Errors and Love

The following reflection is an attempt to process recent readings and not a definitive position.

In Luther's "Disputation Against Scholastic Theology," he claims that the human will can only conform to erroneous ways and that because people are able to love people, they cannot love God.  He roughly repeats these statements in the "Heidelberg Disputation."  I'm going to attempt to wrestle with both of these seemingly odd statements at once.

As I do this, I recognize that part of the major emphasis in Lutheran theology is our complete and utter dependence upon God.  Free will can only do evil "in an active capacity" because otherwise there would be a possibility of someone achieving salvation by works (if one can do good, then one might not need Christ).  If we are able to love God, then we might be able not to sin against God.  If we are not utterly and completely sinners, then there is a possibility of salvation outside of Christ (Christ is the way, any who come to the Father only come through him).

Where I find I can start is naming what I do affirm, though this affirmation is not part something covered in the above mentioned documents.  I affirm Lutheran single predestination.  God chooses everyone for salvation and people choose damnation.  God only "predestines" people for salvation/healing; moreover, within radical Lutheran sinner/saint dialectic, everyone chooses damnation.  God invites everyone to the banquet and gives everyone the clothes necessary for the proper dress attire, and everyone is too busy to attend and refuses to wear the free outfit.  Within this framework, I see how Luther can talk about the inability to love God.  In John, Jesus describes it as those who love the darkness do not love the light because their deeds are evil.

However, Luther's radical description of the inability to love God I cannot affirm.  How I can affirm the radical single predestination theory without affirming the inability to love God?  I recognize, quite differently from Luther, the reality of sin in the Eden story.  Namely, there is a reality that one sin effects all of creation, that one sin disrupts our relationship with God, that one sin sends us into fear and hiding, and that we, as humans, seem not to have the desire to claim our sins as our own but rather add sin to sin by lying and/or blaming others.  Luther sees this as an exposition on original sin, but I recognize it, with my 21st century lens where the Bible is not trying to answer historical fact but tell us about who God is, what God does, and how our relationship with God is lived out, as an exposition on any sin.  Sin, even one, has consequences for all of creation (sin is relational; the relationship with other species was broken and the garden was sealed, among other explicit curses upon the three sinners).  Sin is a bitter trap wherein we would rather keep sinning than have our brokenness and shame exposes (Adam and Eve put on clothing and blamed others).  Sin causes us to fear God rather than love God.

Where this is not as radical as Luther is that experience reveals it false to imagine people cannot love God.  It also appears false that people cannot do good.  However, it is also false to imagine people can keep from sinning or can keep from fearing God or loving other things above God.  Luther needs no possibility of good and love because a small gap allows the scholastics to argue for possibility of otherwise.  All I need to is look around and see that even the people who do good more often than not still sin.  Sin has permeated all of creation, and its relational reality that covers all creation means that without God's help we cannot help but be effected by sin and become sinners ourselves.  We can only have the capacity to not sin when all sinning all together stops.

Of course, Luther gives a role for the Holy Spirit in providing us with the capacity to do good or to love God, but that does not take real account of those who are not Christian and still do good.  Luther talks about the appearance of good when there's actually evil at the core.  I would talk about the reality of doing good and still being permeated by the sin that effects all creation.  For me, this is how we are to understand that our best works are like "dirty rags;" we have not the capacity to fully clean them (by our ability they will always contain dirty even if we wash them 1000 times) or to keep them clean, but there is possibly clean spots on the rags.  Still, within that possibility there is the reality that God works with whole rags and doesn't chop of the clean parts as if that's all that matters or enough.  God redeems the whole body and doesn't just claim that one moment where you happened not to sin.

I should mention, prior to ending, is that this brings me to Luther's affirmation of the role of faith.  Because we all choose damnation, we all sin, we all walk away from God, we all are encompassed in this totality of sin that blankets creation (I know I hear American individualism yelling in my ears, but that may be a conversation for another day), Luther says all we can do is trust God.  God chooses all for salvation.  We all choose hell, but we trust God's choice is greater than ours.  We do not know whether we are going to salvation or damnation, but we trust the promises God has given us for life.  We in fact, as the ones who are not making the eternal judgment, trust that God's can fulfill God's desire to save the whole world and we live into that trust by considering the whole world saved.

More could always be said, but I feel I have not more at the moment even though this is not a great stopping point.  Just trust God to be God and let that trust rather than the fear evoked by sin rule your life.

Inalienable Rights and Health Care

Within a society that maintains a separation of religion and government (classically called "separation of Church and State," but I open the language to include all faiths), I find that one of my roles as a minister is to "speak truth to power," to borrow a phrase from 1950's Quakers.  In order to speak truth to the power that is government and politics in a society where my religion is separate from the government, I find it to be a mandate that I both speak out of my religious convictions unapologetically and that I find political language to frame my religious convictions when speaking to politicians.

Today, I find I am speaking toward all those who label the Affordable Care Act as "Obamacare," a frame that is meant to identify the reenvisioning of health care as a corrupt act of a "corrupt" President.  I have not done indepth research into the Affordable Care Act, but I know it is a worthwhile step in the right direction (see http://www.standupforhealthcare.org/learn-more/quick-facts/12-reasons-to-support-health-care).  My argument in its support today derives from my own faith convictions, but in the language of politics I find what I am saying supported throughout United States history by people who are oppressed, particularly including Frederick Douglass (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=2945).

