For the time being

I was on a walk through the neighborhood feeling a little anxious about why I write and compose music. Both take significant amounts of time and neither will have an audience. As I turned the corner home I realized I was worrying too much about my work rather than focusing on God.

The former mode of questioning will always be polluted by accusation and hopelessness; outside of Christ there is no redemptive arc to one’s life projects. The latter mode of questioning, centered on God, tends in a more positive and affirming direction—not affirming my self necessarily, but affirming the happy Christian sense that there are answers to every question I struggle with regardless of whether or not the answer is revealed. This sort of turning away as a mode is what draws me to Lutheranism. But we’ll arrive there much later.

I don’t intend by this book to enumerate all the differences between Christian traditions studied piecemeal as if from a detached and academic view. That’s been done, and it contributes very little. Instead I consider the philosophical frameworks, the theological systems, the personalities, the characters, the worldviews of Roman Catholicism, Confessional Lutheranism, and Reformed theology from within each stream. I’ve studied each as one who believed the truth of each for more than several years each. As I believed within that stream, the questions I asked all changed. Each tradition has its own mode of thinking.

The tradition I am perhaps finally settled into—i.e., my church—is Lutheran, but if readers are skeptical of or dislike Lutheranism, they may be pleasantly surprised by the critiques I offer my own camp. There is much I want my fellow Lutherans to reconsider.

In what follows I deliberately use different styles when writing about Roman Catholicism, Reformed thought, and Lutheranism. In good writing la forme and le fond ought to match; so the style of writing corresponds to the topic: when I consider Roman Catholicism, bound up with my objection is the general sense that we have forgotten the horror of countless being spiritually bound and gagged. This wasn’t a war of words; the story needs to be told in a manner appropriate to the experience. For the Reformed and Lutheran histories, I match the form with the content. The Lutheran section is more or less a scholastic disputation, whereas the Reformed criticism includes concerns that go deeper, and the writing is meant to reflect as much.

ROMAN CATHOLIC THOUGHT

One of the missed details of history has been just how important the blood of martyrs is to defining the body of Christ, the Church. Historians have long sacrificed detail to the false gods of humanism and ecumenism, writing histories with a bloodless, academic detachment that doesn’t preserve the past but desecrates it, erasing centuries of bloody witness.

We should reject humanist Christian history, and reject Erasmus’s Christianity, which stays in the study, fearing the mob. I don’t despise Erasmus’s scholarship; I use it. But elegant letters don’t reconcile man to God. Modesty is not humility; it is unbelief dressed in manners.

Life is in the blood.

THE SPIRIT WHO DRAWS

To say Christ for us is to confess that no human work can save; to say Christ in us is to live in the Spirit who draws us into communion—“faith working through love”—the very proof we have passed from death to life in the bonds of a living Body.

The Spirit who joins Christians to the risen Lord never leaves the justified believer solitary. “I have been crucified with Christ… and Christ lives in me” is as real now as Calvary was then (Gal 2:20). The same Spirit who binds us to Christ binds us to Christ’s people. Scripture speaks of that bond as “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6) and declares “we know we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers” (1 Jn 3:14). The one made right with God is drawn into communion with those likewise reconciled. We are members of one Body, each living nerve-end connected to the same Head, feeling the pulse of the same blood.

Persistent disdain for the local church by a refusal to love, serve, or suffer alongside Christ’s body exposes a deeper question: has one been joined to Christ at all? I began with justification to make it clear that loving the church does not justify us; nevertheless, the justified will not stay aloof from her. The apostle who insists we are “justified by faith apart from works” also insists we are “one body in Christ,” and that “the eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’” (Rom 3:28; Rom 12:5; 1 Cor 12:21). Faith without love is not merely defective; it is a contradiction. The verdict that sets a sinner free binds him to a living body, or it binds him to nothing at all.

APPEARANCE, FRUIT, AND INTELLECTUAL ALLURE

Satan appears as an angel of light.

By all appearances, she is the most representative Christian church across all domains of religiosity globally. She appears intellectually robust and aesthetically beautiful. The sight of a monk—head bowed, beads sliding through his fingers as he prays for strangers—strikes many of us as more Christlike than the ball-capped Protestant stocking shelves in a disaster relief warehouse which, with its fluorescent lights, forklifts, volunteers in jeans and work gloves, feels not only prosaic by comparison but less set apart, less holy. But Paul’s portrait of the Spirit’s fruit has nothing to do with ecclesial identity or a cultivated look of holiness: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Gal 5:22–23).

In the intellectual domain Roman Catholicism impresses at first as an edifice of marble logic. I continue to study Thomism for its shining façade: its devotees arranging jargon according to a geometry so flawless it dazzles, persuading the mind that as long as one finds more coherence along the path, one is therefore immersing himself more deeply into the Truth.

For a certain personality and a certain kind of mind, this intellectual palace welcomes us in; the invitation feels generous, yet the threshold conceals a condition. Those who enter surrender their native understanding of words now given tighter definitions; their under-formed consciences are handed in to be reshaped; lingering suspicions are turned on the convert himself as chief suspect. Who are you to rupture this beautiful and grand design? Objections are let go into a gaping hole at the center of the palace where syllogisms dissolve them by anticipation.

HIDDEN PREMISES AND THE DOGMA MACHINE

Analytical precision can shelter any conclusion, so long as the premises remain hidden.

Rome mastered the technique. Syncretic devotions swelled first and dogma followed, like a notary sealing a letter already sent. When late fourth-century preachers began swooning over Mary’s perpetual virginity, the Gospels’ blunt references to Jesus’ “brothers” threatened the rising tide of veneration. Jerome’s apologetic ingenuity did not deny that adelphos means “brother” in Greek—Koine already had anepsios for “cousin” (Col 4:10)—but reinforced a reinterpretation already circulating in apocrypha and early commentaries: the “brothers” were cousins, sons of another Mary, the wife of Clopas. So what began as an instinct to protect Mary’s purity became an exegetical necessity. Jerome sharpened the genealogical workaround into a formal defense, redrawing the family tree to preserve the doctrine without explicit Scriptural support. Today’s Catholic apologists often cite Hegesippus, Epiphanius, or the Protoevangelium of James, but these are late, apocryphal, or both. The exception became rule, not because Scripture required it, but because the rising cult of Mary could not endure contradiction.

