fishers of men” (v. 17; emphasis mine)—not “You will become fishers of men.” The accent is

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on Jesus’ activity, not ours. Whatever good we do, he does in us. We are “fishers of men” only through his strength. Further, the verb “make” seems to imply training.

We are not “zapped” into missionaries, but we are schooled to be missionaries.

11. “Nets” in verse 18 is an instance of synecdoche, the part standing for the whole. In other words, what Simon and Andrew left behind was more than a specific piece of fishing equipment—they left behind their job, their vocation, to become “fishers of men.” Moreover, the Greek verb avφέντες is an aorist participle, connoting final, completed action; they left their “nets” permanently, for keeps.

Nothing casual or ordinary about their action—it was radical!

12. Note the parallel between the “at once” of verse 18 (describing the fishermen’s action) and the “without delay” of verse 20 (describing Jesus’ action).

Urgency characterizes both Jesus’ invitation and the human response to it. Like Master, like disciple.

Suggested Outline Introduction: There is no doubt about it: the cause of missions is an urgent one. God takes “no pleasure in the death of the wicked,” but will have “all men to be saved.” “The night is coming when no one can work.” “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near.” What is needed for this urgent cause of missions is a corresponding sense of urgency in behalf of the cause—an urgency like that displayed by Jesus and the disciples in our text.

Urgency in Behalf of the Urgent Cause of Missions I.

As displayed by our Lord: A. Despite adverse circumstances (vv. 13 & 14; sermon note 5), our Lord continued to proclaim the good news of God. B. His description of the kingdom of God abounded in urgent language (v. 15; sermon notes 1, 3, 12).

C. When he encountered the sons of Zebedee, he called them “without delay” (v. 20; sermon note 12).

D. A sense of urgency impelled our Lord toward the climactic acts of his saving ministry (Mt 16:21; Lk 13:31–33, 22:42; Heb 10:7).

II. As displayed by the disciples: A. Called to share in the Lord’s mission activity, Simon and Andrew left “at once” (v. 18; sermon notes 2, 3).

B. Called to share in the Lord’s mission activity, Simon, Andrew, James, and John made a complete break from their former activity (vv. 18 & 20; sermons notes 11, 12).

III. As displayed by us(?): A. Because of our sinful lethargy and our confused priorities, it is

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predictable that we will not respond with urgency to the urgent cause of missions (the malady).

B. The urgency our Lord requires of us, he himself supplies (the solution).

1. The same Gospel that is the object of our sense of urgency is also the source of our sense of urgency (v. 15; sermon notes 3, 8).

2. Hence it is the Lord himself who makes us â&#x20AC;&#x153;fishers of menâ&#x20AC;? (v.

17; sermon note 10).

Conclusion: Given the goodness of our Lord who, through the Gospel, enables the sense of urgency for missions that he requires, we can replace the question mark in the parentheses behind the third point in the outline (above) with a period, even an exclamation mark. Empowered by Jesus, we can respond to his urgent call to mission work immediately, wholeheartedly, and completely.

Francis C. Rossow

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book reviews

COncordia Journal

THE GIFT OF GRACE: The Future of Lutheran Theology. Edited by Niels Henrik Gregersen, Bo Holm, Ted Peters, and Peter Widmann. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005. 378 pages. Paper. $30.00

This collection of essays grew out of an international conference of 125 Lutheran theologians held at Aarhus University, Denmark, in January, 2003, organized by the editors of the book, and supported by the Danish Lutheran churches and the Lutheran World Federation. Several of the essays initially appeared in the journal Dialog and some have undergone revision since then. Two principal questions shape the material: 1) What is the status quo of Lutheran theology at the beginning of the twenty-first Century?

2) Where is Lutheran theology going?

(There is also the related question: “Where should it go?”) An earlier volume, The Role of Mission in the Future of Lutheran Theology (Fortress, 2003), also contains papers that were presented at the Aarhus conference on “The Future of Lutheran Theology.”

Nearly all of the contributors to the second volume are professors of systematic or dogmatic theology.

Monica Melanchthon is the lone Old Testament scholar and Choong Chee Pang the single New Testament one.

Two of the contributors, Ambrose Moyo, Bishop of the Lutheran Communion in Southern Africa (Zimbabwe), and Fidon Mwombeki, Deputy General for the Northwest Diocese of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Tanzania, hold ecclesiastical

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offices. More than a third of the authors (11) are based in North American seminaries or universities, most connected with the ELCA. (My former colleague, David Truemper, now deceased, and Mickie Mattox, now a convert to the Church of Rome, were the only representatives who, at least at that time, were more closely related to the LCMS.) The next highest number of scholars represented here comes from Germany (4) and Denmark (4). In addition to two articles by Finnish scholars and the two by the Africans, the other essays are by theologians from Sweden, Argentina, Norway, India, and Singapore. So while northern American and European perspectives are dominant, there are also significant contributions from theologians working in the southern hemisphere.

