Concordia Journal | Winter 2011

COncordia Journal

Winter 2011 volume 37 | number 1

a partnership issue “Signs of the Times” “A God Who Hides”: Four Views on God and Disaster Seeing the Other Side: Critical Modernist Poetics and Postcolonial Haiti The Global South Meets North America

COncordia Journal (ISSN 0145-7233)

publisher

Faculty

David Adams Charles Arand Andrew Bartelt Executive EDITOR David Berger William W. Schumacher Joel Biermann Dean of Theological Gerhard Bode Research and Publication Kent Burreson William Carr, Jr. EDITOR Anthony Cook Travis J. Scholl Managing Editor of Timothy Dost Thomas Egger Theological Publications Jeffrey Gibbs Dale A. Meyer President

EDITORial assistant Melanie Appelbaum assistants

Carol Geisler Joshua LaFeve Matthew Kobs

Bruce Hartung Erik Herrmann Jeffrey Kloha R. Reed Lessing David Lewis Richard Marrs David Maxwell Dale Meyer Glenn Nielsen Joel Okamoto Jeffrey Oschwald David Peter

Paul Raabe Victor Raj Paul Robinson Robert Rosin Timothy Saleska Leopoldo Sánchez M. David Schmitt Bruce Schuchard William Schumacher William Utech James Voelz Robert Weise

All correspondence should be sent to: CONCORDIA JOURNAL 801 Seminary Place St. Louis, Missouri 63105 314-505-7117 cj @csl.edu

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.

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 ATLA Religion Database/ATLAS and Christian Periodicals Index. Article and issue photocopies in 16mm microfilm, 35mm microfilm, and 105mm microfiche are available from National Archive Publishing (www.napubco.com).

Books submitted for review should be sent to the editor. Manuscripts submitted for publication should conform to a Chicago Manual of Style. Email submission (cj@csl.edu) as a Word attachment is preferred.

Editorial decisions about submissions include peer review. Manuscripts that display Greek or Hebrew text should utilize BibleWorks fonts (www.bibleworks.com/fonts.html). Copyright © 1994-2009 BibleWorks, LLC. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

The Concordia Journal (ISSN 0145-7233) is published quarterly (Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall). The annual subscription rate is $15 U.S.A., $20 for Canada and $25 for foreign countries, by Concordia Seminary, 801 Seminary Place, St. Louis, MO 63105-3199. 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.

On the cover: A boy flies a homemade kite over tents in a camp in Jacmel, Haiti. Photo credit: Jonathan Ernst/ Lutheran World Relief. © Copyright by Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri 2011 www.csl.edu | www.concordiatheology.org

COncordia J ournal CONTENTS EDITORIALs 5

Editor’s Note

7 “Signs of the Times” Dale A. Meyer 11 “A God Who Hides”: Four Views on God and Disaster

ARTICLES 23 Seeing the Other Side: Critical Modernist Poetics and Postcolonial Haiti

John Nunes 39 The Global South Meets North America: Confessional Lutheran Identity In Light of Changing Christian Demographics

Leopoldo A. Sánchez M.

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HOMILETICAL HELPS

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BOOK REVIEWS

Winter 2011 volume 37 | number 1

editoRIALS

COncordia Journal

Editor’s Note Almost exactly a year ago, on January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake rocked the island country of Haiti. I would say it shook it to its knees, but the country had already been flat on its back for decades, rocked by persistent and unshakeable poverty. People from around the globe immediately began efforts to support Haiti.

This included many Lutherans and the substantive, ongoing work of Lutheran denominations and organizations.

The Christian impulse to provide relief in a catastrophe is often immediate and visceral. But the theological work of thinking through what it means to live in the midst of such an event—and what it means for how we understand God’s presence in a suffering world—takes time. Matter of fact, such issues of suffering, theodicy, and relief have preoccupied some of the best (and worst) theologizing the church has done since its inception. This work is not done.

And so, this issue of Concordia Journal marks an ebenezer, in more ways than one.

Chronologically, it marks the one-year anniversary of the Haiti earthquake by focusing on the theology of suffering and how we witness to God in the wake of disaster and tragedy. This issue doesn’t pretend to have the final theological word, but it does intend to provide a substantive contribution to the Christian church’s catholic witness through the lens of the Lutheran theological tradition.

So rather than a “final word,” may I submit a common image: the boy flying the kite. It is an archetypal image of playful youth. Yet, we ask: what does the image of a kite signify? Aspiration? Desire? Illusion? Hope? Perhaps all these things and more. But what difference would it make to know that the particular image you see is of a boy flying a homemade kite in a relief camp in Haiti, one month after the 2010 earthquake?

Our eye is brought back down to earth—to tents, made of a similar material as kites, but staked to the ground. From whence does our help come?, we may then ask. And the theologizing has begun.

The particular image you see on the cover comes courtesy of Lutheran World Relief. Which is what makes for the two-fold ebenezer. To make this theological contribution, Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, has partnered with Lutheran World Relief (LWR) to make this issue of Concordia Journal an exercise in what might be called collaborative theology. This issue represents the fruits of two religious organizations—both of whom are acutely attuned to thinking theologically about the church and the world— thinking together about one of the pivotal ongoing events of suffering, relief, and reconstruction in the world today, in ways where the theological total is greater than the sum of their respective parts.

Some of those fruits have spilled beyond these pages to www.concordiatheology. org, www.lwr.org, and to our respective social media.

What do I mean by collaborative theology? Theology is rarely at its best when it is enclosed within the solipsism of an individual mind. Theology happens in mutual conversation and reflection, the give-and-take of honest speaking and open listening.

And this conversation is all the more urgent in a world where knowledge is becomConcordia Journal/Winter 2011

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ing increasingly specialized and public vocations are increasingly professionalized. The world seems to bend us toward ever narrowing pigeonholes. Thus, the urge to collaborate and think together about urgent issues must be earnest and substantive. And it must be open to seeking out the expertise of other articulate minds when we reach the limits of our own knowledge and experience.

The church finds just such a mutual conversation and reflection in these pages.

The editorial “roundtable” features four unique voices speaking to a common question of how Lutherans confess God’s response to calamity. John Nunes, president of LWR, provides an extended discussion of postcolonial poetics, and their deep theological implications, in light of Haiti. And Leo Sánchez spells out in detail what all this means for Lutheran identity in the midst of a Christian world that is moving “south,” and with great speed.

This collaboration makes this issue of Concordia Journal an historic landmark, and I do not use those two words lightly. It also represents one of the vital ways Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, is working collaboratively with the church to think theologically about the most pressing issues of church and world. In his regular editorial, President Dale Meyer speaks to the urgency of that task.

And the words don’t seem adequate enough to say that we at Concordia Seminary have learned much from our colleagues at Lutheran World Relief. We pray the gratitude is reciprocal. But more importantly, we pray that this experiment in collaborative theology will bear manifold fruit in your own thinking and action, and in the church’s witness within the world. Even if the action is as simple as making a kite. Lest we forget the form at its center, making it fly.

Travis J. Scholl Managing Editor of Theological Publications

What’s New on www.concordiatheology.org New downloadable Bible study on Matthew 18 Completely reorganized, user-friendly “Library” page Video content from the 2010 Day of Exegetical Reflection & Theological Symposium (also on iTunes U) Stay up to date at Facebook (ConcordiaTheology) & Twitter (csltheology)

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“Signs of the Times” Thank you to Lutheran World Relief for partnering with Concordia Seminary to produce this special issue of Concordia Journal. Exploring why partnerships are increasingly important for twenty-first century mission challenges is my present purpose.

I recently met a pastor whose small church worships in a strip mall, but they’re not renting that space. They own the mall! When asked about building a traditional sanctuary, the pastor’s answer is a firm “no.” The monies they collect from tenant rents and from their own offerings go to support various mission projects, projects which members generously support also with their time. To divert dollars to the construction of a traditional sanctuary that will sit empty much of the week would impede the mission. It makes sense. In a different setting another pastor told me that his small but flourishing minority congregation in the city can’t survive on Sunday morning offerings.

He’s a trusted and creative pastoral leader who has led his congregation to diversified sources of income that come from partnerships with other congregations and with governmental and non-governmental entities. These partnerships are making a noticeable difference in meeting human needs in their community, especially in affordable housing. Both of these congregations are vibrant and active, but both understand that they can’t move forward with their respective missions by relying only on Sunday morning offerings.

This scenario will not be true for every congregation. Sunday morning offerings can continue to sustain the expense of ministry for many congregations, but more and more we should expect to see Lutheran congregations and institutions finding their own innovative solutions to local mission challenges. One size won’t fit all. Our Lord’s (not our consultant’s) Great Commission is so commanding that we dare not disobey his order by offering the lame excuse that we can’t fund churches and institutions.

God’s promise that his church will endure does not automatically mean that the institution called The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod will survive and flourish through the twenty-first century. The doctrine, we pray, yes. “God’s Word and Luther’s teaching to all time shall endure,” as the masthead of Der Lutheraner used to say, but inherited patterns for church life are already changing and the changes will only accelerate. Lest you think this is simply advocacy for “contemporary” worship, the changes coming upon us are much greater than the narrow question of worship styles.

A growing Lutheran church in America will see more and more small congregations. Many of them will be ethnic. It is estimated that by 2050 one of every four Americans will be Hispanic while the white Anglo population of America will dip below 50 percent. Hispanic, African American, African immigrant, and Asian congregations must be part of a growing twenty-first century Missouri Synod, not some backwater colonies of our predominant but rapidly aging white Anglo church. We’ll have to get comfortable with churches and fellow baptized who speak Spanish, Sudanese, Mandarin, and many other languages that first-generation immigrants are speaking.

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In the process, their children and grandchildren will likely learn English just as did German-speaking Grandpa Meyer’s grandchildren. More and more of these ethnic churches will be found in larger metropolitan areas, cities we’ve pretty much forsaken as we continued to depend upon mid-twentieth century white birth rates, as we moved to the suburbs and assumed that a younger oriented demographic would continue to sustain growth, and as we continue to follow missional and economic models that reflect a no longer existent churched culture. These ethnic churches will be of small size, not unlike more and more of our shrinking rural congregations whose existence is threatened. The members of these small congregations want to grow but will be unable to sustain themselves unless they find new partnerships to thrive, like the two congregations in my opening. Historically, districts partnered with starting or struggling churches through mission subsidy, but our districts will continue to be hard pressed for money. Historically, the seminaries sent out graduates of residential programs to take up full-time work in their calling congregation, but that single model of formation can’t be sustained on small church finances. And historically, each generation has striven to pay its own way, but a special kind of trans-generational partnership will need to come into play: endowments. Through all this, Jesus’s Great Commission command is still laid upon us and Judgment Day will show us unfaithful should we disobey because we couldn’t be led beyond our traditional models of doing ministry.

The late Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, said, “All politics is local.” The same can be said for growing Lutheran churches. I have yet to find a silver bullet for growth. Yes, the Word of God grants growth but it’s also true that the saving Word is wielded by fallible people who often struggle to adjust to changed realities. I know from my own experience! Whether it’s the small churches I described above or the congregations that continue to make the traditional way of “doing church” work, the premium will be upon pastoral leadership. Twenty-first century pastoral leaders must be faithful to the Scriptures and Lutheran confessions, finding winsome ways to inculcate saving truths in the baptized through preaching, teaching, visitation, and through multimedia resources. Pastoral leaders will model servanthood to their communities as well as to their congregations, seeing themselves called to the local community and not only to a church isolated in the sea of people. Pastoral leaders will hold excellence high, helping make their ministry credible to those within and without. If opponents of true doctrine strive for excellence, shouldn’t we so much the more? And pastoral leaders will be responsive to the needs of their congregants and fellow citizens, be that through partnering with social service agencies, cooperative schools, encouraging care for God’s physical creation, or raising justice issues like poverty and homelessness to scriptural light and action. Can our future pastors learn to do ministry without the traditional model of a church building? Can they operate out of storefronts and mercy missions, in small groups that become a worshipping congregation, in partnerships with governmental and non-governmental agencies, including partnerships with more affluent suburban churches that care about Christ in the city? And what about aging? Not only is the LCMS an aging Anglo church, and that’s not going to change, but the world is getting old, including the growing Hispanic and Asian populations. That is already 8

government budgets, and the pressures upon congregations for word and care straining ministry for older people will be an overwhelming mission opportunity. The fields will be white-haired unto harvest. Will creative church leaders be responsive?

These are not depressing realities for our present witness but stimulating challenges. I intentionally raised the words “faithfulness,” “servanthood,” “excellence,” and “responsiveness” because these are the four core values of Concordia Seminary. But let’s be realistic. I assure you that we cannot graduate from our six Seminary programs that lead to pastoral ministry and from our re-energized deaconess program servant leaders who will be fully prepared to do all that will need to be done. Maybe we could in the past, but we can’t now. What Concordia Seminary is now striving to do is to instill in our pastoral and diaconal students those sensitivities, aptitudes, basic skills, and grounded theology that will enable them to go into called settings, get to know the people of the church, learn the community context (including governmental officials and realities), continue ongoing education, and become true on-site servant leaders.

We have a long way to go but Concordia Seminary is already well on the way.

Many people are surprised to learn that our student body reflects the diversity of America. That’s because of our Center for Hispanic Studies, our Ethnic Immigrant Institute of Theology, our Center for Cross-Cultural Ministry in Irvine, and our Deaf Institute of Theology. Our two residential programs still reflect the white Anglo culture of the past, but we’re working to diversify that residential complexion, something that will happen as The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod more and more reflects America the way it is today. Our graduates will have to lead the way to achieve that. When the students from our distance contextual programs come onto campus for intensive studies, they mix with residential students and worship in daily chapel services that are contextualized to reflect the whole church, purchased “for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9).

As our 500 or so residential and contextual/distance students become on-site servant leaders, they will need more skills than previous generations. The challenges of the church in this new time are more daunting than ever before. We’re not there yet, but again Concordia Seminary is well on the way. Already students in our reenergized Deaconess Studies Program are able to pursue either a Master of Arts in Deaconess Studies or a Master of Arts in Theology with Deaconess Certification. Next year—and this is a significant innovation to help meet the needs of the church—they will have the opportunity during their residency to pursue a concurrent Master of Social Work degree from St. Louis University. We already have pastoral students doing graduate work at Washington University, St. Louis University, and beginning their studies for advanced degrees under our own excellent faculty in Concordia’s Graduate School. They won’t graduate as finished products any more than any of us did, but more and more these coming graduates will have skills for ministry that previous generations did not. Our premium on partnerships is also evident as we vigorously explore ways to work with the schools of our Concordia University System (CUS) to identify the best candidates for pastoral and diaconal formation and begin already in college to set their sights on excellence in service to our Lord Jesus Christ. All of these partnerships will take on Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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extra vitality because our faculty is hard at work to reexamine and revise the formation curriculum to match the needs for faithful mission in the twenty-first century.

We need new models for pastoral service in addition to the traditional sole pastor and team ministry models. One successful innovation in meeting the needs for ministry and mission is the Specific Ministry Pastor program. Two conventions ago the synod adopted the SMP program to provide ordained service to places and situations that would not be served by graduates of the Seminary’s residential program. (By the way, my fellow professors tell me we have excellent SMP students and our admissions office can show that the SMP program is not diverting students from our residential programs.) This has been an excellent partnership for Concordia Seminary with districts and congregations. Another issue that needs action now is “worker priests” or “bi-vocational pastors.” Will small congregations accept the idea of calling the graduate of a residential program who will serve them but hold down a “secular” job during the week? Concordia Seminary has students who are willing to enter the field as “worker priests” or “bi-vocational pastors” but that can’t happen until small congregations say, “That’s the way we should go!” Such a model has potential for growing small churches and for planting mission starts.

Finally, just as some congregations will thrive because they’ve learned how to move the mission forward without total dependence upon Sunday morning offerings, so also Concordia Seminary can no longer marshal the resources to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century on our own. Our history has been that the church had needs for ministry and the Seminary would find the resources and staffing to help meet those needs. The “new normal” of our post-recession economy, including diminished remittances from congregations to district and then to synod and on to the seminaries, means that Concordia Seminary cannot resource itself to be all things to all people. We must find partnerships that enable us to pursue the Great Commission faithfully but also with economic efficiency and wise stewardship. We’re exploring how to do just that with our CUS partners and with our immediate neighbor, Fontbonne University.

And trans-generational partnerships—endowments—are more necessary than ever. I am encouraged. We can do this!

Rev. Eldon Winker was my predecessor at the dual parish of Venedy and New Memphis, Illinois. Before he left for his new call, he put this on the church sign: “Don’t be afraid of tomorrow; God is already there.” The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod can have a great future but it will look a world different and partnerships will be vital. Our Lord told the Pharisees, “You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky but you cannot interpret the signs of the times” (Mt 16:3). Can we adapt, trusting in this venture of faith that God’s blessings await us?

Dale A. Meyer President

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“A God Who Hides”: Four Views on God and Disaster The editorial team of Concordia Seminary and Lutheran World Relief formulated the following question to submit to a “roundtable” of four Lutheran leaders. Their individual responses provide a compelling spectrum of views on issues of suffering and disaster.

The question: Amid disasters such as the Haitian earthquake of January 2010, how do Lutherans confess tangibly God’s penultimate response to calamity? (“Penultimate” because God’s ultimate response is Christ, although you may take exception with such sequencing of responses.) What claims of faith might be made when we ascribe to God both creation and woe—in one breath constructive and the next destructive forces (Is 45:7, 15)?

Jehovah and Johari In 1969, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham created the Johari Window. The purpose of this cognitive psychological exercise is to facilitate interpersonal communication and relationships. The Window consists of four quadrants or “rooms.” When the exercise is performed, usually in a self-help or corporate setting, the subject picks five or six adjectives from a list of 56 that best describe his or her personality. A group of peers are asked to do the same. Those personality traits (e.g. dependable, intelligent, relaxed) seen by both the subject and his or her peers are placed in the “open” quadrant. The “hidden” quadrant becomes the receptacle for those not seen by the peers but only the subject. The quadrant labeled “blind spot” features the very opposite, namely the traits seen by the peers alone. The “unknown” quadrant is reserved for traits recognized by neither the person nor the peers.1 While it was never intended to serve as a theological tool for enhancing our understanding of Jehovah, the Johari Window may help us put tragic events and disasters, such as the one that recently occurred in a country that occupies the smaller portion of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, into a Lutheran theological perspective.

The 2010 Haiti earthquake was an especially devastating disaster. For one thing, the magnitude of the quake itself was 7.0 on the Richter scale and followed by terrorizing aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater. In addition, the epicenter of the quake was very close to the country’s major city of Port-au-Prince, and as a result three million people were affected by it. The toll included 230,000 dead, another 300,000 injured, and one million people rendered homeless. Finally, Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and it is ranked 149 of 182 countries on the Human Development Index.2 On all counts, this is one of the most vulnerable of nations and perhaps the last place on the face of God’s creation where one would expect a calamity of this type to occur. So, where is Jehovah in the midst of the Haitian disaster? And what claims of faith can we as Lutherans make in responding to it?

From an anthropocentric standpoint, terrible disasters like this one can be placed in the “open” quadrant of the Johari Window. Both Jehovah and we as Lutheran Christians recognize that sin is at the source of all forms of human suffering and misery. It is not only the curse that our forbears, Adam and Eve, brought upon themselves Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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and the rest of humankind. God tells them in Genesis 3:17, “Cursed be the ground because of you,” and according to Paul in Romans 8:19–22, earthquakes and the like reflect the “frustration” of the whole of creation as it “groans” in travail and awaits its divine liberation from the “bondage” to which it remains subject. From the theocentric perspective, however, the only place in which we can place the Haitian earthquake is Johari’s “hidden” quadrant. What there is of the creator and sovereign ruler of the universe in this disaster is fully seen only by Jehovah and not by us as human beings.

Two pieces of similarly bad news were brought to Jesus in Luke 13:1–5. One involved a sort of “bloody Sunday” that Pontius Pilate perpetrated, perhaps because the victims were Jews from Galilee suspected of harboring Zealots committed to revolution and the overthrow of all Roman authority. Adding insult to the injury was the fact that they were “slaughtered” while in the Temple offering up their sacrifices to God. The other disaster was a construction accident in Jerusalem at the aqueduct being built at the Pool of Siloam for the benevolent purpose of carrying water to the rest of the city.

One of the towers at the site collapsed and crushed 18 apparently innocent workers to death. “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all of the other Galileans because they suffered this way?” Jesus asked the bearers of this news. Or, “do you think” the victims of the Siloam disaster “were more guilty than all the others in Jerusalem?” He seems to have known that their theocentric inclination, like ours, was to put such events into Johari’s “open” quadrant and to see these events as a form of divine retribution upon persons whose idolatries (e.g. voodoo) were greater than their own. To all such thinking back then and now, therefore, Jesus said, “I tell you, no!”

Theodicy is no less deeply imbedded in our theological heritage as Lutherans.

According to Martin Luther, God “has not created the world as though he were a carpenter: building a house that he could walk away from when finished and let stand the way it is. On the contrary, he remains with and preserves everything he has made.”3 In “everything” God is also the “I am” which is the meaning of the name Jehovah.

Nothing occurs in this world apart from God. Human beings, with or without an awareness of God, may carry out their vocations at home, at work, or in the pubic square. But in Luther’s estimation, they, together with all of God’s other creatures, are in fact larvae Dei, masks or disguises behind which the creator is at work in the world.

From this same theocentric standpoint, God cannot be left “off the hook” when it comes to disorder or tragedy in the world. In the hopes explaining such events by transferring them from the “hidden” to Johari’s “open” quadrant, some of us might want to attribute the type of disaster that occurred in Haiti to the work of Satan. Martin Luther, for all of his awareness of the demonic and his personal struggles with the evil one, resisted this tempting option. For him, God was still God, the one and only sovereign ruler of the universe. Hence, impersonal forces at work in the world, including Satan, could also serve as larvae Dei, masks behind which God was also in some fashion at work. It’s also a truth that makes the relationship between God and Satan described in the book of Job a bit less curious or inexplicable.

Human explanations of God’s role in a Haitian or any other such disaster, however, remain inadequate. Luther stressed that to see God in all of his majesty is impossible. To do so as fallen human beings would put us in mortal peril. Instead, God 12

intentionally turns away from us, as he did with Moses on Mt. Sinai, and thus spares us of the consequences of a face-to-face encounter. The backside of God in full majesty is all we are allowed to see. Speculative attempts on our part to peer behind the mask of the God who hides (Deus absconditus), therefore, are the height of folly. Full knowledge of Jehovah is privy to Jehovah alone, and for this reason must remain consigned to Johari’s “hidden” quadrant. Like Isaiah (55:8), we can only confess that God’s “thoughts are not our thoughts” and that God’s “ways are not our ways.” Along with Luther, moreover, we tend to find it far better to stand in awe of God and leave the thoughts and ways that are past our “finding out” in the realm of mystery.

For Lutherans, however, Deus absconditus is also Deus revelatus in the person of God’s own Son. Jesus Christ reveals God’s desire, not to ignore the world of human suffering in which an earthquake injures and kills a half million people and leaves another million homeless, but to plunge into it with both feet. Paradoxically, Jesus became the “mask” through which God’s redemptive intentions were made plain for us to see. Instead of divine majesty, he was clothed in human flesh and blood. Luther, in his Lectures on Genesis, also spoke of God working through “contraries.” It was by being betrayed by his own brothers, sold into slavery, and cast into prison as one falsely accused that Joseph rose to power and preserved the land of Egypt as well as his family from starvation.4 Similarly, the place where God was revealed as the redeemer of all of humankind turned out to be the cross on which his Son was put to death.

The cross of Jesus Christ for Lutherans is not only the “open” quadrant in which the divine and the human perspectives coincide; it also defines our primary faith response to Haiti-type disasters. Our desire is to emulate Jesus’s plunge into the midst of our world of human suffering and misery. We put our shoulders to relief efforts on the part of humanitarian agencies to provide the victims as quickly as possible with the clean water, food, clothing, and medical supplies they so desperately need. Many of us feel called to make sacrifices of our time and specific skills in order to join forces with those engaged in healing the sick and rehabilitating the injured as well as those engaged in longer-term projects to restore the infrastructures of devastated communities. By engaging in the work of relief and restoration in Haiti, we are in fact functioning as Jehovah in disguise, “masks” behind which God in Jesus Christ is working toward the world’s redemption.

In Luke 13, Jesus proposed another faith response for us to consider. “Unless you repent,” he said to those who brought him the bad news of the twin disasters described in this text, “you will all likewise perish.” The searchlight we are tempted to use in order to find reason for divine judgment on the victims of tragic events is the one Jehovah may use to create a Johari-type quadrant in which some of our “blind spots” are brought to light. Are there ways in which we as citizens of the world’s wealthiest nation have ignored the poor Lazarus lying at our southern gate? Has our economic system contributed in some way to the deplorable poverty of Haiti that only served to compound the devastating effects of the earthquake? Is there another path toward justice for Haiti for which we may need to serve as advocates? Equally important is the idolatry ever lurking within the human soul that a disaster such as the one in Haiti can expose. The opportunity Jehovah creates for us is to “repent.” We learn again Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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that we cannot depend upon a “moral universe” any more than we can upon the works of our own hands. As Luther put it in his explanation to the First Commandment, it is God alone who commands our “fear, love, and trust.”

While Jehovah and Johari may appear to be strange bedfellows, the four-quadrant Window created by Luft and Ingham enables me as a Lutheran to make this modest theological contribution to the larger conversation concerning the Haitian disaster that occurred on a January day in 2010. There is much about the role of the creator and sovereign ruler of the universe that is known only to Jehovah and remains “hidden” from our understanding. At the same time, God’s own Son Jesus Christ provides the “open” quadrant that not only exposes fallen nature of a world that Jehovah has chosen to redeem, but clearly defines the cross-inspired, self-sacrificing faith response of all who would follow him today. In addition, Johari’s “blind-side” quadrant keeps us from ignoring the opportunity to “repent” that a Haiti-situation clearly sets forth for us. Is there anything to be said about emptiness in this version of the exercise of the “unknown” Window quadrant? In my view, it may well be testimony to the grace of a Jehovah who remains present and at work in the midst of all that occurs in this fractured creation and in each of our lives.