THE DOGMA MACHINE

Buried premises, wrought by pure imagination, outran real memories and real records. The feast of Mary’s conception appeared in the East by the seventh century and spread westward long before anyone attempted to define it dogmatically. Duns Scotus then supplied “preservative redemption” to reconcile the belief with original sin; three centuries of sermons embroidered the loophole into a banner; Pius IX swung the banner into a thunderbolt; exegetes scurried back to Luke’s salutation to squeeze kecharitōmenē into a prenatal absolution. The feast may have predated Scotus, but his scholastic argument transformed what was a mere pious intuition into a theological claim and, under pressure of devotion, into an article of faith.

The Assumption stretched the method further: No apostle spoke of it; no grave was empty save Christ’s. The earliest surviving homilies by Juvenal of Jerusalem and John of Damascus are late, legendary, and theologically motivated. Yet by the fifth century the Dormition was a liturgical feast in Jerusalem (there were earlier traces in Syriac tradition).

The main driving force was typology. If the Ark vanished, it is surely reasonable that the living Ark must soar higher; if Enoch and Elijah were translated, how not the Theotokos? What is considered fit for a good and coherent story replaced fact, and the rhyme of symbols was promoted to history. No apostolic record, no Scriptural word—just the inertia of liturgy and the imaginative logic of exalted veneration.

I cannot live in a faith where the story the Church tells and the story its history reveals belong to different realities. If those two worlds cannot be brought together, then the Church is not describing truth but managing appearances. And I will not give my life to appearances.

History is where truth meets me. It is where God would have to meet me. If the Church asks me to ignore its history, reinterpret it, or explain it away, then the Church is asking me to distrust the only world in which revelation could ever occur. A faith that depends on denying what happened is not a faith—it is a demand to close my eyes.

Rome asks me to believe that an office remains untouched even when its holders act in ways that contradict everything the office stands for. It asks me to call rupture “continuity,” to call failure “indefectibility,” and to treat violence as irrelevant to holiness. That is not mystery; it is a refusal to let reality speak. I cannot accept a church that protects metaphysics by denying history.

The way I think about God and the world has always rested on a simple conviction: God reveals Himself in events, not abstractions. Absolution matters because something happens in it. Baptism matters because something happens in it. Scripture matters because it addresses a person in time and not some detached intellect floating above history. Revelation is not commentary about reality. It is the arrival of reality. It is metaphysics showing itself in history. If that is true, then doctrine must be able to stand inside the same world in which I live. A church that cannot speak honestly about its own history cannot speak honestly about God, because both are held within a single reality.

This also follows from the way I understand history: I do not treat history as background; I treat it as the place where truth appears. People don’t construct metaphysics out of theories; they recognize what is real because life has shown it to them. Experience teaches the structure of the world long before analysis does. A person trusts the pattern of reality that has met him in his own circumstances. He may hope for more, but he does not doubt what he has already seen. Any church that asks its members to set aside this lived knowledge in order to preserve an official account asks them to mistrust the very ground on which revelation must be received.

This insight also clarifies why certain thinkers have stayed with me: For ex, George Steiner’s wager on meaning assumes that human beings sense the order of reality before they can justify it. My claim that people experience what is metaphysically true simply states that intuition plainly. Bernard Lonergan’s account of knowing fits here as well, since he holds that truth arises from attention to what is real. Yet I do not share his confidence that an institution can always integrate what it proclaims. My issue is not with revelation. It is with systems that refuse to let revelation address their own history.

All of this shapes the way I see theology and the Church. Reality discloses itself in events. Revelation is the decisive event, history is where truth becomes visible, and experience is where metaphysics takes root. Any church that cannot hold these together cannot claim my confidence because it cannot speak with the God who enters history or with the world in which I actually live.

UNDER THE MARBLE

Although silent premises kept the intellectual palace looking clean to most onlookers, there was always a tell for the true Christian, and the true Christian paid dearly for noticing. Another engine clanked below: From the bull Ad extirpanda under Innocent IV (1252) to the last Spanish execution for heresy in Valencia (1826), Rome choreographed torment as liturgy. Ad extirpanda codified the use of torture within inquisitorial procedure, with limits meant to preserve life but not limb, a formality that turned cruelty into policy. Manuals of the Holy Office detailed how high to hoist a suspect until ligaments tore but bones did not snap, how much water to pour before the chest convulsed.

Modern archival research places total executions under the Spanish Inquisition at roughly three to five thousand across three and a half centuries—far fewer than lurid legends, yet monstrous in reality. The Roman Catholic Church owes a grim debt to inquisitors who perfected religious coercion, marrying sacramentology to strangulation. In vaulted, heaven-pointing chambers a linen toca was thrust down a prisoner’s throat and water followed until the chest convulsed. Streets outside filled with processions of the condemned beneath banners of the Virgin. Families could purchase a “merciful” garrote before the fires were lit, priced on a sliding scale of indulgence. The spectacle was hailed as a work of mercy: error cauterized for the good of souls.

Not even the intelligent or devout were spared. Jan Hus traveled under imperial safe conduct only to feel the pyre’s breath; Savonarola’s ashes fed the Arno; Bruno’s tongue, gagged with iron, could not cry that the universe might be larger than Aristotle allowed. Galileo aged under house arrest, obliged to kneel where others burned and whisper that the earth stands still while it hurtles through darkness unhindered by anathema.

The doctrine of purgatory began as a vague hope that mercy might pursue the dead. But it hardened into a commercial furnace; and as soot from burning conversos, human beings, coated Spanish tiles, pennies clinked into indulgence chests to shorten imaginary years in imaginary flames—all of this licensed by councils that stitched together stray verses as a tailor patches velvet, sure the garment would shine because scholastic gold thread described each seam. They loved their work. They loved the beauty of the pure logic they penned.

These days, in debate halls and online, Roman apologists mock the idea of a Body of Christ not coextensive with a powerful institution. They argue it’s some sort of testament to the authenticity of Roman Church that it lasted so long. But is it any surprise the rich and powerful survive in this world?

Moreover, if the Roman Catholic Church as an institution has always been the Body of Christ, then Christ’s Body designs its own torture. Christ’s Body drowns itself. Mothers clutch their children as icy currents close over their faces, and the Spirit within Him thrashes for breath even as His own Church presses down until the bubbles stop rising.

Is this the Body you love? These were not parentheses in Church history; this was the Roman heartbeat through half the Christian era. The last Spanish execution—schoolteacher Cayetano Ripoll in Valencia, 1826—was carried out by civil authority at the request of the Junta de Fe, decades after the Inquisition’s formal abolition. Yet its logic lingered. The institution that now waves away these centuries as “excesses” is the same that claims immunity from error in defining faith and morals. The smell of scorched hair still clings to its garments, and the rationalizations for torture still polish new doctrines to mirror finish.