Our freedom in this country (apologies to all my Native American sisters and brothers for whom this statement is not true; I hope you see soon that my argument extends to you even if it did not originally encompass you) is founded upon self-evident truths (http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html).  These self-evident truths particular include the reality that all people are endowed with certain unalienable rights.  Unalienable means that this rights cannot be taken away for any reason whatsoever.  These unalienable rights include, but are not limited to, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (as stated in the Declaration of Independence, "among these," implying that these are only a sampling of humanity's unalienable rights).  According to the document that founds our freedom, governments are instituted to secure these rights.

Now I ask you, what does it mean for people to have an unalienable right to life?  Does it mean that the death penalty has any valid place in this country?  No.  (For those who come back asking me about abortion, my response is that the abortion question involves a lot more lives than the question of a person securely locked behind bars for the rest of their lives whom the government is supposed to be guaranteeing that no more harm can come to society from that individual; the question of abortion is inherently more complex and thus deserves a more thoughtful response than the straight-forward answer against the death penalty)  Does it mean that people do not deserve a health care that will provide them the basic services needed to stay alive when their lives are threatened?  No.  This government's foundation within our freedom is to secure the unalienable right of life.  This cannot be done without universal healthcare.

Moreover, I would go as far to say that our freedom is founded upon the unalienable rights of ALL humans. Though I would not mandate the United States government to provide for all the world, it has the responsibility to secure the right of life to all people within its borders regardless of their citizenship status.  This is what all humans means.  This is the depth to which unalienable rights is supposed to be enacted.  The same argument easily extends to liberty and its inherit connection with education.  As long as there exists and inequitable education system in this country, favoring wealthy areas over poor areas, this government is not fulfill its mandate.

This is the challenge I uplift to our government officials: Fulfill your mandate.  Secure the unalienable rights of all people within your jurisdiction.  Secure our right to life by abolishing the death penalty and providing universal health care.  Secure our liberty by providing an equitable education system (and in its equitability, maintain a high standard of education; creating equitability by using the lowest common denominator is not equitability).  Without such freedoms secured, we will never have the freedom to pursue happiness.

For those who are not yet persuaded by the importance of this mandate, I wonder if you are like me: educated, in possession of health care, fairly unworried of ever being directly effected by the death penalty.  What I have come to realize is that as long as the government is not securing this unalienable rights, my freedom is threatened.  The reality of these last few years, as well as of the Great Depression, is that my ability to afford health care is, in many ways, outside of my control.  My ability to afford decent education for any offspring I may have in the future is, in many ways, outside of my control.  And the protests in Georgia over the death penalty let me know that the security of my right to live is probably out of my control as well.  As long as the government does not secure these rights in their fullest sense, my freedom is threatened.  I am not free when I do not have my unalienable rights.  As long as I do not have my unalienable rights securely maintained by my government, my freedom will always be threatened, no matter how much wealth or power I am able to attain.  This is the imperative of this mandate as far as I see it.  This is why these rights are important for all Americans, whether they are in the 1% or they are living in poverty.

Government: my freedoms are being threatened by your inability in over 200 years to secure them.  Secure my unalienable rights.

Trinity

Mother of Earth
Son of Man
Spirit of Christ
Holy Three in One

I know there's a lot of theological debate about non-"Father, Son, Holy Spirit" trinitarian formulas and most theologians think any other formula is non-Christian, but all these names are biblically based (the first is from a psalm where God gives birth to the earth) and I give no apologies for naming God - Hagar did it first.

Lutheran Dualism

The following reflection is an attempt to process recent readings and not a definitive position.

After reading Luther's early work, "Disputation Against Scholastic Theology," I find myself already faced with the issue of dualism in Luther's works.  Though I do not mind paradox (two seemingly contradictory ideas that, when held in tension, reveal the rich variety of reality), I find dualistic concepts (separating one reality into two parts) difficult because, unlike paradoxes, they are never attempted to be reconciled into a whole.

In this document, Luther talks about will / nature / creature and spirit / grace / love.  The will produces evil (though it is not by nature evil), the love of creature excludes the love of God, and nature is always an evil will.  Spirit, on the other hand, fulfills the law, does good, and loves God.  Upon initial reading, my problem with the dualistic view was that it felt as if the spirit of a person was redeemable and the creature was irredeemable.  For me it is always a problem when you start talking about dual parts of a human as if one can, with God's will, be good and another, by any will, cannot.  It challenges the need for God to redeem my whole being.

What helped me start to make sense of the way Luther was using nature and spirit seem very similar to the way Paul talks about flesh and spirit.  Specifically, it seems Luther, when talking about spiritual matters, is not talking about our own spirits but God's Spirit in us.  One who spiritually fulfills the law does not sin, and fulfilling the law can only take place by the grace of God.  The fulfillment of the law is the love of God, put in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Though I am sure I will wrestle with other dualisms in Luther's theology, it has helped to realize that this is not actually a dualism.  Rather, this is talking about two separate realities (human and God) and making our ability to be good, to fulfill the law, and to love God and humans entirely dependent upon God's gracious gift of the Holy Spirit.  Though I will soon raise other questions about this, for the moment it at least resolves the dualism I struggled to read.

Visions of Ministry

More random visions I have as to who I am as a minister and for the church in which I minister:

God's clear desire, as revealed in scripture, is to save, redeem, and heal all people and all creation; our vision of church should be nothing less

The Church is called to care for all of creation in the manner after the heart of God

I am a sinner, I do evil, and I need your forgiveness

War and acts of violence are always, always, always against the will of God and the gospel

All Christians are priests; I am called not to administer the Word and Sacrament, but to be a norming administer of the Word and Sacrament (revise according to Gritsch-Jenson ch. 9 end)