Most are scholars known already for their work in Lutheran systematic theology, but several were unknown to this reviewer. While the German tradition of Lutheran theology continues to have significant voices (one thinks especially of Oswald Bayer and Christoph Schwöbel, who have important essays here), questions surrounding “science and theology,” “justification and justice” (including the nature and future of Lutheran liberationist and feminist theologies), and “Christianity and the other religions” have sparked a global, contextual rethinking of the gifts of Lutheran theology for the sake of the larger church and world. Germany is no longer the center, as it perhaps was during the twentieth century (e.g.,

Bultmann, Elert, Tillich, Ebeling, Pannenberg, and Jüngel).

After an introductory article, “Ten Theses on the Future of Lutheran Theology,” by the Danish theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen, the book is divided into eight sections: Grace, Cross, Justification, Justice, Comparisons (i.e., articles that compare aspects of Luther’s thought with those of Aquinas, Calvin, Grundvig, and Kierkegaard), Ecumenics, World, and Science. The editors have served us well by giving us a collection of articles under these headings from leading scholars of Lutheran theology. That in itself recommends this volume for those interested in the present state and current trajectories of dogmatic theology and ethics or for those who want to be introduced to important work that is being done in these areas.

An evaluation of each of the 28 essays is beyond the scope of this review. I will offer a few observations from my perspective as one who has taught and written about Lutheran theology for fifteen years and who has been engaged as a colleague and in conversation with some of the authors in this volume.

Several of the essays reflect recent Lutheran contributions to the renewal of Trinitarian theology. These essays include an implicit argument for the catholicity of Lutheran theology.

Robert Jenson, for example, asserts in his essay, “Triune Grace,” that the future of Lutheran theology will only reside in its ability to shirk off its particularity and embrace a wider catholici-

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ty that is grounded in the dogma of the Trinity. Jenson’s responder, Christoph Schwöbel (“The Quest for an Adequate Theology of Grace and the Future of Lutheran Theology”), along with Risto Saarinen (“Communicating God’s Grace”) and Bo Holm (“Luther’s Theology of the Gift”) underscore that God’s grace is God’s Trinitarian selfgiving, that God’s being is in giving.

God’s grace is thus pure gift (donum).

Human beings have nothing to give.

The only way people live according to the will of God is to give God the only thing God wants, namely, the faith (trust) that God also gives, and to give the surplus of God’s grace to one’s neighbors. Humans are defined, then, not by what they do, but by what God gives them. While each of these theologians is engaged in the renewal of Trinitarian theology (in the wake of Barth and Rahner), each is also critical of some developments in Trinitarian thinking. Saarinen, for example, rejects those theologies that stress the reciprocity and the dialogical character of the Trinity and which then attempt to make analogies between human communities and the inner-Trinitarian communion. This kind of theology, he argues (rightly, in my opinion), easily forgets the otherness of God as giver and the particular character of grace as gift.

For all of the important stress on the nature of God’s grace as gift, one still wonders if the doctrine of grace is really the central gift/charism that Lutheran theology has to offer to the larger ecumene and world. After all,

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in the sixteenth-century debates between Lutheran and Roman Catholic theologians, there were no major disagreements about sola gratia. The main issue was the reception of grace by faith alone. Is not this teaching of sola fide the central charism, the core of Lutheran theology, which Lutherans insist is in fact true catholic doctrine?

In actuality the doctrine of justification by faith alone remains a serious point of contention among Lutheran theologians, including those who were present in Aarhus. Some maintain that “the doctrine of justification by faith alone should not be treated as a core of Lutheran theology” (Gregorsen, “Ten Theses,” 6) or “understood to be the core of the whole Christian doctrine” (Simo Peura, “Baptism, Justification, and the Joint Declaration,” 125). The dogmas of the Trinity and Christology are understood to be prior to, distinct from, and more central than the doctrine of justification. Furthermore, these theologians reject the claim that justification is primarily forensic in character and defend the new Finnish interpretation of Luther that stresses the transformation of the Christian into the likeness of Christ through Christ’s indwelling righteousness.

According to Peura, “…Luther’s view on justification includes the imputative aspects as well as the effective aspect: a Christian is made and declared righteous because of Christ and his righteousness. If we disconnect the two aspects from each other, the doctrine of justification disintegrates in Lutheran theology … The Lutheran

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doctrine of justification keeps its logical consistency and wholeness only if we take the union with Christ effected in Baptism as the beginning point of our considerations” (122). Still others, such as Ambrose Moyo, set forth a Marxist-liberationist position on justification that is hard to reconcile with Article IV of the Augsburg Confession and Apology IV: “Being justified by faith in Christ means you commit yourself to working for justice for all of God’s people and for their justification

by God as they participate in the justice of God … If we believe that the justice of God is revealed in Jesus Christ and that we are Christ’s disciples, our task cannot be divorced from creating a just society, because that is what the death and resurrection of Christ are all about” (“Reconciliation and Forgiveness,” 154). Moyo’s responder, Guillermo Hansen from Argentina, who is generally sympathetic to Moyo’s concern to relate justification to problems of social justice, nevertheless rightly criticizes Moyo for not properly distinguishing God’s law, also in its political function, from God’s gospel— also in relation to the doctrine of the two kingdoms—and for confusing the relationship between justification and social justice: “… justification does not necessarily lead to justice in society, because the latter—confined in our experience by the limits of space and time—requires measures and means whereby attitudinal aspects analogous to ‘love’ have to be exacted from us in order to establish a minimal framework for life” (Hansen, “Reconciliation and

Forgiveness: A Response,” 163).