INFALLIBILITY, CHRIST, AND THE WORD

Nor can the indictment be waved aside by the familiar dodge that “the office remains infallible while the men who hold it may sin.” From the moment popes sealed Ad extirpanda and, later, Exsurge Domine (1520), the rack, the stake, and confiscation of goods were no longer private lapses but exercises of the Roman see’s jurisdiction; the arm turning the windlass wore the Fisherman’s Ring. Discipline is a mode of teaching; Augustine treats the Church’s judicial sentences as an extension of the pulpit (Contra Cresconium 3.51). Acts performed in nomine Ecclesiae and ratified by councils are not peccata personarum but delicta concilii, corporate crimes. When decrees forbid the chalice to the laity, chain the vernacular Bible, or brand justification by faith a heresy, the communion that wields the sword takes on the likeness of the Antichrist who “exalts himself over everything called God” (2 Th 2:4). We cannot call the persecutor the persecuted, nor claim that the jailer and the martyr share the same Body. Judas severed himself; he did not remain mysteriously united to the very One he betrayed. To equate the Roman institution with the mystical Body collapses the sinless Head into sinful members, mistaking human presumption for divine presence.

Here a deeper issue surfaces. We do not need to guess at where Christ is. His Word speaks; it is not a mute record awaiting a magisterium to give it voice. This brings us to the crux of Rome’s theological position, its claim to infallible mediation of Christ’s gifts.

CHRIST IS NOT DIVIDED

Rome often says, “Our separated brethren have the whole Christ—yet they are missing how Christ meant to give Himself.” This is a contradiction dressed in velvet. Christ is not divided. To possess Him is to possess Him as He is, not by approximation, not by mere resemblance, but in fullness. These apologists suggest that Christ’s gifts are mediated only through certain divinely instituted forms—apostolic succession, episcopal hierarchy, a full sacramental system. But what can be added to the One in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Col 2:9)? If the Spirit of Christ dwells in a man, then Christ Himself is present, and with Him union with His death, resurrection, ascension, and reign.

Rome speaks of “fullness” the way a bureaucracy speaks of process: more steps, more offices, more paperwork, then you will have the real thing. The New Testament says otherwise. It does not say, “You have Christ, but not in fullness until you assent to papal infallibility, venerate relics, recite the rosary, and acknowledge a treasury of merit.” It says, “You have been filled in Him” (Col 2:10). Not filled in Peter. Not filled in tradition. Not filled in Rome. In Christ. The “fullness” Rome offers is not abundance; it is obstruction. It is the gospel with a gag order, grace with a customs office.

They say, “But how do you know? Without Rome, who can interpret Scripture?” The sheep know His voice (Jn 10:27). The Word of God is not a puzzle box requiring papal keys. It is living and active. The Spirit opens it to those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, not only to those who can trace lineage through episcopal paperwork.

WHERE THE CHURCH IS FOUND: HIDDEN YET VISIBLE

So if not in Rome, where is this Church—this Body that loves, suffers, and endures in Christ?

The Church I love is found in the fellowship of those who cling to Christ where He has promised to be. Indefectibility adheres to the Word, not to any single episcopal throne. I cannot step inside the Roman palace, however radiant its marble, knowing what foundations lie beneath.

We confess—not in abstraction, but in joy—that the Church is not a relic of apostolic succession, but a living communion formed by the Word and sustained by the Sacraments. The Church is present wherever the Word is rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered. That makes the Church visible with clear boundaries. Hence we reject an “invisible Church” conceived as a merely spiritual unity that ignores concrete, sacramental communion.

At first glance, our position can look self-contradictory. We deny that the Church subsists as an invisible entity spread across bodies lacking sacramental fellowship, because genuine unity requires a shared confession and common participation in the Lord’s Supper. Yet we acknowledge that members of Christ’s Body can be found in denominations that do not share that communion. Does this concede that the Church exists wherever Word and Sacrament are present, even across institutional divides—a view that sounds like the very invisible-Church theory we reject?

The tension dissolves once we distinguish invisible from hidden. Invisible suggests a non-entity, an abstraction. Hidden affirms a real, though not fully perceived, unity. Our theologians feared that calling the Church invisible would detach it from the concrete, sacramental life through which the Spirit actually works. At 3 a.m. on a Tuesday the Church endures: her members scattered, sleeping, or alone, yet bound by the same Spirit who unites them to Christ in Word and Sacrament. This hiddenness is no disembodied concept; it flowers visibly in the gathered assembly where Christ forgives, heals, and sanctifies through His means of grace.

This logic carries us to the Real Presence. The God who walked in Eden, spoke from the bush, passed through Abraham’s sacrifice, and shed His blood at Calvary is not absent now. He is not the distant God of philosophers. The prophets foretold a Shepherd-King who would feed His flock and bind up the brokenhearted (Isa 61:1–3; Ezek 34:23–24). Fulfillment comes in the Incarnation: the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14). The God who once passed between torn pieces of sacrifice now gives His own torn flesh for the life of the world (Isa 53:5).

The incarnational, covenantal nature of God’s relationship with His people continues into the present. Without this real presence, the most immediate and undeniable experience we have is the brokenness of the world—the fact of sin, suffering, and death. These evils would then define the Church itself. But no. The true Christian Church does not endure by doing violence to minds, bodies, and souls. She endures because her Shepherd still walks among us and still gives Himself: “This is my body, given for you” (Lk 22:19).

NOT LIKE ROME

Even if Lutheran sacramental theology is right, that judgment does not drain Christ’s fullness from credobaptists, Congregationalists, Anabaptists, Presbyterian Calvinists, Methodists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, or the Eastern churches. The Church I love has members in every one of them. Lutheranism is no “leakier” vessel than Rome, nor Rome a tighter one. Emil Brunner reminds us: “The Church exists by mission, just as a fire exists by burning. Where there is no mission there is no Church; and where there is neither Church nor mission, there is no faith” (Brunner, The Word and the World). He presses further: Rome imagines Protestants are trying to reconstruct the substance of her institution, when the real aim is to recover the New Testament ekklesia that precedes every later structure. We do not covet Rome’s marble chassis; we seek the living communion that the Word itself calls into being. For the Word speaks; it is not a mute record awaiting a magisterium.