Jon Diefenthaler Jon Diefenthaler is president of the Southeastern District of The Lutheran Church— Missouri Synod.

Natural Disaster, Judgment, Repentance, and Cross The earthquake that struck Haiti for not quite 30 seconds in January 2010 brought great devastation and loss of life and wounded people mentally and physically, possibly for the rest of their lives. Such destruction and death make people ask God, “Why?” This disaster came upon an island ill-equipped to provide disaster response or to help their people in need. In previous decades, the island nation has suffered extreme poverty, corruption, and civil war. Why would the Lord allow, permit, afflict such a nation of suffering people with this disaster? (The suffering continues with the cholera epidemic that hit Haiti in the fall of 2010.)

There were, in fact, some Christians who suggested that the Lord was punishing the Haitians for their sins. Some suggested the Haitians were being punished for their history of voodoo and occult worship. In many quarters, the accusation of punishment was rejected, but then again the world rejects a God who punishes sin. Perhaps God simply could not prevent the earthquake. In fact, Christians in Haiti reported that this was the conclusion of voodoo practitioners. The prayers to the spirits and gods could not prevent the earthquake. Other people concluded that God simply is disinterested in the affairs of people or in their suffering. These are the answers people invent in the face of disaster. This is the problem of theodicy.

A disaster as God’s punishment is perhaps the most frequent conclusion. The natural human tendency is to conclude, “These people must be worse sinners than I am.” Yet Jesus answered that question when he said, “Or those eighteen on whom 14

in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders the tower than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Lk 13:4–5). When we hear of a disaster in another place, the Lord Jesus calls us to repent of our sin. We are not to conclude that those who suffer are worse sinners; rather, we see their suffering in disaster and recognize that we deserve such a fate or worse for our sins. We need to repent. When we see the devastation and suffering in Haiti, we should repent of our sins.

After President McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Dr. Francis Pieper wrote in Der Lutheraner:

God’s Word teaches us that times of misfortune should be times of repentance for the people. When God allows a time of misfortune to come upon a land, he speaks through it to the people on account of their sins.

God said by the prophet Jeremiah [6:19]: ‘Hear, O earth; behold, I am bringing disaster upon this people, the fruit of their devices, because they have not paid attention to my words.’ So there is no doubt that God, also through the misfortune that He is now allowing to come upon us because of our sins, speaks to us and moves us to repentance.1 The suffering that we see in others brings us to repent of our own sin.

By repentance, the Lord does not mean merely social gospel issues such as “forgive me for my wealth in the midst of such poverty,” or “forgive me for imperialism that holds one culture high and pushes another down.” Rather, the Lord would have us repent for not hearing the gospel of Christ and believing it.2 When a disaster or misfortune happens to another, we should repent of those sins that keep us from believing the gospel. When we ask the question, “Do I rightly honor the gospel?” we are forced to recognize that we deserve untold punishment for our sin. The forgiveness that we receive motivates us to help our neighbor in need. Repentance and forgiveness lead us to compassion for others.

After the earthquake, when we stood in Port-au-Prince, someone asked Pastor Thomas Bernard, a Haitian Lutheran pastor, why this earthquake and devastation came upon Haiti. Pastor Bernard said something like this: I do not know why this earthquake has come to Haiti. I do not know why so many people have died and why so many are suffering. Some have suggested that perhaps God was angry with the Haitians for their history of voodoo or for some other sin. Some have said that Haiti is receiving the wrath of God. I do not know why it happened, but I will tell you what I know. On the cross, Jesus Christ took upon himself and bore the full wrath of God in his body. There on the cross in Jesus, the wrath of God was answered for. Jesus took our punishment and has died for the sins of the entire world. Haiti did not suffer for their sins because Jesus did suffer for their sins. I look to the cross of Jesus to see my Savior.

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These are profound words in the midst of suffering: “I look to the cross of Jesus to see my Savior.” When the law has leveled you, look to the cross of Jesus and see your Savior. The Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, Article XI, 48–49, has tremendously comforting words in the midst of suffering:

Furthermore, this doctrine provides glorious consolation under the cross and amid temptations. In other words, God in his counsel, before the time of the world, determined and decreed that he would assist us in all distresses. He determined to grant patience, give consolation, nourish and encourage hope, and produce an outcome for us that would contribute to our salvation. Also, Paul teaches this in a very consoling way. He explains that God in his purpose has ordained before the time of the world by what crosses and sufferings he would conform every one of his elect to the image of his Son. His cross shall and must work together for the good for everyone, because they are called according to God’s purpose.

Therefore, Paul has concluded that it is certain and beyond doubt that neither “tribulation, or distress,” neither “death nor life,” or other such things “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”3 The Lord does not simply make all things good, but he chose which sufferings you would have in your life before the foundation of the world so that nothing would happen to you during your life to take you away from him. The Lord made sure nothing could take you out of his hand; that is how he works all things for good. In fact, he transforms you through these sufferings into the image of his crucified Son. On the cross Jesus has taken away your sin and punishment; he has borne the wrath of God. So what is a Christian to do when he sees another suffering? Repent of his sin.

Take comfort in the cross of Jesus and the gospel. Have compassion on your neighbor in body and soul, pointing to the cross of Jesus so others can see their Savior. This is what I reflect upon after seeing the devastation of Haiti.

Albert B. Collver III Albert B. Collver III is director of church relations–assistant to the president of The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. He wrote from Astana, Kazakhstan.

The Masks of God The God who reveals himself to us in Jesus Christ is the same God who forms light and creates darkness, makes weal and creates woe (Is 45:7); that is, he is a God who also hides himself (Is 45:15). The God who creates a tropical climate that draws us to vacation on sunnier shores is the same God who created the oceans where mighty storms are born. The same God who created the lovely planet that astronauts watch from afar has made it such that its plates sometimes shift and shake, causing homes and livelihoods to be rent asunder. The God who creates woe like the Haitian earthquake of January 2010 is hidden from our understanding and sight. This is the naked 16

God of wrath, judgment, and glory, who in his majesty is too much for us to comprehend. In fact, in the face of this God Luther cited the saying, “Things above us are no business of ours.”1 It is only through our faith in the God who comes down to us that we have a God of mercy.

There is no way to justify this mysterious and awesome God, who in some ways can become the devil for us as he causes wrack and ruin on the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. As if there was not enough misery, a hurricane slammed ashore there in the fall. We are not called upon to make apologies for this God, who needs no apologies, or to make him weak, as if he stands by and allows evil things to happen or is powerless to control the very forces of nature that he created. When we know that we need not justify God or make apologies for him, we live without asking the question, “Why?” in the face of natural tragedies of these proportions.

The same God who forms light and creates darkness comes down to us in the manger and on the cross so that we need not ascend to face his terrifying glory that is too much for us. Actually, in the manger and on the cross God is also hidden under the opposite forms of what we would expect. Masked there, he shows us what kind of God we have both in his hiddenness and revelation. This God knows what it is like to be homeless like those devastated by earthquake, storm, and fire. This God knows what it is like to be born of a single parent with a foster father in a world of refugee families on the move. This is a God who hides under the form of an innocent, tortured to death by the fearful policies of an insecure empire. Thus, we do not look above, but below, where God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ and the faith given to us in a merciful God draws us up to the God of mercy.

This is the same God that Luther describes in his commentary on the Magnificat: “Because God is most high with nothing above, God cannot look above or alongside, and since nothing is God’s equal, God must necessarily look within and below, and the farther you are below, the better God sees you.”2 Thus, the God of Jesus Christ, who is hidden and seems absent, sees us most dearly when we suffer and is present most nearly to those who experience disaster. To have faith and trust in the God we have in Jesus Christ, who descends to us, is to want to see and understand clearly the situation of neighbors near and far who have experienced disasters and to be present to them personally or representatively through our gifts to healing institutions like Lutheran World Relief. To see and understand in this way may also call for pre-disaster, not just post-disaster, responsiveness, given the disproportionate ways disasters affect the poor.

Factors such as deforestation, inadequate housing, or the building of homes in high risk areas only perpetuate these injustices.

In short, the revealed God of Jesus Christ prompts us not to ask why these things happen to good and innocent people. Rather, disasters present us with opportunities for love: to get down and dirty and be present in generosity with those with the expertise to do great things. As Luther writes in the Freedom of a Christian, “Christians do not live in themselves but in Christ, and in their neighbor—in Christ through faith and in the neighbor through love. Through faith one ascends above oneself into God. From God one descends through love again below oneself and yet always remains in God’s love.”3 When we look for the God hidden and revealed in the manger and the Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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cross, behold, our neighbors near and far come into sharpest view, and we serve them as we would Christ.

Philip D. W. Krey Philip D. W. Krey is president and Ministerium of New York professor of early church history at the Lutheran School of Theology at Philadelphia.

“My God, Why? . . .”

As I write this, Hurricane Tomas batters Port-au-Prince with heavy rains and the threat of mudslides. International aid agencies fear that even after the storm has blown itself away, surging rivers and muddy streets will increase the spread of cholera. All this unleashed on an estimated 1.3 million people who still live under plastic tarps amidst the rubble nearly one year after an earthquake that unleashed mayhem, misery, and mind-numbing anguish on one of Earth’s most impoverished nations.

If Job could ask, if King David could ask, if Habakkuk could ask, if Jesus himself could ask, then certainly the sufferers in Haiti and those who now minister to them will ask as well: Dear God, why?

It’s not a question that falls easily from the lips of the Lutheran faithful. After all, our hymnody has taught us: “What God ordains is always good.” As children of the heavenly Father, we know—or we ought to know, that “though he giveth or he taketh, God his children ne’er forsaketh . . .”

It’s true, of course. Still, in our own darkest moments, we understand instinctively the despair that welled up from David’s heart to push these words from his lips, “Why, O LORD, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Ps 10:1). Just when we need him the most, we know the comfort of his presence the least. Deus Absconditus. Indeed!

Three Pious Platitudes Huddled in rain and darkness as Tomas barrels down upon them, many of our Haitian brothers and sisters tonight likely say with the apostle Thomas, “Unless I see…, I will never believe” (Jn 20:25).

Does the apostle’s challenge shock us? Perhaps. But only when we forget the scandal, only when we forget the fear and darkness, only when we forget the blood and agony, only when we forget the day the earth shook and the Savior shrieked in agony, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In light of all that, Thomas’s question seems reasonable. It did not shock our Lord Jesus. Nor did it deter the Lord from engaging his tormented friend a few days later. In compassion, Jesus came—not to give explanations, but to give himself in the flesh to his friend and follower. Deus Manifestus!

Still, we sinners like to believe rational explanations would help us more. We thrash through the thickets of philosophy, hoping to catch a glimpse of what lies behind the masks God wears when we’re in pain.

We placate ourselves with common platitudes. “Everything happens for a reason,” we say as we pull up our intellectual socks and try to figure out what those 18

reasons might be this time. Only someone stupefied by the theology of glory could believe we will succeed. Senseless, appalling things happen all the time! The catastrophe that is Haiti is but one instance of this—our society’s perpetual mangling of Romans 8:28 notwithstanding.

A second common platitude places us under the law: Believe and receive! This is the error Job’s “comforters” famously made long ago and many false teachers still make today: If I were you, I would appeal to God; I would lay my cause before him. . . .

The lowly he sets on high, and those who mourn are lifted to safety. . . .

From six calamities he will rescue you; in seven no harm will touch you. . . .

We have examined this, and it is true.

So hear it and apply it to yourself. (Job 5:8ff) Admit it. You want to apply it to yourself. So do I. It makes so much sense to my self-righteous heart. How convenient it would be if we could draw a straight line of cause and effect from piety to prosperity and from disobedience to disaster. But our Lord himself put an end to that nonsense long ago: There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” (Lk 13:1–3) Finally, the theology of glory may dump us, bleeding, at the feet of a third common platitude, one that induces despair. “It is what it is,” we tell ourselves at last.

Allahu Akbar. “What will be, will be.” But faith cannot long survive the fetid air of fatalism.

God—Enemy or Father?

It’s here, just here, that the theology of the cross breaks into our darkness. The masks come off, and God reveals himself to the faith he, in grace, gives. With Luther, we see that “unbelief makes a judge and enemy out of a God and the Father,” but “faith makes a God and Father out of an enemy and judge.”1 Where is God when Haiti hurts? Where is God when we ourselves hurt? In Christ, on Calvary, arms outstretched to enfold the heavenly Father’s hurting children.

That cross, ordained by God, is always and eternally good. We know the truth—not through our ability to rationalize or philosophize or even theologize, but only through the faith he works in us by Word and Sacrament.

What Lutherans have not always recognized is the fact that faith will not allow us the luxury of amassing treats and trinkets for ourselves while we await, self-absorbed, Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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the glories to come. No, our relationship with our Father impels us to pray with the hymn writer:

Save us from weak resignation, To the evils we deplore. . .

Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, Serving thee whom we adore . . .

So we pray. And we throw ourselves headlong into battle against the evils we deplore. We give. We work. We advocate. We join forces with others in the communion of saints to alleviate the suffering of our Christian brothers and sisters and the suffering of those who do not yet bow in hope beneath the cross of our suffering Savior.

We commit to become part of Christ’s answer to the prayers his love evokes in us.

Jane L. Fryar Jane L. Fryar has written, taught, and spoken on matters of practical theology throughout her career. After serving several Lutheran institutions, she now freelances from her home in the greater St. Louis, MO area.

Endnotes Diefenthaler 1

Joseph Luft, Of Human Interaction (Palo Alto, CA: National Press, 1969).

2010 Haiti earthquake. Wikipedia.

3 Luther’s Works 22 (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1995), 26.

4 LW 7, 175–176.

2

Collver

1

Matthew C. Harrison, trans., At Home in the House of My Fathers, (Fort Wayne: Lutheran Legacy Press, 2009), 610.

Ibid. “Which sins are predominant among us? God desires above all one thing from all men, including Americans: They should hear the Gospel of Christ and believe it. This is why He allows the world to continue to exist. This is why He preserves government and the entire civil order among us and in other lands. If there were no Gospel to preach and to hear, there would be no more world and no United States. How do things stand in our country with respect to the preaching, reception, and honoring of the Gospel? The greater half of the residents of this country is evidently unchurched. They desire to know nothing of the Savior who died for them . . . Christ the crucified is no longer preached, and instead, morality and politics are proclaimed. Should God, in the face of all this general despising and profaning of the Gospel, not strike us with all sorts of public misfortune? And how are things among us? We have the Gospel. We preach not politics and human morality, but Jesus Christ the crucified as the sole basis of salvation. But do we rightly honor the Gospel? Do we diligently hear it? Do we diligently read it? Do we really love it? Are our hearts fixed on heaven through the Gospel? Are we dead to the sinful ways of this world? Do we make use of our earthly possessions above all to advance the Gospel? This and similar questions will lead us to the recognition that we too are guilty of the sin of this country, namely, the despising of the Gospel. We should repent of these sins.”

3 Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, ed. by Paul T. McCain (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2005), 609.

2

Krey

1 Cited from “Luther’s Bondage of the Will” in David C. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, c. 1986), 26.

2 Martin Luther, “The Magnificat Put into German and Explained,” in Luther’s Spirituality, Classics of Western Spirituality, eds. Philip D. Krey and Peter D. Krey (Mawah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2007), 95.

3 Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” in Luther’s Spirituality, 90.

Fryar

1Luther’s Works, vol. 9, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, Helmut T. Lehmann, vols. 1–30 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955–); vols. 31–55 (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957–86), 96–97.

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ARTICLEs

COncordia Journal

Seeing the Other Side Critical Modernist Poetics and Postcolonial Haiti John Nunes

Mark Taylor, chair of Columbia University’s department of religion, recently expressed his intellectual delight in tracing God’s active presence in unexpected places.1 For theologians who delight in discerning divine things in apparently godforsaken places, few places propose a more prodigious feast than Haiti. The ten million citizens of this island-nation have been tormented by more than a century of backbreaking poverty and unstable governance. Ironically, more than any other nation in the western hemisphere, well-intended, foreign assistance has poured into Haiti: mission trips, charitable agencies, relief efforts, microfinance investors, prayer partners, humanitarian workers, child sponsorship programs, and international development organizations seem to have made only a minor dent in the improvement of livelihoods there.

To add injury to the insult of their poverty—about three quarters of the population already earning less than two dollars per day—Haiti was struck by a succession of natural disasters; first, a string of tropical storms—F, G, H, I (Faye, Gustav, Hanna and Ike)—then, the cataclysmic earthquake of 12 January 2010, where one in forty people lost their lives, and one in ten remains homeless. Cholera threatens in the disaster’s aftermath. Yet, as my colleagues at Lutheran World Relief working in Haiti have anecdotally observed, the people there are resolutely resilient; in spite of utter destitution, they are spiritually confident, vibrantly faithful and hopeful.

How are we to think about Haiti? We believe that there are no unsupervised processes, no overlooked pain, in the universe. We teach that even amid suffering God is up to something good (Rom 8:28); Jesus’s instrument of shame for Christians is the preeminent sign of redemption, to be sure. Friends of the cross, as Martin Luther puts it, discern the works of God in suffering such that they know that “God can be found only in suffering and the cross.”2 Conversely, enemies of the cross (Phil 3:18) prefer raw power to inglorious weakness. In Christ, there is a narrative of the hidden blessings of suffering. Frequently, this narrative was emplotted in the African American civil rights movement in the United States.3 In apical fashion Martin Luther King charged those gathered to hear his “I Have a Dream” speech on 28 August 1963: “You have

John Nunes joined Lutheran World Relief (LWR) as president and CEO in 2007. Prior to joining LWR, he was a professor of theology at Concordia University, Chicago. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

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veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned been the suffering is redemptive.”4 We confess our faith in a God whose hidden graciousness always exceeds the limits of the most astute mind to comprehend or perceive. In Luther’s lectures on the eighth chapter of Romans, he evaluates the philosophical preoccupation on questions of the “nature of things” and the problem of evil. He seems to advocate, instead, a teleological view, an eschatological prism for interpreting events. With his characteristic exuberance, Luther labels a person who focuses only on the present condition of things as “empty headed,” since the creation of God is being “skillfully prepared for the future glory.” It “is gazed upon by stupid people who look only at its mechanics but never see its final goal.”5

All Posts Are Not Created Equal So I, a “stupid person” who sees now only in part, nonetheless intend to use my limited knowledge and my set of experiences serving an inter-Lutheran, international relief and development organization to offer one way to think about Haiti. In this essay, I am positing that since colonialism, which is, in part, a contributor to the desperate conditions of Haiti, arose during the historic period of modernism, a discussion of how to interpret theologically the suffering of Haiti or other postcolonial communities occurs best within a critical modernist rather than postmodernist framework. Many theologians who work with a postcolonial focus opt almost automatically for a so-called postmodern theoretical framework. While easy associations of these two posts seem inferentially reasonable, an ipso facto coupling of postcolonialism with postmodernism misses the reality that all posts are not created equal; postcolonialism and postmodernism derive from an environment that is not coincident in time, geographic location or referential scope. Further, postmodernism’s incredulity toward metanarratives represents potentially a disavowal of certain historical and present realities. Although those realities may have wounded by providing the ideological fodder for colonialism, it is within this wound that healing is found for what ails postcolonial communities economically, socially and spiritually. Credulity toward certain metanarratives, as they are critiqued and scrutinized, as they add to the default hermeneutic of suspicion a hermeneutic of belief, might be just what is needed most.

I define colonialism as a nationalistic ideology with a purportedly civilizing mission, often reinforced by a religious framework, legitimating the total or partial invasion and suzerainty of another’s land and people—extending beyond geography to their relationships, soul, intellect and imagination—accruing usually to the occupier an economic and/or military advantage.

I define postcolonialism as a critical and self-critical intervention of colonialism’s invasionary proposals and practices to the extent that colonialist structures are destabilized and transformed and an alternate identity reclaimed, asserted and recognized.

Postcolonial theology—like other adjectival expressions of theology, e.g., urban theology, liturgical theology, confessional theology—is the Word of God being interpreted, prioritized, and thematized within, focusing upon, and paying attention to a

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context; in the case of postcolonial theology, the pervading construct is attenparticular tiveness to the impact of colonialism on the relationships (koinonia), faith (fides qua creditur), doctrinal statements (fides quae creditur) and intellectual imagination (including liturgy and the arts) of persons living in postcolonial settings such as Haiti. Ministry cannot happen effectively without attention to context. Theologians who claim to operate based only on the Bible without presuppositions or the influence of those “impure,” contextual variables, history or human consciousness are less than honest. Imagining a theological system unimpacted by the created order is difficult—if not undesirable.

For Lutherans, a confessional frame of reference provides the primary priorities of a trinitarian God known christocentrically in Jesus, whose life accomplishes the redemption of an otherwise catastrophically broken creation. The doctrine of justification is a prime Lutheran precept communicated by the Holy Spirit through the twin lenses of law and gospel. We believe, teach and confess that the Scriptures uphold these pillars in a stereophonic manner, both containing and communicating threat and promise through word and sacraments. Yet, even these clear teachings do not happen docetically, apart from human involvement. We are citizens of at least two realms.

Modernism Revisited By modernism, I am referring in a broad sense to a set of ideas: the European, intellectual movement which revolutionized the world’s understanding of power and property, according to the historian Jacques Barzun6 (b. 1907). With Barzun, I identify modernism’s beginnings as contemporaneous with Martin Luther’s Wittenberg Reformation of 1517, yet with antecedent roots in the Renaissance period. It sparked an awareness of humanistic self-consciousness related to the study of philosophy and theology, arts and sciences, prompted in large part by the unearthing of ancient Greek and Roman sources. But there is something of the modernity project that is unfinished, a gap which postmodernist thought attempts to bridge, but, in my estimation, falls short in addressing because of its depreciation of the value of objective truth. Thus, postmodernism counterproductively truncates some aspects of the postcolonial conversation. Postmodernism is further debilitated by its very semantic popularity. Postmodern, the neologism, is a catch-all buzzword, a shibboleth deteriorating into an all too convenient cop-out category for everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else.

Brazilian-born systematic theologian Vítor Westhelle (b. 1952), who teaches at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, has contended compellingly and frequently in lectures that a key to understanding the inchoate character of modernism has to do not with turning toward an ambiguous postmodernism, but rather in going to modernity and acknowledging that modernity always has its opposite inside of it.

Michael W. Jennings suggests in support of this view: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”7 I will call this critical modernism. For the sake of this argument I reduce and simplify postmodernism to that strain of thinking which corresponds with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s (1924–1998) classic definition of postmodernism as an incredulity toward metanarratives, for which he substitutes petites recits.8 Critical modernism, Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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while recognizing the potential totalizing influence of theological metanarratives, prefers not to reject them outright. Among some extreme postmodernists, all narratives derived from white, male, and European sources are regarded as suspect and contributory to an assortment of global problems. In the Lutheran tradition this might suggest an outright dismissal of sixteenth century confessional writings and the “cultural baggage” of a European theological heritage. A critical modernist postcolonial approach addresses the trauma of colonialism by engaging these sources critically. While diagnosing tendencies toward an overreaching, overconfident, monoculturalist way of thinking, it begins with the very theological categories, sometimes employed as tools of oppression, to reverse and redefine colonialializing patterns.

Shaking of the Foundations It should be conceded, however, that critical modernity and postmodernity— especially as used by religiously-minded philosophers—do share in common some key characteristics. As Merold Westphal from Fordham University describes in the preface of Modernity and Its Discontents: “Critical modernism and postmodernism agree that all forms of foundationalism have failed be they rationalist, empiricist, phenomenological, positivist.”9 He continues with an estimation of what critical modernism can import from that confederation of ideas ascribed as postmodernism: Critical modernism retains the modernistic commitment to rationality, critique, and evidence, but listens to and learns from its postmodern other about mediation, the fallibility of reason, the nefarious political uses to which reason is often put, and the pathology of the modern. Critical modernism rejects triumphalistic modernist tendencies toward totally apodictic truth and is critical of postmodernism…10 Applying literary theory to a theatrical event with respect to the movement of plot and narrative, Travis Scholl (b. 1974) offers a challenging observation about the reversal of perception and what constitutes a petit recit. Again, the notion of the opposite/inside is in effect. Scholl posits that some narratives in a supposedly postmodern context “most often presumed to function as metanarrative, can be inverted, taking the form of smaller narratives within other systems of meaning.”11 In what sense does Scholl’s fine-pointed observation abridge and disestablish Lyotard’s somewhat overly handy definition of postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives. Scholl cites a particular transgressive juxtaposition of pop culture and the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus, where the putatively dominant story of Christmas—involving the nativity of Jesus—becomes a subset, a diminutive coefficient of a larger Broadway presentation.

Do these inversions nullify ironically by their untrace-ability and particular emplotment what’s micro- and what’s macro- in this “spectacle,” thus displacing and deferring Lyotard’s definition? As Scholl puts it: “each display will open itself to its own potential transgression into irony, where discourse becomes spectacle, where the spectacle is in the eye of the beholder, and where one person’s metanarrative is, for another, just a fat

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man in a red suit.”12 I believe Scholl has identified an ironic crack in the flux of postmodernism, a fissure which is better interpreted by critical modernist poetics, of the sort that Benjamin propounds in his estimation of Frech poet and critic Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821–1867): “What speaks to us in his poetry is not the reprehensible confusion of [moral] judgment but the permissible reversal of perception.”13 Critical modernist thinkers recognize a shaking of the foundations of foundationalism, a disruption and subversion of the magnitude of their authorial claims, but not a wholesale disavowal of their historical reality. As Rei Terada notes in her appraisal of Derek Walcott’s book-length poem, “Another Life, “it implies that the best art recognizes its vulnerability while not completely surrendering to flux.”14 The emphatic key of critical modernism is located in this “not completely surrendering to the flux” (emphasis mine)—thus avoiding what I would identify as postmodernity’s fatal tautology, it’s interior, intellectual hypocrisy, that of arriving entirely at an unending flux of meanings by deconstructing (as contrasted with critiquing) modernity with modernity’s very tools.15 A Revolutionary Impulse I begin with the recognition of change, flux and revolution that must be included in any consideration of the postcolonial experience in its many intellectual and varied political expressions. Revolution was the heroic trauma that led to the origin of Haiti.

