What's your point?

Are there any good contemporary hymn writers? Surely they exist.

On the one hand, there are great Christian novels—and even works of philosophy—which express “what it’s like” to be a Christian. That’s why I find it difficult to understand the belief—in yet another cast of cynicism unnoticed by the crowd today—that there’s nothing which ought to be said about Christian life which hasn’t been said already. To the contrary, I find inauthenticity in Christians who exclusively use others’ words to communicate their own deepest and most firmly held beliefs (excepting the Bible, God’s word).

I used to worry that I was misleading myself by solipsistic reflections here in these writings, and that I therefore risked misleading others away from God rather than toward him by pridefully spreading what the credentialed might call unrefined and vaguely spiritual claptrap, full of koans and disjointed aphorisms. But setting aside questions of orthodox definitions of faith or belief, etc. (i.e., I’m not talking about teaching Christian dogmatics), I think it's senseless to worry that one's written works contain too many inaccuracies to be useful. Some would read what I have written in my blog and chide, “No, you’re not describing Christian life.” And I would reply, “But I am a Christian, and this is what it has been like.” I write because we can describe the Christian life. What use is systematizing something like a naturally inexplicable assurance that your Creator loves you and has given you eternal life—using terms suited to natural things—though? At every major turn in life, at every encounter with those things that we consider life-altering, I see a story in pictures not words. This is a hard problem, actually, because there are twin dangers of only permitting accepted canon by appeal to authority (which Luther would of course hate), and on the other hand, subjectivism.

All of the above might be pared-down to the following question: Who is qualified to know what it’s like to be a Christian and to describe his life in Christ in his own words? I would answer that every Christian is qualified for this. Although we all still see through a glass darkly, yet even from imperfections we can draw real beauty, truth, and goodness, if we read in a spirit of charity.

On the other hand, faith isn’t a collection of our deepest, most firmly held, beliefs. If it were, it wouldn’t be deep enough to grasp eternal life. What I put down in these writings are nothing more than the feeble descriptions of my thoughts as I experience life as a Christian. They are not what I’d call “Christian thoughts” as in what some might call contemplation, an intellectual communion with God. They don’t “rise” to any such occasion.

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To argue that I am giving faith an intellectual requirement would be to gainsay what I’ve actually said—reading into it a presupposition that faith is man’s work of the mind or heart; I’m not doing that at all. I’m only saying that we all receive salvation the same way, though some are more aware that they are being saved than others. Not only are some more aware of reality than others, but those who are aware ought to love God and praise him in that awareness as they receive it. Just because some can’t do so doesn’t mean we have to go for some minimalist account of things such that, by definition, none can. For another example, this one not having to do with faith per se but with conversion (esp. of the heart): If someone is born with an abnormal frontal lobe, such that his decision making capacity is compromised and he is prone to violent outbursts even as a Christian, that doesn’t mean we can’t say that in conversion God improves Christians’ behavior. Is that so controversial?

If I believe my father exists and that he will take care of his children but I happen to have a mentally handicapped sibling who doesn’t have the capacity to have these coherent thoughts about our father, that doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary that I know and love my father in the way I do; that simply doesn’t follow logically. To say that I know and love my father doesn’t in any way imply that my brother is somehow less loved, less taken care of, etc, either.

Perhaps this is an argument for a sort of pietism. Something to explore, anyway.

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Also this:

From Regin Prenter, “Spiritus Creator”: “The problem is more than a specious one, it is the fundamental problem of the theology of the knowledge and consciousness of sin, which gave the young Luther the most unspeakable agonies. When the self in its self-condemnation will put itself and its own pride to death, does it gain anything other than that the pride and egocentricity move from the real self, the object of mortification, into the subject of the act of mortification? And does this not give us the most refined form of pride: the publican’s pride of humility and self-accusation? This was a real problem for Luther, for it was the whole problem of monastic piety. The only solution to the problem is that the subject of the act of self-condemnation is not the natural self of man, but God himself, who in the act of self-condemnation makes himself the master in man. Odium sui or condemnatio sui is in reality no human act, but a suffering (passio) under the effective judgment of God. This is Luther’s solution to the problem of the knowledge of sin. The Holy Spirit himself is the subject of the self-condemnatory act. We have seen how Luther described odium sui as a unity with God in his judgment of sin and the sinner. This unity is not effected by man’s lifting himself in such a way that he can view the judgment of God, but by the presence of the judging God himself as a power in man, a power which has the effect that man accepts the judgment as his own judgment. It is this presence of God that is the Holy Spirit.

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But this Christocentric idea of conformity is not, as in mysticism, to be interpreted from the point of view of a medieval piety of imitation. Conformity with Christ is not accomplished by imitation of his humble humanity. It is not a result of ascetic technique. It is not at all the work of man’s free will. It has no marks of the law at all. … The mystic can of course also talk about the work of the Holy Spirit and its indwelling of man. But the presupposition for the coming of the Holy Spirit is that man must first have turned to God with all his strength. The abnegation is man’s own work which corresponds to and is often identified by the mystics with facere quod in se est of scholasticism. When the mystics talk about the Holy Spirit it is entirely on the basis of imitation.

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Resignatio ad infernum does not become the proof of the fact that man is now fit soon to receive grace and the Spirit, but of the fact that man already has grace and the Spirit. Only in conformitas Christi, which is wholly the work of the Spirit, is it possible for a man seriously (and not just as a spiritual exercise) to desire to go to hell at the command of God. Therefore it is possible for Luther to declare that it is impossible for such a man to go to hell. For the man who in all things wants to do what God wants is one with God. This we are able to see in Christ. Resignatio ad infernum is for Luther not a product of the imagination but first and foremost a historic reality in the descent of Christ into hell.

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When God begins his work in men, those who are dominated by the spirit of bondage again unto fear (Rom. 8:15) will say: God acts as a tyrant, he is not a father but an opponent. And it is true that God is our opponent. But these people do not know that we must agree with this opponent for then he becomes kind and fatherly—otherwise he never will. The relation to God does not mean that he agrees with us and changes himself according to our desires so that we may become his friends and sons. No, God is our opponent in the sense that to our dismay he lets everything happen contrary to our wishes and desires in spite of our prayers. When God begins to do his will, he exposes everything in man, what he has of both inward and outward glory, makes him completely perplexed and leads him into the darkness of inner conflict, where it is impossible either to know or to love God. In this darkness he finally takes away from him even the word of comfort which in the time of inner conflict can assure him that God only for a season has forsaken him. The words of Christ can be used about this darkness: that except the Lord had shortened the days no flesh would have been saved. Thus it is to be made to conform to the will of God in the crucified Christ; thus it is to be under the operatio of God. This is a theologia crucis which also is a theology of inner conflict.

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For Luther inner conflict is not a psychologically abnormal state, a disease of the mind which the pastor should try to remove if possible, but it is a means in the hand of God to reveal man’s true state when he is away from God, man’s state under the wrath of God.

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In these inner conflicts the sinner experiences the wrath of God in his conscience, so that God as the gracious one and Christ as the revelation of the grace of God completely hides himself, while death and hell and all creation assail man.

There is hardly another writing in which Luther so persistently describes the pangs of inner conflect as in operationes in Psalmos, 1519-21. Here there is a psychology of inner conflict to which there is no comparison.

The cause of inner conflict is guilt. Unpardonable guilt lays hold of the conscience in inner conflict so that man knows he is under the eternal and irrevocable condemnation of God, stricken from the book of life forever. … This torturing experience of the wrath of God in a guilty conscience becomes one with the anguish of death and hell. There is in reality no difference between death and hell and the reality of the wrath of God in one’s conscience. Hell is the terror of death itself which always accompanies it, the experience of the eternal and inevitable punishment. If not before death then in death we shall experience this struggle with Satan, yes, with God himself and the whole creation. There is no possibility of escape in this struggle. Man has been forced into a narrow pass from which there is no way out at all.