A Roman Catholic might finally respond, “I’m Catholic because I love Jesus. I love communing with others who love Him. The traditions draw me nearer to God. I’m nourished by the Church’s intellectual breadth, the beauty of her arts, the love poured out by the saints and religious orders.” To all of that, amen. I would preserve it and name it as gift. But leave behind what is false: oaths to error, blindness to blood, communion with powers that mock the very Christ you seek. Let go, and you will be freer in the love you already know, more unburdened in the truth you already walk toward, and more whole in the Body to which you already belong.

Some may object that I have been uncharitable in my portrayal of Rome—that I have dwelt too long on her crimes and too little on her saints. But it is not uncharitable to tell the truth. Charity does not conceal wounds; it tends them in the light. To describe torture and corruption plainly is not to despise the Body of Christ but to deny that the institutional body which inflicted such harm is that Body. The Spirit’s life cannot be identified with the machinery that stifled it. Yet even there, among the ruins of power, the true Church endured—the faithful who clung to Christ despite their bishops. To speak this way is not hatred, it’s the conviction that holiness outlives its own defilers because it comes from the Word who still breathes life into His people.

REFORMED THOUGHT

At the root of the divide between Lutheran and Reformed theology lies a deceptively subtle yet spiritually decisive question: Where, and how, does God make Himself known to the sinner in grace?

The answers shape not only doctrine but the entire feel of Christian life—its worship, its assurance, even its joy. In a typical Reformed service the liturgy opens, “We gather to worship and serve the Lord.” The accent falls on human response to divine majesty. A Lutheran liturgy begins instead, “Welcome to the Divine Service.” Here God is the acting subject: He speaks, gives, forgives, and feeds; the worshiper’s first posture is reception, not initiative.

This contrast of posture reveals the deeper instinct. Reformed assurance seeks confirmation in the inner witness of the Spirit and in the visible fruit of sanctification. Election is not merely confessed but traced in the mirror of experience—spiritual growth as evidence that one belongs to the decree. Many Reformed believers live in real joy this way, singing of grace, trusting Providence, and resting in an eternal plan. Yet their confidence often arcs back toward the self, measuring God’s faithfulness by their own perseverance.

Lutheran assurance anchors not in the arc of sanctification but in God’s continuing address. When the Gospel is proclaimed, the sinner hears, You are forgiven. When the Supper is given, Christ says, This is my body … given for you. These are not emblems of grace; they are grace delivered. God’s mercy is one eternal act—unchanging in Him, received by us through time. Each moment of hearing and tasting is that same eternal pardon entering history again for our sake.

Calvinism seeks certainty by locating grace in an eternal decree “before time began.” But to place forgiveness wholly in the past tense of eternity is to risk removing it from the living encounter. The Word that should address the sinner now—I forgive you—becomes the procedural enactment of a plan. The drama of mercy in time is flattened into the calm of foreordination.

The difficulty lies in confusing eternity with duration. When the Reformed say God decided “before time,” they mean to magnify sovereignty, yet “before” is still a temporal term. Eternity, as the Fathers and scholastics taught, is not endless succession but the simultaneous whole of life—totum simul (Augustine, Confessions 11; Aquinas, ST I q10). In God there is no earlier or later; His willing and knowing are one act. Thus the Lutheran refuses to rank “orders of decrees.” When Scripture says God chose us “before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4), it speaks analogically: His will toward us is unconditioned by time, not sequential within it.

Here the Church distinguishes two kinds of certainty. We possess certitudo promissionis, the sure promise that God will finish His work in us (Phil 1:6). But we are not granted certitudo subjecti, infallible knowledge about ourselves apart from that promise (1 Cor 10:12). The Reformed attempt to close this gap by self-inspection; the Lutheran keeps eyes fixed on the external Word.

The same tension surfaces in baptism. Lutherans say infants “do not resist” the grace given there. Calvinists suspect synergism: “If lack of resistance matters, grace depends on posture.” But the Lutheran claim is descriptive, not causal. God gives faith through His appointed means, and Scripture shows He gives it even to infants (Mk 10:14; Acts 2:39). Their non-resistance is not merit but manifestation of sheer gift. Grace operates where boasting is impossible. The Reformed, starting from election rather than means, cannot follow: if an infant is elect, God may regenerate him—but not necessarily through baptism. Hence the charge of “synergism.” The Lutheran answer remains simple: God gave baptism, God gave the child, God gave the promise. That suffices.

Faith the size of a mustard seed receives the whole Christ as surely as the strongest saint’s trust. When believers neglect Word and Sacrament, faith still lives though malnourished—salvation intact but comfort diminished. Lutheran theology distinguishes salvation from assurance: God preserves, yet He gives peace only where He has pledged to meet us.

From here the Reformed habit of reasoning extends into cosmology. Patristic and medieval teachers—Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Gerhard—understood “death through sin” (Rom 5:12; 1 Cor 15:21) to mean human death. Creation’s “groaning” (Rom 8:22) signified corruption and disorder, not the first onset of animal mortality. Augustine pictured thorns, toil, disease, and rebellion in nature as marks of futility, not proofs that beasts had once been immortal. Aquinas agreed: animals were mortal by kind; the curse made the world hostile to man, not newly perishable. The Lutheran orthodox continued this reading. Luther’s Lectures on Romans interpret futility as creation’s frustration in serving man. Gerhard calls it “corruption and resistance.” Pieper later affirms the same.

Seventeenth-century Reformed scholasticism, especially Francis Turretin (Institutes 9.7), altered the picture. Viewing Adam as federal head of all creation, Turretin extended the curse to include animal death itself. That development hardened through later Calvinists and finally modern Young-Earth Creationism. Whitcomb and Morris’s Genesis Flood (1961) declared that if animals died before Adam, “the gospel collapses.” Thus the entire fossil record had to fit inside post-Fall history, forcing ad hoc physics—global cataclysm, accelerated nuclear decay, vapor canopies—all to preserve a dogma unknown to the Fathers.

It gets worse. If radioactive decay, tectonic shift, and meteor impact were compressed into a single year, the released energy would have vaporized oceans and melted crust. Each decay event emits a fixed quantum of heat; compressing billions of years of events into days multiplies temperature beyond survivable limits. Faith cannot be saved by violating thermodynamics.

The issue is not youth of the earth but bondage of faith to models. Lutheran theology affirms creation, fall, and flood as divine acts but refuses to hinge belief on speculative mechanics. Miracles are confessed, not diagramed. Luther laughs at philosophers who demand the “how.” Chemnitz distinguishes ordinary providence from extraordinary act. Gerhard keeps Romans 5 focused on human death. When models replace confession, collapse of the model drags faith with it. Better a humble confession than a brittle theory.

