Don’t Open That Book: It’ll Kill You Dr. Robert Kolb

Transcript (edited for readability).

Just to follow up on what Hal has just been talking about: a few years ago I was invited by a colleague at Luther Seminary to come and give the George Aus lectures. Now, I don't know how much of Minnesota Lutheran church history you all know, but some of you may know that at Luther Seminary in the 40s and 50s—maybe I can't remember if it goes back to the 30s—there were two powerful figures. George Aus was a synergist, a Haugean, a pietist, an evangelism person. And his bête noire was Herman Preus, who was the confessionalist on the faculty. The two of them did not get along. They must have made systematics department meetings very interesting.

Well, when George Aus died, his family endowed a lectureship on evangelism. And so my colleague, Gracia Grindal, wrote and asked if I would come to give the George Aus lectures. I wrote back and said, if it were the Herman Preus lectures, I would accept the invitation immediately, but you want me to give the George Aus lectures. And the reply was, that's why we want you. The person who taught me that you can't be faithful to the Lutheran Confessions without being a missionary in spirit was Robert Bertram, my seminary advisor. He was the person who taught me that a Lutheran understanding of the Word of God will not revel in the Word of God, but will proclaim it, and proclaim it to the nations. So that's why it's a particular pleasure to be here with you today to wrestle with a problem.

There are quite a few of you who have had me in class. First of all, you know that I'll just keep talking. So when you have an intervention you'd like to make—a question or comment—please raise your hand, and we'll somehow negotiate the mic, or get you to the mic, or have you speak loud enough to get on tape. But I will just keep talking, and so please, please come at me, because we all are working together on this. And I live in more than one ivory tower. Some of you know that when I came to the seminary twenty years ago, they didn't want me to have too much contact with students, so they sent me off for six months of the year to Europe and points beyond. And that's still my regular schedule. So it's not only that I live in the ivory tower. It's also that I live in an ivory tower on another continent, and so you are the people who can supply the necessary dialogue for the ideas that I will put forth.

"Thy Kingdom Become" is our title. And I know—a friend of mine once said—the kingdom of God comes indeed without our prayer, but we like to pray that it may come to us and through us, so that we who are His own, and those who need to be His own, may live under His rule and serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, since He rose from the dead and lives and reigns to all eternity. How is that ever going to happen? When our heavenly Father gives us His Holy Spirit, so that by His grace we believe His word and live a godly life here on earth and in heaven forever, it will happen. And a significant part of having that life, of living that life, of being the child of God that God has made us to be in baptism, is the fact that you cannot tell a child a secret. Those of you who have two- or three-year-olds recognize that fact. You can tell a child, but it won't remain a secret. You can keep the secret, but then you dare not tell the child. And so being a child of God and living that godly life that Luther talks about in the Small Catechism simply involves, among other things, talking.

So today we are gathered here to talk about the nones. Again, you know the nones far better than I do. I run into very few nones on the seminary campus. I run into more when I'm in Europe, I suppose, than here. And there may be some carryover, but maybe not as much as we would like to think. What I'm going to do in this first lecture may seem very elementary for people who have studied theology, but in fact we need to restudy theology, and to restudy it from the textbook that our neighbors give us today through their misreadings, or their simple non-reading, of the Christian tradition.

Armand Boehme, whom many of you know, reviewed Stephen Prothero—the Boston University professor who wrote American Jesus, some of you may know that work—about five years ago. He wrote Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn't. And in his review, Armand said that people across the street from us, or down the road from us, believe that Sodom and Gomorrah were married, that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, and that the epistles were otherwise the wives of the apostles. Now, knowing Armand, he could have made that up. But he makes the point well, and I suspect he didn't make it up. It is in fact the case that we live in a land in which biblical illiteracy is serious and is growing. I don't encounter that on the seminary campus, of course; when people don't know a biblical figure, they do know enough not to innocently blurt out that they don't know it. But when I was on the college campus, people enrolled in our church-work programs had what we thought, as faculty, rather striking holes in their biblical knowledge.

So we are faced with the task of translating new biblical concepts that are foreign to U.S. Americans, and we are faced with the task of teaching them the biblical story, because the Bible is a story. That's part of our presupposition for these days together: that God is a God who is a storyteller. God is a God who is on the move through human history, and God has a history just like you and I have histories. As a matter of fact, our histories coincide. And it is a tragedy when people outside the faith don't recognize that their story coincides with God's story. And so that's what we are called to do—what I'll later tell you about as narrative induction—to lead people into the story that begins with our Creator saying, "Let there be," and that ends with us gathered around the throne described in Revelation.

One more note from Boehme's review of Prothero's book that I picked up. I haven't read Prothero's book, but he talks about three kinds of particularly young Americans. When Hal first approached me about doing this, I wrote him back all enthusiastic about everything I knew about millennials. And he wrote back and said, well, millennials are all fine and good, but they're not alone among the nones. We really need to cast a broader net when we think about the challenge of going to those who claim no religious tradition at all. So Prothero was talking about young people. And he said there are three groups. Interestingly enough, especially for someone teaching at a Methodist school, he called the first group confessionalists. I wouldn't have called them that, simply because I think that confessionalist describes a peculiar Lutheran way of viewing the church. But he called them confessionalists, and they are the people who take ideas seriously. They're the people who really think that religion has a lot to do with how you conceive of things in your head. He says there aren't many of those. There are many more experientialists, his second category, who have a religion of feeling, of the emotions. And then there are the moralists, those who see religion as something that is involved in ethical practice and service to the community and taking care of your neighbor, et cetera.

And it seems to me that Lutherans can get along with all three of those groups, because Luther certainly recognized that God has ideas about what life is like, and He tells us those ideas. He even acts them out as He comes to us as Jesus of Nazareth. He acts them out already in the Old Testament. But He wants us to be thinking human beings. And of course Luther didn't say—well, he probably did, because he said almost everything you could imagine—but he did not stress, at least, that thinking makes the theologian. What makes the theologian is experientia, experience—particularly the experience of the eschatological battle between God and Satan that goes on within our lives as well as all around us. And you can imagine he has a kind of solid law-gospel distinguisher.