In some ways, this arises from the colonialist’s lack of recognition of the postcolonialist’s full personhood. The French Protestant, former University of Chicago philosopher, Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), reflects: “The negative experience of disregard then takes on the specific forms of feelings of exclusion, alienation, oppression, and indignation that have given social struggles the form of war, whether one of revolution, liberation, or decolonialization.”16 Such struggle is viewed as elemental toward the betterment of the social and economic conditions in postcolonial situations and is often achieved through the process of raising critical consciousness17 (Portuguese, conscientização). Liberation theologians, operating within contexts often identified as postcolonial, adapt frequently consciousness-raising frameworks to challenge hegemonic systems of status quo oppression.18 There is an ideological connection here to Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) who coined the concept (French, conscienciser) in his 1952 book, Black Skins, White Masks.19 A postcolonial theorist who raises our consciousness in this regard, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (b. 1938), offers this definition of a thought-leader: “An intellectual is a worker in ideas with words as the primary means of production.”20 Such a meditative vocation, as it would follow the roadmap of the Lutheran Confession, would carry a prophetic dimension as word-workers, inspired by the Holy Spirit, producing and promulgating ideas that proclaim Jesus Christ as he is cradled in the Scriptures. These ideas are more than conceptual, but since they are divinely impelled in actuality, they serve to “gather the hopes and dreams of all,” uniting them with the silent and sounded prayers of the faithful.

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A Postcolonial Poet as a Critical Modernist Model So, let us turn to one word-worker from a postcolonial community to hear a phenomenological witness for what might inform this postcolonial, critical modernist approach to theology: Derek Walcott (b. 1930), the 1992 St. Lucian, Nobel Prize recipient in Literature whose works rely substantially on religious themes, liturgical metaphors, and as he characterizes it, an on-going quarrel with God.21 An early poem of Walcott’s titled “A Far Cry from Africa” considers the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, occurring roughly from 1952 to 1962. The Kikuyu actors organized a violent response to issues of colonial land rights, resisting the British settlers’ occupation of the most desirable agricultural territories. Along with other indigenous Africans, they were confined forcibly to smaller, less productive, tracts of land. Due to this revolt, Walcott sees, in his poet’s eye, “bloodstreams of the Veldt” as “[c]orpses are scattered through a paradise.”22 More than forty years after this rebellion, the battle over the historical statistics of this brutishness has rendered significant academic controversy. Harvard historian Christine Elkins’s (b. 1969) 2006 Pulitzer Prize winning work, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya,23 unleashed an academic maelstrom over its research methodology and style of reportage.24 This postcolonial rebellion, transgressing violently the violence established by British colonialism, left Derek Walcott, himself an ethnic and cultural hybrid, torn—as he put it “divided to the vein.” Walcott’s response typifies that of a critical modernist, with truth spoken in paradox, rendering here a scent familiar to Lutherans, that is, the sort of dialecticism found, for example, in the dogmatic formulae of saint/sinner, sacramental presence, the two natures in Christ, and applications of law/gospel. We read Walcott, here thinking aloud, deliberatively resisting the easy self-righteous paths that either blindly endorse the imperious British authorial structure or uncritically authorize the murderous revolutionaries. His is no naïve utopianism, no revolutionary vision that imagines an erasure or replacement of all precedents. With regard to those standard works of the modern era, Walcott does not disparage these canonical, classic, European artists. In fact, it is against these that he sums up and measures his own six decades of literary contribution; for example, Karl Kirchwey tracks the references in Walcott’s latest collection, White Egrets (2010) to painters Mantegna, Crivelli, Rembrandt, and poets Wyatt,25 Surrey,26 and Clare.27

Those names, in fact, are a reminder that Walcott has always challenged, by complicating, the attempt to dismiss Eurocentric culture and traditional poetic form as just the claptrap and legacy of imperialism.28 This is critical modernist postcolonialism at a strategic apex: dismissing the totalizing mystique of the grand narrative by employing, even affirming, resources of the master; then placing, somewhat mischievously, colonial narratives directly alongside postcolonial colloquial voices in an art-form that dethrones, if not the History29 of empires, then at a minimum questions blind allegiances to their present and future hegemony.

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By reading poets like Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) “from the other side,” with a critical eye, Walcott learned to emulate the art of high style as well as the art of triangulating and exposing sharp edges where established poets are unobservant.30 Take, for instance, Eliot’s iconic lines:

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.31 Most often, these lines are cited and celebrated as a heuristic for the possibilities that can be “discovered” through exploration. The metaphor suggests that through life’s peregrinations there will be a rediscovery of identity, some revelatory, recognitive collusion of place and person. But the analogy fails in the ears of the postcolonial subject.

What connotes a rediscovery of identity for the explorer can mean a loss of identity for those whose land and people are the acted upon. Westhelle re-reads Eliot to suggest that the reason for the need to return to first places is prompted by a crisis of responsibility and accountability in the undertaking of exploration, a faulty stewardship of one’s neighbors and their home. “Ultimately every one is being asked in our fleeing journeys the question of God to Adam: ‘Where are you?’”32 This question refers to spiritual, existential and geographic space.

Walcott’s strategic cooptation of traditional resources extends even to the level of individual words. For example, I searched for uses of Walcott’s adjectival form, “dragonish,” in the line from his Six Fictions, “grenade-eyed and dragonish; neither science nor fiction.”33 In poetic literature, the use of “dragonish” is exceedingly rare, though Walcott himself uses it multiple times and already early in his career.34 “Dragonish,” we do find employed, however, by William Shakespeare (1546–1616): Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish; A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, A tower’d citadel, a pendent rock, A forked mountain, a blue promontory With trees upon’t.35 While Walcott’s postcolonial poetic strategy is unhesitant in using European sources, these are not adapted uncritically. Walcott would go so far as to say that, “History has no reality until it turns to fiction, until it invents and describes conversation, locale, character and its contradictions.”36 Here again, the reality, the truth we might say, of history is located in its opposite: fiction. All the while, what’s re-inscribed is a claim for the postcolonialist’s placement within the tradition. In Walcott’s irruptive entreaty: “Whatever happened before me is mine, the guilt is mine, the grandeur and horror were mine. Roman, Greek, African, all mine, veined in me.”37 This pattern repeats typically over the span of Walcott’s works. “Repudiating a separatist aesthetic of affliction, Walcott turns the wound into a resonant site of interethnic connection within Omeros, vivifying the black Caribbean inheritance of colonial injury at the same time Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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deconstructing the uniqueness of suffering.”38 Again, the wound and healing, opposites, are collocated. Walcott’s wounded logos, through his poetic turn, finds its cure—“as the Word turned toward poetry in its grief.”39 Critical modernism, then, is not only more compatible with a missiological strategy seeking to extend to a new cultural context a confession of faith that developed within an outside context, it also provides a framework that takes seriously how the legacy of a colonialist heritage may inform positively, even as it is informed by, the legacy of affliction, as in “the anguish of Haiti.”40

A Missiological Caution Part of the historic travesty of the colonial perspective was its dehumanization of the colonialized subject, the subjected subaltern. In a postcolonial literary exploration of European colonial explorers, Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe (b. 1930), author of what is widely acclaimed to be the most read piece of African literature, Things Fall Apart, considers the character and literary contribution of Joseph Conrad (1857–1924).41 Conrad is the traveler and author of the controversial European novella about Africa, Heart of Darkness, which has been both widely lauded and derided.

For example, Walcott refers to Joseph Conrad as “that bastard” for his depiction of the “emptiness” of places other than his own—those subaltern communities—like St. Lucia. Walcott concludes tauntingly in his 2010 collection, White Egrets: “This verse / is part of the emptiness, as is the valley of Santa Cruz, / a genuine benediction as his is a genuine curse.”42 Achebe’s remarks center around whether Conrad’s deprecatory view of the humanity of the indigenous inhabitants of the African continent nullify whatever literary contribution critics ascribe to him. Achebe’s argument has been delivered on several occasions,43 but I will consider his keynote address, titled “Africa’s Tarnished Name,”44 at the 1998 meeting of the African Literature Association. These remarks reflect Achebe’s portrayal of the British writer’s mis-recognitive portraits of Africa and its people with, what Achebe considers, offensive stereotypes. Conrad, in Achebe’s controversial estimation, valorizes and heroicizes himself as he considers his journey up the Congo River: We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance.45 “And then Conrad delivers his famous coup de grace,” Achebe calls it ironically—what he means is more aligned literally with a coup de gaffe.46 As Conrad describes the humanity of these people living in what he considers primitivity and simplicity, especially as contrasted with Europe’s putative civility and sophistication, Achebe categorizes Conrad’s response to their humanity as, “the most sophisticated ambivalence of double negatives.” Conrad remarks, “No they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.”47 The doctrine of imago Dei is critical to non-whites and others engaged in postcolonial theology in part because of the lingering echoes they sense of this notion. Cornel West (b.1953), the philosopher, 30

theologian and African American studies’ scholar, posits with wry combativeness, “The notion that black people are human beings is a relatively new discovery in the modern West.”48 Conrad’s exclamatory “suspicion of their not being inhuman” would seem to bear out West’s historical observation of the possible non-humanity of these others.

Christian organizations that engage the postcolonial, developing world should embrace a humanizing, Judeo-Christian anthropology.

Cornel West’s historical observation is borne out on the islands of the West Indies, which served New World conquerors as outposts of the empire, refueling stations on their way westward. As the empire declined, the imperial investment commensurately decreased. At first, though, these paradisiacal islands were “the front porch of the New World, latent with all the mythical potentials of Columbus, Crusoe, and a new Eden.”49 For example, Haiti was, at its peak, the most productive and prosperous colonial outpost. Now, among the poorest postcolonial places on the planet, it bears the scar of a depersonalizing European colonialism that took people as a means to prosperity.

Critical Modernism is Not Naïve Regarding Human Brokenness How, then, are we best to depict these “native” communities prior to European intervention or those chattel slaves deployed in the cause of colonialism? How are we to regard Haiti, initially a French colony, nowadays being colonized by humanitarianism, a flood of visitation from well-intended, yet dependency-creating outsiders? A mystique sometimes plaguing postcolonial thought consists of a myth of primitive innocence. Namely, a sentimentalism regarding the prior condition in which peoples untouched by outsiders lived; it is reported often as an idyllic harmony between people and people and nature. While a postcolonial critical modernist theological framework would have many points of theological digression from confessional Lutheran theology, an appreciation of the depths of human brokenness would not be incompatible with the doctrine of original sin. As Walcott suggests, “All colonies inherit their empire’s sin.”50 The same Ricoeur whom I cite earlier in this essay regarding revolutionary action as a consequence of communities being neglected, on the one hand, does not, on the other hand, downplay a universal ethical responsibility for evil.

Evil is part of the interhuman relationship, like language, tools, institutions; it is transmitted; it is tradition, and not only something that happens. There is thus an anteriority of evil to itself, as if evil were that which always precedes itself, that which each man finds and continues while beginning it, but beginning it in his turn. That is why, in the Garden of Eden, the serpent is already there; he is the other side of that which begins.51 The critical modernism I propose does not subscribe to the Enlightenment’s notions of the individual as an ethical tabula rasa awaiting social construction. Baudelaire was strikingly aware of the collapse of an unsubstantiated optimism in the human experience: “In all the actions and desires of a purely natural man, you will find nothing that Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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52 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), considered a paragon of modern is not ghastly.” ism, fueled a positive anthropology in his On the Social Contract, which was built upon the stirring observation, “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Baudelaire, the modernist, utterly rejects the “Rousseauian belief that man is by nature good.”53 Devastating ruptures, irresoluble aporias, and unconquerable lapses characterize life in Baudelaire’s view, a view entirely compatible with postcolonial theory.

In his lecture delivered on the occasion of being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Walcott supplies an image of the fragmented human experience, shattered, in need of recreation and redemption: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”54 Is there justice for these fragmented colonies?

The Opportunity for Justice Lutherans correlate the concept of justice tightly to soteriology. Justice, for Lutherans, tends to relate directly to God’s justifying work on the cross of Jesus Christ, which entirely makes satisfactory amends for the injustice of human sinfulness even as it appeases the justifiable wrath of God toward errant humans. Yet, this biblically orthodox and confessionally consistent beginning point provokes at least two questions: (1) does this priority of a correlative link between soteriology and christology—in other words, this emphasis on Jesus’s person and work in salvific categories—miss other aspects of what God has done for us and for our salvation beyond saving humanity from eternal hell? If there are other domains of spirituality influenced by God’s actions for us in Jesus Christ that call for our attention, what might those be? (2) A second consideration and related inquiry might be: does the Lutheran instinct to attend foremost to the verticality of justice bypass questions of theological horizontality, of the societal implications and ethical dimensions of justice? Both considerations fall within the concern of the response to the Haitian earthquake of 12 January 2010. Witness these who were barely surviving, subsisting in a desperate post-disaster mode, singing heartedly songs of praise to God in spite of their infernal suffering. Among them, what God has done for us in Christ offers some praiseworthy benefit in spite of a desperate experience, something that precedes the human transition to eternity.

Martin Luther’s comment about Lutheran pastors being fine preachers from Advent to Easter but being “very poor Pentecost preachers” relates to this concern. In spite of this predilection among confessional Lutherans in their preaching and practice to understand justice within the domain of God’s wrath and God’s justifying act in Jesus, there are biblical and historical instances where God’s justice is concretely and prophetically encountered as a work of sanctification through which people respect each other, engage in mutual recognition and establish relationships that promote every individual’s opportunity to pursue the common good. In a brief article titled “Justice and Poverty” in the new The Lutheran Study Bible I observe that the Old Testament Scriptures contain “more legal and prophetic material about the poor and powerless than any other social problem.” This not only pertains to the Hebrew texts, but extends

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than “half of Jesus’ parables (17 of 29 in the Synoptic Gospels)”55 which conto more cern money and issues of economic justice. Even the trenchantly conservative Benedict XVI reiterates the role of enacting justice: “Every Christian is called to practice this charity, in a manner corresponding to his vocation and according to the degree of influence he wields in the polis.”56 Rather than a practice of charity, which invests in the building-up of local resources, increasing the capacity of local communities and their sustainable development, colonialism, on the other hand, creates crippling patterns. It imposes a plot and ascribes a narrative that displaces the freedom of the subaltern to live autonomously forward. It occludes the opportunities for the subalterns to pursue their own, self-defining, self-sustaining, economic livelihoods because, in power, it puts first its own agenda. Would that there were “a life without plot and a day without narrative,” Walcott muses poetically. In reality, the identity of the postcolonial subject is emplotted and narrated externally through colonializing actors and conquerors. In what sense might the United States’ predilection for short-term mission trips actually represent a self-justifying, dependency-building neo-colonialism? In what sense might those motivated rightly by what God has done to justify them in Jesus attempt to live out their sanctification misguidedly in a manner that actually perpetuates patterns of injustice?

Intent is not my issue, the process and outcome is. We in the relatively materially prosperous United States of America have hard questions to ask ourselves.

Critical Modernity as a Process of Critique and Renewal The human process of knowledge-making must be self-critical, or it runs the risk of becoming exclusively self-referential—like an epistemological version of the “good ol’ boys’ club.” (The male reference here is intentional.) While theological truth is unchanging, human applications of God’s Word to the world do, of course, change.

Likewise, Christian congregations operating without an inchoate and penultimate corporate self-understanding, without a tentative introspection that is informed and fulfilled by God’s refreshing Word, can become encapsulated in a non-mediative ecclesial closet. Critical modernity embraces the role of the intellectual leader who pushes prophetically the envelope of interpretation. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o proposes that an intellectual is an “interpreter, mediating between society and the specific processes in nature, society and thought.”57 The emphasis here is on self-reflective mediation, the same hermeneutical force at work in critical modernity.

For example, how does the postcolonial theologian interpret critically those notable hallmarks of modernity: freedom and reason? These constitute the ideological architecture of the public arena in which intellectuals pursue their mediation. Therefore, those uses of liberty or rationality that never make it out of a self-referential bubble, that do not intentionally engage the other, can give the illusion of “having arrived,” producing, even involuntarily, an absolutism, an impenitential self-absolution, a selfabsorbed incurvature, a self-contained purism that diminishes, corrupts, or even extinguishes ironically these very hallmarks of modernism; either freedom is afforded to some and not others (i.e., slavery) and/or capable voices of reason are uninvited from Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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fora of participation in reasoned discourse (i.e., discrimination).58 Both of these negative results are components and consequences of the colonial mindset, of an absolutization and totalization of a single cultural reality. Such monocultural myopia is a by-product of an original sin that fails to recognize (Anerkennung) others as transcendent works of God, resulting in their unjust, intellectual preclusion from both processes of liberty and rationality. Orthodox, Lutheran definitions from the Formula of Concord are clear.

Even despite original sin, God recognizes us as God’s own work. “For God created not only the body and soul of Adam and Eve before the fall but also our body and soul after the fall, even though they are corrupt. God also still recognized ([an]erkennt)59 them as his own work, as it is written, Job 10:8 ‘Your hands fashioned and made me together all around.’”60 “Half the Story Has Never Been Told” Yet, even confessionally conservative theological systems have from time to time prejudicially proscribed some from freely participating in their reasoned discourse not based on the merit or content of what they say, but simply because of who they are.

Thus, critical modernism preserves both freedom and reason by decentering those actions and declarations that blur the line between (1) a firm confession of a dynamic faith and a cold, static notion of aprioristic, factual finality, and (2) a particular cultural option or opinion and a universal, uncontestable truth. As a corrective, critical modernism realizes that “half the story has never been told”61—not that there is anything incomplete in what God has worked in creation or in Christ for human salvation; not that biblical revelation is insufficient, but that we have not participated fully in our baptismal witness (martyria) if we have not sought with integrity to tell with (not for) other communities the untold half of God’s story in a way that complements and completes their historical narratives. God acts in history and not ours only. God has acted in ways that exceed the resolutions of human spirituality and the theological thinking accrued from our own earlier epochs. These need to be self-critically decentered. “Decentering is not the alternative to inwardness; it is its complement.”62 As the people of Christ participate in this critical modernist intervention, they are doing publicly what they confess ecclesially. John Caputo points out that even these radical acts must be undertaken with grace. Suspending deserved retribution, extending underserved forgiveness manifests what Luther understood catechetically as God’s reign; such forgiveness speeds the second petition’s pleading that the kingdom would come “unto us also.” Forgiveness constitutes “the decentering centerpiece of the poetics of the impossible.”63 Forgiveness in Christ, not a forgetful disparaging of metanarratives, constitutes the most radical historical and social intervention.

Might it be posited that such possibility for renewal pivots precisely on these radical acts of forgiveness? Rather than returning evil for evil, the forgiven ones return to evildoers and restore relationships. Rather than taking the easier path of either mere revenge or amnesiac erasure, they go further, they give more: they reconcile as totally “new creations” (1 Cor 5:17). Rather than running away to either new revolutions or new possibilities through exploration, they stay home to participate daily in that incom-

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prehensible plunge of forgiveness. They dare to share power with those they live, work, play and pray with, those whose homes are broken by sin, broken into by colonialism, or broken down by disaster after disaster. As Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) puts it: “Forgiveness is thus mad. It must plunge, but lucidly, into the night of the unintelligible.”64 Haiti is surviving a long night of unintelligible disaster. From the font of our own forgiveness, from our own threefold plunging into Jesus’s death and resurrection, we are called by the Holy Spirit to plunge ourselves into situations of suffering with development strategies that are compassionate and lucid, critical and self-critical, with a noble humility that matches the nobility of the humanity we recognize in the people of Haiti. Then, both the postcolonialist and former colonializer may discern divine presence in unlikely places.

Endnotes

1 Eric Banks, “The Provocations of Mark Taylor,” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 24 January 2010.

Taylor’s actual quotation is, “I always find religion most interesting where it is least expected.”

2 Martin Luther, “Heidelberg Disputation,” Luther’s Works (AE) 31 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1957), 53.

3 See my “The African American Experience and the Theology of the Cross” in The Theology of the Cross for the Twenty-First Century: Signposts for a Multicultural Witness, ed. Alberto L. Garcia and A. R. Victor Raj (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2002).

4 Martin Luther King, Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 219.

Martha C. Nussbaum in her contemporary analysis and application of the ancient Aristotelian virtue of compassion offers a cautionary theoretical counterpoint to an approach which, in the name of theologia crucis, adopts a theological version of that excusal “what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger.” “Suffering and deprivation are unusually not ennobling or educative; they more often brutalize or corrupt perception. In particular, they often produce adaptive responses that deny the importance of the suffering; this is especially likely to be so when the deprivation is connected to oppression and hierarchy, and taught as proper through religious and cultural practices.” From Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 309.

5 Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans: Glosses and Scholia, ed. Hilton C. Oswald (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972), 362.

6 Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

7 From Michael W. Jenning’s introduction of Walter Benjamin’s The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 24.

8 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir), trans. Goeff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1984). This theme is underscored throughout this volume.

9 James L. Marsh, John D. Caputo, Merold Westphal Modernity and Its Discontents (New York: Fordham University Press), xi.

10 Ibid.

11 Travis Scholl “Trangressive Irony at Radio City” in Sightings (December 19, 2007), http://divinity. uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2007/1220.shtml 12 Ibid.

13 Jennings: 28.

14 Rei Terada, Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2002), 129.

15 James L. Marsh, Post-Cartesian Meditations: Essays in Dialectical Phenomenology (New York: Fordham, 1988), 89.

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16 Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition. (Parcours de la Reconnaisance, 2004), trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 201.

17 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Pedagogía del oprimido, 1970), trans. Myra Berman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 2006).

18 Edward Cleary notes with clarity, and almost as an understatement, that the papal Enyclycial “Gaudium et Spes plunges right into the current world situation.” Edward L. Cleary, “A New Ideology: The Theology of Liberation” in Crisis and Change in the Church in Latin America Today (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1985).

The emerging principle that was then newly introduced to Roman Catholic pastoral practice both refracted from and reflected in Paulo Freire’s method in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Gustavo Gutiérrez’ A Theology of Liberation. It was two-fold (if I may reduce it to its simplest form): (1) “critical reflection on the activity of the church,” Cleary, A New Ideology. Followed by (2) a praxis—radical “doing”—flowing from the posing of tough, naïvete-reducing questions in the first step in this process of conscientization. Liberation theologians learned the text of the faith from European master theologians, and now were learning the strategic placement of that text within their own context by beginning with where the pueblo were living; or better said, with what level of personhood they were living. A significant shift had occurred, “they were not concerned with the nonbeliever, but with the nonperson.” (T. Howland Sanks, Salt, Leaven and Light: The Community Called Church. New York: Crossroad, 2002.) See also Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, Promulgated by his holiness, Pope Paul VI on December 7, 1965. Published at the Vatican’s website. http://www.vatican.va/ 19 Fanon should be familiar to all working in postcolonial environments. See also Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture.” [“Sur la culture nationale” 1961, Les damnés de la terre.] The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004).

20 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “The Interpreters: Writing, Language and Politics” in Multiculturalism and Hybridity in African Cultures edited by Hal Wylie and Bernth Linfors (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2000), 45.

21 “Poetry, in a way, is a quarrel with God, one which I imagine God understands,” says Derek Walcott in an interview in Conversations with Derek Walcott. Ed. by William Baer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 84.

22 Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa” in Collected Poems 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 17–18.

23 Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005).

24 See David Elstein, “Letter to the Editor: the End of the Mau Mau” in New York Review of Books 23 June 2005 in response to a review of Elkin’s work (cited above) by Neal Acherson, titled “The Breaking of the Mau Mau” in New York Review of Books 7 April 2005.

25 Often considered the poet who brought the sonnet form into English, Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–24 September 1542), the sixteenth-century English lyrical poet.

26 Sir Henry Howard, the aristocratic 3rd Earl of Surrey (1517–19 January 1547), a leader in the English Renaissance poetry.

27 Though his life began in humble, rural roots, John Clare (13 July 1793–20 May 1864) was an English poet, whose works were celebrated even as they celebrated rustic life.

28 Karl Kirchwey, “Derek Walcott: Man of Many Voices,” in New York Times Book Review, Sunday, 25 April 2010, 19.

29 Walcott will often use the upper-case for History in order to illustrate its dominion.

30 In the opinion of Kirchwey: “More than almost any other contemporary poet, Derek Walcott might seem to be fulfilling T. S. Eliot’s program for poetry. He has distinguished himself in all of what Eliot described as the “three voices of poetry”: the lyric, the narrative or epic, and the dramatic.” In New York Times Book Review, Sunday, 25 April 2010, 19.

31 Thomas Stearns Eliot, “Little Gidding” in Four Quartets (Orlando: Harcourt, 1971), 240.

32 Vítor Westhelle, After Heresy: Colonial Practices and Post-Colonial Theologies (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade, 2010), 150.

33 Derek Walcott, “Six Fictions” in Bounty (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).

34 “Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candledust, / Remain to file the lizard’s dragonish claws.” From early in his writing, 1962, In A Green Night, (Cape Poetry Paperbacks, 1969), 19.

35 Antony and Cleopatra Act IV. Sc. 1 36 Derek Walcott, “A Frowsty Fragrance” New York Review of Books.

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85.

37 William Baer, ed. Conversations with Derek Walcott, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 38

2001), 50.

Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

39 Derek Walcott, “Midsummer” in Collected Poems 1948–1984 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 510.

40 A phrase used by Walcott during the question and answer session at a New York Public Library lecture on 3 December 2010.

41 Born in what is now Ukraine to Polish parents, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was an immigrant to England who, curiously, did not speak English fluently until his twenties.

42 Derek Walcott, White Egrets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 78.

43 This original essay, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” is the published (and amended) version of the second Chancellor’s Lecture given by Chinua Achebe at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in February 1975. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness, An Authoritative Text, Background and Sources Criticism.

1961. 3rd ed., ed. Robert Kimbrough (London: W. W Norton and Co., 1988), 251–261.