Genesis 1:29–30 does say God gave plants for food to man and beast. Luther reads it as generosity, not zoological law. Gerhard warns against deducing universal vegetarianism from it. Pieper concurs: the verse witnesses God’s provision, not the impossibility of predation. Historic Lutheranism thus remains free to confess a young creation without binding conscience to pseudoscience.

The Resurrection is our measure. We do not explain it by biology; we confess it by witness. Likewise, creation is miracle, not mechanism. When miracles are forced into natural models, the models collapse; when confessed as divine acts, faith endures.

Faith itself is likewise miracle, not mechanism. It truly happens in you—it is your act of trusting Christ—yet that act is wholly caused by the Word that creates it. “Faith comes by hearing” (Rom 10:17) describes what God does. You breathe because He has already given air and life. Calling faith your act does not make it a work; it is grace taking form in you. The Gospel does not find capacity and request its use; it finds death and raises it. The cry “I believe” is resurrection speech.

Here Lutheranism and Reformed theology part again. The Reformed describe faith as habitus, a created quality infused into the soul that endures as latent power. The Lutheran sees faith only as living relation—event, not faculty. It exists in hearing, not storage. To call it a habitus implies it can self-subsist; to call it relation means it lives only from the continual Word. Reformed grace is implanted principle; Lutheran grace is present communion.

Hence the Reformed man lives by a system; the Lutheran, by a conversation or relationship. One guards a decree; the other listens to a voice. Faith as habit can be inspected; faith as hearing can only be received. For the Lutheran, the believer is one in whom the Creator is presently speaking, and whose believing is nothing other than the echo of that speech. Faith, then, is not stored vitality but living dependence; not a candle kept burning in the soul, but the light that appears whenever the Word is spoken. To call it a habitus would imply the fire keeps itself alive. The Lutheran insists instead that the flame burns only because air and spark are continually supplied.

Out of this flows two metaphysics of being. For the Reformed, creation endures because God’s once-for-all decree sustains it—a legal continuity. For the Lutheran, creation exists because God’s Let there be still sounds—an ongoing presence. Decree produces order; utterance produces life. In the first, providence is management; in the second, mercy. Thus annihilation becomes conceivable only within the Reformed frame: if being results from a decree, the decree could be rescinded. Within the Lutheran frame, annihilation would mean God unspeaking Himself, impossible to a faithful Creator whose “Yes” (2 Cor 1:20) endures.

In the Reformed world God relates as ruler to subject; in the Lutheran world as lover to beloved. Decree yields distance; presence yields communion. Reformed love is decision; Lutheran love is nature. The Reformed say, God loves because He wills; the Lutheran says, He wills because He loves.

Even human love echoes this ontology. “ You complete me ” sounds idolatrous under a theology of decree, but true under a theology of communion. We are created relational, imaging the Triune exchange of giving and receiving. Marriage itself becomes the continuation of God’s creative Word—two lives through which the divine Yes is heard anew. The Reformed can describe it as covenant order; the Lutheran hears it as living speech.

Therefore I remain Lutheran. The Reformed honor God’s might but place the creature forever at a distance, existing by permission. The Lutheran beholds glory in nearness, power in fidelity. To exist at all is grace—the unrevoked Let there be still sounding through all that is. In that light, even the human cry “You complete me” becomes doxology: we live, move, and have our being because the divine Word still speaks (Acts 17:28).

LUTHERAN THOUGHT

Now a word of caution for my Lutheran brothers and sisters.

Let us reconsider our identity as Lutheran Christians and the proper status of the Lutheran Confessions, the Book of Concord chief among them. Within certain circles there is a tendency, often unconscious, to elevate the Confessions almost to the level of Scripture. Yet our identity is first in Christ, and only secondarily as Lutheran. Lutheranism is not an end in itself; it is a faithful way of understanding, living, and worshiping as a Christian. The Confessions are trustworthy words from good pastors, not a second canon.

Scripture alone remains divinely inspired and infallible. Because the Confessions faithfully echo biblical truth, they reliably convey infallible doctrine (Formula of Concord, Epitome, “Summary, Rule and Norm”). Still, as human writings, they are not themselves infallible. Recognizing this prevents us from giving confessional documents the kind of authority that belongs only to the Word of God. This distinction does not invite instability; it guards humility. Subscription to the Confessions involves a solemn quia commitment—because they agree with Scripture—yet that commitment presupposes Scripture’s prior authority.

This calls for careful theological reasoning. Every doctrine engages concepts, distinctions, and language shaped by human history. Scripture itself uses metaphor, argument, and abstraction; therefore theological reflection must also use reason. Philosophy in this sense is not alien to theology but its servant. The Confessions themselves employ philosophical tools—Aristotelian categories, distinctions of substance and accident, person and nature—to clarify mystery without pretending to master it.

Philosophy serves theology well when it clarifies the content of revelation; it corrupts theology only when foreign assumptions distort that content. Properly used, reason is an instrument of fidelity, not rebellion. Misuse of reason does not invalidate its use any more than bad preaching invalidates preaching. Our minds, though fallen (1 Cor 2:14), are redeemed in Christ and renewed to serve truth (Rom 12:2).

This balanced approach avoids two extremes: naïve suspicion of reason on one hand and restless revisionism on the other. Doctrinal truth is stable and objective; human articulation of that truth may always be refined in understanding, though rarely in wording. Interpretive refinement does not equal textual revision. Revision would be necessary only if a real doctrinal flaw were discovered. Absent that, the text stands.

History illustrates the distinction. The Nicene Creed changed only to repel Arianism, not because reflection had matured. The same principle governs the Lutheran Confessions: they might require amendment only upon proof of doctrinal error, never merely for conceptual polish. Openness to reflection safeguards, rather than threatens, confessional stability.

Thus the problem in some confessional circles is not the Confessions themselves but the posture toward them. To treat them as unassailable or immune from deeper reflection risks confusing human witness with divine revelation. The Confessions derive authority from their fidelity to Scripture; they do not lend authority to Scripture. Recognizing that derivative nature protects us from both fundamentalism and antiquarian traditionalism.

All theology involves philosophical reasoning, whether admitted or not. To pretend otherwise is to imagine a “pure” biblical Christianity detached from all history—a restorationist fantasy. Lutheran theology avoids that trap by acknowledging its historical mediation. It stands consciously within the great tradition shaped by Augustine, scholastic discipline, and Reformation clarity. Its norm is Scripture (norma normans); its confession is the faithful normed expression (norma normata). Maintaining that hierarchy keeps us sane.