How disappointed I was to find out that even some of Luther's earliest sermons are terribly moralistic. But he was dealing with Germans, and he had to instruct them in right and wrong. And he sometimes did that by accusing them of sinning, but he often did it simply by explaining what God's will is for human beings. And so some of his earliest postils—those model sermons that he preached on the pericopes, right, in the case of the first postil he didn't actually preach them; he simply wrote them out as, I think, his continuing-education program, his distance-learning program for priests who wanted to join the Reformation movement—but he emphasized that faith in Jesus Christ not only places us before God as His trusting, faithful people, but it also places us before our neighbors as loving and serving neighbors. And so to all three of those groups we come with a message that needs to be taken from the pages of Scripture and presented to them initially. We want them to grow later, but initially in terms that somehow fit, at least roughly, into their world. They won't fit exactly, because if we try to make them fit exactly, they won't see anything new and different, and they won't be interested in us if they're looking for something that will help them beyond their own knowledge. But at any rate, we translate the message.

And that art of translating the message, as Christians have done in every era, and particularly as they have entered new cultures—and we're surrounded by a new culture—as Christians have entered new cultures, they have always translated. The person that helped me most with this—sorry, I should have done this beforehand—the person that helped me most with this is a missiologist at Yale named Lamin Sanneh, L-A-M-I-N S-A-N-N-E-H. You will recognize that that is not a German name. He was born in the Gambia, on the West African coast, son of a paramount chief. Lamin Sanneh. He became a Christian at, I don't know, age sixteen or eighteen. You will recognize that he is now in retirement. He's a little older than I am. And he points out from his Muslim background that if you really want to be a good Muslim, you learn Arabic. You can read the Koran in translation, you can pray in other languages, but the direct route between you and Allah comes in Arabic. Sanneh points out that as we open the Bible, we have almost no words from Jesus in his original tongue. We have a Greek translation of the Aramaic that he spoke. When Christians go into other cultures, they immediately start to learn the native language. They begin to translate catechisms and Scripture and all sorts of other things into the native tongue first—as Luther was trying to do with his Small Catechism, for instance. They were trying to make a cultural translation that brings the Word of God in meaningful terms to the new culture. And Sanneh says, we shouldn't expect anything different. We're dealing here with a God who translates Himself into human flesh. That's just the way God is.

I know I shouldn't be so presumptuous as to think that I need to talk to seminary graduates about who God is, but I'm going to risk it anyway. My second Roman numeral on the outline: God is—as I read Scripture with Luther, at least—God is a God of conversation and community. Luther never used that term, but it's all over his writings. God is a God who talks. He's a God who, before we see anything—it's still dark out—but we know He's talking. We hear Him before we see Him, as He says, "Let there be." And there was light. So God is a God of conversation, of speech, and speech, of course, immediately forms community. I mean, I talk to myself, I know, but basically speech is for coming together, for communication. I don't know what the communication part is, but it means that you're together in a community.

Now, you and I take for granted—I can't ever remember a time I didn't think that almost everybody believed God is a person. As I've grown older, though, I've come to realize that there are many people in the world who don't believe in God as a person, in personal terms. There are some people who think of God as impersonal. In the ancient world, they were Gnostics. The concept of the divine in theoretical Buddhism, at least, is of nothingness, of just some impersonal—but you can't describe nothingness, because that attributes somethingness to it. So it's just there, the ultimate, the absolute. And we have people, particularly in New Age belief systems, who really do think of the ultimate and absolute in their lives as the Force. Now, they may have to personalize the Force into Mother Nature, or they may have to say, "The Force be with you—and also with you." I mean, that's just the natural reaction, not only of Christians. So the Force is somehow personalized, but still, what makes things happen in this life is impersonal.

Then there are probably the majority of people in the world who believe that there are kind of semi-personal deities, forces, whatever—and these semi-personal things are almost always plural. By nature, I think you and I also are polytheists. And if you say, "I've never been a polytheist," I will just ask you about what really makes your life happen on a daily basis, and you will come up with at least a dozen false gods that at any given moment may take over your thinking and dictate the way you live. And so there's a lot of polytheism, not only in the traditional religions, but in all the major world religions, so-called, as well.

Then there are also people who think that what is ultimate and absolute is something human. Germans thought that the Aryan race was the ultimate and absolute. People in the Soviet Union believed that their class, their social class, and above all their party, were absolute, were ultimate, and could really determine reality. I have been told that there is some society in human history that has actually cultivated the idea that I, as an individual, can be absolute and ultimate—that I am the master of my own fate and the designer of my own destiny. I can't imagine that such a society would survive very long, frankly—a couple, three hundred years at the most—but it just won't work. It just won't work.

We have to remember God's first great "whoops." You remember God's first great "whoops." He's saying, "It's good, it's good, it's good." And all of a sudden He said, "Yeah, very good"—but it's not good at the time; it's not good that that guy be there alone. Human community is, according to Genesis 2, part of the warp and woof of who you and I are. And we stand alone before God—that's clear. We are individuals. Paul breaks a lance against the Gnosticism that would like to have us just absorbed back into the great heavenly, whatever it is—spirit, or the One, as some Gnostic systems called it. So we are individuals. But we are individuals who are always in community, either with our God—well, both with our God and with our fellow human beings. That's just the way we have been designed.

And then there are other people who believe in a personal deity. But those religious systems are few in our world. They are basically the Christian faith and its two major heresies, post-apostolic Judaism, and Islam. And other than that, there are not systems that think of God as a single Creator, a person who comes to us through His word. And so we recognize that God is a God of conversation and community.