Hansen’s careful law-gospel, two kingdom critique, which clearly also demonstrates concern for engaging problems of social justice, provides an important warning to Lutheran theologians of liberation. (An essay that complements the position of Hansen, a graduate of Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, is “The Word and the Mask,” by Vitor Westhelle, who teaches at Hansen’s alma mater and who here revisits the genealogy of the misnamed “two kingdoms doctrine” for the sake of contemporary theological practice.)

Other Lutherans, notably David Truemper (“The Lutheran Confessional Writings and the Future of Lutheran Theology”) and Oswald Bayer (“Creation as History”), stress the forensic, promissio character of God’s gospel word and emphasize that justification by faith is a “stipulation about what constitutes gospel speaking, whatever the content” (Gerhard Forde, as quoted by Truemper). “The whole theological enterprise, I contend, needs to be done, ‘according to the gospel,’ that is, according to the Reformation insight into the nature of the gospel as sheer promise” (Truemper, 139). This line of theological thinking, also evident in Hansen’s and Westhelle’s perspectives, uses the Confessional writings as normative resources for diagnosing contemporary theological problems and discerning how the gospel addresses those problems. Contrary to those who see the future of Lutheran theology more in terms of a medieval theology

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of “nature and grace,” these theologians believe that the distinction between law and gospel, Luther’s Heidelbergian theology of the cross (which is about more than merely the cross and human suffering), and a two kingdom hermeneutic hold more promise. For the foreseeable future, the divide over justification, already evident at the LWF Assembly in 1963 (Helsinki) but also evident in some of these essays, presents a significant problem for the future of theology, Lutheran or otherwise.

Finally, one needs to note the important work that Lutherans are doing in the area of the doctrine of creation. The essay by Bayer and one

by Ted Peters (“Grace, Doubt, and Evil”) are particularly important because of their engagement with scientific and technological approaches to “nature.” But here, too, tensions are apparent. Although both Peters and Bayer are sympathetic to some emphases in Whitehead’s thought process and in recent discourse from the philosophy of nature, and although both seek to overcome the isolation of theology from the natural sciences and to stress God’s immanent, incessant acting in the world, Bayer is shaped more by Luther’s and Hamann’s focus on God’s trustworthy, faith-creating address, his promissio (which is important not merely for the sacraments and sermon, but also for the doctrine of creation). Peters’ essay, on the other hand, takes its point of departure in terms of “grace” and “nature,” and seeks to overcome the principal “barri-

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ers to grace,” namely doubt and evil, by means of a theology of the cross that stresses God’s presence in suffering and death. Whereas Bayer refrains from entering into matters of theodicy, Peters thinks contemporary theology cannot avoid developing a kind of apologetic theodicy. (The other essays in the section on “science” also question such attempts.) While this reviewer wholeheartedly agrees that the future of Lutheran systematic theology cannot avoid rethinking and restating the Christian doctrine of creation (including revisiting traditional understandings of the pertinent biblical sedes doctrinae) in view of contemporary scientific facts and prevailing theories, the future of “nature and grace” approaches does not seem so promising.

Matthew Becker Valparaiso University Reutlingen, Germany

OLD TESTAMENT THEOLOGY, VOLUME TWO: Israel’s Faith. By John Goldingay. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006. 891 pages.

Hardback. $49.95.

Old Testament Theology, Volume 2: Israel’s Faith is the second of John Goldingay’s magisterial three-volume Old Testament Theology. Whereas Volume 1: Israel’s Gospel follows the Old Testament story line, Volume 2 is based upon the Prophets, Psalms and Wisdom Literature. Goldingay orders Israel’s Faith under the major titles of God, Israel, The Nightmare, The

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Vision, The World, The Nations, and Humanity. Along the way he dialogues with other Old Testament scholars, as well as theological giants such as Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Jürgen Moltmann. Goldingay adds occasional New Testament footnotes and closes each chapter with a reflection upon how the New Testament takes up Old Testament themes and theology. His major thesis in this regard is that Christ did not come to reveal something new, rather he provided a visible embodiment of Yahweh’s earlier self-revelation to Israel. Throughout the book Goldingay grants that there is a plurality of voices in the Old Testament, often with radically different perspectives. However, he also maintains that a single faith may be articulated even as he allows for ambiguities in which he recognizes “that we see only the outskirts of God’s ways” (17).

An example of how Goldingay structures his thinking is in his discussion on Yahweh and sexuality. In the Old Testament Yahweh is normally referred to in terms of male images, e.g. “Lord” and “King.” But Yahweh may also take on female characteristics (e.g., Nm 11:12; Dt 32:18 and Is 66:13).

Throughout the Old Testament Yahweh has eyes, ears, hands, feet, and a face but he has no genitals. He is not imaged in erotic terms, and sexuality was simply not part of the divine order.