44 Chinua Achebe, “Africa’s Tarnished Name” in Multiculturalism and Hybridity in African Literatures, ed.

Hal Wylie and Bernth Linfors (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2000), 13–24.

45 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 51.

46 a mistake 47 Conrad, 51.

48 Cornel West, Prophecy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), 47.

49 Robert Hamner, Derek Walcott (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 24.

50 Derek Walcott, Omeros (5.41.2) (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 248.

51 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 257–258.

52 Baudelaire is quoted here in Charles Taylor, Sources of Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 434.

53 Ibid.

54 Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory (The Nobel Lecture) (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992), 8–9.

55 The Lutheran Study Bible (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2010), 1486.

56 Pope Benedict XVI, Charity in Truth (Caritas in Veritate) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009). See my review in of this encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate: Through a Lutheran’s Eyes” in Concordia Journal 35 (Fall 2009): 350–355.

57 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “The Interpreters: Writing, Language and Politics” in Multiculturalism and Hybridity in African Cultures, ed. Hal Wylie and Bernth Linfors (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2000), 45.

58 It would not threaten—and I imagine could well revitalize—the LCMS confessional tradition if we could seek more occasions to invite voices from diverging traditions. For example, woman theologians from other Lutheran church traditions could be engaged to publish in distinguished theological journals like this one, so that we could dialogue on the grounds of the persuasiveness of theological content. Dismissively excusing ourselves from conversations because of someone’s gender is a form of ad hominem judgment which ignores the substance of argument and, in my view, might even mask puerile insecurity.

59 This represents a verbal form related to Anerkennung as in: “Denn nicht allein Adams und Evas Leib und Seele vor dem Fall, sondern auch unsern Leib und Seele nach dem Fall, unangesehen daß sie verderbt, [hat] Gott geschaffen, welche auch Gott noch für sein Werk [an]erkennt, wie geschrieben steht Hiob 10: ‘Deine Hände haben mich gearbeitet und gemacht alles, was ich um und um bin.’ Deut. 32; Jes. 45. 54. 64; Act. 17; Ps. 100.

139; Eccl. 12” from Triglotta Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (German— Latin—English), ed. F. Bente. (St. Louis: Concordia, 1921). See also: Lutheran Church. Missouri Synod, Concordia Triglotta—German: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 780 (Milwaukee, Wis.: Northwestern Publishing House, 1996).

60 See Epitome I. “Concerning Original Sin,” in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 488.

61 In the sphere of the African diaspora, both reggae and hip hop musicians have employed this phrase.

For example, Bob Marley sings in “Get Up, Stand Up” “It’s not all that glitters is gold / half the story has never been told / So now you see the light / Stand up for your rights.”

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62 Charles Taylor, 465.

63 John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 208.

64 Jacques Derrida, On Cosmpolitanism and Forgiveness (New York: Routledge, 2001), 49.

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The Global South Meets North America

Confessional Lutheran Identity In Light of Changing Christian Demographics

Leopoldo A. Sánchez M.

Philip Jenkins argues that “far from being an export of the capitalist West, a vestige of Euro-American imperialism, Christianity is now rooted in the Third World, and the religion’s future lies in the global South.”1 How will this emerging influence of the Christian global South be felt over the years in North America by its cultural and religious institutions? In particular, what might the southern identity of global Christianity mean for the future of confessional Lutheranism in the U.S.? Or to state the matter more positively, how might U.S. confessional Lutherans engage an increasingly southern Christian world?

When confronting questions of this sort, one is painfully aware of the nature of the global demographics of religious movements, namely, that they are constantly changing—although important statistics are stable enough to allow for some thoughtful consideration and future planning. One is also aware of the life-changing tricks history likes to play on us, the so-called X factors or unforeseen consequences of hardto-describe events that no one can fully predict. And yet acknowledging these events should not stop us from reflecting on those trends that are hard to avoid because they seem to stare at us right in the face. As Jenkins puts it: “In the case of the southward movement of Christianity, we can be quite sure that the event will occur, but interpreting it or preparing for it is quite a different matter.”2 With Jenkins’s careful optimism, I offer a North American perspective on the future of confessional Lutheran identity in light of the southward orientation of Christianity across the globe and into the U.S. My argument proceeds in four stages. First, I make an attempt to weed out doom and gloom scenarios on the basis of the changing demographics. By doing so, I hope to help North American Lutherans focus and work on addressing some of the more pressing questions that will arise from the global South. Focus is not meant to lead to cultural or theological reductionisms, but it does help us to read contexts in which theology will be done in the U.S. more accurately for the sake of a faithful witness. Second, I look at some of the major characteristics of Christianity in the global South, focusing particularly on how southern Christians’ worldviews on realities ranging from healings to politics, from worship to suffering, are shaped significantly by Leopoldo A. Sánchez M. teaches systematic theology in the Werner R. H. Krause Chair for Hispanic Ministries and is director of the Center for Hispanic Studies at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the International Lutheran Council’s fourth World Seminaries Conference, June 2010, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

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their sense of biblical realism and immediacy. Third, I offer some preliminary questions confessional Lutherans in the U.S. should consider as they engage the global South critically and creatively in the service of the Gospel. The result of such engagement also has the potential to give confessional Lutheranism in the U.S. a more southern flavor and profile, which might be a bit hard for some to imagine at the present time. Some cultural and theological issues or realities that might have been thus far on the periphery or margins, or maybe not even on the radar, will eventually get greater attention.

Serious interaction with Christianity’s southward movement, in turn, has the capacity of making the Lutheran church a truly global phenomenon, or—to use ecclesial language—a more fully catholic reality in the world. Finally, I offer some thoughts towards institutional moves or strategies that will have to be in place in our Lutheran Church in North America in order to prepare us for and facilitate the kind of intentional exchange with the contexts, trends, ideas, and communities surely coming into the U.S.—and already among us—from the Christian South.

I. In-Your-Face Christianity: Weeding Out Doom and Gloom Scenarios After 9/11, a fairly common assumption made about the U.S. religious landscape has been that, unless we do something right now to stop what is coming, we are almost inevitably on our way to becoming a Muslim country. While no one is ready to argue against the church’s need for engaging Islam in the future, particularly, but not exclusively in Europe, Jenkins argues that, at least when it comes to the U.S. religious context, Muslim demographics tend to be blown out of proportion and, moreover, “any likely Muslim growth through immigration will be far exceeded by the continuing Christian influx from Africa, Asia, and above all, Latin America.”3 Even if the rise of Islam in Europe is fully acknowledged and one should deal with it, as Jenkins puts it, “for the sake of both religion and politics, and perhaps of simple planetary survival,”4 one must also make room for the significant rise of southern Christianity itself in the old continent, especially through African immigration and re-evangelization of what these new Christians see as a largely secularized culture.

These new Christians will most likely be the ones making the case for Christianity in the Europe of the future. Be that as it may on the other side of the North Atlantic, Jenkins argues that, at least on this side of the North Atlantic, “the United States is substantially a Christian country now, and Christian predominance is likely to be still more marked in decades to come.”5 Moreover, the Christians coming from the global South will also be, as John Allen Jr. puts it in his latest book on the Roman Catholic Church of the future, much more “entrepreneurial” about their faith.6 This is another way of saying that these new Christians will not privatize their faith or be quiet in the public square about their religion, but rather they will be more “in your face” about Jesus. Otherwise stated, they are much more likely than North American Anglos to share their faith in Jesus Christ vigorously with atheists, agnostics, Muslims, and people of many other religious persuasions in the U.S. religious marketplace.

While privileging pluralism in religious studies curricula across universities in the U.S. might give us the impression that all world religions are or will have a similar 40

our attention in the future, Jenkins points out that, merely on the basis of the claim on math, Christianity, globally speaking, “cannot be considered as just one religion out of many; it is, and will continue to be, by far the largest in existence.”7 In the pluralistic framework of U.S. religious studies, what ends up getting lost is, oddly enough, the pluralism of the southern Christianity itself, what Jenkins refers to as “that other religious giant, the strangely unfamiliar world of the new Christianity.”8 Without putting aside a better understanding of the world religions for the sake of Christian witness, one may ask: Where is that new world, that “religious giant,” on our U.S. radar, not only in what concerns religious studies departments, but also areas, of the church’s life such as missions, relief efforts, and seminary formation?

Another fairly common assumption made about the U.S. religious landscape has been that, unless we do something right now to stop what is coming, we are almost inevitably on our way to becoming a post-Christian, post-churched society—if we are not there already. That has become a popular way of exegeting the U.S. context from the pulpit nowadays. We are told that we live in a radical post-modern world where rampant relativistic pluralism inimical to truth and authority is the order of the day, a world where people are increasingly secular, agnostic, or atheist. We are assured that we live in a bleak world, one that is hostile to Christ or at least could care less about Christian claims. The challenge, then, is to do theology in an increasingly secularized, materialistic, and relativistic world hostile to the gospel, what Robert Newton has called more broadly doing missions in Babylon, or in a post-Christian society.9 While that is part of the picture, is it the whole picture?

While I am not prepared, without some theological qualification, to argue that the U.S. is or will become a “Christian” country (what exactly is “Christian”?), and while admittedly no one is ready to argue against the church’s need to confront the idols already mentioned, Jenkins gives us enough data to suggest that the evils of a post-Christian, secularized society are most likely to become, over time, the views of a few vocal minorities in the U.S. While the extent of the prominent and lasting influence of the few can always be argued, it appears that eventually the overwhelming influence of southern Christianity in the U.S. will most likely crush, not only in terms of numbers but also influence, a last attempt in the North to define itself as “secular, rational, and tolerant” over and against what Jenkins refers to as the “primitive and fundamentalist” Christian South.10 Therefore, the assumption that we live in a post-Christian or postchurched society will be increasingly challenged in the U.S. of the future. We can still talk that way for a little while, but probably not for too long.

The issue here is not whether there will be opposition to the gospel in the U.S. of the future, even in a predominantly Christian country. Luther found hostility to the gospel in his own day and age, and he found it in the context of Christendom! The issue is how one reads the world in which Christianity seeks to proclaim the gospel.

The post-Christian framework will not be the best one for the U.S. What is often seen from a northern angle as, to put it negatively, an unreflective, childish, or primitive form of southern Christianity—namely, one that looks quite “traditional” or, in broad terms, “conservative and charismatic”—will eventually become closer to the norm in North America. As Jenkins suggests: “Not only is traditional Christianity weakening Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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in large sections of the North, but it is indeed being reinforced and reinvigorated by Southern churches by means of immigration and evangelization.”11 In short, the prevailing worldview will not be secular, but quite religious—of the Christian South sort.

Much like Jenkins, John Allen Jr., an observer and commentator of global trends in Roman Catholicism, describes such southern-cast Christianity as conservative partly because it takes seriously the authority of the Bible and its explicit or implicit moral injunctions against practices such as homosexuality and abortion.12 It is charismatic in part because it takes for granted the supernatural worldview of the Bible where exorcisms and healings are commonplace, illnesses are seen as much as the result of evil spirits as physical causes, and also because southern Christianity operates as a matter of course with what Allen calls “strongly inculturated forms of worship and theological expression.”13 These references to emerging Christianity in a southern cast are simply meant to put into question long-held familiar sociological arguments on the near inevitability of the church’s secularization in the West. Jenkins has noted that classical arguments on secularization tend to blame the decline in church numbers on the assumption that “under the impact of modernity, individualism, privatization, and the rise of a scientific worldview, older styles of Christianity lose relevance.”14 By “older styles of Christianity,” what is often meant is the Christianity of the poor in the majority world who still hold to biblical premodern and prescientific worldviews. Once Western-style development hits these poor, religious societies upon arrival to the U.S., they will very likely become secularized. So goes the argument. Jenkins shows that such claims are highly inflated and will not likely shape in any significant way basic Christian commitments from the global South. He argues that overall the secularization model might work “wonderfully well in Western Europe, where Christian loyalties and Christian numbers really are in decline, but woefully badly in the United States, where Christian churches continue to grow and flourish in the world’s most advanced economy.”15 Decline in mainline Protestant churches and in Lutheran churches does not necessarily mean that the U.S. religious landscape is inevitably becoming post-Christian.

In fact, we can expect, and are already seeing, significant growth in Roman Catholic, Evangelical, and Pentecostal-Charismatic churches in the U.S. Cursing the darkness of a post-Christian society from the pulpit might rally the troops in some cases, but it cannot ultimately take the place of doing the hard work of figuring out what exactly Lutheran identity should look like in an increasingly southern Christian U.S. That is by no means an easy task to undertake, but it will be a necessary one if we are interested in being a faithful confessional Lutheran church body in the U.S. In the next section, the reader will get a flavor of a unique, yet representative, example of southern Christianity, that of the Lutheran Church in Cuba. One should note in particular the way global South Christians approach the world with a sort of biblical realism and immediacy, which in turn raises rather critical questions about the state of the world in the midst of injustice and suffering without actually giving up hope in God’s miraculous justice and deliverance of His people in a tragic world.

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World but Not of the World: Christianity with a Southern Flavor II. In the So what does the Christianity of the global South look like? A couple of years ago, during a teaching trip to La Havana, I was introduced by the bishop to his somewhat tongue-in-cheek definition of the Lutheran church on the island: “¡Aquí en Cuba somos luteranos confesionales conservadores, carismáticos y comunistas!” (Here in Cuba we are conservative, charismatic, and communist confessional Lutherans!). Beyond the initially shocking labels, the more I spoke with the bishop over a number of days, the more I began to understand what he was actually getting at. Let me say something about what each of these labels actually meant to the bishop as a concrete way of getting into the mind of a Christian from the global South—in this case, one who also happens to define his church as confessional Lutheran.

By “confessional Lutheran,” the bishop meant that church workers in Cuba had to subscribe to the Lutheran Confessions (the Book of Concord) as a true exposition of the word of God. The bishop was clear about this: “To work with us, you have to subscribe to the Confessions.” No surprises there. By “conservative,” the bishop meant viewing the Scriptures as the inspired word of God, the only trustworthy norm for Christian faith and life. Furthermore, the label meant that Scripture served as the reliable basis for a conservative view of sexuality against practices such as abortion, gay marriage, and the ordination of homosexual pastors. During my visit, for instance, the bishop had expressed to me in no unclear terms his disapproval of the preliminary considerations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) that eventually led to its assembly’s vote in favor of allowing practicing homosexuals to be considered for ordination into the pastoral ministry.

By “charismatic,” the bishop did not really mean being Pentecostal or some form of it in theology or practice. The term meant basically a strongly inculturated Cuban mass, with all basic elements of a traditional Lutheran Western liturgy, but also with a distinctly local Afro-Cuban musical tone, arrangement, and rhythm. The bishop actually sent back with us a number of CDs they produced with various versions of Afro-Cuban Lutheran masses. Moreover, the label meant that, within a fairly orderly liturgical setting, worship was not to be without many spontaneous expressions of dancing, clapping, and gestures of praise such as the lifting of hands. Yet the bishop did not interpret such expressions as Pentecostal per se, but rather as being within the realm of what can be allowed by biblical standards. Common in worship was also prayer for healing from sickness and deliverance from the evil one and his spirits, again not because these acts were seen as Pentecostal (or Charismatic) but because they were seen as part of the biblical worldview.

Though especially controversial, at least to the ears of U.S. Christians raised during the Cold War, the term “communist,” surprisingly enough, did not translate into some pro-Castro agenda. The bishop was respectful of the office, but critical of the office holder. Interestingly, the label referred more to a sort of realistic view of the world, one where governments are often promoters of evil and where opposition to the gospel is common and thus should actually be expected. An implication of such a

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view is that it is ultimately neither useful nor necessary to have a perfect world, utopia, or government to be a confessional Lutheran Christian. Besides its critical function as a subtle critique of the state as representative of the world negatively but also realistically conceived, the label also was meant to function as a criticism or suspicion against naïve or uncritical views held by Christians in the North about the goodness or even “Christian identity” of the U.S. government or of its global capitalist and military influence. The bishop was particularly offended by a prominent visitor of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (LCMS) from the U.S. who apparently argued for the need to hold democratic and capitalist U.S. values as quasi-conditions for being a Christian or confessional Lutheran in Cuba.

Linked to the subtle critique and realistic view of the world, and of the potential use of any type of government and economic system (either socialist or capitalist) to promote evil and injustice, the bishop spoke of poverty as a recurrent problem in the island due as much to the Cuban state’s failure to provide for its own people as to the U.S.’s embargo on Cuba which ultimately did not punish Castro and the state as much as poor Cuban families. During a meal, the bishop told me: “During some of the toughest days of the embargo, some Cubans were eating plantain skin as steaks.

Plaintain skins, Leopoldo! Can you imagine that?” (I still can’t.)

The concrete case of this emerging Lutheran church in Cuba, one that is not yet in altar and pulpit fellowship with the LCMS even though it continues to look up to the LCMS as a solid confessional church and a reliable source of evangelical teaching, has all the general characteristics of the Christianity of the global South that Jenkins and Allen outline in their studies. In this particular case, southern-cast Christianity has obviously been appropriated quite self-consciously through a Lutheran lens by the bishop of the national church body. Yet the southern flavor is evident.

We are talking about a Christianity that, at least by U.S. standards, can be seen as morally conservative or traditional on issues such as the ordination of gay pastors, yet also as politically liberal in its overall skepticism about the goodness of market capitalism and globalization and wariness about U.S. economic power and military influence in the world.16 We are also speaking of a Christianity that, from a northern liberal and secular perspective, is seen as conservative or even fundamentalist in its appeal to biblical authority and truth, as well as in its commitment to a biblical worldview where miracles, healings, exorcisms, and direct divine intervention are commonplace.17 As we said before, such a southern worldview, which Jenkins calls “enthusiastic and spontaneous, fundamentalist and supernatural oriented,”18 also spills into what Allen, when speaking of the growing southern Catholicism, calls “robustly inculturated forms of liturgical worship and theological expression.”19 Such matters of theological expression and accompanying readings of Scripture are informed to a significant degree by the global South’s experience of poverty. As Jenkins puts it crassly enough: “Contrary to myth, the typical Christian is not a white fat cat in the United States or Western Europe, but rather a poor person, often unimaginably poor by Western standards.”20 And so for southern Christians, biblical themes dealing with poverty and oppression by rulers are not easily skipped over in their

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reading and hearing of the sacred text. For the same reason, neither does the South ignore what Jenkins calls “the profound pessimism about the secular world in the New Testament,”21 which the realities of oppression and poverty—not to mention natural disasters—confirm where the majority of Christians live today.

Suffering and oppression is what it is, whether it is experienced under a certain form of government, as an incurable disease, or as a result of natural disasters. Global South Christians tend to deal with questions of theodicy and suffering cosmically and practically at once. Cosmically, in that God is involved in absolutely everything that happens in the world. Nothing escapes God or is out of his control. Consequently, God is neither excused nor defended in the midst of evil and suffering, even if one does not know exactly what was in God’s mind when disaster struck. A student from Haiti once told me that the recent earthquake was God’s doing. He felt no need to make God look good at all, no need to justify God in the midst of the cross. He was acting as a theologian of the cross, as Luther might say, namely, as one who sees the manifest things of God through suffering and the cross.

That is a bit different from quite a few prominent preachers in North America who claimed events like 9/11 or Katrina were clearly God’s punishment for the nation’s immorality. Like fire and brimstone preachers in the North, there are southern Christians who still venture into the mind of God by appealing to divine punishment as a common definitive explanation for tragedy. The same student from Haiti was rather sure that God’s punishment came to Haiti because of the voodoo practices in the land.

Maybe. But how can he know for sure? And what about all the Christians who died in the earthquake? Why did God not do something about them? Answering these questions end up making God look bad, putting into question his power to deliver, and ultimately his love. To paraphrase Luther, no one is immune from the temptation of the theologian of glory who claims to be able to peek into the invisible attributes of God (such as his power or justice) as though they were clearly perceptible in the events of nature and the world. Not even global South Christians. Yet in the cosmic scheme of things, excuses for God or denials of his existence in the midst of the cross, are seemingly uncommon in the global South.

Global South Christians also deal with theodicy—or better yet, respond to it—in rather practical ways. They often see the way out of concrete suffering not as one of solving some theodicy question per se, but rather in terms of praxis. Atheism or agnosticism of the mind or the heart is more of a North Atlantic answer to theodicy. For the global South, dealing with the issue at hand is more critical. Even if some forms of fatalism are not uncommon in the face of tragedy among people from the majority world, global South Christians’ strong commitment to God’s direct radical intervention in everyday affairs mitigates against a defeatist attitude. In the case of Cubans in general, and the Cuban Lutheran Church in particular, there is a great deal of emphasis placed on practical survival rather than dealing with God through some rational attempt at making sense of a less than perfect world. If anything, our Christian past, the history of the church’s martyrs and struggles in every era, should confirm for us that a tragic world is indeed to be expected. The emphasis is placed, therefore, on resolve, that is, on Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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having the resolve to deal with the issue at hand, however painful, without trying to resolve “Why me, God?” questions.

For many Cuban Americans who have actually fled the island to come to the U.S., the biblical themes of poverty, exile, and God’s love for the suffering sojourners or aliens in a strange land speak to them quite literally. Once again, biblical texts dealing with such realities are too close to home to pass over too quickly.22 An example of a contemporary Cuban American reflection on the biblical theme of exile can be seen in the work of Fernando Segovia, whose “diaspora theology” describes in various ways what the tension between being “in the world but not of it” might mean for a Cuban American: Segovia has advanced the term “exile” as a category in U.S. Hispanic American theology to describe the social location of “otherness” immigrants experience in the adoptive nation…. Segovia reserves the literal use [of the word “exile”] for first-generation immigrants whose “diaspora” identity is one of “living in two worlds and no world at the same time.”…

[T]he task of a “diaspora theology” demands unpacking what it means to be “in the world but not of it” through an ongoing deconstruction and construction regarding the world, the otherworld, and human-divine relations. Accordingly, diaspora theology can see the world as unjust but also as a potentially more just place; it sees the otherworld as bringing into question God’s justice in the face of suffering, but without losing confidence that God hears and delivers the marginalized; therefore, a diasporic social location allows one to see divine-human relations in terms of the paradoxical character of the human religious experience of God as absence/presence, uncertainty/certainty, and limitation/power.23 Segovia’s description of a “diaspora” identity can function more broadly as a biblical framework for understanding how global South Christians think of their place in the world. In short, the world is both unjust and just. God’s justice and love are doubtful when tragedy strikes and yet hoped for in the sure expectation of His deliverance from evil and suffering. Like the experience of someone in exile, of the migrant who is moving in the social space between two worlds, one can be said to be neither here nor there and yet in both places at the same time—what Segovia calls, using Johannine language, being “in the world but not of it.” Global South Christians are not unfamiliar with living “in the middle,” in that place where God is experienced as both absent and present, where God’s presence—and thus the next meal, next available medical treatment, or next just government—is both uncertain and certain, and where one’s will to change the difficult situation is both denied and affirmed. This global South worldview is neither fatalistic nor romantic in the face of suffering, both world-denying and lifeaffirming in its assessment of human nature, health, and governments, and at once cosmic and practical in its dealing with theodicy questions or just the plain fact of tragedy.

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III. Interpreting Signs: Engaging Global South Christianity I will now raise some questions for Northern Lutherans and, in the process, suggest some preliminary ways confessional Lutheran theology in the U.S. might engage the emerging Christianity of the global South in its midst critically and creatively in the service of the Gospel. To get at such ways of engagement, I will focus on addressing some particular religious beliefs and practices of the fastest-growing ethnic group in the U.S., namely, the Hispanics or Latinos.

We can be quite sure that by 2050, less than 40 years from now, approximately 128 million Americans will claim Hispanic/Latino origin. They will account for about 25% of the total U.S. population. By then, the U.S. Hispanic population will triple and constitute about 60% of the total growth of the U.S. population. By contrast, the Anglo population will actually decrease from 67% to 47%. Among Hispanics, about 60% will be of Mexican descent. While immigration will be an important reason for the growth, an even greater one will be birth rate. With the exception of Mexico and Brazil, the U.S. will be the most populous Latino society in the Americas, making it also one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the region. Immigrants from the global South and their descendants will yield a fairly young labor force in the U.S. of the near future.

Bilingualism and biculturalism will not be uncommon.

In 2007, the Pew Hispanic Center collected the largest data to date on U.S. Latino “religious beliefs and behaviors and their association with political thinking.”24 One of the most striking statistics is that about 43% of Hispanic evangelicals in the U.S. are former Roman Catholics. Yet the document also points out that “negative views of Catholicism do not appear to be a major reason for their conversion.”25 While many reasons could be advanced to explain the conversions, the study concludes: “By an overwhelming majority (82%), Hispanics cite the desire for a more direct, personal experience with God as the main reason for adopting a new faith.”26 For the overwhelming majority of Hispanic converts in the U.S., going secular, agnostic, or atheist is not the way. They go for Christianity, but a particular type of it—what has been called somewhat loosely the “charismatic” type—which, within a rather broad spectrum, ranges anywhere from strongly inculturated liturgies to “speaking in tongues.” Be that as it may, the study’s observation that a majority (54%) of U.S. Hispanic Catholics, which constitutes more than two-thirds of the total number of Hispanics in the country (68%) and will continue to grow in the years to come, also describe themselves as “charismatic Christians,” brings up a critical issue for confessional Lutherans in North America to consider.27 In short, we will have to navigate through whatever the broad term “charismatic” means for new Christians, including in some cases Lutherans, coming from the global South.

To engage the so-called “charismatic” dimension, for instance, Jenkins calls for the serious, though often neglected, academic study of Pentecostalism in U.S. religious studies departments.28 Some have listened. In 2009, the Templeton Foundation granted $6.9 million to the University of Southern California’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture for research on Pentecostalism on various continents—one of the largest awards ever granted for the study of global Pentecostalism. Consider also that there Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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in our midst Pentecostal scholars from the U.S. and around the world who are are now both committed to and at times quite critical of their own traditions and its excesses.

