Finished #reading A Large Catechism, by Robert W. Jenson.
This is a short exposition of Luther’s Small Catechism, covering:
Baptism (and penance as a return to our baptism);
It’s a mixed bag. There are some good insights, some slightly ploddy and ho-hum sections, some riding of Jenson’s personal hobbyhorses, and some bits I really couldn’t get on with, such as the section on the Lord’s Supper (where, having read it, I still struggle to work out exactly what he thinks the Supper is and does).
Here are some of the better bits, though. On the First Commandment:
The great religious question is not: Is there God? It is rather: Which is God? Of the innumerable claimants to the predicate “God,” which makes good the claim? The notion that all gods are more or less alike, or that there could be God-in-general, is a piece of childishness born of religious provincialism. What if Moloch were God? Or German Blut? Or capitalism’s Invisible Hand? Or socialism’s Dialectic of History? “The Lord” is whoever got Israel out of Egypt; what of the gods who tried to keep her there? One religion’s heaven is another religion’s hell; one community’s God is another community’s Satan. Life and death and all their meaning depend on the identity of God, and finally on nothing else.
On why the Commandments major on “thou shalt not”:
It is the commandments’ predominant negativity that we must first observe at this point. The second table is not to create human community but to protect it, and the crimes that destroy community are everywhere drearily the same.
On the Commandments, conversely, as a positive vision of the Kingdom:
I have saved the best and deepest for last and shortest. Filled with positive content by the stories of God’s acts for his chosen communities, the commandments are finally a description of the Kingdom of God. We are promised the day when God’s intentions for us will be done. The ultimate purpose of the Decalogue is to tell us how things then will be. When we teach them to ourselves and our children, this is the last and best thing we are to say: “God is making a world of love to God and one another. See how fine that world will be. We will be faithful to God. We will be passionate for one another. We will be truthful with one another. We will . . . .”
On Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper (from an earlier section of Jenson’s presentation, which is why I was so disappointed that his section on the Supper itself failed to live up the high expectations this paragraph created):
The test case has always been the question: How does it happen that the bread and wine of Eucharist are Jesus’ “body,” i.e., occupy the space where he is, so that we can find him by finding them? Most Christians have supposed that heaven, where the risen Jesus is, and the space occupied by the bread and cup are two different places; some have then thought a special supernatural act of God needed to transcend this separation, and others have supposed that it is our faith, to which distance in space is irrelevant, that transcends it. Lutherans have thought that the space occupied by the bread and cup is heaven, in which our Lord is with the Father, so that there is no separation to transcend.
The believer may meet all the doubts and temptations of religion with the same response: “Yes, but I am already baptized.” Asked, by others or him/herself, “Have you been saved?” the believer may respond, “Yes, because I am baptized. […] As Luther endlessly insisted, the gospel is not gospel until it is so spoken that I may hear it as a tale of what is done “pro me.” The fact of my baptism tells me, whenever I need to hear it, that God’s words of love and possibility are spoken to, for and about me specifically.