There is therefore a certain distance between Yahweh and sex (e.g., Ex 19:15; Lv 15:18; 1 Sm 21:4). Goldingay writes, “Whereas other Middle Eastern

peoples, like the modern Western world, located sexuality within the godhead and also had a god called Death, the First Testament sees sexuality as of exclusively human significance and knew that God was distanced from death and sex, even though sovereign over these realms; there are no other deities involved in these realms” (48).

Israel’s Faith is chock-full of word studies; for example, the noun hesed appears in two contexts and both shed light on its meaning. First, hesed describes an extraordinary commitment to someone who has not been previously known (e.g., Rahab in Jo 2:12).

Second, someone’s hesed may presuppose an existing relationship and, against all odds, one party holds on to the relationship (e.g., Naomi’s comment in Ruth 2:20). Yahweh’s hesed for Israel embraces both of these ideas; he chose the patriarchs whom he did not previously “know” and he remains committed to his promises to them and their ancestors forever.

Goldingay has recently published two commentaries on Isaiah 40–55, so it is not surprising that he references texts from these chapters quite often.

In his discussion on Yahweh’s reign he maintains that in the Old Testament no one consciously brings it about. In Isaiah 40–55, Cyrus is trying to carve out his empire, Babylon is being forcefully removed, Judah has little power to accomplish anything, Isaiah only announces the good news, and the exiles do nothing to usher in or extend Yahweh’s kingdom. People cannot work for, or further extend this king-

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dom. In similar fashion, Christ’s followers in the New Testament can do nothing for the reign of God except announce it, suffer because of it, and die for it. God’s kingdom comes without human cooperation (cf. Dn 2:34).

The actualization of the kingdom of God is not a matter of human initiative, but entirely a matter of God’s initiative.

Goldingay notes also that Isaiah 40–55 is so positive that exiles might have thought the restoration of Judah and Jerusalem would be the absolute End, Yahweh’s last great event. There would be no more history. Yet the vision (cf. Is 1:1) contains multiple fulfillments. Moving into the New Testament, Goldingay maintains that this pattern reappears when both John the Baptist (Mt 3:2) and Jesus (Mt 4:17) announce the coming of God’s kingdom, also with an interim. Many more days will follow before the Final Day. Although Good Friday was followed by Easter, the church still cries out, “Come, Lord Jesus” (Rv 22:20). Put another way, the baptized live between Good Friday and Easter Sunday on a Saturday that has become the longest of days.

Israel’s Faith is full of insights that will assist any pastor in his teaching and preaching ministry. For example, the word “my people” (άmmî) shows that renewal is not only an issue of changing individuals (cf. e.g., Is 40:1).

Goldingay notes that individuals are part of communities and are decisively shaped by their belonging to communities. Yahweh would not be satisfied

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with merely changing individuals as if individuals were self-contained entities that could, for instance, serve him separately from their being part of their community. If Yahweh changes only individuals, that may do nothing for the corporate entity. If he changes the corporate entity, that will also bring about change in the individuals. Hence, Yahweh also pursues άmmî, “my people.”

The book needs more summary paragraphs and synthesis at the end of chapters. Those looking for a narrative flow (such as what is in John Bright’s classic, The Kingdom of God) will be disappointed. Goldingay’s writing is often choppy and uneven. Yet these shortcomings pale in light of the book’s strengths. Goldingay’s refusal to mute discordant notes in favor of a reassuring harmony often gives readers an “edge-of-your-seat” feeling, while new understandings abound until the reader’s “cup overfloweth.”

Reed Lessing

PROPHECY AND HERMENEUTICS: Toward a New Introduction of the Prophets. By Christopher R. Seitz.

Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.

264 pages. Paper. $19.95.

This volume by Christopher Seitz—published in the Studies in Theological Interpretation series— offers a contemporary look at the study of Isaiah and the twelve Minor Prophets. Seitz explores the fundamental questions of hermeneutics, the

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canon, and the Prophets as a bridge between the Testaments. His primary dialogue partner throughout the book is Gerhard von Rad (1901–1971), who was one of the seminal Old Testament theologians of the twentieth century. In the first section of the book Seitz discusses the unintended consequences of von Rad’s tradition-historical approach, especially as it separates the Prophets from their canonical context. The second section, “Time in Association – Reading the Twelve,” offers three exegetical essays in which Seitz explores the themes and the hermeneutical approach developed in the first half of the volume.

Seitz’s “figural” approach to Israel’s prophets finds its closest ally in von Rad, who lived in an academic environment where nineteenth century approaches dominated the conversation; namely, that Israel’s prophets represented the ground floor of the nation’s religion. The two ideas that fueled this program were a fixation on time and authorship. Scholars became transfixed with locating the exact time an author spoke/wrote a text. This question then became inevitable: how could an Assyrian Isaiah speak of a Persian Cyrus and the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple? The book of Isaiah, it was theorized, was a compilation of numerous authors and any interpretation required decisions for how it originated, developed, and achieved its final form.