And within the last five years or so, my students in South India, in Luther seminars that I've offered there, have taught me something about the Reformation I had never noticed before. We were reading The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. And I just kind of made a casual offhand remark: why does Luther keep harping on this ex opere operato stuff? Can't he just say that's wrong and go on to something else? He just keeps saying, you can't have this sort of automatic, magical—he doesn't say magical, but he's implying it, I think—view of the sacrament. And my students were amazed that I was so dimwitted. They said, coming out of a Hindu-shaped culture, it's clear: Luther changed the fundamental definition of what it means to be Christian, from a ritual-based religion, in which you went through sacred activities, rituals, liturgy, common practices, going about in daily life. He was moving the center of Christianity from a human-being-to-God kind of religion to a religion that said what binds life together—that's how I define religion when I want to use it positively—what binds life together is that God comes to us, and He comes to us talking, and He talks to us in oral, written, and sacramental forms.

We'll talk, I think, tomorrow about the elements that we can think of that go into what makes up religious systems, belief systems of various kinds. But ritual is one of the important elements of almost every religious or belief system, and ritual is important for us too. It gives form to the way in which we converse with God. We converse with God. But at the same time, we have to realize that that's not where it starts. It starts with the Creator, who talks to us, and He talks to us not only in creative ways, but in recreative ways. And He has given us really two words. He has talked to us in ways that are recreative, giving us the gift of identity as His child. And then telling us what that means in terms of our own performance. And we're going to talk about that a good deal later.

So, I do want to say a few words about trust. I'm at 2B, one, right now—sound like Mr. Voelz. Trust is a very important word. It's very important for Lutherans, but it's very important for U.S. Americans as well, because we have all been shaped—the way we think has been shaped—by one of my favorite dogmaticians, Erikson. Not a Christian dogmatician; I didn't say it was a Christian dogmatician. But he laid down a dogma that most Americans believe in firmly, even if they've never heard his name. His dogma starts with the principle that we go through eight stages of life, each one moving to the next stage, each time moving to the next stage with—just to show how learned we are, I'll say it in Greek—a krisis. He uses the English word "crisis." But call it what you will, it's judgment. And we encounter these crises when we experience, above all, our own judgment: the person that I've been identifying myself as is not really the person that I want to be. And so the first crisis comes at age two. And the two-year-old says, "I'm not going to be completely dependent on my parents anymore. I can already start standing on my own two feet." And that makes the twos terrible.

What was that fellow's name? Erik Erikson. Yeah. In 1950 he published a book called Childhood and Society. He didn't publish a lot of books, but his theory about the eight stages of life got written into every psychological textbook since, even though it's been disputed, or amplified, or changed. But I asked a friend of mine who's a clinical psychologist; I said, "I like Erikson." And he said, "Oh, we've shot Erikson all to pieces." And I said, well, I like two things in him. First of all, his concept that identity is a key to human personhood—that our sense of who we are is an often unspoken, even unthought-of, presupposition. I didn't look in the mirror, to be honest with you; I didn't look in the mirror this morning and say, "Ah, I believe that's Bob Kolb." I just got up, just presuming that I was Bob Kolb. So I take my identity for granted, but in taking it for granted, it is ever-present with me. It is the source of my sense of integrity—that is, my sense of wholeness as a human being, et cetera.

And then the other thing, and that's what I want to talk about here for a moment—Erik Erikson, I was going to write his name—Erik Erikson's second word that psychologists still pretty universally agree on is trust. And he says trust or mistrust happens on a spectrum, but somewhere in the trust-mistrust spectrum, we learn during our first two years of life. We learn the basic stance, I suppose you would say, of our personality, that follows us then through the eight stages. Now, people do shift. They can have experiences that destroy trust or build trust. But fundamentally, they experience life out of learning, he says, trust from mother. It also comes from father, grandma, and grandpa, and other people in the first two years, but by the age of two, you have gotten this basic shape of your personality, according to Erik Erikson.

Just a little historical detail: you notice the name, Erik, Erik's son. He—I'm not sure if he was illegitimate, but at least he didn't know his own father, and I think he was not even sure of his own father's name. And he was adopted, and I don't remember exactly when he came to the United States. He's German. But Erik Erikson is the name he chose. So I'm reading into it now; I don't know that he ever said this, but I think he established his own identity—which, of course, he didn't, according to his own theory. The way his mother treated him established the person he was.

Well, at any rate, Erik Erikson is not the first to have talked in these terms. Martin Luther did, and Martin Luther did because Paul and the prophets also talked this way. A fundamental development in Luther's theology was the shift in defining the first of the theological virtues, faith, fides—which in the Middle Ages was understood as mere—I don't believe in "mir" in this case, but mere historic faith. "The devils believe, and tremble." And Philip Melanchthon taught Luther, no, that's not what pistis means. It means fiducia. It means trust. It means reliance. It means dependence. It means throwing yourself into the lap of another person. And Luther, too, saw that that was fundamental to human personhood and personality. Fearing, loving, trusting—synonyms in Luther's case. They are what give us our fundamental sense of who we are. And it always comes from outside. You remember that the reason that you try to avoid hurting and harming your neighbor in his body, why you want to help and befriend him in every bodily need, is because you fear and love God. So that's just key.

In his Large Catechism, Luther says that gods are made by trust. The Holy Spirit is moving you; you create your God by trusting the true God, the God who speaks with His people from Genesis 1 on. But if you don't have a relationship with the true God—if the Holy Spirit has not created that relationship of trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who became flesh in Jesus of Nazareth—you have a relationship with some other false god or false gods. You don't have a choice. You need something to anchor your life and give you, well, let's say, a sense of identity. I think that the sixteenth-century word for identity was righteousness. Now, that's a rough translation, and I'll bet you you won't find it in any dictionary. But the meaning of the word "to be righteous" means to know who you are, to have a sense of your own integrity by being able to identify yourself in the right place, doing the right things, and so on and so forth.

And so I want to go on to talk a little bit—point 2C—about what God's word of promise promises us. God promises us, and Luther's word for the gospel was essentially—or his description of its form was essentially—a promise, a promissio. A promise is something that is not subject to proof, of course. It is part of a personal relationship. It is in this community that God establishes by talking to us. And what He says to us is, first of all, His promise—the promise to be our God, and to have us as His children. And especially after the birth—well, after his oldest child, Hans, was a year or two old—Luther talked far more frequently about God as his Father than he had before. He had always talked, I think, about us as children of God, but that whole theme of praying, for instance, because we can go to our Father in heaven as children boldly go to their fathers—that's just part and parcel of Luther's understanding of who God is and who we are.

