Creative Grace: The Spiritual Revolution of the Reformation
-
Ingolf Dalferth
Summary
The paper argues that the 16th century reformations have to be understood as a spiritual revolution. Their key idea was to put God alone radically at the center (solus deus) and construe faith, justification, salvation and everything else not in terms of divine-human cooperation but as a creative divine gift that changes the sinner from being destined to death to becoming a saved sinner. The paradigm is Christ’s change from the death on the cross to his resurrected life with God. The one-sided divine activity in the change from death to life is the key to understanding God’s creative activity and human deep passivity.
Zusammenfassung
Der Vortrag argumentiert, dass die Reformationen des 16. Jahrhunderts als eine geistliche Revolution zu verstehen ist. Ihr Kerngedanke war, Gott radikal ins Zentrum zu stellen und Glaube, Rechfertigung, Heil und alles übrige nicht als Resultat einer Kooperation zwischen Gott und Geschöpf zu verstehen, sondern als göttliche Gabe, die sich ihren Adressaten selbst schafft. Erst sie befreit den sündigen Menschen dazu, wahrhaft frei zu sein, indem er sich ganz auf Gott verlässt. Das Paradigma dieser schöpferischen Beziehung ist Christi Wechsel vom Tod am Kreuz zum Leben mit Gott. Die Asymmetrie zwischen Gottes schöpferischer Aktivität und der völligen Passivität des Menschen in diesem Geschehen ist der Grundgedanke des reformtorischen Gabeverständnisses.
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Dank
- Editorial: „Special Focus on Holm Tetens’s ‚Thinking God‘ (‚Gott denken‘)“
- God as Creator of Natural Laws: On the Relation of the Absolute and the Contingent World
- Holm Tetens on Panentheism: The Concept of Panentheism, Sin, and Special Divine Action
- Holm Tetens on the Moral-Existential Argument for Theism: Reasonable Hope and Wishful Thinking
- Holm Tetens on the Moral Argument for Theism: A Kantian Perspective
- An Outline of a Rational Theology
- Creative Grace: The Spiritual Revolution of the Reformation
- Sin, Grace, and Human Responsibility: Reflections on Justification by Faith Alone in the Age of Globalization
- Justice and Freedom: The Continuing Promise of the Reformation
- Real Relation and the Saturated Phenomenon (Part Two)
- Rezension: Practical Mysticism in Islam and Christianity. A comparative study of Jalal al-Din Rumi and Meister Eckhart (Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh)
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Dank
- Editorial: „Special Focus on Holm Tetens’s ‚Thinking God‘ (‚Gott denken‘)“
- God as Creator of Natural Laws: On the Relation of the Absolute and the Contingent World
- Holm Tetens on Panentheism: The Concept of Panentheism, Sin, and Special Divine Action
- Holm Tetens on the Moral-Existential Argument for Theism: Reasonable Hope and Wishful Thinking
- Holm Tetens on the Moral Argument for Theism: A Kantian Perspective
- An Outline of a Rational Theology
- Creative Grace: The Spiritual Revolution of the Reformation
- Sin, Grace, and Human Responsibility: Reflections on Justification by Faith Alone in the Age of Globalization
- Justice and Freedom: The Continuing Promise of the Reformation
- Real Relation and the Saturated Phenomenon (Part Two)
- Rezension: Practical Mysticism in Islam and Christianity. A comparative study of Jalal al-Din Rumi and Meister Eckhart (Saeed Zarrabi-Zadeh)