Von Rad’s epochal break with this reading strategy is typified in his programmatic text from Isaiah 43:18-

19a: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!” In a decisive break with nineteenth century scholarship, von Rad maintained that Israel’s prophets were not the founders of the nation’s religion, rather they were indebted to Israel’s earlier traditions. Von Rad not only built this bridge backwards, he also maintained that Israel’s prophetic traditions thrust “violently forward” into the New Testament. That is to say, prophetic oracles are not fulfilled in the New Testament in a simple prediction/fulfillment sense. Rather, each oracle is part of a much bigger movement whereby earlier acts of Yahweh are continuously adapted for new use; former texts are dynamically transformed “in radical ways until the witness of the New Testament culminates in one final fulfillment” (43). The Old Testament has an inner nerve that drives it toward the final hermeneutical transformation that is Jesus Christ in the New Testament.

Seitz’s chief critique of von Rad is that he ignored the final form of prophetic books as well as the prophetic canon. For example, von Rad approached Isaiah by stating that because the prophet lived in Jerusalem he knew only the Zion and Davidic traditions. There was a binding connection between the prophet’s geography, time-frame, and theological traditions that could not be broken. Seitz contrasts this view with a focus on the canonical ordering of the Prophets, for this is itself an important theological and historical statement. And as such,

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the books do not need to be manipulated by authorial, theological, and chronological assumptions. He seeks to read the Prophets in ways that allow for canonical and historical issues to cohere in a closer way.

This book is a reminder that Jesus did not come to usher in something completely new. He himself says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Mt 5:17). Indeed, Paul writes that Christ’s work was “in accordance with the Scripture” (1 Cor 15:3–4). The Old Testament is “the same word in a different dress” (252). Seitz builds upon von Rad and in this way offers a compelling prophetic hermeneutic. Those seeking to interpret Israel’s prophets in light of their canonical context and New Testament fulfillment will have much to learn from this book.

Reed Lessing

THE MAJESTY OF GOD IN THE OLD TESTAMENT: A Guide for Preaching and Teaching. By Walter Kaiser. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. 176 pages. Paper. $16.99.

In this book, Walter Kaiser, a veteran evangelical Old Testament scholar, elucidates the splendor of God’s character and how one might preach from ten specific Old Testament texts that highlight the greatness of God. Each chapter begins by exploring a key concept, an important term, an archaeological fact, or a

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word study that adds depth to the understanding of the text at hand. At the heart of the book is Kaiser’s belief that pulpits ring hollow and parishioners are left wanting because pastors lack the ability to preach about the majesty of God. He quotes these words from John Piper; “Preaching that does not have the aroma of God’s greatness may entertain for a season, but it will not touch the hidden cry of the soul, ‘Show us your glory’” (10).

In a sermon study on Isaiah 40:9–31, Kaiser zeroes in on 40:12, “Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens?

Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket, or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance?”

He comments that three-fourths of the earth’s surface is comprised by ocean water, and yet all of it could fit into the hollow of Yahweh’s hand. The vastness of the universe cannot be measured, and yet it is reducible to the distance between Yahweh’s thumb to his small finger. All the dirt of the earth is difficult to comprehend, and yet Yahweh is able to reduce it to one-third of a bushel. And Yahweh is able to balance all of the mountains and hills—with one mountain, Mt. Everest, almost six miles high—on his scale. Yahweh is an awesome God, like no other! And yet, Kaiser goes on to note, Yahweh is not so powerful, so “high and mighty” that he is unable to sympathize with Israel’s pain in exile.

In a sermon based on Numbers 20:1–13 Kaiser provides a study on the

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phrase “the word of our God” which is analogous to the more frequent expression “the word of Yahweh.” The latter formula appears in the singular 242 times in the Old Testament and 17 times in the plural form. No other nation had ever heard Yahweh’s words (Ex 20:22; Dt 4:33, 36). His speaking ability marked him as distinct and greater than the gods of the nations (Ps 115:5; Is 41:26; Jer 10:5). Israel was counseled to delight in this word and count on its faithfulness (e.g., Ps 119:11, 16, 97, 162; Jer 15:16).

Yahweh’s words are perfect, for he cannot lie (Num 23:19; Pss 12:6; 18:30).

And since his words come from him, they possess his same characteristics, i.e., they are eternal e.g., Ps 119:89; Is 40:7–8. According to Jeremiah 23:28, when compared to real grain every substitute for Yahweh’s word is like straw.

With these facts in mind, Kaiser then moves into the text and specifically develops Numbers 20: 8 where Yahweh places emphasis on his word in this command to Moses, “Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water.”

In a sermon on Micah 7:11–20 Kaiser’s focus is upon the verb nâúâ’ which denotes “to lift up.” It may be employed literally, e.g., in Gn 7:17 where the flood waters “lifted up” Noah’s ark. Here, however, it is used figuratively denoting the “lifting up” and taking away of sin. It appears in this sense in e.g., Lv 16:22, to describe the scapegoat who “lifts up” all of Israel’s sins. Micah 7:18 rhetorically asks of Yahweh, “Who is like you, lift-

ing up iniquity.” Kaiser then points to John 1:29 where John the Baptist announces that Jesus is the ultimate “lifter upper” of sin.