Here, then, is the danger I see: we rightly revere the Confessions but risk idolatry by treating them as Scripture; we distrust philosophy yet depend on it to explain our own doctrines. Recognizing this tension is the first step toward health. Our goal is not to loosen our identity but to keep it oriented toward Christ. Theology lives only when reason, humbled under the Word, remains a clear instrument for the Church’s praise.

Acknowledging that the Confessions are human does not relativize them. It simply prevents us from baptizing human finitude as divine speech. Fear of liberal drift should not drive us into denial of our own humanity. To call the Confessions human is not to call them unreliable; it is to remember that only one Word is God-breathed.

Even now we read them through lenses shaped by centuries of reflection. Every generation discovers small imperfections in phrasing or emphasis, none fatal but all reminders that we are still learners. The integrity of confessional Lutheranism lies precisely in this humility. Like the Nicene fathers, we know revision is permissible only to correct real error. Interpretive refinement, however, is perpetual and healthy. Stability comes not from freezing the text but from trusting the Word to which it points.

Confessional Lutherans therefore can and should engage philosophical reflection without anxiety. To think deeply is not to betray the faith; it is to honor the God who made us thinking creatures. Scripture remains the sole infallible norm; the Confessions remain the faithful witness; philosophy remains the servant that clarifies without ruling. Such a hierarchy guards the Church from both sterile literalism and fashionable drift.

THE FREE-FLOATING LUTHERAN MAN

Lutheranism may feel hollow because, though it locates Christ perfectly in Word and Sacrament, it does not always locate us—our place within the unfolding story of redemption. Calvinism offers the drama of a sovereign plan; Rome and the East offer the solidity of visible institutions. Lutheranism sometimes leaves believers knowing where grace is but not who they are inside it.

The desire for belonging is not sin in itself. Many have sought to feel “part of God’s story” by clinging to visible power or cultural success. Yet the Christian story is the grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies (Jn 12:24). The victory is hidden under thorns, weakness, and rejection. We do not deny God’s eternal counsel, but we do not preach it; we preach Christ crucified. We do not direct the sinner to decipher providence but to hear absolution. We point not to decrees but to the Man on the cross and say: There—for you. That is your place in the story, received, not guessed.

The Calvinist may feel swept up in the divine plan but still wake at night wondering, “Was I truly written into it?” Assurance built on glimpsing one’s line in God’s script is always uncertain. Better to be the beggar who knows Christ came for beggars than the prince who fears his coronation was imagined.

Yet the hollow feeling should not be ignored. Assurance must be nourished not only by declaration but by the Spirit’s indwelling. “Examine yourselves, whether you be in the faith,” Paul writes (2 Cor 13:5). The Spirit does bear witness with our spirit (Rom 8:16). To recognize that witness is not enthusiasm; it is comfort. We need not base faith on feelings, but we must not deny that faith feels. When a man walks with God, he knows it—not in fireworks but in the slow work of sanctification, love, and repentance.

If we ask to know our place in God’s history, we are already praying; and if we are praying, the Spirit is already interceding. The hollow space may be the chamber where mercy’s echo resounds most clearly.

A DEMONSTRATION OF HOW TO LOVE CONFESSIONAL BOUNDARIES RIGHTLY

The question of hell, when approached with doctrinal seriousness rather than rhetorical heat, exposes a deeper fault line about what theology is permitted to do with final things. At issue is not merely whether judgment is real, or whether punishment endures, but whether theology may render the last horizon of reality intelligible as a stable metaphysical structure, or whether such intelligibility itself risks displacing the very center of Christian faith. The doctrine of hell becomes a diagnostic instrument. It reveals how a tradition understands revelation, reason, fear, certainty, and—most decisively—where the Christian is finally allowed to rest.

There is a poison that is especially prevalent among Lutherans. Lutheran suspicion of intellectualism has deep historical roots and is often marked by a lack of self-awareness. From the seventeenth century onward, Lutheran orthodoxy frequently warned against “abstraction from Scripture” as the pathway to heresy, yet the very act of interpretation presupposes abstraction. Similarly, while Lutheran thinkers from Melanchthon to Chemnitz and Gerhard freely engaged philosophy in service of doctrine, later heirs often denounced “philosophizing” as a betrayal of faith. This tension was less about reason itself than about fear: fear of rationalism after the Enlightenment, fear of heterodoxy after Pietism, and fear of losing certainty amid the speculative systems that surrounded them. The result has often been an anxious confessional protectionism, a reflexive tightening of boundaries driven more by dread than by confidence in the Word.

The nature and duration of hell bring this anxiety into sharp focus. It is a topic that reveals premises Lutheran believers may not otherwise notice, and it also exposes flaws in the confessional defensiveness that so often masquerades as fidelity. When pressed, many instinctively assume that eternal conscious torment must be affirmed in all its details, not because the Confessions demand it, but because any relaxation feels like surrender. Yet this instinct deserves careful scrutiny rather than reflexive obedience.

A genuine case for annihilationism can be made within the confessional Lutheran horizon, and it must be made honestly rather than dismissed with caricature. The Augsburg Confession speaks of “everlasting punishment,” not “everlasting torment.” That distinction is not incidental. To insist that conscious torment is essential is to go beyond the text to which subscription is actually made. Paradoxically, such insistence belittles God’s holiness by imagining that eternal separation from Him is somehow less dreadful than eternal fire. If God’s presence is the highest good, then His absence is the greatest possible horror. The worst of hell is not heat but the eternal No from the lips of Him whose Yes gives life.

Scripture’s own language reinforces this restraint. Death, fire, darkness, destruction—these images signify irreversible loss and exclusion, not the physiology of suffering. The biblical emphasis falls consistently on finality, deprivation, and exclusion from God’s life-giving presence, not on an account of subjective experience prolonged without end. Eternal punishment names duration and irrevocability before it names sensation. To infer eternal consciousness from eternal judgment is an additional step, not an exegetical necessity.

On the level of lived human reality, the rhetoric of “deserving hell” also exposes a theological unreality. It is doubtful that anyone has ever genuinely believed they deserved hell in a fully internalized sense. A person who truly believed this would be unable to function, unable to defend themselves, stripped of the basic psychological capacities required for ordinary life. They would be a miserable wretch incapable of even self-preservation. Appeals to desert often function rhetorically rather than existentially. This does not weaken judgment; it exposes the limits of human moral comprehension and the danger of treating doctrinal formulas as though they corresponded neatly to lived self-knowledge.