There are peer-reviewed journals such as PNEUMA from the Society for Pentecostal Studies or the Journal of Pentecostal Theology published by BRILL. The Journal of Pentecostal Theology put together a scholarly series that was published by Sheffield Academic Press, now under Continuum. If we think we have somehow dealt definitively with issues related to Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity back in the 60s and 70s, we are mistaken. More work needs to be done that accounts for the seemingly dynamic, evolving, inculturating, and even all-encompassing or holistic nature of both Pentecostalism and Charismatic/Renewal movements in global South communities. Which confessional Lutherans are nowadays engaging this global phenomenon in all its complexity and diversity?

What is Pentecostal per se in the description “charismatic” among global South Christians and what is not? What is the direct, personal experience of God people in the global South have found so captivating? Is it merely a reference to the power and joy of the Gospel? How do we engage new Christians who speak of biblical healings, exorcisms, visions, prophecies, and gifts of the Spirit as common things to expect in a world that is not conceived in modern secularized, but rather biblical terms? What is biblical or biblically sound about these readings of the Bible and the world, and what is biblicistic or literalistic? For instance, what does a Lutheran theology of the Holy Spirit and his gifts look like?29 How does it steer away from domesticating the Spirit either by falling into a biblicist or a cessasionist theology of gifts? The former insists that all gifts listed in the Bible must be present in every age and place, and the latter claims that some gifts definitely ceased immediately or eventually after the apostolic period. Or what might a Lutheran theology of spiritual struggle against the devil look like? How might Luther’s reflections on tentatio or, say, his Baptismal Booklet’s rather realistic view of the baptized child’s lifelong struggle against the evil spirit contribute to global South concerns? How does healing fits into all this?

What if “charismatic” refers to the solemnity and joy that an inculturated worship offers? If so, what exactly does a Lutheran theology of worship that deals seriously with inculturation or indigenization questions look like? How do proposals about the Lutheran theology of this or that—say, of spiritual attacks or tentatio—actually relate to and concretely influence corporate worship, and vice versa, in a salutary way? Is the form-substance paradigm even adequate to deal with such questions? Even with some assimilation factors in place, the Pew study found out that “while the prevalence of Hispanic-oriented worship is higher among the foreign born, with 77% saying they attend churches with those characteristics, the phenomenon is also widespread among the native born, with 48% saying they attend ethnic churches.”30 Significantly, the LCMS’s Lutheran Service Book (LSB) includes a few hymns and canticles in Spanish— an acknowledgment of the global South’s increasing influence on the way Lutherans worship. The most complete Lutheran hymnal in Spanish in North America, with a broad array of representative selections and a recognizable corpus Hispanicum of hymnody, remains the ELCA’s Libro de Liturgia y Cántico. But the broader question can be

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framed this manner: What should “Hispanic-oriented,” confessional Lutheran theology and worship look like?31 How does one negotiate the relationship between the local/ regional and universal/catholic character of the church and of her theological, liturgical, and pastoral identity? Which Lutheran theologians and musicologists are dealing with questions of inculturation?

When dealing with cultural symbols through which southern Christians express their faith, how do we deploy, for instance, the Apology’s distinction between signs instituted by God (i.e., the means of grace) and those signs not instituted by God, which might nevertheless be useful to admonish or teach the common folk?32 Signs or symbols likely to be found in some Hispanic homes and churches might include the bloody crucifix, an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a Bible permanently opened on Psalm 23 at the family altar, or a practice of dancing to a Sanctus set to Afro-Cuban rhythms and drums. Which of these signs are conducive to the hearing of the gospel and under what conditions? Which ones are obstacles to bringing people to the knowledge of God’s justification in Christ?33 These are the types of questions that an “enthusiastic and spontaneous” Christianity—to use Jenkins’s terms—will bring to the table.

These issues have thus far been treated marginally in North American Lutheran circles.

The overall move in worship wars is towards the preservation of a confessional identity (what might be called centripetal confessionalism), which of course has its place.

We find, on the other side of the divide, the unmediated or direct translation of newer forms into worship without a sound confessional appropriation, which yields a sort of juxtaposition of theological and musical forms that never truly meet each other. What is missing is a reflective move towards the contextualization of a confessional identity in the world, what might be called a more centrifugal confessionalism. The aforementioned issues remain critical for engaging a growing sector of the population that has thus far been treated as borderlands people in the theological scene, namely, the new Christians from the global South in our midst. Confessional Lutherans must bring these issues closer to the center in years to come so that the Christianity of the South can be engaged both critically and creatively, leading us to ask not only what is wrong with it, but also what is right. In doing so, confessional Lutheran Christians from the South in the U.S. must definitely be participants at the table.

Christians from the global South are also politically curious and engaged, seeing biblical themes such as poverty, exile, oppression at the hands of rulers, and God’s love for the aliens or sojourners in our midst as descriptive in many cases of their own situations. Add to that their realistic, even pessimistic, view of the state of the present world or age, which to some extent they also see reflected in the Scriptures. When speaking of the commitment of southern Christians to the biblical worldview, Jenkins provocatively suggests that, compared, for example, to the North Atlantic where modern medicine and wealth has done away with the belief in healings and the harsh realities of poverty, “it may be that it is only in the newer churches that the Bible can be read with any authenticity and immediacy.”34 He also suggests that Christians in the North, so detached from these aspects of the biblical worldview, might perhaps “reinterpret their own religion in light of these experiences.”35 Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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The Pew study notes the interest Hispanic Christians have in bringing their faith to bear on political issues: “Two-thirds of Hispanics say that their religious beliefs are an important influence on their political thinking. More than half say churches and other houses of worship should address the social and political questions of the day.”36 Given the relative prosperity and stability of the Lutheran Church in North America when compared to the rest of the world, theological reflection on issues like poverty, immigration, and globalization become marginal. And yet these are the kinds of real life topics that affect the majority of Christians in the world, our own brothers and sisters.

A young Lutheran college student who goes to my home church was telling me about how much she enjoyed her microeconomics class. I shared with her briefly some of Luther’s thoughts on work and vocation, the economy and usury, the poor and the rich, in the context of his times. This Lutheran lady told me she had no idea Lutherans cared about such matters. What do confessional Lutherans have to say about these global realities?37 In dialogue with my colleague Robert Newton’s argument for the Babylonian or post-Christian location of missions in North American today, I have argued for what Virgilio Elizondo has called a Galilean location for thinking about and doing theology in North America.38 Such Galilean location refers to theology that addresses the situation of peoples who live in the borderlands of or at the margins of society—whether that society is churched or unchurched does not really matter. Like Jesus, people on the margins come from a place from which nothing good comes. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Galileans, like Jesus and his disciples, were despised by both unchurched and churched societies, by pagan Rome and religious Jerusalem alike.

Similarly, Elizondo notes that Mexican Americans, as borderlands peoples, are often seen as less than American for the North Americans and less than Mexican by the Mexicans. Moreover, we might add to the mix that these borderlands peoples are often suspicious of both Babylon and Jerusalem. They are skeptical of unchurched societies that want them, say, for their cheap labor and of churched societies that, to mention one example, want them to speak English before they can become “real” Lutherans.

Contrary to the doom and gloom scenario mentioned earlier, that we are now living and will continue to live in a U.S. best thought of as a new Babylon (namely, a post-Christian, unchurched society), one could argue that Jenkins’s studies suggest a different future for the U.S. given the growth of Christianity through immigration and birth rates of peoples of the global South and their children. This means, at least to a significant degree, that we are going to be doing missions in Galilee for some time yet, in the borderlands, among people who are poor, exiles, immigrants, refugees, or more broadly economically, socially, and even ecclesially marginalized. Among them, we will encounter the new Christians who do not quite fit into our predictable cultural and economic patterns and are wary or skeptical about both churched and unchurched societies.

Do we allegorize all passages in the Bible dealing with issues of poverty, exile, or marginality? Do we allow for different layers of meaning in reading these passages, allowing for political implications of the texts? What exactly is biblical or biblically

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sound about ethical or political readings of the Bible, and what constitutes using the Bible to advance a political ideology or agenda? What might a comprehensive Lutheran theology of poverty, immigration, and globalization look like? How might such theology actually affect our spending and patterns of consumption and waste, or our attitudes towards and treatment of immigrants (both legal and illegal)? And what might a confessional Lutheran theology say about our view of the ethical dilemmas involved in the global influence of the U.S. in multinational markets and the effects on local cultures, economies, and the environment? What will a theology of vocation, the use of the law, active righteousness, or the two kingdoms or realms have to say about these global issues?

To extend Elizondo’s arguments, we might add that the borderlands also include people from the global South who are religious. They do not even come close to assuming a secularized, agnostic, or atheist vision of the world. They have another problem. It is what Allen has referred to as “not too much skepticism about religion, but too much credulity.”39 How do we engage the confessional Lutherans from the global South who hold to the Lutheran Confessions and have a conservative view of biblical authority and morality, but whose religious practices, forms of worship, political concerns, and theological priorities seem in some cases quite different from those among North American Anglo Lutherans? This will require not only what I have already described as an ecclesiology of “mission in the borderlands,” but also one of “catholic unity” that finds a place for what J.A.O. Preus once called a “Lutheran theology of difference”—what I call, quite simply, a place for sound “catholicity” that does not confuse unity with homogeneity.40 As Christianity becomes a global South phenomenon, we will have to ask: What is of the esse of Lutheranism and what is of the bene esse of confessional Lutheranism?

In his study of the influence of the global South in the Roman Catholic Church of the future, Allen concludes by arguing that the challenge for Catholicism lies simply in becoming a global Catholic, which means “moving out of the parochialism of a given language, ethnicity, geographical region, or ideology and embracing membership in a truly ‘catholic’ church.”41 That is also our challenge: having the courage to become a truly global, and thus catholic, confessional Lutheran church in the world. Getting there assumes a healthy complementarity of centripetal and centrifugal approaches to confessional Lutheranism, where preservation of identity and contextualization of identity among cultures are done well in service to Christ and the Gospel.

IV. Facing the Near Future: Some Practical and Institutional Implications What should the Lutheran church in the U.S. do, from an institutional perspective, to be prepared for engaging the growing global South at its doorstep and already in its backyard?42 Let me offer some preliminary reflections for consideration in no particular order of importance.

First, we must be prepared to provide pastoral and mercy care for our aging Anglo Lutheran elders. What this means is that we must deal compassionately with a predominantly Anglo Lutheran church that is becoming older and declining in Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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due in part to low birth rates. Looking at the future of Catholicism in the numbers, U.S., Allen notes that by 2020, 1.2 million people 65 years and older will have no living relatives, siblings, or spouses, creating a generation of “isolated elders� in Western societies.43 These elders will need to be incorporated into congregational networks that can offer them emotional and spiritual support, companionship, contact with younger members in the church, and the care of parish nurses and deaconesses. Lutherans in the U.S. should be able to put their heads together around this issue given its many resources as residential and health care providers.

We must then also be prepared to become a young church body and at least a bilingual, bicultural one. The new Christians from the global South have much higher birth rates than the non-Hispanic White U.S. population. It is significant, for instance, that birth rate charts for Hispanics in the U.S. look like pyramids, with lots of children at the bottom. Those of other non-Anglo ethnic groups are similar. That means that, quite literally, a church of many cultures and languages united by a common confession can be coming our way. This is already evident among Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals. However, so much more needs to be done in the LCMS, which, quite honestly, is not close to reflecting in its congregations the national demographic reality and trajectory. As an example, the Hispanic population in the nation is currently 15% of the total U.S. population. The LCMS is about 0.04% Hispanic. In the LCMS, the only two synodical level institutions that are currently providing funding for Hispanic ministry are Concordia Seminary through its Center for Hispanic Studies (CHS) and Concordia Publishing House through its Multilingual Resources unit. Almost shockingly, no national facilitator for Hispanic Ministries has been funded for years at the synodical level—although the last two LCMS national conventions have voted overwhelmingly in favor of doing so.

Second, one of the critical steps that the synod should take fairly soon is to find ways of creating networks between its educational institutions and non-Anglo ethnic churches and communities across the nation. Besides the move towards planting new churches, developing strategies for bringing significant numbers of new Christians from the global South and their children through our parochial school system (the largest non-Catholic one in the nation) and our Concordia University System (CUS) schools can make a huge difference in creating the conditions for an increasingly young, bilingual, and bicultural Lutheran church worker force. At the present time, in spite of recent increasing enrollments in the CUS schools, it is not clear that a clear, short- or long-term strategy is in place for recruiting, retaining, and linking to the Lutheran Church more Christians from the global South and their children.

Even though the CHS of Concordia Seminary and its regional coordinators and partners across the nation play a critical role in the identification and formation of Latino church workers in the U.S., Concordia Seminary alone cannot provide for the church workers needed in the U.S. of the future. We are talking about a systemic issue that requires networks with all educational pipelines of the Synod and various congregations and communities. Our parochial school, university, and seminary programs, as well as our Lutheran faculty and staff in these institutions, will need to be

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more grounded in global South realities, speak at least one other language (in the U.S., Spanish will be the most critical), and engage global South Christianity as they look at their various fields of study and teaching responsibilities. Some in leadership positions must come from such communities. Searches for younger administrators and staff who are conversant with global South issues in our institutions across the board must continue into the future at various national, District, and congregational levels.

Third, we must be prepared to be a confessional Lutheran church that is at home in the “borderlands,” or in Galilee. That is to say, we must be prepared to be a church that is not detached from the world of the poor or that of the marginalized (whether socially, politically, or religiously) from the global South. Being a church that does mission in Galilee or the borderlands means, in part, being in solidarity with Christians in the U.S. and abroad who are poor. Praying for the poor, aiding in relief efforts, but also dealing with issues of social justice from a confessional Lutheran angle as a form of theological solidarity, are Christian aptitudes to promote. Doing ministry in Galilee also means becoming a church whose missional leadership and ministerium is also willing to serve in those congregations or mission fields that are typically seen as being on the margins in terms of their financial resources or particular socioeconomic contexts. How do we support and encourage Lutherans to serve in such contexts where Christianity often thrives? It will require, in part, teaching through example and showing such paths to church workers as a real and even joyful possibility. Synodical leadership at national and district levels will have to continue contacts with non-Anglo ethnic churches. University and faculty leadership will have to continue to work in close proximity with these relatively young, yet growing, sectors of the church in pastoral formation and continuing education initiatives. Dare we think, for instance, of investing in crucial deployed units of the Lutheran Church’s flagship institutions along the U.S. Mexico border or other borderland areas?

Being a church that does mission in the borderlands means, in part, being patient, creative, and yet faithful in the midst of settings where gospel and culture come into conflict with each other, but perhaps can also be congruent with one another. One must see, listen, and learn before proceeding to change something without a proper understanding of the cultures involved. This means, as we said above, undertaking the difficult task of a Lutheran theology that takes inculturation seriously in its reflection and practice. At a recent meeting of leaders from around the world, who were mostly members of the International Lutheran Council (ILC), comments were made about the shyness of the LCMS and its partner churches in engaging questions of contextualization. Key to note, for example, is that global South Christians do not typically approach the faith or spiritual formation merely through the intellect or conceptually (“from above,” as it were), but also and even primarily through the heart or intuitively on the basis of life experience (or “from below”). What does this basic insight mean for approaching theology through music, art, rite, and symbols?

Engaging the religious also means dealing with potential credulity about the biblical worldview or certain skewed religious interpretations of the same, while acknowledging how one’s Northern cultural baggage (e.g., secularism, individualism, Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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middle-class status) might actually inform the ways we read the biblical worldview and appropriate it in our theology and practices. Access to good health care and the best medicines should not make us be suspect of southern Christians who often lack such benefits and thus depend only on prayer for God’s miraculous healing. On the other hand, prayer for God’s immediate intervention in everyday affairs should not be used as a barometer for assessing the genuineness of a person’s faith in Christ. Moreover, when dealing with global South Christians who rightly see God as being mysteriously involved in all events (including tragic ones), it is important not to attempt to justify or defend God in the midst of suffering through theodicy. On the other hand, when southern Christians are tempted to see divine punishment as the supposedly definitive explanation for earthquakes or sicknesses, one must warn against attempts to peek into the mind of the hidden God. Moving beyond theodicy should lead to theological reflections and practices that foster pastoral solidarity with the poor, as well as the sharing of the gospel and the fruits of the same in good works of mercy and disaster relief.

Otherwise stated, northern Christians must be aware of what we have called before the global South’s at once cosmic and practical response to the reality of God’s direct involvement in a tragic world.

Fourth, we must be prepared to become a global or catholic confessional Lutheran church. For the foreseeable future, it seems that the Lutheran church in the U.S. might continue to offer any available financial means to facilitate the formation of future generations of confessional Lutheran scholars from around the world—although those financial means have not always been easily available. At the same time, such young scholars from the global South must be given opportunities for writing theology, presenting essays, and giving responses, which in turn should help inform scholars and administrators in the U.S. with much needed perspectives on Christianity and confessional Lutheranism. Lutheran theology cannot simply be a one-way affair, where global South Christians are basically spoon-fed translations from the North Atlantic.

While it is true that our seminaries are well respected overseas, we cannot assume that we have made our contribution towards a global and catholic confessional Lutheranism until we stop talking about how we are God’s gifts to the world and instead begin to actually engage critically and humbly our global South pastors, bishops, and scholars on an equal footing. That means we must hear what they have to say, learn from them, invite them to publish, and incorporate their insights into our own theology and practice. That two-way approach, what some Hispanic theologians have called teología en conjunto (doing theology together), would be a step in the right direction towards living out an ecclesiology of catholic unity. Taking seriously the global South theologically in our mission, relief, and educational efforts has the capacity to foster a global Lutheranism where not only North Americans and Europeans, but also Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans are seen as contributors to our life together, not simply in terms of their cultures or gifts of service, but also their theological reflections, as well as educational/formation, pastoral/mission, and relief/mercy practices.

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Endnotes

1 Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), xi.

2 Ibid., 251.

3 Ibid., 123.

4 Ibid., 254.

5 Ibid., 124.

6 John L. Allen Jr., The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 434.

7 Jenkins, Next Christendom, 255.

8 Ibid., 254.

9 Leopoldo A. Sánchez M., “Toward an Ecclesiology of Catholic Unity and Mission in the Borderlands: Reflections from a Lutheran Latino Theologian,” Concordia Journal 35/1 (2009): 17–34. See esp. 21–24.

10 Jenkins, Next Christendom, 187.

11 Ibid., 224; admittedly, Jenkins’s thesis paints global South Christianity with a broad “Christian” brush and tends to assume little lasting influence from the North on the global South. As a sort of counterbalance, some at times wonder whether the global South is indisputably “Christian.” See, for example, Douglas L. Rutt, “Christians Missions in Latin America: the Challenge of the 21st Century in Light of the Past 500 Years,” Missio Apostolica 8/2 (2000): 56–63; for a view that assumes a two-way dynamic influence between the North and the South, see Sánchez M., “Toward an Ecclesiology of Catholic Unity,” 24–32.

12 The Future Church, 24, 433.

13 Ibid., 27, 434.

14 Philip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (N.Y.: Oxford, 2008), 187.

15 Ibid., 188.

16 Allen, Future Church, 24–25. Allen adds that Christians in the global South also generally tend to be pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel, pro-United Nations, anti-war, and overwhelmingly opposed to U.S. military intervention in other nations. They also tend to be in favor of a strong role for the state in the economy, and in some cases of being “green” in their increasing support for laws that protect the environment. Allen argues that “…Catholicism under Southern influence will also amount to a strong challenge to Western political and military dominances; to the West’s corporate interests; to its patterns of consumption and waste, approach to immigration and the environment, and cultural traditions of individualism and nationalism; and to its role as the architect of the globalized economic order.” Ibid., 435.

17 Ibid., 27.

18 Jenkins, Next Christendom, 92.

19 Allen, Future Church, 436.

20 Jenkins, Next Christendom, 256.

21 Ibid., 260. Jenkins continues by arguing that, from a global South perspective, if Christianity “is not exactly a faith based on the experience of poverty and persecution, then at least it regards these things as normal and expected elements of like…. A healthy distrust of worldly power and success is all the more necessary given the remarkable reversal of Christian fortunes over the ages.”

22 Ibid., 259.

23 Leopoldo A. Sánchez M., “Immigration,” in Miguel A. De La Torre, ed. Hispanic American Religious Cultures, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO, 2009), 295–297; for Segovia’s fuller proposal, see Fernando F. Segovia, “In The World but Not of It: Exile as Locus for a Theology of the Diaspora,” in Hispanic/Latino Theology: Challenge and Promise, eds. Ada María Isasi-Díaz and Fernando F. Segovia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996), 195–271.

24 Changing Faiths, Latinos and the Transformation of American Religion (Pew Research Center, 2007), 4.

Available online at http://pewforum.org/Changing-Faiths-Latinos-and-the-Transformation-of-American-Religion. aspx 25 Ibid., 1.

26 Ibid., 3.

27 To keep the number of defections in perspective, we should note that there is an issue of lack pastoral care in play given that in Latin America there is only about 1 priest for every 8,000 people. Moreover, to keep the broader global picture in perspective, Allen reminds us that, despite the conversions, the U.S. will still be the fourth largest Roman Catholic nation in the world in the 2050 with about 99 million members. See Allen, Future Church, 18.

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28 Jenkins, Next Christendom, 255.

29 Not surprisingly, the latest works in this area from Lutherans come from the global South. On pneumatology, see Leopoldo Sánchez, Pneumatología. El Espíritu Santo y la espiritualidad de la iglesia (St. Louis: Editorial Concordia, 2005), and on the gifts of the Spirit, see Omar Weber, Los dones del Espíritu Santo. La gracia de Dios en acción (St. Louis: Editorial Concordia, 2010).

30 Jenkins, Next Christendom, 4.

31 For a recent contribution, see Douglas R. Groll, La adoración bíblica. Enfoques hacia la adoración cristiana (St. Louis: Editorial Concordia, 2005); see also Relación entre culto y cultura (Geneva: Lutheran World Federation, 2000).

32 Apol. XIII, 3: “Therefore, signs instituted without the command of God are not sure signs of grace, even though they perhaps serve to teach or admonish the common folk.”

33 Some Lutherans have been contributing to reflection on the function of rites and symbols such as the Guadalupana, the cross, and other expressions of popular religiosity. See Maxwell E. Johnson, The Virgin of Guadalupe: Theological Reflections of an Anglo-Lutheran Liturgist (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Ricardo Willy Rieth, “The Lutheran Confessions and Popular Religiosity in Latin America,” in Dialog: A Journal of Theology 45 (Summer, 2006): 132–137; Carl C. Trovall, “Juan Diego: A Psychohistory of a Renegerative Man,” in American Magnificat: Protestants on Mary of Guadalupe, ed. Maxwell E. Johnson (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2010), 51–76; Douglas L. Rutt, “Luther, Tentatio, and Latin America,” LOGIA: A Journal of Lutheran Theology 19/1 (Epiphany 2010): 7–11, and “Ritual and Animism: Liturgical Symbols and Ritual in an Animistic Context—What Do They Mean?,” Missio Apostolica 5/1 (1997): 4–18.

34 Jenkins, Next Christendom, 257.

35 Ibid.

36 Changing Faiths, 4.

37 Some contributions from global South Lutherans include Aurelio Magariño, Justicia social en un mundo injusto. La iglesia como agente de cambio (St. Louis: Editorial Concordia, 2010), and Leopoldo A. Sánchez M., “The Struggle to Express Our Hope,” LOGIA: A Journal of Lutheran Theology 19/1 (Epiphany 2010): 25–31; “Misión e inmigración” and “Pedagogy for Working Among the Poor,” Missio Apostolica 16/1 (May 2008): 70–74, 81–84, and “Arizona Neighbor On My Mind,” a short piece written for ConcordiaTheology.org. Available at http://concordiatheology.org/2010/05/arizona-neighbor-on-my-mind/; Douglas Groll, “Pastoral Questions about Immigration Problems,” Concordia Journal (April 2006): 128–130.

38 Sánchez, “Toward an Ecclesiology of Catholic Unity and Mission in the Borderlands,” 28–31; and “Galilean Neighbor On My Mind,” a short piece written for ConcordiaTheology.Org. Available at http://concordiatheology.org/2010/10/galilean-neighbor-on-my-mind/ 39 Allen, Future Church, 28.

40 Sánchez, “Toward an Ecclesiology of Catholic Unity and Mission in the Borderlands,” 26–28.

41 Allen, Future Church, 453.

42 For other LCMS perspectives on institutional critiques and recommended responses, see Eloy S. González, “At the Edge of the Nation Reprised: On Marginality and the Hispanic Church,” Missio Apostolica 16/1 (May 2008): 22–34; Douglas R. Groll, “Lutherans with Hispanics in Ministry: Lessons Learned and Futures to Behold,” LOGIA: A Journal of Lutheran Theology 19/1 (Epiphany 2010): 13–16; on various Lutheran proposals for understanding and reaching out to U.S. Latinos, see Alberto L. García, “Cross-Cultural Keynotes for Mission and Ministry in the U.S. Hispanic/Latino Communities,” Missio Apostolica 8/1 (2000): 4–12; Mark Junkans, “In Search for a Lutheran Latino Church Planting Model: Reflections from a Church Planter on the Field,” Missio Apostolica 16/1 (May 2008): 35–45; and Melissa Salomón, “The Call to Community: What Hispanic/Latina Women Share with the Church,” and a brief response to Salomón’s reflections by Rose E. Adle, Missio Apostolica 16/1 (May 2008): 46–53.

43 Allen, Future Church,, 158.

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Homiletical Helps

COncordia Journal

Homiletical Helps on LSB Series A—Gospels Epiphany 6 • Matthew 5:21–37 • February 13, 2011

This passage is part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5 through 7.

Although, at first glance, the verses in our text appear to be totally law, they need to be seen in the greater context of the life of a Christian—living in response to the gospel.

Jesus is not describing how to attain righteousness or a place in the kingdom, but rather, having been declared righteous through faith in Jesus, having been given a place in the kingdom by the grace of God, Jesus describes how the citizens of his kingdom live.

As Christians, we are salt and light. What does that look like? We are blessed (Mt 5:3-12). What does that mean for how we live in relation to each other?

