Thinking of God
43
In this creedal expression, critical thinking is at the service of religion. Critique extracts the articles of faith from the New Testament story in the holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the flesh and eternal life.^8
form of a synopsis. Critical thought prioritizes the episodes of the larger story and orders them into a new creedal unity. Jump ahead now to the late Middle Ages.Martin Luther, the great reformer, clearly belongs in the metaphorical
cluster of biblical personalism. Luther’s theology arose within a context of anxiety and guilt caused in part by the breakdown of the “protective unity of the religiously guided medieval culture” and the rise of an educated middle class in the larger cities. (^9) Luther was not alone among religiously
serious people who could no longer assume that confessions at Mass in reciting the Lord’s Prayer (“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”), or any other religious observance, would suffice for forgiveness from a righteous God. For Luther, the thought of the right-
eousness of God was terrifying and brought him to despair.the just law of God (“Be perfect, as the Lord your God is perfect!”) could not be fulfilled by any human, for anything we do is tainted with sin. He was haunted and hunted by the fear of facing God as both just lawgiver and^10 He knew that
judge, with eternal life hanging in the balance.Letter to the Romans 1:17 – “the righteous shall live by faith” – saved him from the despair of guilt and made him feel as though he had been born again. He placed the dynamics of justification, which comes by faith through^11 Luther’s readings of Paul’s
the unmerited grace of God, at the heart of theology.grace alone by imagining a divine–human courtroom drama.is rightfully judged guilty and condemned to hell. To the astonishment of the Luther’s followers expressed the doctrine of justification through faith by (^12) The accused
condemned, he or she then hears God the judge add, “yet forgiven” – not on account of one’s good works, but in recognition of faith in Christ, who stands by the sinner as substitute. Luther’s theology is by no means devoid of critique. He brought criticism against the abuses of the Church and its
“Babylonian captivity” to the papacy in Rome and the selling of indul-gences. He railed against the dependence of scholastic theology on Greek philosophy and insisted on a return to biblical sources (of course, never questioned the authority of the Bible as God’s Word. With sola scriptura). Luther,
the modern period, however, criticism arrived with full power, thanks in no small part to Johann Semler (1725–91).