At this point, the confessional argument must be stated with precision rather than implication. The Lutheran Confessions, grounded in Augsburg XVII and the Athanasian Creed, bind consciences to five and only five eschatological essentials. They bind the Church to the bodily return of Christ for a universal resurrection of the dead. They bind the Church to a final and righteous judgment rendered by Christ Himself. They bind the Church to everlasting life for the justified in communion with God. They bind the Church to everlasting punishment for the impenitent, described in Scripture as eternal fire or eternal death. And they bind the Church to the irrevocability of this final division. These five claims exhaust the confessional content. They affirm duration and gravity, but they do not require a mechanism explaining how the wicked continue to exist, an immortal-soul ontology, a literalist reading of every image, or a portrayal of God as delighting in retribution.

This point must not be softened. If punishment is eternal, finality is required; consciousness is not. Eternal judgment does not logically entail eternal sensation. The permanence of the verdict, not the physiology of suffering, is what Scripture and the Confessions insist upon. To refuse over-specification is not timidity but obedience. Revelation stops where mystery begins. Any account that preserves eternal judgment and the irrevocable verdict remains, strictly speaking, within confessional bounds. What may not be taught is restoration after the Last Day. What may not be asserted is a denial of judgment’s finality. Beyond that, the Confessions bind nothing further.

Common objections collapse under scrutiny. To claim that relaxing infernalist detail weakens judgment misunderstands symbolic language, which heightens rather than diminishes reality. To insist that the confessors “surely believed” in eternal conscious torment imports private assumptions into public documents. As Scripture interprets Scripture, so the Confessions are read by their words, not by conjecture about the psychology of their authors. The confessors claimed no infallibility, only submission to the Word. We receive their documents as faithful witnesses, not as a second canon of metaphysical commitments. To reverse that order is to turn testimony into commentary.

At this stage, annihilationism stands as a live option, not because it is attractive, but because confessional integrity requires honesty about what is and is not bound. That space must be made before it can be closed.

And yet, once that space has been made, some deeper Lutheran convictions might reassert themselves—not as confessional prohibitions, but as metaphysical and theological judgments rooted in creation, Christology, and the doctrine of God.

Some Lutherans may dig their heels in with a philosophical objection: if existence itself is the ongoing act of God’s will—creatio continua—then annihilation would mean God unspeaking what He once spoke. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” God’s Let there be is not a transient command but an abiding presence. What He has once called into being He continues to sustain. To annihilate would imply reversal within God’s own will, a change incompatible with His faithfulness. On this account, annihilation is not merely morally troubling but metaphysically incoherent. God’s freedom is not the freedom to revoke His Word, but the freedom to remain faithful to it.

The truer and more fundamental philosophical assessment, however, is not that. Instead, we should at least bracket or disregard annihilationism, as it resolves judgment by terminating the subject. Scripture does not threaten non-being; it threatens encounter with truth, exposure, exclusion, loss. Judgment is personal before it is mechanical. To eliminate the subject is to silence that encounter and replace divine address with metaphysical closure. This is precisely what Lutheran theology resists. The principle at work is that finality, in Lutheran thought, belongs not to an abstract moral order or an eschatological structure, but to a person. Christ alone is the locus where God’s justice and mercy are known as good news. The cross introduces a rupture that metaphysical continuity cannot domesticate. Justice appears as injustice, power as weakness, righteousness as condemnation borne by the innocent. Any account of divine justice that resolves this scandal into a transparent system risks undoing the cross by making its outcome predictable. Finality, therefore, is evental rather than architectural. It occurs in God’s act, not in a structure that can be surveyed.

This conviction governs the Lutheran handling of doctrine through the Law–Gospel distinction. Hell belongs to the Law. Its purpose is to accuse, terrify, and kill presumption. The Law may threaten endlessly, but it must never console, stabilize, or provide a resting place. If hell—whether conceived as torment or annihilation—becomes an explanatory ontology, the conscience will attempt to inhabit it, either through despair or calculation. Lutheran theology insists that the only legitimate resting place of faith is the Gospel promise given extra nos, outside the self, in Word and Sacrament. Judgment must therefore remain real and final, but not intelligible in a way that rivals that promise.

This posture is not a modern invention. Martin Chemnitz affirms eternal punishment unequivocally and rejects annihilationism and universalism, yet refuses to move from proclamation to speculative architecture. Doctrines must be handled according to their use. Hell is to be preached as warning and accusation, not mapped as an ontology. Johann Gerhard, more scholastic in temperament, speaks readily of eternal conscious punishment and irrevocable judgment, yet grounds these affirmations directly in revelation and subordinates eschatology to Christology and justification. He distinguishes between certitude of outcome and comprehension of structure. The wicked are judged; how divine justice is internally ordered beyond Christ’s revelation remains hidden. Even at Lutheranism’s most metaphysically confident moment, judgment is never allowed to become a second source of final meaning.

This refusal of metaphysical closure introduces tension, and Lutheran theology does not deny it. The position can appear incomplete or incoherent to traditions that equate coherence with system. Critics argue that without explanatory finality, judgment becomes arbitrary and mercy becomes exception. Lutheran theology rejects that premise. Coherence is Christological, not architectural. Truth is personal before it is systematic. Reality is unified not by a complete eschatological diagram but by the crucified and risen Christ who speaks absolution. Hell is coherent because it is God’s judgment, real and final; it is not required to be transparent.

Here the Roman Catholic position functions as an illuminating contrast. Catholic theology confidently defines eternal conscious punishment as de fide, believing that such definition safeguards moral seriousness and does not compete with Christ’s centrality. Lutheran theology fears that even minimal metaphysical stabilization can function pastorally as a second resting place, shifting attention from promise to structure. The disagreement is not about whether judgment is real, but about how doctrine functions in relation to faith.

The same Lutheran instinct explains resistance to Reformed systems. The Reformed insistence on a single, indivisible divine decree leads inexorably to the conclusion that evil flows from God’s will. Calvin’s attempts to soften this with distinctions between ordaining and approving cannot escape the logic of the system. Once God wills all things in one decree, evil must be willed. The instinctive recoil many Christians feel toward Calvinism is not sentimentality but moral perception. It is the sense that the God behind the system has become indistinguishable from the author of evil.

Roman Catholic Thomism avoids this by explaining evil as privation rather than substance. God causes the act insofar as it has being; the creature causes the defect. The system is elegant and internally consistent. Yet it begins with Aristotle rather than with Sinai or Calvary. In rendering God metaphysically intelligible, it implicates Him in every act, including those Scripture names wicked. The cross itself becomes unintelligible. The Roman soldier’s hammer-blow must be split into being and evil so that God is not implicated. Scripture knows nothing of such partitions. Where Scripture says, “You crucified Him,” the system whispers, “God as First Cause gave the act its being.” Theology becomes bloodless.