So Luther's big breakthrough, I think, in terms of understanding what it means to be human—or really there are two. First of all, Luther defines what it means to be human as God being in the center of our lives. What's the First Commandment? What's the first descriptor of who we are as human beings? It is that we fear, love, and trust in God above all things. And that's our core identity. That's the gift of the Holy Spirit, that's our DNA, that stands at the very heart of who we are. But then He also gives us the gift of living as His children. So there are two aspects to our identity—there are two aspects or elements of what it means to be human.

And so Luther talked about that core identity in terms of righteousness. In 1518 and 1519 he wrote two tracts, one on three kinds of righteousness, the other on two kinds of righteousness, which he called—the first kind he called an alien righteousness. Except he didn't call it an alien righteousness. That's one of the worst translations we have in our tradition, because it's not at all alien; it's at the heart of who we are. It simply comes from outside us. That's what iustitia aliena is—the righteousness from outside us. And that is not an improper righteousness, as you might believe by calling the other kind of righteousness proper righteousness. No, they're both proper in the sense of the English meaning of "proper." The other kind of righteousness is called proper because of the Latin word proprius, which means belonging to me. Well, they both belong to me, but this one's proper because I perform it. God performs the first kind. It's totally His gift. I perform the second, because His gift of my core identity enables me to serve my neighbor, and thus enjoy the fullness of my humanity.

So the last thing I have in my outline under trust is: we need to be confident. We are confident that we are God's children. And if we are truly God's children—if we really believe that—then we delight in obeying Him. Remember the Hebrew word for "to obey"; one Hebrew word for obey is shama. Or, no, I thought that was the word for "hear." It's the word for both. If you hear God, you've got to be pretty foolish not to obey. And so you translate shema from context. Most of the time, I think it means "hear," but it also can mean "to obey."

Well, I would like to just talk a little bit about Luther's definition that a God is what we put our trust in. And he explains why. First of all, we need to have a source of all good. And secondly, we need to have a haven in every need. Well, I've expanded—my commentary on that insight of Luther's really gives us, I think, a prism through which the light of God may be beamed into our lives, through which we may understand what it means to have God as our Father, and what it means that we are His children.

This prism consists, first of all, of our sense of identity. And that sense of identity is a gift. Let me give you three analogies to help understand the fact that we have a core identity, and then we have many secondary identities. Do you remember the conversation you had with your parents when they called you to the supper table about nine months before you were born and said, you know, if you promise to help with the dishes each week—or each day—and carry out the garbage once a week, and occasionally—you know, I'm so old, when I started this I talked about washing cars; that's something kids used to do before—well, never mind. Do you remember that conversation? There's a Norwegian in the back that remembers that conversation, I noticed. His name is Erik. Yeah, yeah. It never happened, because that's not the way our DNA was given us. I've never seen DNA, so I don't know if I really believe in it, but it's the way U.S. Americans talk. It's just there. Our parents just gave us the gift of life, and with it, the persons we are.

Second analogy. Do you remember in Genesis 2, God took the dust of the earth, breathed into it, and Adam and Eve then got to be there? And He said, "Okay, you're living beings. Now, I have this plan for a crown to the creation. You're eligible for earning that status." And you remember, was it six weeks or six months or six years that Adam and Eve were given to prove that they were worthy of being human, living creatures? Do you remember, in Genesis 2, how long that is? And so, as God turns back—as soon, actually, even before then; it's in verse 1:02, and none of us have read that far—Adam and Eve were human by the very gift of God. No questions asked. Nothing demanded. Jesus said "born again" to Nicodemus. He could have said, well, you enter the kingdom of God through something similar to a commercial deal. Or He could have said, well, it's kind of like bride and bridegroom, and here's how the wooing process goes. He said, "born again," where we come out of the womb kicking and screaming, but we are totally passive. And so it is with our new identity, our new creatureliness in Jesus Christ.

Third example, to get at what Luther meant when he talked about the two aspects or two elements of our humanity. He called it two kinds of righteousness. He thought it was our theology. I didn't know that for a long time. But at any rate, I've been one of the few people who's been given the privilege of researching in the archives of purgatory. And I found that St. Thomas Aquinas, in 1274, when he died—they lost his papers. You know, the saints are all supposed to go right on through and on to heaven. But they lost his papers. They found them on the eighteenth of February, 1546. So he spent nearly 300 years there.

Well, they had a party. They were very embarrassed. And he went on and comes to St. Peter, and Peter says, "Who are you?" "Thomas von Aquino." "Why should I let you into my heaven?" "Because of the grace of God," Thomas said, proving his grace. "And how do I know you have the grace of God?" "I just happen to have brought my work along." So Thomas empties out his sack and he's got all his daily practice of the seven hours of prayer. He said, "I didn't always want to go, but the grace of God moved me to come to prayer. I wasn't always happy with the idea that the bells were ringing for mass, but I always went, again, only by the grace of God. I obeyed my parents and my superiors in the order and even my princes, no matter how knuckleheaded they were. I obeyed because the grace of God was with me. I took care of my brothers in the monastery and those outside, to the extent I could, and I led a chaste and decent life in word and deed," and so on. All of that was simply because of the grace of God.

Well, there was a line forming, so Peter didn't undertake instruction at that point. He just took the next guy. "What's your name?" "Martin Luther." "Why should I let you into heaven?" "By the grace of God." Well, Peter was feeling a little playful, so he said, "Well, look, Thomas had proof that he had the grace of God in his works, but I don't see you have anything with you. Where are your works?" And Luther said, "Works? I didn't realize I was supposed to bring them with me. I left them down on earth with my neighbor." Peter said, "Well, then how am I supposed to know you have God's grace?" Luther fumbles around his pocket, takes out this sheet of paper. It says, "Martin Luther, baptized the eleventh of November, 1483." And Luther said, "I was just born again into the family."