In a sermon on Psalm 139 Kaiser discusses Yahweh’s omniscience.

He notes that there are 164 texts that explicitly affirm God’s foreknowledge.

Additionally, there are 271 passages that teach other aspects of his omniscience (either of past, present, or future aspects of knowing). There are 1,893 texts that affirm what God will do through people and 128 passages declaring what he will do through nature.

Although Kaiser says he rejects Calvin’s theocentric method of biblical interpretation, his sermons are still a far cry from Luther’s Christological emphasis. Readers of this journal will find much that is profitable in his sermon studies, even while they employ Paul’s hermeneutic of the Old Testament that is so pastorally and winsomely spelled out in 1 Corinthians 10:1–13.

Reed Lessing

EVANGELICALS IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE: Four Formative Voices on Political Thought and Action.

By J. Budziszewski. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006. 224 pages. Paper. $19.99.

For several decades American evangelicals have aimed—and sometimes struggled—to speak about and into the public square on the basis of Scripture. Evangelicals in the Public Square

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evaluates their efforts with several essays from a 2003 conference sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In the opening essay, political theorist J. Budziszewski writes, “although evangelicals have long played a part in the public square, they have never developed a clear, cohesive, and Christian view of what politics is all about” (15). Evangelicals want to base their political theory on Scripture, but “the Bible does not provide enough by itself for an adequate political theory” (23). Evangelicals typically respond by accommodating the Scripture to their views or by turning to biblical law codes or stories to fill out their political theories. Budziszewski rejects both approaches, arguing that evangelicals would be better served by the Christian natural law tradition.

The second essay, also by Budziszewski, examines four thinkers whose political thought has influenced American evangelicalism: Carl F. H. Henry, Abraham Kuyper, Francis Schaeffer, and John Howard Yoder. He dubs Henry the “pricker of the evangelical conscience” (40), whose greatest contribution was challenging evangelicals to abandon the isolationist tendencies of fundamentalism and engage the culture. Kuyper introduced evangelicals to “principled pluralism—not mere interest-group politics, but a celebration of the independent worth of the various forms of social life [local communities, civil society, churches] that fill the abyss between the state at the top and the individual at the bottom” (55).

Of Schaeffer Budziszewski writes, “It

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was Schaeffer who first made evangelicals aware of the culture war …. [He was] an apologist, cultural critic, and internal judge of the evangelical movement itself ” (73–74). Finally, Budziszewski takes up Yoder, who contends that the church is a new polis which must “refuse all complicity in coercing, threatening, or taking life” (90); Christians must therefore abstain from governing.

In this long essay, Budziszewski argues that each thinker fails to provide an adequate political theory, largely because each is ambivalent or outright hostile to general revelation and the Christian natural law tradition. Four respondents (David Weeks, John Bolt, William Edgar, and Ashley Woodiwiss) engage Budziszewski’s interpretation and evaluation of the thinkers; Woodiwiss takes Budziszewski to task for his incomplete picture of Yoder, and Bolt and Edgar also find opportunity to disagree with Budziszewski.

Finally, Jean Bethke Elshtain argues as a “friendly outsider” that a comprehensive theory may be neither desirable nor necessary (195).

Obviously, a short book cannot adequately cover four figures, so readers may come away feeling they know more about Budziszewski than about the men whose work he addresses.

Lutherans will appreciate Budziszewski’s call for greater engagement with the natural law tradition, although they will disagree with Budziszewski and the other four thinkers on several fundamental points, such as Budziszewki’s understanding of

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the function of civil law (49–50). At the same time, the book is helpful for those who want a brief introduction to the various strands of evangelical political thinking.

David W. Loy Bolivar, Missouri

THE WAY THAT LEADS THERE: Augustinian Reflections on the Christian Life. By Gilbert Meilaender.

Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006. 184 pages. Paper. $16.00.

In the book of Job, Satan levels a terrible accusation: Job fears God only because he gets wealth and prosperity (Job 1:9–11), indeed, life itself (Job 2:4–5) out of the deal. This accusation articulates a tension that occupies those who reflect on the Christian life: are we to love God simply for his sake, completely indifferent to what it may mean for us, or may we love God for the wondrous joys he promises? It is precisely this question that Gilbert Meilaender tackles in The Way That Leads There, and he does so with sensitivity and insight.

Meilaender, an LCMS clergyman who teaches at Valparaiso University, casts a large net: after reflecting on the role of the desire for happiness in the Christian life (“Desire”), Meilaender examines whether lying is ever permissible (“Duty”), what we may hope for from politics, how we are to view sex, the place of grief in the Christian life, and his own philosophical and theological method. Along the way, he leans on

Augustine—not so much out of scholarly interest, but, in Meilaender’s words, because “in thinking about certain perennial problems of the moral life, I find that he seldom fails to illume my own insight or provoke me to fresh thought” (ix). Meilaender’s portrayal of the Christian life is deeply rooted in a Lutheran worldview, conversant with the moral and political scholars of our own age, and sensitive to the richness and complexity of human existence.

