Volume 48, Issue 1

The focus of this article is to raise some philosophical questions concerning Bayer's aim of making topical the theology of Luther. The involvement of philosophy offers both opportunities and risks for theology. On the one hand, philosophy can mediate between a religious or theological vocabulary and contemporary secular society; on the other, however, theology runs the risk of being affected by the inner-worldly categories of philosophy. The latter position seems to be the one of Bayer since he defines the relation between philosophy and theology as a discordant one. In order to examine if and how philosophy can serve as a mediator between religion and secular society, I concentrate on a common characteristic of theology and philosophy, viz. that they query all kinds of traditional wisdom in order to offer true, theologically or philosophically corroborated wisdom. First, I analyse Bayer's idea of theology as personal, traditional wisdom. He develops it through a confrontation with Kant's critical assessment of wisdom in his Critique of Practical Reason , according to which science is the only narrow entrance gate that leads to wisdom. According to Bayer, the entrance fee is far too high, since is implies an imoverishing reduction of theology to (objective) science. Instead, he understands theological wisdom as meta-criticism, standing in the middle between dogmatism and scepticism. In my comment on Bayer's position, I start from the definition of wisdom as a kind of knowledge, helping humans to find the true destiny of their lives. However, in our post-modern times, the plausibility of the truth-claim implied in this definition is being challenged. All our vocabularies about the destinies of our lives, be they religious, theological, or philosophical, are perceived as radically contingent and equivocal. Consequently, wisdom has become a private opinion of a person or a group of like-minded people. Although I agree with Bayer's critique of the privatisation of wisdom, his argument in favour of a theological wisdom which claims to be above any suspicion of being ideological in character because of God's personal address, seems highly problematic to me. Although religion has an enormous critical potential with regard to the ideologies of our times, it does not convince contemporary, secularised people, because they perceive religion itself as a form of ideology. Therefore, I propose, with the help of Kant's, What Does it Mean to Orientate Oneself in Thinking , another approach of the necessary critique of religious wisdom, which is based on the concept of reason, as distinct from science. This leads to a less discordant view of the relationship between philosophy and theology than Bayer's.

While having dinner in an American restaurant, a group of Christian ethicists, some of whom were Lutherans, were addressed by a woman. Upon hearing the profession of the group, she replied, “Well, I'm a Lutheran, so I don't know anything about Christian Ethics.” This article intends to explore in what sense the woman might have been correct. In order to do this, I argue that the realm of “the ethical” comprises at least three characteristics: universalisability, prescriptivity, and a reference to a conception of the highest good (or of the good life). After this, it is argued that, as a consequence of Luther's reference to God as the highest good, the so-called political use of the law ( usus politicus legis ) can be seen as strongly ethical and Christian at the same time. The Christian element lies, however, not so much in the designation of what values ought to be pursued, i. e., in the field of normative ethics , since the law in its political interpretation may be known by, and is applicable, to all people, believers and nonbelievers alike. Rather, the contribution of Christianity to ethics lies on two other levels of ethics: first, on the level of metaethics (including the reference to God as the highest Good, the importance of the doctrine of human sinfulness); and, second, because of Luther's stress on human freedom as a consequence of salvation, on the level of the realisation of the good . Finally, it is argued that Luther's theological use of the law as well as his doctrine of human freedom (which, in a sense, equates Calvin's third use of the law) can hardly be conceived as ethics, due to the absence of the characteristics of universalisability and prescriptivity. By some, this may be considered as a flaw, but the criticism might also go in the other direction: to Luther, there is more to the good life than prescriptivity and universalisability alone.