That's the difference between Luther's understanding of the grace of God and the understanding of many, many, many Christians, probably many Lutherans as well. Many believe that there is one kind of righteousness, and the grace of God is really handy because it helps us attain that one kind of righteousness, the righteousness of human performance. And Luther said, there are two ways in which God wants us to be righteous. He wants us to be righteous in front of Him, through our trust, that simply recognizes His recreative word made us His people. And He wants us to be righteous over and against each other, through love and service, through carrying out God's commands. So I like to rile pastors at Lutheran pastoral conferences by asking them, did Luther believe in works righteousness? Of course he did. But only between you and me. Not between you or me and God.

So that's the identity we have. We are God's children, and we get to act out that core identity. We have the privilege and the blessing of acting out that core identity, because we live in trust in Him. But we are His people. We are His children, and the word gets around on the block when we're out there playing: those people come from the family that live at God's house.

Secondly, I think this idea of—why do we trust? Why do we need to trust in something outside ourselves, above ourselves? We need a sense of place. We need to have a place where we can go where everybody knows our name. I have a way with words. We need to have a place where they have to take us in when there's no place else to go. We have to have a place where people have the gift of weeping with us and weeping for us. That's a new line with me that I just discovered in Philippians 3. Paul, when he's complaining about the dirty, rotten people around him, wants to weep for them. That's a special gift. But we need someplace that we can say, this is where I belong. And so the supper table of the Lord is that place, and the church becomes that place—also for the nones.

People—and this is kind of related to place, I guess—need safety. They need security. Luther called it a haven in time of need. We need to have the sense that there is a haven for us, and that God will be with us. In that translation of the Book of Concord that Hal mentioned before, there's one place where they got it wrong. It still reads in the Small Catechism that He protects us against all danger, as if you might read that we don't have danger anymore in our lives. The German is vor. It means "in the face of." It's the same word as our righteousness before God—it's that vor word. So God protects us in the midst of dangers. And Luther believed very much that we are constantly in this battle between God and Satan, between the truth and the lie, or the lies. And God really is our fortress. He is our Herberge—what's the word for Herberge? It's this sense of the place you can go to in the storm. And not only in the storm. It's a place where you're always welcome. So again, place and safety are quite closely related.

We also need a sense of respect. We need to know that other people recognize that we have dignity and worth. And I'll tell you the story now. I really have it in my outline later, but it occurs to me that I have to tell it now. When Oxford University Press asked me to write a proposal for a theology of Luther, I wrote in the proposal that writing a theology of Luther in the twenty-first century means that you can't write just for Western Europeans and North Americans. You have to write for people from the majority world. And they liked that. They accepted the proposal. And then I started to wonder what I meant by that. And so, David Tswaedi, then the bishop of our partner church in South Africa, our black partner church in South Africa, was on campus, and I asked him over to my office and said, "David, is Martin Luther of much use to your pastors?" "Oh, yes." "Well, his distinction of the two realms helps us sort out and fight against, actually, the claims of those who say, if you want to be a real South African, you'll also have to go back to the traditional religions. And Luther's two realms explains how you can be a good citizen and a disciple of Jesus—if you're a disciple of Jesus, you have to be a good citizen." "How about the doctrine of justification?" "No." No, this conversation was not going in the direction I had hoped.

I said, "Well, then what is the chief problem, the chief spiritual problem, that your pastors have to help their people address?" And he said—even, I don't know what it was then, ten, twelve years after apartheid had been abolished—"they have no sense of their own personal worth. They have no sense of a future. They have no sense of anything significant happening in their lives, because they're second-class citizens. They're just dirt." And I said, "Well, David, what is the doctrine of justification according to Martin Luther all about, if it's not an affirmation of your dignity and your worth—not on the basis of anything you do, or not on the basis of any identification anybody else pins on you, but solely on the blood of Jesus Christ, your Savior, and the recreative power of God's word to give you a new identity?" We had forty-five minutes of the most fabulous conversation about what Luther's doctrine of justification means.

And that's a good example of what I was talking about before. We have to translate into the situations in which people are at the beginning of the conversation. Then, I think, we have to bring them into the fullness of the tradition later. But we have to begin the conversation there. Well, people need to know that they are creatures of God, and their lives may be totally loused up because of other people's fault and because of their own fault, but they are the people for whom Christ died and rose. And to get that message across is part of saying, here is a God you can trust.

Well, I suppose you know what the last letter is. M is for meaning. It's kind of the flip side of respect. It's the way I make an estimate of my own life. I suppose one American word for that is satisfaction. And satisfaction comes from two Latin words, which mean to make enough, to have stuff made enough. The other word we might use for this is fulfillment—to be filled to the fullness of who we are. And I'm willing to live with those two definitions of the meaning that God gives to our lives, or the effect of the meaning God gives to our lives. But do any of you know the German word for satisfaction? This just struck me as I was working on this presentation. I mean, I knew the German word for a long time. It is Zufriedenheit, being at peace. And that's really what God's meaning means for us—that we are set at peace. By knowing, first of all, that the meaning of our life rests in Christ, not in us. And then secondly, knowing that we have meaning in life as we fulfill the callings in every corner of our lives. No matter how unsatisfying it may feel on days when our kids aren't coming up to our expectations, when we've disappointed our spouses, or our bosses, or our neighbors, our lives still have meaning—in the smallest of details of our service to the world, even in the midst of our imperfections, because the one in whom we trust says, "You are my servant," even on the days when we haven't been particularly faithful.

So, moving right along—we're not going to finish this outline, obviously—God's word is performative. It is more than creative and recreative. God's word, as gospel, as promise, is performative, as the modern linguists say. It gives us a new identity. But it gives us a new identity not just by performing in the way that the judge performs when he says "guilty" or "not guilty," not performing in the way you change the reality of two people's lives when you say "I pronounce you husband and wife," not just the way reality is determined by the call of an umpire who, if you weren't blind, could still see your fingernail marks in the base, and he thinks you're out. Those are all performances of speech that are regulated by a human framework. When God says, "You're my child," that's actually recreative. That changes your DNA. That changes your core identity. I guess what I've just said actually means your—is it called a genome?—is more than just the genes in it. There's a God-relationship gene that they haven't discovered and won't, because it's not under their power to discover.