The verses of our text are part of a larger section that includes verses 21–48.

Jesus deals with six commands. Each one begins with, “you have heard that it was said.” Most references are to commands from the law of Moses, but the point of comparison is to the traditions of the Scribes and Pharisees (first century Judaism) associated with that command and the popular teaching of the day (much like the self-centered, tolerant, permissive mind-set of our own society) often limiting the extent of the command, weakening its impact or importance in one’s life. Jesus, speaking with authority, goes on to say, “But I myself say to you.” Here is what this command has meant all along.

The six areas of instruction are: murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, revenge, and love. The text deals with the first four. The gospel for Epiphany 7 deals with the last two.

One could develop a whole sermon on each one of these six areas of instruction.

But there are some common threads and themes that run through each of these sections that might help to focus our attention and our lives.

It is important to note that Jesus does not give a full exposition of each of these areas of sin, but shares some general truths. Cross-referencing other passages of Scripture that focus on the same sins can be helpful. Also, Jesus uses exaggeration or hyperbole to drive home his point. A literalistic or legalistic interpretation is not helpful to understanding what Jesus is teaching.

Jesus is concerned with our relationships with others. Our relationships with others are not independent of our relationship with him (horizontal and vertical relationships). Our relationship with Jesus must influence our relationships with others. Broken relationships with others will damage our relationship with Jesus.

Murder happens not just when someone takes another’s life. It happens through actions against another and even in words and in the attitudes of the heart. Not all anger and words of insult are murder, but when anger and words are intended to hurt or harm our neighbor and not for the purpose of seeking his good and well-being, these are sin, this is murder. It is especially bad when we treat each other in the church in this way. Do not neglect your relationships with fellow disciples. Those who follow Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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repent and turn away from this sin. Those who belong to Jesus will seek recJesus will onciliation. Those who refuse to be reconciled no longer belong to Jesus.

God desires there to be sexual purity among his disciples, not just in outward deeds, but in inner thoughts as well. A life of purity begins in the heart and extends out to relationships with others. “If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” Sin is often activated by the eye. What I choose to look at is important. I can choose to turn away, but to pluck out my eye or cut off my hand? Jesus uses hyperbole to drive home the need for radical action in dealing with impure thoughts. It is actually not the eye or the hand that causes us to sin, but the heart. “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” (Mt 15:19) So tear out the heart and throw it away. What we really need is a new heart, and that is what Jesus gives us, a heart transplant. “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Ps 51:10).

Divorce, like adultery, is sin. Both violate and destroy marriage, which is not just an invention of society, but a blessing given to us by God even before the fall. See also what Jesus says about divorce in Matthew 19:3–12 and what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 7. Jesus confronts the notion (very prevalent today) that divorce is no big deal. Divorce is never what God wants or intends for a marriage relationship. Divorce is sin. It shatters a sacred union that God intends to be permanent and that he wants to bless. It shatters and breaks lives. Do not divorce. Instead be faithful to your marriage promises.

Love and serve your marriage partner.

Our speech matters. Don’t use words lightly. To make a promise is no small matter. Be careful what you say, and let your word be your bond, your “yes” mean yes, and your “no” mean no. Don’t be deceitful. And don’t have an inflated view of your own importance (swearing by your own head implies that you actually have power to make it happen). Satan, the father of all lies, whose nature is deception, would have us believe his lies and half truths. Rather, let your words speak truth, and remember your humble position before God. So here is a picture of what salt and light look like, a picture of who we are and how we live with each other. Do we sin and fall short of God’s expectation for his children? Yes, indeed we do. Confronted with our sin and shortcomings, we repent and confess our sins of thought and attitude, word and deed, to God, asking forgiveness for Jesus’s sake and for the strength of God’s Spirit to turn away from these sins and live at peace with one another, loving and serving each other, as Christ Jesus continues to love and forgive us.

My thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Gibbs for his insights on this text in his Commentary on Matthew 1:1–11:1, from the Concordia Commentary Series, published by Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, 2006. A very helpful resource!

Wally Becker

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Epiphany 7 • Matthew 5:38–48 • February 20, 2011

Matthew wanted his Jewish readers to know and believe that Jesus is the promised Messiah and therefore shows him fulfilling Old Testament Scriptures. Jesus is portrayed as the climax of God’s grace to his people and to the world. This grace is complete and universal. For example, four non-Israelite women are included in Jesus’s genealogy, only in this Gospel do Gentiles honor the Christ child, and it finally concludes with the Great Commission.

The text under consideration is assigned to be read (and preached on) in the season of the church year known as Epiphany. The word “epiphany” is derived from the Greek word for “manifestation” or “appearance.” It is a time to remember/celebrate Christ’s manifestation to the Gentiles by the guiding light of the star. The king has appeared for all. Also remembered and celebrated is Christ’s manifestation to the Jews at his baptism. Here he begins his public ministry that leads him to the cross, the grave, and victory over death in resurrection.

Given all this, it seems somewhat odd at first glance that a text from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount should be assigned during the season of Epiphany. What do all the ethical imperatives in that text have to do with “light to the Gentiles?”

If you’ve ever been caught driving through a heavy downpour at night, then you know how difficult it can be to see where you are, much less where you are going. The occasional storm-produced flashes of lightning that arc across the sky, however, quickly and clearly reveal, for a split second, the true nature of things. You get a glimpse of how things really are and of what you will really encounter as you proceed down the road you are on.

The declarations of the Sermon on the Mount (including those in our text) have been fruitfully compared to flashes of lightning out of the kingdom of God. They are the brilliant flashes that illumine the path, the perils, the opportunities, and even the final destination in the twinkling of an eye. Suddenly everything is clear, although the darkness quickly closes in again. Thus, taking cues from our text, we know that the kingdom road we are on is one where the evil person is not resisted, where the other cheek is turned, where we literally do give the “shirt off our back,” as well as our coat, where we go the extra mile, where we give and borrow whenever and to whomever asks, where we love our enemies, and where we pray for our persecutors. And this is all summed up in 5:48 where it says: “You shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

To me, this verse has the ring of Leviticus 19:2, where it says, “You shall be holy.” There is a word of law here, to be sure, but there is also a word of gospel: “You shall be holy.” God is in the process of making us what he has already declared us to be!

There’s an old educational adage that asserts, “You teach what you know, but you only reproduce what you demonstrate.” It seems that Jesus understood this full well, for he is showing us in our text that we are on the kingdom road not only because of what he taught, but especially because of what he demonstrated for us and for our Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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Go back over the exhortations in the text. Are they not perfectly fulfilled in salvation. and by him who was “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering;” who was “oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth;” who was “led like a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before her shearers is silent so he did not open his mouth;” and who “bore the sins of many and made intercession for the transgressors” (Is 53: 3, 7, 12 NIV)?

We live, move, and have our being in a time, place, and culture that is decidedly postmodern, post-Christian, and often very anti-church. More and more we face not just disinterested and apathetic onlookers, but ungodly and aggressive gainsayers who rail against the faith we have staked our lives on. How are we to deal with such people?

This text is not so much about us as it is about Jesus and his radical love for people. Out of love and grace and mercy, he causes his rain to fall upon the just and the unjust. Out of his radical love and grace and mercy, he shows, calls, and equips us to become what we are already declared to be. Jesus is all about people; even, and maybe even especially, about those who are his enemies.

“He is an agnostic.” “She is an atheist.” “They are hell-bent on attacking and hurting the church and the faith we confess!”

Categorizing others creates distance and gives us a convenient exit strategy for avoiding involvement. Jesus took an entirely different approach. He was all about including people, not excluding them. “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood” (Jn 1:14 MSG). Jesus spent thirty-three years walking in the mess of this world and dealing with all kinds of unhappy, dysfunctional folks. “He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, becoming human!” (Phil 2:6–7 MSG).

In our lifetimes we are going to come across all kinds of unhappy people; angry at the church, angry at us, angry at God. They may be mean. They may even be malicious. They won’t deserve any kindness or consideration we show them. And we get to choose. Limit our exposure to them or love them? We know Jesus’s choice. Just look at what he did with us.

William Utech

Epiphany 8 • Matthew 6:24–34 • February 27, 2011

The Text as Text The text is in overall good condition, and the few substantive issues do not materially affect the overall interpretation of the passage. In verse 25 the words “or what you will drink” are of questionable authenticity (but cf. v. 31 where they are clearly original). Similarly, in the phrase in verse 33 “the kingdom of God and his righteousness” the words “of God” are of questionable authenticity. Both are included in brackets in the standard text of NA27 but are omitted in the newer SBL Greek New 62

Testament text. However, the possessive modifier of the phrase “his righteousness” (v.

33) appears to require an antecedent and argues for the authenticity of the words “of God” there.

The translation presents no special difficulties, and the differences among English translations are relatively minor. The verb merimna,w occurs six times in this short passage (6:25, 27, 28, 31, and twice in verse 34), and thus requires some comment. The verb is sometimes used in the general sense of to “attend to” or “take care of” something. It is also used to convey the sense of anxiety attendent to things that need to be taken care of. This distinction gives rise to the word-play of verse 34, where the first instance carries the sense of anxiety and the second instance the more general sense of to “take care of.” The ESV translates both instances as “be anxious,” but the point would be better conveyed by distinguishing the two senses by translating, “Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself.”

The Text as Literature The passage is part of the Sermon on the Mount, and doubtless represents a central theme of Jesus’s preaching.

Our pericopal system includes verse 24, which in many translations is treated as either a separate proverbial saying or as the conclusion of the preceding unit (cf. the ESV). In favor of this separation is the fact that the Lukan parallel to verse 24 is found in Luke 16:13 (the conclusion to the parable of the dishonest steward) rather than with the parallel to the rest of this discourse in Luke 12:22–31. However, a connection between the two segments of the discourse is established by the text itself through the introductory phrase Dia. tou/to (ESV “therefore”). Thus, the admonition to trust in God and not worry about the things necessary to sustain this life is rooted in the fact that one can not be equally devoted to two competing interests.

The turning point in the discourse is the rhetorical question of verse 30. We should especially note how Jesus deals with the fact that his followers are ovligo,pistoi “people of little faith.” In addition to this passage, Jesus addresses the concern that his disciples were ovligo,pistoi in Matthew 8(:26), 14(:31), and 16(:8), as well as in the passage parallel to ours in the Gospel of Luke (12:28). In each of these instances Jesus comforts and reassures the disciples and does not simply criticize them for their weakness. Here the comfort arises not only from the examples preceding the question, but also from the explicit statement that follows, “[Y]our heavenly Father knows that you need them all” (6:32).

The Text as Theology The admonition recalls God’s dealing with his people throughout their history.

In the wilderness God provided not only food (manna and quail, Ex 16) but also drink (Ex 15:22 ff. and 17:1–7) and clothing (Dt 8:4, 29:5; Neh 9:21). Through these trials God sought “to teach you that a person does not live by bread alone, but a person lives by everything that comes from the mouth of the the Lord” (Dt 8:3, cf. Mt 4:4).

The teaching of Jesus in this account recalls the people to this truth and to the fact that God knows their needs and provides for them. The words that close the passage, Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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the disciples that “each day will take care of itself,” especially recall the way reminding in which God provided just enough manna to meet the needs of the people one day at a time.

Similarly, Jesus’s words recall the prophecy of Isaiah that is used as the Old Testament lesson for this Sunday, Isaiah 49:8–16a, that “in the day of salvation” (Is 49:8) God will lead his people on a new Exodus and will provide for them food and water for their pilgrimage because he has not forgotten them (Is 49:15), but has engraved them on the palms of his hands (Is 49:16). By connecting his ministry to these Old Testament deeds and promises, Jesus declares that his ministry has inaugurated the “day of salvation” of which Isaiah speaks.

Proclamation As people of little faith (ovligo,pistoi) we are often more preoccupied with the cares and needs of life in this world than with the kingdom of God and his righteousness. Too often life’s thorns threaten to choke our faith (Mt 13:1 ff.). Like the Israelites in the wilderness, we hesitate to trust God to provide our daily manna.

Some people take the words of Jesus in our text as an order to ignore or neglect the needs of this life. Others are tempted to use disdain for the needs of this life as a kind of measuring stick for how good a Christian one is. Both miss the point of Jesus’s words. God is not saying that the needs of this life in the world are irrelevant. (Indeed, he knows that they are necessary (6:32) and so he promises to provide them.) Rather, Jesus reminds us that God has liberated his people from the need to be preoccupied with the things necessary to sustain life in the here and now and frees them to focus on the kingdom of God. But this text is not really about us, it is about the kingdom of God. The words of Jesus are a declaration that in him the kingdom of God has come. By connecting his ministry with God’s promise of the coming eschatological kingdom, Jesus declares that he is the one who will accomplish the day of salvation to which Isaiah points (Is 49:8), of which a central characteristic is God’s provision for those who are engraved on the palm of his hands (Is 49:16).

David L. Adams

Transfiguration Sunday • Matthew 17:1–9 • March 6, 2011

True Glory If there is one point that the Transfiguration pericope makes, it is that Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. A number of the spectacular details of the text point in this direction. The disciples see Moses and Elijah talking with Jesus.

Since Moses is the great law-giver and Elijah is the great prophet, this scene may be understood as a dramatic representation of the fact that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets.1 The cloud is also an Old Testament phenomenon that indicates the presence of the Lord’s glory (see Ex 40:34–35). The voice from heaven evokes a number of Old 64

Testament passages, which will be discussed below.

To say that Jesus fulfills the Old Testament, however, does not yet tell us precisely what the Transfiguration says about Jesus’s identity. A number of strands come together here to make a multi-faceted point about who Jesus is. His shining face and clothing is a mark of God’s presence. Moses’s face shone from being in the presence of the Lord (Ex 34:29) (though he did not shine “like the sun”), and in Revelation, heavenly beings and objects are often described as “shining.”2 The voice from heaven says, “listen to him” (Mt 17:5), which strongly evokes Moses’s words in Deuteronomy 18:15, “The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen.”

The other phrase from the voice from heaven, “this is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased,” reminds the reader not only of Jesus’s baptism, but of at least three Old Testament passages. In Psalm 2, similar words are spoken to the king of Israel: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you” (Ps 2:7). In Isaiah, similar words are spoken to the suffering servant: “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one, in whom my soul delights” (Is 42:1). In this case, the verbal echo is somewhat clearer in the LXX because the Greek word used for “servant” (pai/j) can also mean “child.” Finally, the reader cannot help but think of the words the Lord spoke to Abraham, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you” (Gn 22:2).

If we assume that the voice from heaven is intentionally evoking these three passages, then we may conclude that this voice offers a multivalent revelation of Jesus’s identity.

In one sentence, it identifies him as the king of Israel, the suffering servant, and a sacrifice, in addition to identifying him as the prophet of Deuteronomy 18:15, mentioned above.

It would be difficult to present all of this data in one sermon without making the sermon sound like a mere list of Bible passages. Therefore, it is advisable to select one or two of these themes. For example, one could focus on the contrast between Jesus as the king of Israel (drawing on the Ps 2 reference as well as the glory of his shining face and clothes) and Jesus as the sacrifice (drawing on Is 42 or Gn 22). How can Jesus be a glorious king and a lowly sacrifice at the same time?

We might be tempted to think that Jesus’s humiliation and death are a momentary exception to his true identity as mighty king and God, a blip on the radar screen, as it were. He underwent these things for our salvation, but his humiliation and suffering do not reveal to us anything about his true identity.

Such reasoning, however, fails to see that the Transfiguration includes both facets of his identity, humiliation and exaltation, at the same time. Furthermore, in the larger context of Matthew, there is the strong suggestion that Jesus’s reign as king happens when he is crucified. Many of the details of the passion narrative identify Jesus as king. The soldiers make fun of him with a scarlet robe, a mock scepter, a crown of thorns, and jeers of “hail, King of the Jews!” (Mt 27:27–31). The sign above his head on the cross also said, “This is Jesus, the King of the Jews” (Mt 27:37). Thus, his suffering and death cannot so easily be distinguished from his glorious reign as king.

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The key homiletical application of this point is that we need not fear the majesty that Jesus reveals in his transfiguration. We know that his glory is to show mercy and his strength is to stoop down to help the weak. That is the truth that the voice from heaven subtly inserts into the glory of the Transfiguration with the words, “This is my beloved Son.” David R. Maxwell Endnotes

1 Cf. W.F. Albright and C.S. Mann, Matthew, The Anchor Bible Commentary Series (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1971), 203.

2 Ibid.

Lent 1 • Matthew 4:1–11 • March 13, 2011

Introduction In general, you find that in Middle Eastern and African cultures food quite often is used in a time for fellowship, a symbol of hospitality and the welcome of a stranger.

In our text, though, we see how the devil uses food to advance his attack on Jesus; something he thought could easily derail Jesus’s mission. Imagine this: the devil started his dirty tricks on Jesus just when he thought the time was right, when Jesus had been fasting and must have been hungry. Do you realize by what method the devil introduces his lies? He uses a conditional statement, which in my way of thinking suggests the “doubting Thomas” tactic. “If you are the Son of God . . .” (Mt 4:3, and Jn 20:27).

And so the devil, by conditionally referring to Jesus as “the Son of God,” is subjecting Jesus’s divinity and lordship to doubt (interestingly something which is similar to the Muslim contention of the Quran Sura 9:30). Yet in spite of the devil’s (the Arabic equivalent is Iblis) deception, as Christians we affirm Jesus’s divinity and lordship as timeless truth.

In continuation, there are two other lies told by the devil. In verse 5, the devil asks Jesus to throw himself down, while showing him the temple. Next, the devil’s promise of kingdoms if Jesus will worship him essentially points back to Deuteronomy 5:6–7, that there is only one God (the word in Arabic for this doctrine is Tawhid), neither should there be any graven image of him. In verse 8, the devil alludes to power and influence, but the devil’s “power and influence” holds no sway over Jesus. After all, the whole universe already belongs to God. There are several key elements worth noting while reading this text, especially the devil’s final temptation for Jesus to worship him. First, in pagan religions, gods are represented both in human and animal forms. Second, the imageless worship of the invisible God is a fundamental characteristic of Mosaic faith. Third, the sense of covenant here is strong, especially of the Sinai tradition and its deliberations.

The implications of the text in our contemporary world and lives In my African context, speaking about the devil is not an imagination or fiction, nor is it a delusion. Most Africans would perhaps notably envisage the devil (or some66

thing similar called by other names) interchangeably with Satan or an evil spirit. They might conceive of him most notably through his evil works as a tempter or as an evil destructive agent. Still, he would be branded as one who motivates conduct or might even possess someone who might be seen as cunning or perpetrating evil deeds in society or the church. As a pastor, you might sometimes feel as though you can see some actions as being of the devil. And so it was with Jesus later in Matthew 16:23, when he said, “Get behind me, Satan.” The devil is real. This we know to be true.

During this period of Lent, perhaps it would be best to remind ourselves of the many tricks of the devil. They are numerous, and he knows no limits or boundaries. In these days of culture wars, we are witnessing an invasion of nearly every matter considered godly. The devil uses the relativistic tendencies in our culture to marginalize Christian morality and ethics.

In the Lutheran service of holy baptism the question is asked, “Do you renounce the devil?” The sponsors and the congregation respond, “We renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways.” That pledge, I am sure, must be said with some degree of humility, knowing that our struggle is against the power of evil (Eph 6:12). And so, while we are still on this side of heaven, we try to defeat the evil in us. Victory in all of our battles with evil is achieved only through the power and aid of the Holy Spirit.

There is a responsibility on our side as Christians to be in the word, so that, like our Lord, a good knowledge of the word can equip us to counter the devil’s tricks and his evil deceptions.

Finally, as we apply this text to our daily personal lives and in our corporate lives as a community, we can gain three lessons. First, there will be struggle and vulnerability in our lives. Secondly, we are bound to be tempted or swayed by the evil one.

And third, there will always be victory in Christ. When sometimes it may appear that the devil seems to be in triumph, let us always remember there will be joy in the morning when victory comes and evil is defeated. And then, like our Lord, we take joy and comfort that we are never alone, that the Lord takes care of his own, and that the same angels who ministered to Jesus minister to us.

John Loum

Lent 2 • John 3:1–17 • March 20, 2011

“For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified…”

It was because of the signs that Nicodemus came to Jesus: “Rabbi, we know you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs (shmei/a) that you do unless God is with him.” So far, John has recounted only the first sign at the wedding at Cana—the miracle of the water turned to wine—but the evangelist admits at the end (20:30–31) that he has left out much: “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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in his name.”

So Nicodemus saw many signs, but the faith that leads to life remained elusive. Indeed, seeing is not the foundational category for the kingdom of God. The wind is unseen, and yet its breezes still refresh. So it is with the Spirit of God. But if Nicodemus wants to talk of signs, then Jesus will direct him to a better one. He sends this “teacher of Israel” back to the Torah to consider the sign of the bronze serpent: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (pa/j o` pisteu,wn evn auvtw/| e;ch| zwh.n aivw,nion). Here Jesus’s words echo Numbers 21:8, “Whoever bitten, seeing it, will live” (LXX: pa/j o` dedhgme,noj ivdw.n auvto.n zh,setai), with the notable exchange of “seeing” for “believing.” The climax of the evangelist’s commentary on faith and sight (Thomas in 20:25f., but see also 1:18, 4:48, 5:37, 6:30, 6:36, 6:40, 8:56, 12:40, 14:9, 20:8) is foreshadowed here.

But most striking is the sign itself, and the point of comparison is unmistakable.

In Numbers 21, Moses is instructed to put the serpent upon a “pole” or “standard” (snE) for the salvation of the people—in the same way the Son of Man will be lifted up. If Nicodemus desires a sign of God’s kingdom and salvation, then he will need to be confronted with the cross. The point is further strengthened by the fact that the Septuagint translates “standard” (snE) with shmei/on—the same word employed by the evangelist for Jesus’ miraculous “signs.” The two words can mean both “standard” and “miracle,” and the double meaning is especially exploited here (later rabbinic commentary on Numbers could likewise play with the ambiguity of the Hebrew word: “And Moses made a serpent of brass, and set it up by a miracle. He cast it into the air and it stayed there.”1). Jesus crucified is the greatest shmei/on of all—the miracle of the cross.

It is the consummation of all the signs that Jesus performed, the greatest demonstration of God’s power and glory and kingdom. “There is no miracle in the passion narrative.

This is not because the story of Jesus ceases to have the value of revelation; in fact, the death and resurrection are the supreme shmei/on.”2 Nicodemus would eventually see this sign too. He would see Jesus lifted up on the cross, and he would gently bring him down and bury him. Whether such sight yielded to faith is not said. It is a grisly sign, a scandal and offense to the eyes. But to them that believe, it is the greatest sign and miracle of all. This Lent, may we see again this greatest of Jesus signs and believe, “that by believing we may have life in his name.”

Erik Herrmann

Endnotes

1 H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, eds., Midrash Rabbah: Numbers, trans. Judah Slotki (London: The Soncino Press, 1939), 19.23, 772.

2 C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, (London: SPCK, 1955), 65.

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Lent 3 • John 4:5–26 (27–30, 39–42) • March 27, 2011

Life is never the same after you drink of this water!

The familiar Samaritan woman text is seldom set in the context of the Gospel’s broader presentation of Jesus as the one who bears and gives the Spirit, the one upon whom the Spirit rests and who baptizes with the Holy Spirit (1:29–34). Towards the beginning of the Gospel, the Son’s descent from the Father to become the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world is accompanied by the Spirit’s descent and remaining on him. Towards the end of the Gospel, the Son’s ascent to the Father as the glorified Lord is accompanied by the Son’s handing over of his Spirit from the cross and his breathing of the Spirit to the disciples so that they might forgive sinners (19:28–30 and 20:19–23). It is such handing over and breathing upon of the Spirit that fulfills what John refers to as the Son’s baptizing with the Spirit.

Between these bookends, this broad movement from the Son’s descent to his ascent, from his bearing of to his baptizing with the Spirit, we find some pivotal events that expound on Jesus’s identity as sender of the Spirit. One of these events is Jesus’s promise, on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles, that rivers of living water will flow from the heart of those who believe in him (7:37–39). At the time, it was customary for the high priest to pour water from the pool of Siloam onto the temple altar where sacrifices were offered to God. In this feast, Jesus, God’s lamb, tabernacle, and temple in our midst, now promises to be the source of life-giving “water.” The evangelist explains to the reader that Jesus was referring to the Spirit whom believers were to receive upon his glorification. In John’s Gospel, the Son’s glorification corresponds to his ascent to the Father, which begins concretely with the Son’s “hour,” or being lifted up on the cross so that everyone who believes in him might have life (Cf. 3:3–15, 17:1–5). It is from that cross that the lamb of God, upon whom the Spirit rests, now hands over his Spirit as the glorified Son to others. From the side of the crucified Jesus, who is the temple (cf. 2:18–22), flowed water and blood, which in John’s highly symbolic Gospel signifies respectively the Son’s sacrificial death and giving of the Spirit (19:34). At the end of the Gospel, the risen Lord, who died for the sin of the world, now also breathes the Spirit upon his disciples, giving them the power and authority to proclaim forgiveness of sins to the world.

Another pivotal event that not only expounds on Jesus’s identity as the giver of the Spirit, but also brings it to fulfillment in a proleptic way (or by anticipation) is his promise of “living water” to the Samaritan woman in John 4. On the basis of John 7, the reference is to the Holy Spirit, the “gift of God” (4:10), whom Jesus will give to all who believe in him, and who will flow from them like “a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (4:14b). In John’s Gospel, the Son sent from above speaks the words of God because God has given him the Spirit without measure (3:31–34). Jesus’s words are “Spirit and life” (6:63–65), both Spirit-breathed and Spirit-giving, bringing people to belief in the Son in whom there is resurrection unto eternal life (cf. 6:40). In our text, Jesus’s life-giving words bring with them the life-giving water and gift of the Spirit to the Samaritan woman.

