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October 12 - November 11, 2017
Mannermaa's key idea is that "in faith itself Christ is really present,"1 a literal translation of Luther's "in ipsa fide Christus adest." This idea is played off against a purely forensic concept of justification, in which the Christus pro nobis (Christ for us) is separated from the Christus in nobis (Christ within us).
for Luther faith is a real participation in Christ, that in faith a believer receives the righteousness of God in Christ, not only in a nominal and external way, but really and inwardly.
Luther under the spell of neo-Kantian presuppositions.
On this basis one should ignore all ontology found in Luther; faith is purely an act of the will with no
ontological implications. Faith as volitional obedience rather than as ontological participation is all that a neo-Kantianized Luther could allow.
Luther expresses a realist conception of knowledge according to which knowledge brings about a real participation in the object that is known.
Ritschl maintains, what is called Christ's presence in faith is an effect of the will of God.
God himself remains outside of human reality so that only the impulse of God's will reaches us.
The "presence" expressed in this conception is in its essence neither a mystical nor a substantial union, but rather a "union of wills" that is carried out in the consciousness of the believer.
the objects of intellect and of love are the being and act (esse et actus) of the intellect and love itself.
Luther does not distinguish between the person and the work of Christ. Christ himself, both his person and his work, is the righteousness of man before God.
Christ himself, as incarnated agape, and not the striving caritas-love ("eros") of the scholastic theology that Luther criticized, is the divine reality of being, the forma, that makes faith "real."
Christ, I say, not as some express it in blind words, `causally,' so that he grants righteousness
and remains absent himself, for that would be dead. Yes, it is not given at all unless Christ himself is present, just as the radiance of the sun and the heat of fire are not present if there is no sun and no fire."16
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The idea of participation in Christ and in his divine properties was thus the content of his so-called reformatory insight and at the same time the foundation of his criticism of scholastic theology.
even if faith is not the fulfillment of the law, it nevertheless imports love along with it, and love is the fulfillment of the law.
Another reason for finding Luther fascinating is that he joins the Lutheran tradition to the common classical Christian heritage. The bridge to this heritage from the Augustana and from the Formula of Concord is too weak to stand up to the traffic of the whole Lutheran tradition. But Luther himself forges a serviceable passage for dialogue. Luther's theology is ecumenically fruitful.
God comes near and gives himself to us in the mode of favor and gift.
Leading German scholars have thought it antecedently established that ontology has no place in theology, and therefore have not wished to find their hero seriously involved in it. The Finns have said, "But he nevertheless is."
But there has always been a tradition of those who have taken a third way, accepting the Greeks' question about being but proposing new and specifically Christian answers. Great figures of this sort include Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, Aquinas, Edwards, Hegel, and Barth. Some may recognize these as my heroes. Mannermaa and his students have rescued Luther for this company, and I thank them for it.
To be, according to Luther according to Mannermaa, is to give oneself to an other, by speaking. Note the subtle but vital difference between this and Kantianism. According to the Kantians, we cannot deal with being but only with relations. According to Luther according to Mannermaa, a certain mode of relation is being.
for Luther "to be" is to share oneself by speaking: thus for Christ "to be" is to share himself in his word.
Statements about Being can never be used in respect to persons, because in the realm of persons only statements about values (Werturteile) or personal existence are valid. The idea of divinization, therefore, belongs to an inappropriate and false way of speaking about God, since it employs precisely such statements concerning Being in respect to God.
In patristic thought itself the "ethical" and the "ontic" were never actually separated from each other in the modern way.
The classic text dealing with God's indwelling is found in the Formula of Concord (FC). According to this text, God, in the very fullness of his essence, is present in the believer. Important here is to recognize that any notion that God himself does not "dwell" in the Christian and that only his "gifts" are present in the believer is explicitly rejected.
Luther unites, then, the Latin and the Classic theories of reconciliation. In his theology, Christ's expiatory work as such is at the same time victory over the Powers.
He won the battle between righteousness and sin "in himself" (triumphans in seipso).
God becomes man so that man may become God.
faith is not divinely elevated human love, as in the scholastic program of fides charitate formata, but is in reality Christ himself.
Christ is the object of faith, or rather not the object but, so to speak, in the faith itself Christ is present. Thus faith is a sort of knowledge or darkness that nothing can see.
trust in a thing we do not see, in Christ, who cannot in any way be seen (ut maxime non videatur), but, nevertheless, is present.
But the mode in which He is present cannot be thought, for there is dar...
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At least on the level of terminology, the distinction, drawn in later Lutheranism, between justification as forgiveness and sanctification as divine indwelling, is alien to the Reformer.
When it comes to justification (in causa iustificationis), therefore, if you divide Christ's person from your own, you are in the Law;
One must ask here whether what Luther considers damning for the believer to think is exactly what the Formula of Concord calls sound doctrine: in the
locus of justification the divine person of Christ is separated from the person of the believer, because justification is only a forensic imputation and does not presuppose the divine presence of Christ in faith.
the problem of Osiander's doctrine was not actually his claim that justification was based on God's indwelling in a Christian, but the christological presuppositions of this claim. Osiander (in opposition to Luther) separated Christ's human nature and divine nature from each other and broke the unio personalis in Christ.
Gift (donum) has taken on the meaning of a new relation to God, a change in one's self-understanding or existential confidence in God's mercy. The content of gift is actually reduced to the Christian's insight that he has a new position coram Deo.
Peter of Lombard, who claimed that the Holy Ghost himself is the love (charitas) of a Christian.
love is donated as a gift only under the condition that its donator is present. So, if a Christian is supposed to have love and to become loving he must first have Christ and the
Spirit of Christ, the Holy Ghost.
Because of its completeness the first foundation, grace, is the strongest one; it is called the main foundation of the Christian. Because of its completeness grace is also the necessary condition of the gift; that is, the Christian's renewal, which is by nature always partial and imperfect.
Gift, the expulsion of sin and the renewal of the Christian, is realized in a Christian only as a work of the real presence of Christ.
not only that a Christian is joined with Christ but that he is in this union transformed into a likeness of Christ.