A Lutheran account proceeds differently. God’s hidden will is not an area for investigation but a boundary. The Christian must not speculate about why this person suffered or that one died or why deliverance was withheld. Sin cannot be reduced to a defect of being, nor suffering mapped onto a logical diagram of causes. What God reveals is enough: His will to save in Christ, His mercy for sinners, His judgment against evil, His promise that none who belong to Him will be lost. When Scripture speaks of suffering, it directs attention not to a system but to Christ Himself. Only in Him can suffering be endured without collapsing into cynicism or fatalism.

To place suffering or judgment “within the counsel of God” does not mean tracing causes upward into hidden decrees. It means locating them within the story God has made known: creation ruined by sin, humanity under curse, Christ bearing that curse, death defeated in His death, resurrection already breaking into the world. In this story alone do suffering and judgment take on meaning. They are not explained, but they are not meaningless. They are not justified, but they are not final.

The clarity and sufficiency of God’s Word stand without human defense. At the same time, Lutheranism at its best has never feared disciplined reasoning. What it must fear instead is anxiety—the fear that drives Christians to defend boundaries rather than inhabit them, to substitute system for promise, to mistake certainty for faith. Anxiety is not the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Fearfulness is an illegitimate mother of thought for those in Christ.

In the end, the Lutheran position is neither a covert invitation to annihilationism nor a sentimental retreat from judgment. It is a refusal to let any doctrine of final things—whether torment, annihilation, or restoration—become an ontology that explains God. Judgment is real. Punishment is eternal. The warning stands. But final meaning, intelligibility, and consolation belong to Christ alone. The last word about reality is not an eternal structure but a crucified man who still speaks. That refusal of metaphysical closure is not a defect. It is the cross carried all the way into eschatology, where even hell itself is kept under the Word rather than allowed to stand above it.

In a word: The term aiōnios in Scripture marks the irrevocable and God-related finality of judgment, without requiring us to specify the internal mechanics or experiential duration of punishment.

ROMANS, CALVINISTS, AND LUTHERANS ON THE QUESTION WE ALL ASK

It’s foolish to imagine one’s way into the secret counsels of God. If we try, we will invent a false god or we’ll despair. What God reveals is Christ; what God hides is His reasons, and this is His mercy.

Now we put our finger something else that separates Lutheran theology from the Reformed: Does placing suffering within the “whole counsel of God” make God the author of evil?

No: not if one is Lutheran; but yes: inevitably, if one is Reformed and consistent with the deductions of their system. The Reformed tradition, beginning with Calvin and curling forward through all its confessions, insists that God’s will is one, indivisible decree. Once they commit to that premise, they cannot stop. Logic forces them: If God wills all things in one decree… And evil happens… Then evil flows from that decree.

Calvin tries to soften the blow with phrases like “God ordains but does not approve,” or the famous voluntas permisiva as a kind of rhetorical buffer. But the decree remains the same, the damnable horror was in the script. He is consistent. Monstrous, but consistent. This is also why many sensitive Christians recoil from Calvinism instinctively: the God behind the decree is terrifyingly indistinguishable from the author of evil. And the Reformed theologian must then spend the rest of his days trying to prove that this is not what he means.

And here we see the danger that appears whenever biblical faith is replaced with a rational system. We’ve seen how this temptation plagues both Romans and Calvinists alike. This is precisely what Christian theology must refuse. The Christian does not interpret suffering by trying to read God’s secret intentions. The attempt to peer behind the curtain of divine providence always ends in a monstrous caricature of God. In Scripture, the only safe knowledge of God is the knowledge given in Christ crucified. This means that suffering cannot be understood through deduction, system, or metaphysical necessity. It must be met where God has chosen to reveal Himself: in the One who suffers with us and for us. The Christian does not explain evil; the Christian is taught to endure it, protest it, weep under it, and entrust it to the God who has overcome it in Christ.

Let’s turn to the best of Roman Catholic thought on this subject. The Thomistic view differs sharply from the Reformed or Lutheran ones. Thomas, committed to preserving both God’s goodness and God’s universal causality, explains evil as a privation: a lack of due good in a creaturely act. He argues that God causes the act insofar as it has being, since all being is good and comes from Him; the creature causes the defect. Sure, it’s clear, it’s metaphysically air-tight, it’s part of the beauty I’ve already described enough in the section on Roman Catholic thought.

But, as was the case with the other beautiful structures I described, this one hides a pernicious ugliness beneath. Although Thomas is not saying that God causes evil as evil—he is saying that the very act in which evil appears is caused by God, while the evil itself is an absence rather than a substance—nevertheless, it begins with Aristotle rather than with Sinai or Calvary, and thus attempts to explain the God who refuses to be explained. In rendering God metaphysically intelligible, it inevitably makes Him the source of every act, including those Scripture calls wicked. The cross itself becomes unintelligible; the act and the evil of the crucifixion must be pried apart so the First Cause is not implicated in the murder of His Son. The Roman soldier’s hammer-blow cannot be split into “being” (caused by God) and “evil” (caused by man). Scripture knows nothing of such partitions. Where Scripture cries, “You crucified Him,” the Roman system whispers, “God as First Cause gave the act its being.”

It is theology with the blood drained out of it.

A Lutheran account proceeds differently. God’s hidden will is not an area for investigation. It is a boundary. The Christian must not speculate about why this person suffered or that one died or why deliverance was withheld. The Christian must not imagine that sin can be reduced to a defect of being or that suffering can be mapped onto a logical diagram of causes. What God reveals is enough: His will to save in Christ, His mercy for sinners, His judgment against evil, His promise that none who belong to Him will be lost. When Scripture speaks of suffering, it directs attention not to a system of causes but to Christ Himself. Only in Him can suffering be endured without collapsing into cynicism or fatalism. Only in Him can the Christian resist naming God as the author of evil while still trusting that nothing lies outside His governance.

To set suffering “within the counsel of God” therefore does not mean tracing its cause upward into the hidden mysteries of eternity. It means locating suffering inside the story God has made known: creation ruined by sin, humanity under curse, Christ bearing that curse, death defeated in His death, and resurrection already breaking into the world. In this story alone does suffering take on meaning. It is not explained, but it is not meaningless. It is not justified, but it is not final. The Christian does not need a metaphysical defense of God.

The Christian needs the God who raises the dead.