Dr. Angus Menuge
Grand Reunion, 2012 – Belleville, IL
Dr. Menuge tackles the complex problem of Post-Christian Christianity with a multi-dimensional approach that confronts the root of the problem rather than the symptoms. This approach deals with the will, intellect, and imagination of a person, specifically of those coming from the modern and post-modern worldview, with the goal of restoring the idea that Christianity is objectively true. The Grand Reunion also included Dr. Andrew Bartelt of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, whose session on Isaiah 6 takes up the call to ministry and the servant leadership it asks for.
1. Naming the Beast: The Roots of Our Post-Christian Malaise – Dr. Angus Menuge
The speaker diagnoses “post-Christian Christianity” as the reshaping of Christian faith from within by non-Christian assumptions, tracing intellectual roots through Enlightenment scientism, logical positivism, romanticism, and postmodern hermeneutics. Drawing on Christian Smith’s moralistic therapeutic deism, Michael Horton’s “Christless Christianity,” and Luther’s theology of the cross, the lecture argues that emotivism has colonized ordinary church life, eroding the objective character of faith, vocation, and the orders of creation. Constructive remedies are deferred to a following session; the lecture closes by locating the counter to self-referential religion in Christ and baptismal death-and-resurrection. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
2. Taming the Beast: Some Strategies for Rebuilding the Christian Mind – Dr. Angus Menuge
The speaker argues that responding to post-Christian cultural religion requires engaging imagination, reason, and will. C.S. Lewis’s fiction (the Space Trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Great Divorce) serves the imaginative case; philosophical argument refutes scientism and emotivism; and the self-contradiction of postmodernism is exposed directly. The session closes with discussion of vocation, family, and the Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3 account of Christian maturity as acceptance of creaturely limits within God’s ordering of creation. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
3. Dr. Angus Menuge – The Role of (Cultural) Apologetics During and After Catechetical Instruction
A lecture from Doxology’s Grand Reunion 2012 arguing that Lutheran catechesis needs to equip young people to identify and answer rival worldviews, not only transmit doctrinal grammar. Working through the three articles of the Apostles’ Creed, the speaker covers the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments for creation, manuscript evidence for the reliability of the New Testament, historical arguments for the crucifixion and resurrection, and Lutheran vocation as a counter to postmodern self-construction. Apologetics is presented throughout as law-work that removes obstacles to faith, not as a means of conversion. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
4. Servant Leadership: God’s Call and Calling – Dr. Andrew Bartelt
A lecture from Doxology’s Grand Reunion 2012 reading Isaiah 6 within the larger structure of Isaiah 2–12. The speaker sets the prophet’s call in the year of King Uzziah’s death against the political collapse of the eighth century and the rise of Assyria, argues that the temple is where heaven and earth intersect, and reads the Hebrew of verse 3 transitively: God’s glory is filling all the earth rather than the earth being full of it. The seraph’s coal is absolution: those who speak forgiveness have first been forgiven. The lecture closes in Isaiah 55 and 62, tracing the shift from king to suffering servant and the renaming of the forsaken land as Hephzibah, “My delight is in her.” Watch the lecture and read the transcript →