Modern theory tells us about the psychological impact of performative, or even recreative, speech. And we need to be aware of this as we think about what we say when we're talking, particularly with people who don't have the equipment—they don't have the gifts, they are outside the faith. Because they're outside the faith, that means they haven't learned the language yet. But we need particularly to remember what Austin and Searle taught us in the last thirty years, that our speech has a locutionary impact. And as I was trying to think of a good example, I thought back to St. Louis and thought of my wife saying, "The wastebasket in the kitchen is full." You can envision the kitchen. You can envision the wastebasket. You can envision opening it up and seeing it piled to the top. You know what that sentence means. The illocutionary force of my wife's statement—what she intends to say—is, "Take out the garbage." But the perlocutionary force—that is, the effect it has on me—is, "Oh, that's a good explanation for why it stinks in here." Which may lead her to be more explicit with her locutionary expression, and come clearer on the illocutionary. We need to remember that what we say bears an intent, and we have to be clear about our own intent. What are we trying to accomplish with this sentence? We may be attempting a catechetical task at a pre-catechetical stage. Probably not helpful, although they may come back to remember that later. And we have to be listening very carefully for the perlocutionary force. We have to be picking up all the signals we can for what it's actually doing to the person.

So that helps a little bit with the psychology of all this. But we also need to think of God's word theologically. And there we go beyond what we can explain. There we go beyond linguistic theories and psychological explanations. Interestingly enough, I have asked a number of people well trained in psychology about exactly how to explain the origins of trust. And I don't get an answer. The way trust functions is just not yet determined in easily understandable psychological terms, interestingly.

So the word of God, then, as gospel comes to us in the form of a promise. Promises elicit trust. They're not matters of proof. They're matters of trust. And they are matters that are always based on this personal relationship. And the personal relationship happens when God's intelligible word, propositional word, addresses not only the proposition-receiving head part of us, the rational in us, but also addresses our wills and our emotions. And I think that's true simply because we're in the image of God. When the Bible talks about God pondering, or about His willing or His emoting, those aren't anthropomorphisms. When we talk about our pondering, willing, emoting, those are theomorphisms. We are who we are because we are in the image of God. And so the word is rational communication, but it's rational communication with more than just rational impact. Like the Supreme Court justice said about pornography, "I knows it when I sees it." We just know what God's saying "I love you, trust me" means. And the response to "I love you" is not—well, what, you know, "is a very interesting phenomenon, consisting of a mutual attraction between two people, that can be forged on a variety of bases, to prepare people for self-sacrifice for the beloved in a unique fashion." Now, you can try that on your wife when you go home. But I would say, "I love you" is a better response to "I love you."

It's what Gerhard Forde is talking about when he picks up on Luther's "for you" and "for us" and "for me" language, with his insistence that the native form of the promise is in first-order discourse—that is, the I-thou communication. And I am going to take time, although we're running a little bit late, to kind of illustrate this. Brad, will you join me in an experiment? Sure. I want to show the difference between second-order discourse and first-order discourse. So think of a sin that you have committed. You don't need to tell us. You certainly can, but you don't need to. Okay, do you have that sin in mind? Okay. I want you to look over there. No, look up there. And there, imagine that there are also two other crosses. There's a hill at Golgotha, and on that cross is Jesus of Nazareth, the one who claimed to be the Son of Man, who comes to sit at the right hand of the Father, and to whom glory and dominion and honor and so forth are given. And He actually came, as God in human flesh, to atone for the sins of all human sinners, everybody in the history of the world. Do you find that comforting? Very. Okay. Brad, I forgive you of that sin and every other, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Now, that wasn't quite as comforting as the first, right? This young man is not taking me seriously. Just tell me what you think. Well, the first one was probably more. But when you spoke it, because you spoke it—you would have said, "I, a called and ordained servant of the Word"? That's the power of the word.

Somebody else. John? What did you think? Was it more fun to hear it personally? Okay, for me. Well, I do this in class a lot. And some students really believe it, but some students know that Kolb tends to set students up. You've forgotten; it's been too long, you've forgotten. I think both do. I mean, the argument usually that I get is it was more explicit, there was more detail. But you also put it in the context of the "for you," didn't you? Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

And so the native form of the gospel is when it comes, and we know that God is talking to us. The abstract stuff is necessary. Forde says you've got to do the theology before you can proclaim; if you don't have instruction and explanation in terms of the whole of the Jesus story—the whole of God's history of coming to save us from the beginning on, that's just His whole person is involved in being there for His people—if you don't have that, then the I-thou language won't make sense. But the message comes home to rest with the I-thou, the personal conversation. And that's because God is a God of conversation and community.

Let me say a little bit about the law. Luther says any number of times, believe it or not, the law is good. But he also says, as James Nestingen says, the law is like a wolf that you train to be a guide dog. Very good guide dog, very good guide dog, but you never know when it's going to turn on you. And so we need to realize that as we converse with the nones, many of them come from families in which there have been very few boundaries set. Or often boundaries set, but arbitrary boundaries. They shifted with the needs of the parents from day to day, and how energetic the parents wanted to be in enforcing rules, or how much they needed to have their kids have rules that made them their servants when they needed them and got them out of their hair when they didn't need them. So we need to realize that the law is going to be very good news for many of the people that we encounter in our society today, as they first come to hear the Christian message. We also have to realize that it's just a matter of time until the law turns on them. So we have to be patient with them in what sounds to us like works righteousness, because their lives will have meaning and security because they have learned the boundaries of the law. But they need also to be cultivated in that trust that goes beyond the inevitable staring at themselves, to stare at the cross, and to know that that's who they are.