In this pass terrible temptations beset the troubled soul. Ultimately the result is blasphemy, the desire that God were someone else, or that he did not exist. The most dangerous of all conflicts is lurking there—that caused by the idea of predestination. But when the believer suffers these inner conflicts he is to know that they are also part of his training by which he is made to conform to the will of God in Christ and by which he comes under the operation of God. For Christ has also suffered the pangs of hell, yes, even the temptation of blasphemy. The inner conflicts, therefore, are the work of God, although as long as this is hidden from the anxious soul it is Satan who dominates in the conflict and who tries to separate the sinner from God. But God pursues his own aim in the conflict. God is not really angry, and he does not desire that man’s sin should be unpardonable. But through the cross of inner conflict God wants to teach us to hope only in his pure mercy. Like every other cross and all other work of wrath in the believer, the inner conflicts are God’s opus alienum, which prepares the way for his opus proprium. He takes all peace away from the conscience in order to give it peace. This is the order of the salvation of God. He puts to death before he makes alive. Our will cannot be made to conform to the will of God unless it is first put to death. Therefore it becomes even more pronounced here than before that the love to God which yields itself to his will is not an active yearning and is not like the Augustinian caritas a continuation of our appetitus boni, but a process of suffering and endurance as God establishes his work. When the work of God is the cross, pleasing God becomes the same as enduring the marvelous work of God in his saints. As the mystics put it faith, hope, and love to God mean walking into darkness, being driven and led by the Word of God, persistent suffering, a narrow and strait way, a steady and increasing impotence. But it is a way on which the sinner is gladly led, because it is God’s way, which Christ has dedicated and hallowed by traveling it first himself. In the storm of inner conflict we must learn to know that God, who as our protector forsakes us, as our helper permits us to suffer, and as our Saviour judges us.

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When the siner groans for sighs that cannot be uttered in spite of the darkness of trial, in the midst of the excruciating experience of the wrath of God and the terror of hell, and out through his rebellious blasphemy against God, then this greatest love to God, which groans for God in the midst of the hatred of death and hell to God, is not possible for man. It is not man himself who calls upon his last resources in a final religious effort, it is not man’s inward soul that appears, but it is God himself who, as the subject of this greatest act of love, is truly present in us, it is the Holy Spirit himself who, as our helper and comforter, groans in us and for us. Now for the first time we understand what it means that the Holy Spirit is the subject for odium sui and the realization of the true conformity wiht Christ. And for the first time we understand what Luther means by totus homo.

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The ‘infused grace’ of which Luther constantly speaks can no longer be understood as a caritas which supplements and sublimates the indwelling idealistic urge in man, his amor boni, but as the actual fusion of God’s opus alienum and his opus proprium, his dying and creating work of redemption. Luther therefore speaks of the infusion in such a way that the death of the old man is God’s gift as much as the new life. Grace considered from the point of view of the idea of conformity means the fusion of God’s deadly opus alienum and his life-giving opus proprium. Thus the idea of justification by grace considered as a new nature mediated through the sacrament has become impossible in principle.

As a summary of this first impression of the young Luther’s claim about the Holy Spirit we may conclude: Luther no longer thinks of the Holy Spirit in terms of the scholastic tradition as a trasncendent cause of a new (supernatural) nature in man producing infused grace (i.e. caritas—the sublimated idealistic urge). The Holy Spirit is instead proclaimed as the real presence of God. God himself as the Spirit is really present in the groanings of the anxious and tempted soul held in the grip of death and hell. Luther sternly and firmly contends that everything outside of God himself in the inner conflict allies itself with wrath against the sinner. No form of divine power other than that of God’s own presence is available for the sinner in this conflict. No infused grace can groan for man with unutterable groanings. No one but God himself is able to do that (p. 19).

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