Meilaender’s fundamental insight from Augustine is “that the way that leads to God (and, hence, to fulfillment) is a way that often hurts and wounds us” (x). The fallenness of our world and the sin within our hearts mean that the happiness which God promises to those who believe may not be available this side of eternity. “Because our desires remain disordered even after the fundamental division within the self has been overcome, the God who is our happiness may not make us happy here and now” (19). Likewise, “the gap that sometimes separates desire and duty in our lives cannot be solved by moral theory. That gap is, finally, the tension between the God who calls us to himself and the God who commands us to obey. Only the God who gives what he commands, in whom we are to hope, can overcome it” (76).

Meilaender’s embrace of the limitations of politics is refreshing, and his analysis of Catholic arguments against birth control is incredibly insightful.

The Way That Leads There is an excellent book. Anyone working in ethics ought to study the book as an

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example of ethical reflection that is unabashedly Christian and deeply human. Parish pastors may benefit from the book simply because of its rich insights into the complexity and deep-seated sinfulness of human thinking, as well as its tacit eschatological outlook. Because Meilaender engages contemporary theologians and philosophers in an accessible manner, the book would also work well in undergraduate courses.

David W. Loy Bolivar, Missouri

WHY POLITICS NEEDS RELIGION: The Place of Religious Arguments in the Public Square.

By Brendan Sweetman. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2006. 256 Pages. Paper. $19.00.

The last two decades have seen several books on the role of religion in public discourse in a democracy.

Answers range from quite restrictive to unrestricted. With Why Politics Needs Religion, Roman Catholic philosopher Brendan Sweetman weighs in with a unique position. Sweetman’s book “is aimed at the general reader and not at philosophers, scholars or specialists on the topic” (23). The book focuses on moral concerns (not legal or constitutional).

The core of Sweetman’s argument is “that all worldviews are faiths (in the sense that they hold some beliefs for which they do not have conclusive evidence or proof), that a faith

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must be rational in order to be taken seriously, especially in politics, and that the religious view of the world in general is a rational faith, more rational than secularism” (18). Sweetman thus rejects the claims that religion per se is non-rational and that non-religious wordviews have stronger evidence than religious ones. He argues that, “the general religious view of the world is reasonable” because it is accessible to human reason and evidence (99). Human reason can find support for the existence of God, the fact that he created the world, and the God-given dignity of each person. Restrictions on such rational religious beliefs in public discourse should, by sheer force of logic, restrict nonreligious beliefs with similar or lower levels of evidence. Non-religious worldviews cannot simply claim neutrality over against religious worldviews.

In fact, Sweetman contends that religious beliefs merit a hearing, “because the religious view of the world can make valuable contributions to modern debates concerning a host of issues” (100).

Sweetman’s work is generally strong, but two points bear noting.

First, like others who restrict religion in public debate, Sweetman presupposes that citizens ought not use arguments which appeal to authorities (such as church bodies or religious texts) that other citizens will not accept. This assumption drives much of the anxiety over the role of religion in public debate. Unfortunately, Sweetman accepts this premise without any extended treatment. Second, his treatment of displaying religious symbols 348

on public land (227 ff.) overlooks the fact that some religious symbols have meanings that derive from non-rational beliefs (e.g., the cross is tied to specific soteriological and Christological beliefs).

In the end, Sweetman has provided a unique and interesting account of the place of religion in public debate. Two features make his account particularly attractive. First, his analysis of secularism as a worldview with an epistemic structure similar to that of religious worldviews lets him counter the claim that secularism is neutral visà-vis religions. In today’s climate, this point cannot be overemphasized, even among the members of our own flocks. Second, he reminds us all that many issues in a democracy, including whether a given argument is acceptable in public debate, are themselves subject to public debate. With issues like these, one can never achieve a foundation apart from public debate. But that, to quote Sweetman, is “part of the messy (but perhaps beautiful?) process of democracy” (109).

David W. Loy Bolivar, Missouri

TEACHING C.S. LEWIS: A Handbook for Professors, Church Leaders, and Lewis Enthusiasts.

By Richard Hill and Lyle Smith.

Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 165 pages. Cloth. $59.99.

As its subtitle clarifies, Teaching C. S. Lewis is intended to aid academics

who teach courses on C. S. Lewis and Lewis enthusiasts who lead C.S. Lewis study or reading groups.

This handbook covers the Narnian chronicles, the space trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, and Till we Have Faces.

For each selection the authors provide an historical context, give a summary of the plot, identify major themes, list books for further reading, suggest teaching strategies, and furnish numerous study guide questions. An appendix contains three sample syllabi for different educational levels.

Brief as the historical contexts are, they are consistently on target. The plot summaries are thorough despite an economy of words. (One repeated error in the authors’ discussion of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is ascribing the role of Coriakin to Ramandu.) In their identification of key themes, Professors Hill and Smith are true to Lewis, at no time sneaking in their own agenda or riding their own hobby horse. The only major omission from their enumeration of key themes is Lewis’s concept of the Inner Ring, especially prominent in That Hideous Strength. On the other hand, the authors’ treatment of Lewis’s stance toward paganism is excellent. “Lewis sees paganism not as an evil child of Satan, but rather as a…good uncle of Christianity” (137). “Lewis sees pagan religions as heralds blowing trumpets before a king” (137). “Paganism, as Lewis saw it, was spiritual kindergarten: mankind was not meant to settle there, but its basic lessons were necessary

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preparation for real spiritual matriculation” (138).