And so we live in a world in which the proper distinction of law and gospel is the only way to reach clarity. Along with the distinction of the two realms and the distinction of the two kinds of righteousness, that alone is clarity. I think we should stop now, and I will pick up, very quickly, after our break, go through my fourth point in this outline, but I promise by the end of the day to be at the end of lecture 2 so that we can spend all tomorrow in lecture 3.

Questions or comments? Just to clarify, you said the nones will like the law because they like the boundaries that get set? Some will. Some will. Okay. Not all. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, but we are here being hosted by brothers who are an order that was founded by Eugène de Mazenod, who, it is suggested, is the patron of dysfunctional families, because he came from—it's a very interesting story. There's a brochure on St. Eugène around here. It's worth reading. But not all dysfunctional families have this no-boundaries or arbitrary-boundaries problem, but some do. And we need to be prepared to listen to those people and to walk with them and realize that that's their orientation. That's their first eighteen years. And it's not going to be easy to overcome. I think we need ministries of prayer for dysfunctional families in our midst too.

Oh, is there one other? I am—okay. You're speaking about God as a God of conversation. Think about what Luther says in the Gospel of John: he talks about the Father as the speaker, the Son as the Word that is spoken, and the Holy Spirit as the listener. Yeah, I try to shy away from Trinitarian speculation. But sometimes it's at least homiletically really very helpful. And I think that that try gets across an important message.

Let me start, then, with the word religio, which, as I say, is not one of my favorite words, because I often use it as a term for all belief systems. The atheist is also one who finds a prism, simply not in the true God. And so are all other religions. But there is a sense in which I think it's helpful, because all belief systems are a matter of trust, and you and I really are in the business of conversing with people who have false religions, to bring them to what truly binds life together and gives us a sense of awe in the face of our God.

The Latin word religio is said to come from one of two roots. You know how Latin is. There are four conjugations, and sometimes the stems of one conjugation and another conjugation are pretty much alike. So there's a word religare with an A, and a word religere with an E. And I always confuse them. But I believe it is that religere means to stand in awe of. And a lot of linguists will say that's the real root of our concept of religion. It's what we stand in awe of. I like the other one better, though. Religare is to bind together. And I think religions are what bind life together by giving us an object of trust—personal or impersonal or semi-personal—an object of trust, or objects of trust, that hold life together.

And a historian of religions, a comparative religionist named Ninian Smart, has used a system that I think was probably put together by others, to do the comparative-religion thing. When you believe in comparative religion as your way of interpreting life, you say all religions are more or less created equal. But nonetheless, his analysis is useful for our thinking our way into the way of thinking of those who have false gods, who stand outside the Christian faith. This is my order; I've forgotten his order. But he says that all religions have doctrine. That is, they have certain principles, certain basic descriptions of life. Doctrine is described in our day and age as—Kevin Vanhoozer talks about religion, or Christianity particularly, as the production script for a movie or for a stage play. It's that which tells us where things belong, as we read Scripture; it comes out of Scripture, it comes out of the story, but then it sets things in a kind of codified place. Or George Lindbeck talks about doctrine as the grammar and syntax that explain the language of Scripture, that give us the categories which we use. Luther and Melanchthon thought of doctrine, especially the topics of doctrine, the loci communes, as a good guide for teaching, for helping organize teaching. Not all religious systems will have an elaborate system of doctrine. Very often, adherents of certain religions won't be able to articulate much of the doctrine. Some of them will do some of the equivalent with their narratives, with the way they tell stories about life. And of course Christian doctrine does come from God's narrative that He has given us in Holy Scripture, from His telling His own story, which is then our story as well.

All religions have ritual. That is, they have ways of directing human action toward God, in liturgies and in other pious practices. It may be a pinch of salt at the juju at the corner of the field as you begin to plant or harvest. It can be a whole host of things. It can be getting up in the morning and checking the stock market online, if you're a Mammonite. Now, there's nothing wrong with doing that, of course, if it's done after you have prayed to the true God. It becomes bad when you can't drink your first cup of coffee without having checked online as to how your stocks or your bonds or your commodities did.

That's the horizontal relationship. Ethics describes the horizontal relationship. It's the rules for life. And practically all religions, according to Smart, place us in community. And that includes the way religious communities govern themselves, but also how individuals and families and the like interact within the religion. And then there's something that binds everything together. Faith is what we call it. Islam calls it submission. If you recall Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy, he said that traditional religions are bound together by a sense of awe, that involves neither trust nor necessarily obedience—just do the right thing and get out of the way for the gods.

Well, we need to remember this when we analyze what we're hearing from the nones. They will have different accents, different points of orientation. Some of them will not be able to spell out their principles for life very much, but they'll be able to tell the stories that tell you why they feel safe, why they do the things they do, et cetera. Most will have some kind of ritual, because I know that variety is the spice of life, but routine is its sustenance. And ritual is the expression of core values in ritual form. They'll all have ways of codifying the way we treat other people. And even in individualistic North America, we do seek, and sometimes even long for, community. And so all of those factors will be playing a role as we talk with other people. And we need to remember nowadays that we have to pay attention to all these aspects of our own faith and its practice as we assimilate people.

There's probably the leading missionary anthropologist in our day, a man named Paul Hiebert, H-I-E-B-E-R-T, a Mennonite who taught at Fuller, and then taught at Trinity in Deerfield. And Hiebert's posthumously published Transforming Worldviews talks about the fact that—well, he starts out; he was a missionary in India before he came back to the U.S. to teach. And in India, he was experiencing that missionaries were often three and four generations into the church's existence in a place. And he was wondering why people who could, in Lutheran terms, recite the catechism, and who knew all the rules for right and wrong, would still be doing some unintelligible things for the missionary. And he recognized that below doctrine and ritual and ethics and community principles, and the understanding of the narrative, is a fundamental worldview, that sometimes coincides with our expression of doctrine particularly, but sometimes we fit the doctrines we learn into the worldview beneath it. And that's not just a problem in India. That's a problem in every place that you and I minister. Our people are getting a basic worldview, especially from North American media today. And it's not a biblical worldview. And we are always supposed to be, if we're smart, fighting that battle against the false presuppositions they bring to our sermons and to our catechism classes. So they may learn all the stuff we want them to know and still not have gotten it, because they're putting it in old wineskins. So what we need to do is to retell God's story again and again, including sensitivity to those places where God's story doesn't make sense to them, because they have false presuppositions about the very shape of human life and what it means to be human.