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The blessings that follow from such gifting are many, but these are all oriented towards one thing alone, namely, new life according to the Spirit who comes from Jesus. There are a series of stark before-and-after contrasts drawn in the text between life before and after Jesus. The difference lies in the gift of the Spirit who orients the life of the Samaritan in another direction. Life is never the same after you drink of this water! Here are some of those contrasts: 1. John 4:5–15 — Before the gift of the Spirit, the Samaritan woman can only see life in terms of her lineage, her ancestors’ link to Jacob, Joseph, and the blessed well. After the gift of the Spirit, the Samaritan woman must see her life in terms of a more lasting lineage, namely, her relationship with God through Jesus, who is greater than Jacob, and her fellowship with those who put their trust in this Messiah.

2. John 4:16–36 — Before: the Samaritan can only see devotion to God in terms of a particular dear holy place (Mount Gerizim). After: the Samaritan must see devotion to God in terms of faith in Jesus, God’s “truth” (cf. 14:6–7), which amounts to worship “in the Spirit” (cf. 14:15–17). Since Jesus is God’s temple and presence in our midst, one looks for God neither on Mt. Gerizim nor in Jerusalem. Instead, one looks to his Son and Messiah through whom we have access to the Father (cf. 1:18, 14:8–11).

3. John 4:16–19, 27–42 — Before: the reader of the text is invited, along with Jesus’s suspecting disciples, to see the Samaritan woman’s life as one of limitations, disappointments, failures, and sins. After: the reader is invited to see the work of God in the life of a suspect outsider and thus to celebrate her new life in Jesus and the extension of that life through the woman’s bold witness to her countrymen.

The preacher can draw from or focus on any of these contrasts as he proclaims to hearers of the Word that Jesus indeed gives “to you” today the same Holy Spirit, the same water, the same gift of God, that he promised to the Samaritan woman in the past. Such proclamation will have at least the twofold purpose of calling to repentance those who live as if the Spirit had not been given to them (law) and of offering the promise of the Spirit anew to those who feel as if they do not deserve it (gospel).

Leopoldo A. Sánchez M.

Lent 4 • John 9:1–41 • April 3, 2011

John 9 is the appointed gospel lesson for the Fourth Sunday in Lent (Series A).

The appointed Old Testament lesson works well with the gospel lesson, since Isaiah 42:14–21 announces both God’s promise to lead the blind and his rebuke of ancient Israel for its spiritual blindness. Jesus picks up this Isaianic theme and focuses on its fulfillment. Jesus is the light of the world, not a static light, but the one who gives light and sight to the blind.

John 9 records the sixth “sign” when Jesus gave sight to a man born blind on a sabbath day. The time is during Jesus’s third trip to Jerusalem, and the location is set outside the temple (8:59). The preacher might consider an expository style that walks

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the entire chapter in summary form in order to highlight the layers and ironic through reversals revealed in the entire narrative.

Jesus “saw” a man who had been blind from birth. Jesus can “see” people in need and he takes the initiative. His disciples, presumably the Twelve (last mentioned in 6:67–71), assumed a constant and predictable nexus between a person’s actual sins and his maladies. Since the man was born blind, they wondered if he sinned or his parents. Jesus corrected his disciples by focusing on the purpose, the “final cause” (to use Aristotle’s distinction), that God’s works might be displayed in him. During his public ministry Jesus was sent by God to do the works of God. So also his disciples in fellowship with Jesus were to do the works of God (“we” is the most likely reading in 9:4).

Jesus repeats, “I am the light of the world” (8:12). As the light he shines in the darkness and enlightens everyone (1:4-9). Jesus used the physical elements of mud and his own saliva to give the blind man sight. His divine power does not deal with people directly and immediately, but in, with, and through his own human nature and with earthly elements. The blind man hearkened to Jesus’s words and returned seeing.

The rest of the narrative consists of conversations. The first is between the man and his neighbors and acquaintances (9:8–12). The formerly blind man testified to what happened. He is the key public witness for Jesus. So far, the only thing the man knew about Jesus is that he was “the man called Jesus.”

In the next paragraph (vv. 13–17), the man testifies before the Pharisees. They dispute whether Jesus is “from God,” and there is a schism among them. When the name of Jesus enters, there is always a division (7:43; 10:19). Now the man confesses that Jesus is “a prophet” (9:17). In the next scene “the Jews” (here John’s designation for the Pharisees) disbelieve the “sign.” They interviewe the man’s parents, who testify to their son’s previous blindness. But they are afraid to testify more, because of the Pharisees’ pact to exclude anyone who confesses that Jesus is “the Christ/Messiah/ Anointed One” (cf. 7:13; 12:42; 16:2).

So the Pharisees, with hostility, interview the man a second time. They claim to know that Jesus is a sinner (9:24). The man testifies that Jesus must be “from God.” Ironically, the Pharisees end up taking a position that was initially raised by the disciples (v. 2). They accuse the man of being born in sin. They reject the man’s witness and cast him out, as agreed upon earlier. But Jesus finds him and asks him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” (=the more likely reading). The man asks “Who is he?” Jesus identifies himself as the one whom he saw and heard. Faith comes by hearing. The man now “gives glory to God” (v. 24) by confessing that he “believes,” by calling Jesus “Lord,” and by worshiping him (v. 38). Through the word, the man now sees spiritually and not only physically.

Division is inevitable. Jesus is from God, not from the world. He came into the world to do God’s works, for judgment (krima), that the blind may spiritually see and the sighted may become spiritually blind (v. 39). In one sense he came for the world’s judgment and to cast out its ruler (12:31). But in another sense he came not “to judge the world but to save the world” (12:47). How did he do that? By submitting to the world’s darkness as the atoning sacrifice for the world (9:4). On the third day God Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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raised him from the dead, so that now his light shines in every land where his words are retold, where he gives new birth through water and the Spirit (Jn 3), where his flesh and blood are received in faith (Jn 6).

Paul R. Raabe

Lent 5 • John 11:1–53 • April 10, 2011

When Confronted with Adversity In preparing to proclaim the biblical truths of John 11, the preacher would do well to keep in mind John’s words in 20:31, “. . . these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” Here in chapter 11, Jesus is clearly revealed as the Christ, the son of God—the very one who gives life. Here we see his power and authority. Here we see his compassion and love. Here we see that he is in complete control of the situation as he moves toward Jerusalem where he will fulfill the Father’s plan of salvation.

In Holy Baptism we receive the gift of faith. Here we become forever connected with our true God—our creator, savior, and sanctifier. In baptism (the apostle Paul teaches) we too have a Lazarus-like resurrection, having passed through death into life with our Lord. In baptism we are assured of the forgiveness of sins. In baptism we are assured of God’s blessing in this life and in the life to come. And so, when the inevitable adversities of life come our way, we need to turn to him who not only has the desire, but also the power and ability to help us in our time of need—the one who is true to his word and faithful to his promises.

In John 11, adversity comes to the home of Mary and Martha. Their beloved brother Lazarus becomes very sick and dies. They call out to Jesus, who comes and raises Lazarus from the dead. While this results in awe, joy, and gratitude for them and their community, it also leads to adversity for the church leaders—the Sanhedrin.

“Something needs to be done,” they say. “If he keeps doing things like this then everyone will believe in him, and we will lose our place.” (It is interesting to note that the religious leaders do not deny the miracle, but react to it.) And Caiaphas adds, “It is better that one man should die for the people.” Their response to adversity was to condemn Jesus to death. Nevertheless, even in this meeting of corrupt Jewish religious leaders, we see the hand of God—a hand that is in complete control.

How will we respond when adversity enters our lives? The Scriptures encourage us to call on Jesus Christ—because of who he is (the Son of God and Savior of the world) and because of the truth of his word. When he says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” he is telling the truth!

Sometimes our prayers are answered almost immediately. Sometimes, however, the answer is very long in coming. And sometimes the answer which we want never comes. It is when the answer is long in coming or when it never comes as we want it that our faith is sorely tried. That was the situation with Mary and Martha. They had prayed fervently to God for help; they had also sent a personal message to Jesus. But 72

not respond. He doesn’t even come to see Lazarus. He lets Lazarus die.

Jesus did And yet, across the black shadow of this devastating illness fell the golden ray of Christ’s words here in our text: “This illness is not unto death; it is for the glory of God.” The religious leaders thought that, “it would be better for one man to die for the people.” And yes, this too is “for the glory of God!” There are many wonderful examples of how God allowed adversity to impact the lives of others for eternity. From Scripture, we immediately think of Joseph, and the apostle Paul. As we deal with adversity in our life, we need to hold fast to the promises of our baptism and the promises of our Lord. “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die” (Jn 11:25–26).

Robert Hoehner Palm Sunday • John 12:12–19 • April 17, 2011

A Victory Parade—on a Donkey?

Goal: That the hearers more firmly believe that Jesus is victorious over our greatest enemies.

(The following is one approach that focuses Jesus’s victory over his/our enemies by way of riding into Jerusalem on a donkey.)

Perhaps you’ve seen the old movie clips about the welcome home those in the military received at the end of World War II. Flags lined the parade route. Guests of honor rode in the best cars in town. People turned out from all around. Applause and shouts of thanksgiving could be heard as the line of cars drove by. Paper and streamers swirled in the wind. One look at the celebration and you knew immediately it was a victory parade.

Things haven’t changed much. Go back to biblical days. When a king conquered another nation or a general captured a city, he returned to a celebration. Since paper wasn’t available, many waved palm branches, a symbol of victory. People would come out of the city to welcome home the victors. Shouts and cheers would go up around the city. The king would ride triumphant on a mighty steed, a horse that stood tall and pranced around in pride. One look at this ancient celebration and you knew immediately it was a victory parade.

Jesus rides into Jerusalem to begin the last week of his life. People are following him into the city. Jerusalem is packed with people who have come to celebrate the religious festival called the Passover. Many of those in the city come out to join the crowds that are already showering Jesus with praise. Palm branches are being waved in victory. People are chanting “hosanna.” They are shouting out that Jesus is the king of Israel. One look at this celebration and you know immediately it’s a victory parade.

Except Jesus is on a donkey. He’s not in a fancy chariot. He’s not on a horse that stands tall and mighty. He’s on little donkey. The donkey is young and hasn’t been ridden before. It’s not been in a war. It’s not impressive. It’s a donkey.

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And yet, the donkey is the key to what Jesus’s victory was all about. Verse 16 says the disciples did not understand these things at first, but when Jesus was glorified, then they remembered. It seems the disciples weren’t paying attention to the donkey during this victory parade. If they had, they might have understood just what kind of victory Jesus would bring. The same is true for us. We know about the palms, the people shouting, but our eyes need to focus on the donkey. Because the donkey points out the enemies Jesus came to defeat.

Who were Jesus’s enemies? Well, the people back then thought it was the Romans who had conquered Israel and had soldiers all over the place. They were hoping that Jesus would bring Israel back to its glory days of King David. They were hoping they would be free and secure, protected from anybody ever oppressing them again.

And it was true that the Romans could be considered Jesus’s enemy since they nailed him to the cross.

But the list of enemies only begins with the Romans. A greater enemy turns out to be his own people, the religious leaders, the Pharisees and chief priests. Just a few days before this victory parade, Jesus did an incredible miracle. His friend Lazarus had died. He had been in a tomb four days. Jesus comes and with a simple command, “Lazarus, come out,” Jesus brought his friend back to life again. No wonder so many people were following Jesus into Jerusalem and coming out to meet him.

But behind the scenes, the religious leaders were not happy. They gathered together as a council. The heart of the discussion went like this, “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” During the victory parade, they accused each other, “You see that you are gaining nothing. Look, the world has gone after him.”

The next step by these enemies was to get Judas to betray Jesus. Then they would arrest him, falsely accuse him, and condemn him to death. They would get the crowd to yell, “crucify him,” instead of “hosanna.” They would get the Romans to execute him. Jesus’s enemies are some of his own people.

But we still haven’t gone far enough. Jesus’s enemies are not just his own people.

An even greater enemy is what’s driving the Pharisees and priests to do what they’re doing. Jealousy—the people are following Jesus instead of them. Fear—they may lose their privileged position that gives them power. Hatred—Jesus is telling them they need to change their lives and follow him. Greed—Jesus attacks their money making schemes in the temple. Anger—they are upset that Jesus is letting the people worship him instead of God alone.

Now that brings all this closer to home, doesn’t it? Greed, anger, hatred, jealousy, fear come from deep within all of us. We call it sin, and we know it as the dark places in our hearts and minds. We see it in the world around us, and we can’t stop from being infected ourselves. A whole demonic world, led by Satan, tempts everyone to give in to these ugly enemies of Jesus.

But we still haven’t gone far enough. One more enemy to name; it is our last and greatest enemy. Last year, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran a cartoon (Wiley Miller, Non Sequitur, Oct. 29, 2010) playing off GPS technology. That is the helpful device used when you are driving, that gives you directions to a location by telling you when 74

to turn, using a map on a small screen. In the cartoon, a box reads “The Inevitable Navigation System.” The picture is of a cemetery, with a number of headstones and one grave, freshly dug. A car has driven into that open grave. The voice coming from the car is the GPS saying, “You have arrived at your destination.” The comic strip uses humor to open our eyes to reality. The last great enemy we face is death itself, the punishment for greed, jealousy, anger, hatred, fear, and everything else that put Jesus on the donkey.

Do you see who the real enemies are? Not just some Roman soldiers or a few religious leaders back then. Jesus is going up against the very enemies that haunt us. He is going to battle against the dark places in our hearts and minds. He is taking on our worst enemies: sin, the wickedness that infests this world we live in, and Satan himself.

His war is ultimately against our greatest enemy—death and the grave.

And how does Jesus go into battle against all these enemies? On a donkey.

Sounds strange, especially since the donkey was an animal of peace, not war. It was an animal that conveyed humility and gentleness, not violence and bloodshed.

But a war was going on, and Jesus would ride right into the worst of what his enemies, our enemies, would do to him. He would not resort to violence, but the Romans beat him up. He was manhandled and whipped to within an inch of his life.

And blood was shed. Not the blood of the Romans, the Pharisees, the priests or the people who yelled out “crucify him,” but Jesus’s blood. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, humble and gentle, seeking to bring peace. Indeed, he was the prince of peace.

And his enemies, our enemies, attacked him.

Last Christmas season, I received a catalog from Bronners in the mail. Bronners is a huge Christmas decoration and ornament store in Frankenmuth, Michigan. One of the ornaments caught my attention. It’s a donkey–shaped decoration. It has a legend associated with it. I’ll read what the catalog says: “Legend tells us that the donkey that carried Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday followed Him to Calvary. Appalled by the sight of Jesus on the cross, the donkey turned away but would not leave. It is said that the shadow of the cross fell upon the shoulders and back of the donkey. A cross marking found on many donkeys today remains a testimony of the love and devotion of a humble, little donkey.” (Bronner’s Christmas Favorites, 2010 Catalog, 9. It can also be found online at http://www.bronners. com/product/donkey-legend-ornament/1106520.)

Actually, I would say that the cross marking on the donkey reminds us of the love and devotion of Jesus. He rode into Jerusalem for one purpose, and that was to make the victory parade come true. He was riding into Jerusalem to become our Prince of Peace. He was riding on a donkey to show just how he would defeat all our enemies.

So how did Jesus gain the victory? He let those enemies do their worst to him.

He did not stop the violence done to him. He willingly went to the cross. All our greed, fear, hatred, jealousy, anger, sin, evil, and death surrounded him. And when darkness covered the earth, it looked like those enemies had won. It looked like Jesus had been defeated. He was beaten, battered, bloodied and buried. Satan and all the powers of evil had to be cheering. They thought they had won.

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But we know better. We know what happened next. We know of a morning that shattered the darkest places of sin and evil. We know of a stone that was rolled away and of the hatred, jealousy, fear, anger and greed that had been overcome by the prince of peace. We know of a savior who rises from the dead to defeat death once and for all.

And then the disciples understood. Jesus’s victory was bigger than pushing back a few soldiers or greedy, threatened religious leaders. His victory was over everything sin and death could do to us. And it came by riding into town on a donkey. It came by way of a cross. It came because of his victorious resurrection from the dead.

And the victory parade has been going on ever since. Every hymn of praise we sing is added to the sounds of the parade. Every prayer we say raises the volume of that celebration. Every day we follow Jesus in faith and obedience, we’re joining the crowds who followed Jesus that first Palm Sunday. Every act of devotion and love for Jesus is like the palms being waved once again. Today, in this service, and everyday, in our lives of love and devotion, we join in a victory parade that takes us to an eternity with Jesus.

You see, the cartoon has it wrong. The inevitable navigation system will lead us to that enemy called death, but it is not our destination. The final destination is an eternal parade, celebrating with all the saints the victory that Jesus won for us when he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. So perhaps the better name for this victory parade is not Palm Sunday, but Donkey Sunday. Amen.

Glenn A. Nielsen

The Resurrection of our Lord • Matthew 28:1–10 • April 24, 2011

Proclaiming the gospel on Easter is a joy-filled challenge. This is the big Sunday in which everyone coming expects dynamic, joyous music and an outstanding, memorable sermon. It is, after all, the resurrection of Jesus Christ we’re celebrating! But the preacher’s hearers are of many types. The regular members, perhaps a little judgmental about the Christmas and Easter (C&E) attenders, have spent the last six weeks in lenten “sackcloth and ashes,” and they want to bust out into the joy and wonder of the empty tomb. Semi-regular attenders are looking forward to the “big event.” There may be a few de-churched who come, inquisitive, because it was something they did as kids. Maybe even a few “never-churched” come along if they are invited by a Christian friend. And then there are the C&E attenders whom the pastor, trying hard not to be too judgmental himself, would love to entice to at least become semi-regulars.

When I was a novice parish pastor, it was easy for me to assume that C&E attenders took the Bible less seriously or struggled with doubts in their faith in Christ.

Home visits with the C&E attenders led me to realize my assumptions were rarely valid. There were often relational problems, not theological ones, keeping these people away from regular attendance. Research conducted by Britt Beemer (with Ken Ham in their book Already Gone, 2009) on young evangelical Christians found that 91% of

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holiday attenders still believed “in the creation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden” and 72% still believed that they “were saved and [going] to heaven upon death.”

C&E Christians were much more like regular attenders in their survey responses and extremely different from those who never attend church. Research by Robert Putnam (e.g. in Bowling Alone, 2000) indicates that Americans in general, not just Christians, are becoming less and less involved in structured social groups (like churches, bowling leagues, PTAs, etc.). More Americans are actually bowling, but not in leagues.

So what does this mean about proclaiming the message of the resurrection based upon Matthew 28:1–10? Perhaps to not forget to make some home visits both pre-Easter and post-Easter to the individually-minded C&E attenders (as well as the regulars and semi-regulars). It may not be just your preaching that draws them in or pushes them away, but your personal invitations and pastoral presence among them.

Encouraging your regular members to be invitational and not judgmental might also be wise.

Suggested Outline There was a Great Earthquake Opening: What was the strongest earthquake you have ever felt? (Geographically dependent personal earthquake story—Californians are accustomed to them, but many others are not. The great New Madrid quake of 1811 was felt as far away as the East coast.)

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

There was a great earthquake (seismo,j) at Christ’s resurrection (women walking, angel appearing, guards fearing and “quaking”).

There had been another great earthquake on Friday, at Christ’s death, filling them with awe and leading to many other resurrections (or at least revivifications; 27:51–54).

We modern people explain earthquakes away as friction between te tonic plates, but in Scripture earthquakes often indicated that the LORD was speaking (e.g., Ex 19:18, Nm 16:31, Ps 18:7, Hg 2:6ff, Rv 6:12 and 8:5. See Hendriksen’s 1973 New Testament Commentary on Matthew for more citations).

The resurrection of Jesus has been a glorious “earthquake” felt around the world for centuries, changing lives, destroying death, and changing the course of human history and eternity.

It started with just these few women at the tomb, then spread to the disciples, then throughout Samaria, Galilee, the Mediterranean, and beyond. It continued through to your baptism.

Do you still feel the earthquake of Christ’s resurrection rumbling through your life? (Personal and/or congregational stories can be inserted here. Either the Great Commission or the Colossians 3 epistle lesson could be tied in for support). Through your Christian life, baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection (Rom 6), and

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7.

through the church’s life (and our local church) the earthquake continues to rumble and spread. The world looks at our lives as evidence for Christ’s reverberation.

This earthquake will continue until it is ended with a trumpet call, when death for all is overcome (1 Cor 15:50ff).

Rick Marrs

Easter 2 • John 20:19–31 • May 1, 2011

Introductory thoughts: The text contains material for at least two good sermons; the sermon on Thomas and his faith and doubt can wait for another year. John comes to the climax of his entire gospel here: he has written in order that readers and hearers may believe that Jesus is the Messiah who has come to deliver them and in this trust in him that may have the true life in communion with the creator for which he fashioned us in Genesis 1 and 2.

Notes on the Text Jesus has a habit of barging in on his people. It is not always that he is unwanted—though that is sometimes the case. Sometimes he simply is unexpected. But Scripture repeatedly depicts God as one seeking our company. He wants to be with us.

He is a God of conversation and community, and he yearns for both with us. From his first evangelism call in Genesis 3:9 to today, he comes through doors we erect for our own security, though they are always inadequate to give us that security. He comes to say, and give us, “peace” in the midst of our fears.

We have good reason to fear. All hell has broken loose to stalk us like a roaring lion, from inside our selfish selves, from all around us, and from Satan himself.

Elaborations of those threats to people in our own congregations are easy to make and too easily dominate a sermon that should focus on Jesus. Mentioned, however, they must be!

Peace. The Hebrew greeting, no flippant “hi” (though behind “hi” hides the Germanic root “heil,” which embraces the end of hostility, settledness, harmony, health, all the good things God gave us in Eden), constitutes the state in which God made Adam and Eve. Christ came to restore that peace by taking away the disruptive factor of our inability to fear, love and trust in God above all things.

The settled peace of Eden does not imply standing still. God is always on the move, as we view him in human history, and Jesus here confesses that he is on God’s mission and comes to send us on ours.

“Breathing on them,” recalling Genesis 2:7, Jesus here creates a new people of God out of his apostles, twelve in number like the twelve tribes of Israel (the absence of the apostate and the doubt of Thomas also reminds us that the church includes tares

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as well as wheat). The people of God are sent on their mission to bring peace through the forgiveness of sins, which restores trust and love in our savior and creator. This new creation, as unearned as the first, dependent only on God’s gracious will to restore his people to himself, brings us back to our original relationship with him in Eden.

The law/gospel element in John 20:23 is important. This great commission parallels the command in Luke 24:47 to preach both repentance, turning away from false gods, and the forgiveness of sins, God’s enfolding us as his children in his arms once again.

John’s Gospel, he says, is all about the deliverer, Jesus, whose death and resurrection form the focus of this Gospel, and about trusting in him and thus receiving the gift of genuine, Eden-style human life again.

Suggested Outline I. What is causing you to huddle, to shut the doors against enemies, whether viruses, neighbors or fellow employees, family members, or God himself? How is your security system functioning (and failing)?

II. Jesus breaks through every kind of barrier simply because he loves us enough to suffer, die, and rise again for us, for you.

III. Forgiveness of sins sets aside the barrier that has blocked us from trusting him. We live as real human beings again, freed from trusting in insufficient sources of security, freed for the mission on which he sends us.

IV. Being sent means bringing the breath of new life in the Holy Spirit to those around us by forgiving them and by announcing their forgiveness and new life in Christ.

Robert Kolb

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book reviewS

COncordia Journal

NEW INTERNATIONAL BIBLICAL COMMENTARY: Job. By Gerald H. Wilson. Peabody: Hendrickson, 2007. 494 pages. Paper. $16.95.

Since its beginning in 1989, the New International Biblical Commentary series has produced some thirty commentaries covering the entire New Testament and three quarters of the Old. It characterizes its approach to the interpretive task as not pre-critical, nor anti-critical, and certainly not uncritically critical, but rather as “believing criticism” (i.e. in conversation with modern biblical scholarship, yet with full “commitment to the Bible’s full authority for Christians,” xii).

In terms of format, this commentary begins with a very brief (20 pages) introduction to the book of Job. Wilson (Asuza Pacific U., now deceased) suggests that though the prose and poetic sections may have different histories, the formation of the present book of Job is a literary unit, dating perhaps from the exilic or postexilic period.

Beyond isagogics, the commentary provides a brief introduction to larger units of Job, followed by a closer study of each of the 167 individual sections into which Wilson has divided the book.

In each section, he provides theological and biblical comment on individual verses, plus “additional” comments on textual or linguistic matters. He does refer to the underlying Hebrew in the form of romanization. In addition, Wilson provides three appendices: a bibliography and two helpful indecies organized by subject and by Scripture.

The heart of Wilson’s book is his textual comments, which are insightful and which are linked helpfully with other Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

parts of Job and wider Scripture. With an experienced teacher’s touch, he elucidates the biblical text (words, concepts) and traces their development in the book of Job. Where appropriate, he also enters into dialog with modern translations (mostly, but not exclusively, the NIV) to explain their rendering or to give alternate suggestions.

As helpful as Wilson is, there were places where he wrinkled this reviewer’s eyebrows. As low-key a figure as Satan is in the book of Job, for instance, this reviewer wonders if full justice is given the Satan figure by characterizing him “merely as one of the functionaries of Yahweh” (22). One senses, rather, that there is something about the Satan figure that is chilling, haunting, and very ominous, even if he disappears from the story after chapter 2. At the other end of the commentary, Wilson’s comments about the “rather bombastic character of the divine appearance” (359) forfeit much of the beauty and the invitatory openness of Yahweh’s self-revelation.

Likewise, though Wilson’s comments about Job’s “new understanding of God” in 42:6 are helpful, his suggestion that Job has nothing to recant (421) undercuts the radical nature both of Job’s response and of his renewed relationship with God. As a thoughtful, insightful introduction to the book of Job, both sensitive to modern scholarship and loyal to the authority of Scripture, Wilson’s is a helpful commentary. One systemic caveat is that for newcomers to Scriptural study, Wilson’s discussion of issues raised by biblical scholarship may seem distracting, even troublesome. One familiar with scholarly discussion, however, will recognize Wilson’s conservative instincts 83

and will be enriched by his theological reflections. As with any book, and particularly any biblical commentary, this book should be read with a discerning eye, with practiced study of Scripture itself, and with ready reference to other trusted study helps.

