Gene Veith surprisingly misses what early radio preachers like Walter A. Maier of The Lutheran Hour were really up to in helping to reverse "America's Religious Depression"

 

At one point in his excellent review of Ministers of a New Medium: Broadcasting Theology in the Radio Ministries of Fulton J. Sheen and Walter A. Maier, Gene Veith makes passing reference to their opposition to the atomic bombings of Japan, which for the time seems like a pretty conventional position for churchmen to take who were already grappling with the profoundly demoralizing effects of the atrocities of the World Wars.

Veith, however, might have better considered this larger theme of American demoralization and how preachers such as these rose to address it. In a word, they did it first, by reasserting the primacy of God's law, calling a spade a spade. The two broadcasting luminaries were, as he says, "robustly orthodox", and frequently "began with a searing condemnation of sin, often occasioned by a current issue or event".

Veith, a Lutheran, oddly misses that the phenomenal recovery of the churches in the post-war from the malaise of the period 1930-1950, "America's Religious Depression", stems precisely from preaching what Lutherans call Law and Gospel. First, they called the wars' sins actual sin, something most men and women who lived that hell needed and wanted to hear, something which made sense of the senseless maelstrom into which the whole world had been plunged, not once but twice. Second, they proclaimed the gospel's antidote to that sin in the form of Christ's gracious act of redemptive death on the cross. We had blood on our hands, but Christ's blood washed it away.

People forget how amazingly popular The Decalogue, The Ten Commandments, became during the 1950s. Preachers preached it, film makers dramatized it, President Eisenhower himself promoted it, monuments to it went up everywhere. It was what war weary souls most needed to hear. Love for God's law reoriented the entire country.

We were a victorious nation, but a nation literally sick of the immorality of war and desperate for forgiveness. The Law, and then the Gospel, together answered this situation. The churches boomed, the population boomed, the economy boomed.

 

On the contrary, the frenzy of negation will burn itself out

 The old progressives—whether Marxists, socialists, or New Deal liberals—wanted to construct a better world, and they had an idea of what that would look like. “The new frenzy is an activism not of construction but of negation” in which “the point is to undo, to liberate and emancipate." 

Thus, “the mode is one of undoing, taking apart, deconstructing, and critique, all in the name of emancipation, liberation, self-determination, and choice.”

This frenzy of negation is all-consuming and self-consuming. Snell notes how the sexual revolution, predicated on infertility and the termination of pregnancy, now turns against the sexed body itself, with the ideology of transgenderism.

The frenzy of negation will never end, it should be noted, for these activists “do not seek anything.” Thus, there is no goal, just a constant conflict against objective reality.

More. 

Nature abhors a vacuum, and those who fail to reproduce, or who extinguish themselves, will be replaced by those who do reproduce, and by those who give each other life and build rather than dismantle and destroy.

Do not sing "keep me free from birth". Choose life.

 

 

 

Isn't "postliberal theology" oxymoronic?

Think about it.

The post-liberals rejected the preeminent role played by reason in the formulation of the modernist interpretation of Christianity, which in its turn had really been a rejection of the pre-modern rationalism of the church in favor of the so-called modern type. 

The post-liberals granted that there was an internal logic to these two interpretations, something liberal theology had been loathe to grant, but rejected the existence of a superintending logic over them all, to which they bare witness.

When one goes this route, one is separating the "logy" from the "theo" in theo-logy and jettisoning it. As a consequence, one can't really speak of a postliberal theology. In rejecting logos one is really rejecting speech and argument itself. One is left with a God about whom nothing can be said.

Had postliberalism been true to itself, however, it never would have come to exist in the first place because it would have understood this imperative to shut up.

The thing post-liberalism claimed was true of others they never quite applied to themselves, namely that the limitations of language and culture made their own truth claims impossible. In seeking to relativize the dogma of others, their own movement became a dogma, but not one successful enough that you can actually look one up in the Yellow Pages under "post-modernist churches" and attend a Sunday, or preferably some other day, service.

What post-liberalism actually does is attract certain personalities from the pre-modern or the modern camps who are susceptible of rejecting reason, Americans caught up in radical individualism being noteworthy examples. This mission field has been white unto harvest, riddled as it is with self-imposed isolation and separation from "community". Some of them doubtless call themselves "nones", and their creed, if they have one, is "Here's to the truth as perceived by you!".

The topic is recently and usefully discussed here at The Blog of Veith.

In the Marburg Colloquy the Lutherans and the Reformed forever parted company over the meaning of the presence of Christ

Present everywhere, huh?

You can read a transcript of the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 online here.

About it Gene Veith here points to "the different approaches not just to the Sacrament but to the Bible and, above all, to Christology."

This is most certainly true, but it is the different approach to the Bible I think which is paramount, for it is from the Bible that Luther derives his Christology and all his doctrine. Its articles of faith dominate independently and are not to be put at war with one another:

"Every article of faith is a principle in itself and does not require proof from another one."

Luther defends his understanding of the Holy Supper on the basis of the plain meaning of the words of institution from the Synoptic testimony, whereas the rationalistic reformers venture far and wide over the ancient fathers and the text of Scripture in their debate with Luther, but end up appealing especially to John's Gospel to argue against Luther's understanding of that Synoptic testimony.

For example, Oecolampadius of Basel opened the meeting with a salvo which takes Christ's presence at the right hand of God in heaven so narrowly and literally that for him Christ couldn't possibly be present bodily also in the Holy Supper at the same time. But for Luther, "this is my body" means both things can be true at the same time because Scripture says so, even though we cannot understand it.

In this Luther refused to make Scripture the enemy of Scripture (of course, his problems with James for example show that if he thought there were differences which couldn't be reconciled, well, then the offending Scripture must not be Scripture). 

If anyone ever doubted Luther's devotion to the authority of the text of Scripture to the exclusion of all else, one need only meditate on this excerpt from near the conclusion of the meeting:

"The important thing, as Augustine says, is that the words of the fathers must be understood in relation to Scripture. If they seem to run counter to the Scriptures, one must clarify them by interpretation, or reject them." 

Martin Luther, sovereign theologian, sovereign individual.