Jared Wicks, the Jesuit Luther scholar, probably the best Roman Catholic Luther scholar in the United States, lectured on our campus on Thursday. And as we were together with colleagues from Kenrick Seminary on Friday in conversation with him, he was jokingly telling about being at a conference with Carl Braaten, who had testily said, "I don't tell stories," in this phase of his doctrinal development. He is into doctrine. Well, we all tell stories. We all have our own stories to tell, but more importantly, God has His story to tell. And so I will admit that I would have been of the Braaten school not too many years ago, and then I was assigned to work with Luther's storytelling as a means by which he cultivated the Christian life. And I realized how important storytelling was for Luther. Now, his sermons are, if you want to do the statistics, more catechetical. They are more doctrinal proclamation. But at key points, he makes the gospel come clear, often through dramatizing, and adding details to the stories that you and I probably wouldn't dare to do. He reads Rebecca's mind. And he tells you what Abraham thought. We've all been tempted to read Abraham's mind as he goes up Mount Moriah, I suppose, from the writer of the Hebrews on; that's been a healthy and sometimes unhealthy tradition. Abraham usually thinks something like what you or I would think, depending on whether it's you or I who's retelling the story. But Luther does that to make the story come alive. Although the story can stand on its own—that's true.

But at any rate, I think we need to be aware, because we live in a world that is saturated in storytelling. And because when you talk about really important things in their lives, your neighbors and mine will begin telling stories before they'll sort of lay out a logical argument. Logic, of course, is culturally determined. And so I suppose that a certain postmodern logic in North America today involves the logic of a story, the logic of bringing experience to bear.

But to end this first lecture, I want to say that the witness that God calls us to do does what a sociologist named Charlotte Linde calls narrative induction. She tells the story of a Midwestern life insurance firm. I believe it was founded in the 1920s or 30s. And it trained a generation, or maybe even two generations, of salespeople, by retelling and impressing upon new recruits for the sales force exactly how the founder made it work. And so they were led narratively into the story of the founder, and in that story of the founder's way of making calls, of dedicating sixteen hours a day to the firm, of doing this and doing that as a salesperson, the founder had built this empire, and his salespeople also contributed to the building of the empire. Well, you and I are called to bring God's story into people's lives, and to bring their stories into God's story. And the Holy Spirit is at work doing that. And He uses our whole persons, our examples that build trust, and our words that build trust to do that.

So that's the end of the first lecture. It was called, if you'll recall, "Don't Open That Book, It'll Kill You." And that refers, at one level, I suppose, to the locutionary level—no, it's got to be already illocutionary. What I mean to say is, the Bible's a very dangerous book. The Bible kills sinners. It was inspired to kill sinners, and it actually does it. And so it's a very dangerous book for sinners to open. If you open it and keep it at arm's length and just say, "I'm going to study it objectively," it may work. But if you start to read the stories and are drawn into them at all, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ finally will get you. And it will bury your sinful identity. And it will raise you up as a new child of God. That's the performative nature of the word, and that's what we're all about. So.

The worldview idea—it would explain why people would say, "Okay, yeah, that's what the church believes, but we are now living in the real world. So abortion's okay, homosexuality's okay. You know, all religions will lead us to heaven. I personally accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, but I believe in God." Yep. It may not be a personal creator-speaker kind of God. It may be a kind of impersonal force, "but I like the pastor, and I like the music, and I like to be there." Now, we shouldn't think that we're all of a sudden the Lone Ranger in this. Think of Luther. He was dealing with people whose worldview was totally that of medieval Christianity, with all the blessings that brought, but also with the remnants of paganism. So it's a battle I think we always fight. If Lamin Sanneh is correct, Christianity always changes a culture when it comes into a culture. Cultures are never the same. My colleague Victor Raj says—probably you can't say this, because history is history, but probably—Hinduism wouldn't have come up with ideas like a Western school system and Western medical care, et cetera, if they hadn't had Christian models brought to them by the British. So Christianity always makes an impact on culture. Culture always makes an impact on Christianity, because God is a God who comes to talk to us in our own cultural context. The problem is, our cultural contexts are always creatures of God, and inhabited by the demonic forces of Satan at the same time.

You know, just adding to it—how many hospitals were founded by Christians and churches, right? "You've got to take care of those people." Right. And in India, which is, I think, six percent Christian today, my guess—I'm just totally guessing—but maybe a quarter of the hospitals still are run by Christian churches. I mean, far beyond the percentage that you would think from a group that's a minority. So yeah. But you also always see the marks of culture. And we're not immune to that either. So we always have to be on guard. The whole life of the church, as well as of the individual, is, as Luther said, a life of repentance.

What about the use of the word "story"? There are those who would say that that plays into the postmodernists' hands, that that is already subconsciously letting them believe that it's not necessarily true. I think that's a danger, so I think we need to counteract that. But we all have our own stories, and we call them stories, and we do believe they're true. So narrative may be a better word to use, or history isn't bad either, because it is God's history. He enters into human history. He was there to invent human history. Time is a construction of His. I wouldn't have been clever enough to come up with it, I don't think. And you can just trace what He's done in the history of Israel, in the history of the church, at the critical crossing point of history on Golgotha and in the empty tomb. So I'm glad for the warning, because all of us have said, "Well, that's just a story." It's kind of like the word "myth." All myths are true. Many of them are just fictional. But myths in the sense that the sociologists and anthropologists use it are the expressions of true principles for a society. It's just that the myths of ancient Rome, where we get our basic popular usage of the term—they were all probably fairly early recognized by most of the population as fictional. But they were guides, and so forth. So no, I think that's a good warning. Thanks.