In my opinion, Teaching C. S. Lewis is of more help to C. S. Lewis aficionados leading voluntary study groups than it is to academics teaching college or university courses. Although the handbook provides the latter group quick and convenient review materials, it really tells them little more than they must already know, whether it is in the area of Lewis content or of teaching strategies. In saying this, I am not belittling the particular book under review (it’s the best of its kind), but I am minimizing the value of its “kind,” the genre to which it belongs. What is basically needed to teach Lewis on a professional level—besides, of course, an aptness to teach and a fondness for students? The answer is a fondness for Lewis, repeated immersion in all his writings, and a reasonable acquaintance with much of the secondary literature on Lewis. There is no shortcut to teaching Lewis on a higher level. And given the quality of Lewis’s writing and the brilliance of his insights, who would want to take a shortcut anyhow?

Francis C. Rossow

THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism.

By Michael J. Behe. New York: Free Press, 2007. 319 pages. Cloth. $28.00.

In 1996 Michael Behe, professor of Biological Science at Lehigh University, joined the growing group of scientists that were challenging

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Darwin’s theory of evolution. His book was titled, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. Behe maintained that research in microbiology and biochemistry had demonstrated that Darwin’s theory of random mutations and survival of the fittest could not account for the maze of complex molecular machinery that inhabits and operates living cells. He concluded that the scientific evidence pointed to the creation of living organisms by an intelligent designer.

The growing evidence of intelligent design in nature has provoked a violent reaction by supporters of Darwinism. Despite the fact that the concept of intelligent design is based solely on scientific evidence, Darwinists have recognized that it implies a creator. This offends their underlying commitment to materialism. In the last 12 months more than a million copies of books defending atheism have been sold. The most prominent is Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion.

Behe’s The Edge of Evolution is a strong defense of the concept of intelligent design. He first demonstrates that the decade of research since he published Darwin’s Black Box has shown that the living cell is even more complicated than scientists realized in 1996.

For example he cites complicated control machinery that function as genetic regulatory networks. When diagrammed, these biologic systems strongly resemble a computer logic circuit. Behe writes, “Random mutation does not account for the mind-boggling systems discovered in the cell”

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(164). He once again concludes, “ The elegant, coherent, functional systems upon which life depends are the result of deliberate intelligent design” (166).

Behe agrees that there is indeed evidence for what may be termed microevolution. He points out that changes within species, such as varieties of dogs, may well have occurred as a result of random mutations and natural selection. He then looks for the edge beyond which random mutations cannot carry the process, the edge beyond which design is required. He concludes that random mutations may explain differences up to the species level and perhaps somewhat beyond that. But the big categories, orders, classes, cell types, and phyla can only be explained by design.

It is worth noting that Behe’s conclusions regarding the edge of evolution are in harmony with the biblical account of creation. Genesis speaks of the created “kind” (Hebrew mîn). Old Testament scholars have long maintained that the most likely root meaning of mîn is “division” or “class”. In Leviticus 11: 13–19 the hawk is referred to as a “kind”. In science, it is listed as a super family which contains many species. Thus Scripture also speaks of an “edge.” This would allow microevolution, but nothing beyond.

Behe points out what is, no doubt, evolutionary theory’s greatest challenge: How does one account for the evolution of life from non-living material? He states, “Let me be clear. I am not saying the origin of life was simply an extremely improbable acci-

dent. I am saying the origin of life was deliberately, purposely arranged ... the origin of life is merely an additional planned feature culminating in intelligent life” (216).

Looking beyond the evidence of intelligent design in living things, Behe takes note of other research based on astronomy, physics, and chemistry. He writes, “The laws and constants of the universe are finely tuned to allow life.

So, too, are the physical and chemical properties of elements such as carbon and simple compounds such as water.

So, too, is earth’s location in the galaxy and solar system. So, too, are details of the earth’s composition and history” (214).

Behe accepts the claim that life has been on earth for billions of years.

But he gives no evidence for this supposition. Likewise he accepts the concept of all living creatures having a common descent. This is disappointing, because his findings concerning intelligent design fit equally well the Genesis account of created “kinds.” Similarity of structure and genomes is to be expected in living organisms created to live on the same earth under the same conditions.

The concerns expressed in the preceding paragraph notwithstanding, Behe’s The Edge of Evolution provides significant evidence of how natural knowledge of God is mediated to man

by God’s created works. Romans 1:20 comes to mind: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities— his eternal power and divine nature— have been clearly seen, being under-

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stood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”

Behe’s latest work is an important resource for pastors counseling young people who are almost certain to encounter Darwinism and its underlying materialism in high school and college biology classes. Moreover, he is successful in presenting the evidence for Intelligent Design in language that the non-scientist can comprehend.

Paul A. Zimmerman Traverse City, Michigan

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