Henry Rowold THE WORD OF THE CROSS IN A WORLD OF GLORY: Lutheran Voices. By Philip Ruge-Jones.

Minneapolis: Augsburg-Fortress, 2008. 96 pages. Paper. $10.99.

Ruge-Jones (Texas Lutheran U.) has put together a very inviting series of four reflections on the Word of the Cross (similar to, but not identical with, “theology of the cross”), each rooted in a different historical and cultural perspective: New Testament era, Reformation, Ruge-Jones’s own personal development, and his internship in Chile. A concluding summary chapter rounds out the book.

In all but the last chapter, RugeJones utilizes his gift of storytelling. He constructs two scenes to introduce New Testament perspectives. In the first, he ghostwrites Chloe’s reflection (1 Cor 1:11) on Paul’s ability to dissolve the class divisions in Corinth by his application of the Word of the Cross. In the second, he places himself inside the mind of a baptismal candidate as he traces in the Gospel of Mark the contrast between the Word of the Cross and Roman, power-driven society. The most entertaining storytelling is the extended conversation between two servants of a bishop resistant to Luther’s Reformation; here he touches on the Word of the Cross in some of Luther’s key Reformation writings. His personal “testimony” is given 84

in the third chapter and is a very insightful autobiographical reflection. Recalling his two-year internship in Chile, his next chapter presents statements from people who suffered from violence and repression under General Pinochet. There is a bit of overlap of political and social focus in the final chapter, as Ruge-Jones wraps up his reflections on how the Word of the Cross stands over against the standards, goals, and methods of a World of Glory.

What makes the book inviting is the very fresh, visual quality of his writing— perhaps they are originally oral presentations put into literary form? As brief and engaging as the chapters are, however, they are far from superficial. There is substance enough to elicit reflection and discussion. The “further thought” questions appended to each chapter give a head-start to using this as a Bible or small group study. Ruge-Jones also recommends a book for further reading at the end of each chapter, whether for an interested student or a group study leader.

There are occasional comments that cause one to wrinkle the brow, such as “Jesus [maturing] in His understanding of God’s will” through his meeting the Syro-Phoenician woman (28) or RugeJones’s turning Jesus’s instruction that disciples become as little children (Mk 9:34) into looking after the vulnerable, marginal ones (29). Most of those are positioned in the storytelling sections, perhaps to function as discussion-starters. There is a sharpening focus on political and social issues as the book moves along, so that what begins as an easy read takes on a bit of a convicting tone.

However, aside from insightful, quotable gems throughout this book that linger

reader, the integrity of the Word with the of the Cross is given clarity and vigor— in words and categories that non-theologians can understand and appropriate.

One hopes that the other thirtysome volumes in the Lutheran Voices series are similarly fresh and insightful.

Henry Rowold

FUNDAMENTAL GREEK GRAMMAR, 3rd ed. By James W. Voelz. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2007. viii + 376 pages.

Hardcover. $62.00.

It can take a lot to get a Greek teacher to change textbooks. The syllabus is set. Handouts and supplements are prepared. Banks of test questions are ready to go. However, the latest edition (3rd) of James Voelz’s Fundamental Greek Grammar may just make the effort needed to change textbooks worth it.

The text itself presents the fundamentals of Greek grammar in 42 chapters. Each of these typically presents an item or two of grammar, a conjugation or declension to memorize, and a list of vocabulary words. The lessons are, for the most part, presented clearly and cleanly (a few typos persist, and a few particulars are suspect, e.g., the claim that with aorist participles “attendant circumstance usage is not now possible” [128]). Vocabulary to be memorized is not selected at random but is coordinated with the content of the lesson (e.g., the introduction to the second declension is followed by a collection of second declension nouns). All this is followed by a set of practice exercises designed to reinforce the content of the chapter. These exercises typically consist of parsing drills, translation from the Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

Greek New Testament, and translation of “author-made” sentences from both Greek to English and English to Greek.

Finally, various appendices including an answer key, charts of various paradigms (without the vocative), tables of principal parts, a Greek-English vocabulary, and a subject index round out the text proper.

In summary, Voelz presents a traditional deductive approach to teaching Greek in a classic format and thus follows in the footsteps of Machen, Wenham, and others.

Several key strengths make this work especially appealing. First, it is comprehensive. Unlike a number of recent grammars that seem to cut corners, Voelz does not sacrifice the fundamentals of Greek grammar on the altar of expediency. His text is both rigorous and complete (e.g., coverage includes constructions with evge,neto, the pluperfect, aorist forms of bai,nw and ginw,skw, -mi verbs in full, comparatives and superlatives, and the optative). Although not for the faint of heart, it is not unnecessarily complicated or difficult (it does contain a sustained emphasis on accenting, but this can be muted if the instructor so desires).

Greek is what it is, and Voelz faces this squarely and makes no apologies.

Second, it is clear. The text is well organized, evenly paced, and the 42 chapters allow the instructor to develop a steady cadence. Such a division of chapters is especially welcome since many introductory grammars squeeze too much material into too few chapters, making daily allotments difficult to manage. In terms of style, Voelz is straightforward and clear, even dignified—and refreshingly so. He does not offer a cutesy, silly, or chatty presentation of what ultimately is a very serious subject. He is all busi85

not in an off-putting way. ness, but Third, it is carefully crafted. The practice exercises at the end of each chapter are particularly well written.

Author-made translation exercises allow Voelz to bypass the irksome glossing of vocabulary and grammar unfamiliar to students and to focus specifically on the chapter at hand—but not at the expense of reviewing earlier material. The GNT is not neglected, but rather than reprint NT texts, Voelz merely cites biblical references. In this way, he wisely forces students to access a GNT for themselves on a daily basis. A very helpful answer key, which provides answers to the oddnumbered exercises, is included in an appendix. Also, no superfluous workbook is involved; happily the text is selfcontained.

Fourth, it is competent. Voelz is the co-chair of “The Language of the New Testament” seminar in the international New Testament society, Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. Thus, not only is he well qualified for the task at hand, but he is also abreast of the latest issues in the study of Greek, some of which he integrates into his text (notably verbal aspect, [62]; also see issues concerning pronunciation, [7], as well as his fine treatment of the imperative, [200–202]). So although following a traditional approach, the work moves past Machen and company in its linguistic and grammatical sophistication.

Weaknesses are few, and those that do exist are perhaps better seen in a series of recommendations for improvement. I offer the following: 1. Expand the answer key to include all exercises, not merely the odd-numbered ones. And above all, include the

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parsings of the verbal forms in the Greek sentences intended for translation into English (at the very least, the “difficult” forms should be parsed).

2. Improve the abbreviation scheme.

Although somewhat intuitive, the abbreviations “R” (19), “r” (19), “M” (48), and “C” (55) seem to confuse rather than clarify. At the very least, a separate and introductory page of abbreviations should be provided.

3. Include an English-to-Greek vocabulary. Since there are Englishto-Greek translation exercises, such a vocabulary would be especially helpful.

4. Add a Scripture index. Valuable insights into the GNT could (and should) be preserved in this way.

5. Supply English definitions to the table of Greek principle parts (350–54).

That is, supply an English gloss for the first principle part of each word in the list.

6. Collect the fragmented treatment of indefinite relative clauses and indefinite local clauses (182, 266) into one location and expand the coverage of indefinite temporal clauses (181) to include those with a;cri, e[wj, and me,cri.

7. Define and illustrate more clearly the attributive and predicate positions (40, 77), as well as when, where, and how they apply (82, 118–21, 231–32, 255).1 8. Indicate the rationale for the vocabulary words selected. Frequency does not seem to be the single or even the most important criterion. And as a result, one wonders if some frequently occurring NT words were accidentally omitted.

Although the foregoing weaknesses are relatively minor and have been

under the guise of suggespresented tions or recommendations, everything in Voelz’s primer does not come up roses.

A number of features are more problematic. First is the question of verbal aspect.

Although aware of Buist Fanning’s and Stanley Porter’s important work on verbal aspect,2 Voelz blazes an independent trail. And though the nature of verbal aspect is hotly debated, the advisability of introducing a novel scheme (vis-àvis Fanning or Porter) into the discussion at this stage must be questioned.

There seems to be a real danger that students will not be adequately prepared to encounter the far more common perspectives represented by Fanning and Porter. Yet Voelz’s tack is not irredeemable (and may well be correct), for with some adjustments his treatment can be adapted to Fanning’s approach and thus serve as an entry into the whole area of verbal aspect (adapting it to Porter’s scheme would be more difficult).

Second is the treatment of conditional sentences. Although Voelz’s discussion of conditional sentences is quite helpful at points (see 248–49), it is not always 100 percent accurate. For example, he seems to indicate that a contrary-to-fact condition must contain the particle a;n (248–249). Such, of course, is usually the case, but it is not always true (e.g., John 15:22). More disconcerting, however, is Voelz’s use of “Goodwinian” terminology (e.g., future more vivid, present general, and simple particular) and theory (to some extent) when discussing the various classes of conditions. Greater clarity (and perhaps greater flexibility to analyze the NT phenomena) could have been achieved using the “widely recognized scheme”3 of first, second, third, and fourth-class Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

conditions. In all this, however, it must be kept in mind that conditional sentences, like verbal aspect, are the subject of on-going debate.

Third is the fact that Voelz’s grammar is simply too Spartan. That is, Voelz assumes too much on the part of the student, particularly in the area of English grammar and terminology. For example, how many students will know what elative means (234) or, for that matter, even what a direct object is and how to differentiate it from an indirect object (20, 23–24)? Voelz bemoans such a lack of preparation on the part of students (vii) and thus is aware of the problem.

Yet, he does not do enough to remedy it. An introductory chapter covering the basics of English grammar or more sensitive treatments, chapter-by-chapter, of the relevant grammatical points seem necessary.

In the final analysis, Voelz has produced an excellent text—perhaps the finest in a very crowded field. I have used it successfully in the classroom, and I am planning on doing so again.

Jay E. Smith Dallas Theological Seminary Dallas, TX Endnotes

1 For a helpful treatment see Eugene Van Ness Goetchius, The Language of the New Testament (New York: Scribner, 1965), 52–53; cf. Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 309.

2 Buist Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); Stanley E. Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament, with Reference to Tense and Mood (New York: Peter Lang, 1989).

3 Stanley E. Porter, Idioms of the Greek New Testament 2nd ed, (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994), 256; cf. Wallace, Greek Grammar, 689.

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AND CULTURE CHRIST REVISITED. By D. A. Carson. Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2009. xii + 243 pages. Hardcover. $24.00.

As North American society becomes more hostile toward the Christian message and as the rising voices of Christians in the Majority World influence even North American Christian thinking, the question of the relationship of the church to surrounding cultures becomes acute in new ways in the early twenty-first century. For the past sixty years the discussion of this relationship has been conducted among North Americans largely within the framework set in place by H. Richard Niebuhr’s seminal Christ and Culture (1951).

New Testament scholar Donald Carson aids readers in coming to terms with the inadequacies of Niebuhr’s analysis, especially by noting that his category of “Christ of culture” embraces forms of Christianity, particularly nineteenthcentury classical Liberalism, which reject cardinal elements of the biblical message, and thus were vulnerable to the kind of “cultural Christianity” that devoured the churches of Germany in the Third Reich.

Carson himself has mastered a wide spectrum of literature, Christian, nonChristian, and anti-Christian, particularly from the last quarter century, to bring readers into the current cross-fire over the subject of “culture” inside the church and between it and its cultured despisers of this new day. His final answer to the question brings a healthy tension to all attempts at formulating one single approach to the challenges of living within the wide variety of twenty-first century cultures in which God calls his church to minister.

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Carson leads readers to work within biblical categories and to recognize the variety of ways in which biblical writers addressed the believer’s participation in and critique of the surroundings in which the people of God are called to live. Following the insightful examination of Niebuhr, and without discarding his insights in toto, Carson sharpens his own focus on definitions of “culture” and the “postmodern” context in which North Americans live. This enables him to assess both positive and negative aspects of secularism, democracy, freedom, power, and both biblical and contemporary approaches to the relationship of church and state. Each of these can be “an enormous force for good, if firmly embedded within the normative structure of the Bible’s story line and priorities, but … can be both dangerous and idolatrous when it assumes independent value and constructs a frame of reference in flat contravention of Scripture’s norms” (207, emphasis his). The Bible’s story line that norms Christian attitudes toward the world into which God has called them include for Carson creation and fall and a proper understanding of both God as creator and the impact of sin upon his human creatures; the relationship of Israel to God under the law; Christ and the salvation he has won for his own through his death and resurrection; the creation of the church by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost; and the return of Christ to bring this age to an end (44–59).

If the book suffers a deficiency, it is its failure to engage Luther’s own thought on the two realms of human life as God created it, which correspond to Carson’s own reading of Matthew 22:21 much more closely than he recognizes.

The fault is not entirely his by any means.

He correctly notes the “fairly disparate” interpretations and misinterpretations of Luther within the Lutheran traditions— to say nothing of outside them. John Witte’s noting that “the early kingdom is distorted by sin and governed by the Law,” while it can be understood correctly, leads Carson to conclude that this earthly kingdom is the kingdom that does not recognize Christ’s lordship in this world. That misrepresents Luther’s position though the fault is partially his own.

For he used the term “Reich,” usually translated “kingdom,” in at least three different ways. One indeed does denote Satan’s rule in conflict with God’s, but Satan, according to Luther, attacks godliness not only in the earthly realm of relationships among God’s creatures— which for Luther stands totally under God’s creative lordship—but also in the “heavenly kingdom” (better “realm”), the realm of the gospel and faith. Based upon his distinction of the two dimensions of human righteousness, active as well as passive, Luther’s healthy appreciation of life in this world and his proposal for concrete improvements in earthly governance and life, which he ever again pressed on the powers that were of his time coincide with much of Carson’s analysis but largely go unnoticed here.

This should not distract readers from this well-woven appraisal of “Christ and culture” on the basis of the biblical framework for viewing reality that Carson has created in this book. It commends itself to all who are concerned about Christian presence in today’s world—and that must include all of this journal’s readers.

Robert Kolb

Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

THE PASTOR: A Spirituality. By Gordon W. Lathrop. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2006. 142 pages.

Cloth. $20.00.

Spirituality is a popular topic engaging America culture today—from the Church of Oprah and Silva Mind Control to Feng Shui and Eastern Orthodoxy.

The term is most often associated with the non-(or even anti-)physical, nondogmatic, non-institutional, non-rational, pluralistic and highly individualistic outlook on one’s personal life. Gordon Lathrop, eminent expert on liturgy and prolific author, has prepared a resource which goes beyond, or probably more accurately, goes deeper into the subject of spirituality than most contemporary proponents promise. Many pastors’ personal or professional libraries contain a book or two on spirituality which provide methods for enhancing the spiritual walk of congregation members, but few have anything for the pastor himself. Lathrop has attempted to fill that need. With this compact book he offers an “ecumenical reflection on the identity and central tasks of the ordained leader who lives in relationship with a current, public Christian assembly” (vii). Although such intentional ecumenism is present, the book is clearly a product of a Lutheran spirituality as it is correctly understood.

Spirituality, as Lathrop uses the term, is prefaced (either explicitly or implicitly) with “Christian” (and often assumptively with “Lutheran”). As a pastor reflectively encounters and relearns the symbols of the faith in the context of his ministry and nurtured by the Spirit’s graces, he will continually refine his own understandings of himself and his holy

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calling. In his introduction Lathrop notes that this book is better understood as a “call to holiness” through a “lifelong catechumenate” (13) for the pastor. The Lutheran focus on catechesis through the means of grace is central for this kind of pastoral spirituality. Lathrop opens these elements in his inimitable way as a wordsmith and image-shaper.

Ministry is often very stressful.

Moments for contemplation are not always possible. Meditation is not a regular part of our Lutheran spiritual tradition, although Luther recommended it as a necessary activity for making a theologian. Reading through each of the seven chapters provides numerous opportunities to stop and reflect on what a pastor does in his own ministry setting. Lathrop leads pastors to focus on their own identity and responsibilities by looking at how they use the Lord’s Prayer, Scripture, and the Sacraments for community service (Diakonia). This is the essence of Part One: “Learning the Tasks by Heart.” Part Two, “Living from the Liturgy: A Little Catechism for the Pastor,” continues with the catechetical approach by highlighting the creed, the Commandments, and then one final chapter on “The Pastor in Dying: Baptism, the Supper, the Keys.”

In “the deep structures of the liturgy” (25), according to Lathrop, a pastor finds and demonstrates his servant-leadership most profoundly as he proclaims God’s law and gospel regularly and richly.

He asserts that “preaching is to lead us to the Supper as the visible Word and then invite us to turn in faith toward the famine in the rest of the world” (67). Personal reflections or illustrative stories from Lathrop’s pastoral and per-

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sonal experience conclude each chapter.

Although this reviewer did not find these vignettes necessarily helpful, they were attempts to show the applicable real-life spirituality of a pastor through his strong and regular self-catechesis through the word and liturgical piety.

Terminology is a critical consideration in a publication about the pastoral office. One of the first phrases to be noted in this book occurs in the contrived avoidance of sexist language which ELCA authors seem compelled to promote. As a result, Lathrop continually refers to pastors (in the plural) or he must succumb to the use of double pronouns—for example, “the collar around his or her neck” (3) or “the pastor may say to herself or himself” (103).

While undoubtedly helpful as a sensitivity issue, such repetitive pronominal usage becomes irritatingly annoying about halfway through the book. Another terminological issue has to do with the image-driven verbiage which is characteristic of Lathrop’s homiletical writing.

As he paints a variety of verbal pictures, one is forced to pause and ponder his prose, with the serendipitously beneficial result that occasionally new images may be drawn into a pastor’s professional vocabulary and Sunday proclamation. A few theological concerns which need to be mentioned—women acting as clergy, open communion of all the baptized, and questions on the realities of eternal life— are all assumed or at least articulated as if they were accepted Christian practices or beliefs.

How useful this book will be for busy pastors depends upon how they employ the basic elements of their pastoral care toolkit, the means of grace. While

not a replacement for such devotional materials as The Treasury of Daily Prayer or even the LSB Pastoral Companion, the devotional potentialities for a pastor’s strengthened spirituality are plentiful.

Once one overlooks some of the noted weaknesses of this resource, this volume would make a marvelous gift for graduating seminarians as well as for pastors celebrating significant anniversaries in the pastoral ministry.

Timothy Maschke Concordia University Mequon, WI

RICH IN GRACE: The Bible of the Poor for 21st-Century Christians: Meditations in Verse on the Triptychs of the Biblia Pauperum. By Kathryn Ann Hill. Delhi, NY: American Lutheran Publicity Bureau, 2007. 86 pages. Paper. $10.00.

This collection of 38 one-page poems by Kathryn Ann Hill is a brilliant conception brilliantly executed. For each triptych from the medieval Bible of the Poor, Hill has composed on an adjacent page a poem expounding on its three biblical pictures: the center one from the life of Christ flanked by two scenes between the Christ-event and the Old Testament episodes it depicts. The service Hill has rendered is to put these profound associations into words—in many cases, however, verbalizing associations that would unlikely be recognized in an initial viewing of the triptych. For example, her poem, “John Baptizes Jesus,” infers from the biblical scenes depicted on the corresponding triptych not only the familiar connection between the Red Sea crossing and Baptism and Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

the equally familiar connection between the Promised Land, Canaan, and the Promised Land of heaven, but also more subtle associations such as the following: (1) the pole bearing grapes from Canaan and the tree of the cross bearing the body of Christ; (2) the fruit of grapes and the fruit of Mary’s womb, Jesus; (3) the vine from which the spies plucked the grapes and Christ the vine of John 15. Even more subtle is the suggestion of a common “gospel denominator” in the water of the Red Sea, the water of the Jordan River, the water of Baptism, and the water that flowed from Jesus’s pierced side. Repeatedly in her poems Kathryn Hill takes the jewels mined by the medieval authors and gives them the kind of setting that enhances their worth and splendor. Like the householder of the Matthew 13:52 passage with which she prefaces her collection of poems, the poet brings out of the treasure provided by the Bible of the Poor not only “what is old” but also “what is new.”

In her Preface, the author concedes that her poems are “unabashedly didactic.” True. But the lessons they teach are not moralistic. They are never superficial nor merely ethical. The ultimate “lesson” in every case is the gospel—Christ as the giver of eternal life or Christ as the power for a specific aspect of Christian behavior. In brief, her poems are consistently Christ-centered. In Gideon’s victory over the Midianites, the poet sees a preview of Christ’s victory over Satan and sin. In the widow’s cruse of oil miraculously replenished by Elijah, the poet sees a foreshadowing of the wine/ blood of the Lord’s Supper. From the honey in the carcass of the lion Samson killed, the poet makes an imaginative leap

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to the resurrection of our dead bodies in their graves. Even of the pious efforts of Reuben in the Joseph story, of the bride in the Song of Solomon, and of the three women visiting Jesus’s tomb, Hill makes the gospel point that it is not what we do but, rather, what our Lord does that ultimately matters.

And the gospel Hill presents is, surprisingly, what I have called in my teaching “the full literal gospel,” that is, a full, complete depiction of what happened to Jesus on the cross: not only his experience of physical death there but also his suffering of hell, not only an execution but also a damnation. “You endured the pangs of hell” reads the last line of “The Flight into Egypt.” “A harsher blow is yet to fall before the Passion’s end:/ The Father’s own beloved Son will feel his Father’s hate—” occurs near the end of “Judas Betrays Christ.” “His sinless Son for our sake felt the torments of the damned” is an amazingly explicit line from “Christ is Condemned.” Bodily and spiritual death are the full wages of sin, and our Lord experienced both of these in our place on the cross. It is too seldom that this aspect of the gospel surfaces in the writing and speaking of the clergy; that it should abound in the poetry of a laywoman not only warms the cockles of my heart but also enriches the gospel power of her poems for the fortunate reader.

For those interested in the more technical and aesthetic aspects of poetry, Hill provides nourishment also. Her poems are not only an orthodox and devout witness to the Gospel—they are an artistic witness to that gospel. In each poem she works with a basic rhyme pattern (often stanzas of four lines with an aabb rhyme scheme) and a recognizable 92

meter (frequently iambic heptameter).

But, as is true of all good poetry, there are exceptions to these patterns to prevent the poem from trivializing its content or from lulling its reader, exceptions adhering to the principle of form serving content rather than of content being sacrificed on the altar of form.

Also, the poet is capable of variations in the rhyme schemes, kinds of meter, and stanza length she employs. In “The Presentation,” for example, Hill composes three stanzas consisting of only three lines each (all rhyming)—particularly appropriate to the tree scenes contained in its corresponding triptych. In “The Flight into Egypt,” the poet experiments with trochaic meter, four feet per line.

In “Christ Appears to Mary Magdalene,” she employs occasional anapestic meter appropriate to the joyful actions of Mary and Jesus in their garden encounter.

Kathryn Hill avoids the temptation to which too many budding contemporary poets succumb: the “spontaneous me syndrome” in which the poet burps out his or her subjective feelings irrespective of form or rule. Hill curbs and disciplines her emotions so that the reader can focus on the more meaningful objective biblical truths that are the burden of her message. Her poems are simple—yet never simplistic. If there is ambiguity, it is never the ambiguity of nonsense, only the ambiguity of levels of meaning. With minimal effort any reader can understand the poems, yet there is enough in each poem to justify a third or fourth reading for additional enrichment and further delight.

The poems—like the triptychs they accompany—are chronologically arranged: beginning with the announcement of Jesus’s birth to Mary; continuing

major events of Christ’s infancy with the and ministry; focusing on his climactic suffering, damnation, death, and resurrection; ending with Christ’s ascension and return in judgment with their implications for believers and unbelievers. Reading the poems will provide a rich and orderly devotional experience. As a bonus, the reader will considerably improve his familiarity with Old Testament history.

Above all, the reader will be led to recognize that the Bible is not a religious scrapbook of stories, events, prophecies, and wise sayings but, above all, a unity composed by one author for one purpose: to make us “wise unto salvation.”

I highly recommend the publication of this remarkable collection of poems.

Francis C. Rossow

Concordia Journal/Winter 2011

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The Center for Hispanic Studies (CHS) Concordia Seminary, St. Louis presents

6th Annual Lecture in Hispanic/Latino Theology & Missions 2nd Hispanic Theological Consultation March 14-16, 2011 2nd and 3rd Generation Hispanics in the U.S.: Questions and Implications for the Church Presentations in English and Spanish Presenters include: Rev. Eloy González, Rev. Aurelio Magariño, Rev. Héctor Hoppe, Prof. Mark Kempff, Dr. Leo Sánchez All lectures are free and open to the public. CEUs are available. For more information, contact the office of continuing education and parish services at 314-5057486; ce@csl.edu; or visit the Seminary’s website at www.csl.edu.

Dr. Victor M. Rodríguez, professor in the department of Chicano and Latino Studies at California State University, Long Beach, Calif. (CSULB)

The Center for Hispanic Studies (CHS) of Concordia Seminary offers theological education and leadership in the Lutheran tradition from and for U.S. Hispanic/Latino communities. CHS advances and carries out its mission through ministry formation programs, research and publication initiatives, and various continuing education and advanced studies opportunities.

Ninth Annual

Day of Homiletical Reflection

Featured speaker: Dr. Thomas Troeger, The J. Edward and Ruth Cox Lantz Professor of Christian Communication at Yale Divinity School

Wednesday, May 11, 2011 9:00 a.m. - 4:15 p.m.

Werner Auditorium Concordia Seminary Sectional presenters: Dr. David Schmitt and Dr. Reed Lessing, professors at Concordia Seminary Registration fee is $25. To register, call Continuing Education at 314-505-7486 or e-mail ce@csl.edu.

The Day of Homiletical Reflection combines the annual Wenchel Lecture that promotes critical thought about preaching and practical enhancement in this art with the Ernie and Elsie Schneider Endowment for Excellence in Preaching that fosters support for innovative 21st century proclamation.

Concordia Seminary 801 Seminary Place St. Louis, MO 63105