In this contribution, I focus on Bayer's interpretation of Luther's concept of justification as promissio . In part I, I sketch Bayer's central idea that this concept is to be understood as a performative speech-act in Austin's sense, i. e. as an act constituting novel ‘facts’ while being performed rather than registering already existing ones. The words of the absolution do not only register that the sinner is justified but, when being spoken in the proper circumstances, actually do justify him. In part II, I evaluate the consequences of this interpretation of justification. On the one hand, I suggest that Bayer's interpretation captures the aspects of the concept of justification which are characteristic of Lutheranism and should be defended. On the other hand, however, I criticize Bayer's contention that his concept of justification as promissio undermines all attempts to verify theological claims. I summarize the tension between the religious, pro-Lutheran perspective and the philosophical, Luther-critical perspective in a dialogue between Lutheran heart and philosophical mind. In part three, I suggest that there is no easy way out of the tension between Lutheran heart and philosophical mind since both are valuable in their own way. Nevertheless, I offer two cautious suggestions by way of conclusion: The first is that the idea of ‘verification’ should be reconstructed in a (broadly) pragmatic spirit in order to be acceptable from a Lutheran perspective. The second is that the non-relational background which is presupposed by construing justification in a relational fashion (as is the case with the concept of promissio ) should be construed as a Gadamerian ‘prejudice’, i. e. as being presupposed in every act of understanding, yet, as always being open to revision.

This contribution concentrates on one strong and one weak side of Bayer's approach to Luther's theology. It finds a strength in the universally implemented theme of justification in Luther's theological thought. A weakness is however found in the way Bayer breaks through Luther's dialectics concerning the dual way God hides himself – i. e. hidden ‘under the opposite’ and absolutely hidden – by separating them and using this division as a criterion to distinguish between the period where Luther had fully worked out the insight of the Reformation and the pre-Reformation Luther. Such an interpretation of Luther needs to be reconsidered because it neglects the correspondence and the contrapuntal relation between this double hiddeness in the light of the ‘revealed God’. A similar problem arises when Bayer divides speaking about the triune God, which is exclusively orientated towards the Gospel, from a general way of speaking about God, which is only based on the Law. Luther's idea that the distinction between Law and Gospel is fully integrated into God's revelation of the Gospel contradicts such a division. This contribution considers not only a distinction between an immature (theology of the cross) and a mature Luther who has worked out all the implications of the reformation insight unnecessary, but appreciates the young Luther as a theologian who is capable of holding together what the later Luther is in danger of letting fall apart. Fortunately, in Bayer's study there are also openings for a Luther interpretation that includes the positive as well as the negative aspect of both kinds of hiddeness and of Law and Gospel in a single continuous process.

According to Oswald Bayer, creation is God's address to human beings. Belief in the Creator is a response to what God promises us in this world. Creation is about our present, not about the past; about God's personal communication with us, not about impersonal causation; about God's active and personal presence in everything that happens in this world, not about otherworldly transcendence. With Bayer it is right to say that creation is God's gift and promise, and that belief in the Creator is a response to this address and a way of experiencing this world. The manner in which Bayer spells out these insights, however, raises some serious problems. In this article four criticisms are made. First, the Bible expresses belief in God's creation not only in hymns in the second person, but also in narratives in the third person. Second, when we take these narratives seriously, we have to think about creation as the first act of God in the history of His people. Third, in a theoretical reflection about the concept of creation as God's first act, we need a theologically modified concept of ‘causation’ as agency. And last, God is not only free in His transcendence, and loving in His immanence, as Bayer claims, but also loving in His transcendence and free in His immanence. This implies, in contrast to Bayer's account, that we have to acknowledge differences in the way the willing and acting God is involved in the history of His creation.

My short (ecumenical) contribution is a reading of two texts by Luther that play an important role in Bayers book, especially where the theology of the Trinity is concerned: the hymn »Nun freut euch lieben Christen g'mein« and a passage from the Great Catechism (the end of the commentary on the Creed). Bayer, in his analysis of the hymn uses two contrasts that should highlight the new insights of Luther: one is concerned with the motivum incarnationis , the other with the theology of the Trinity. On the basis of research in Aquinas and recent developments in the theology of the Trinity these contrasts need to be nuanced. Bayers interpretation of the passage from the Great Catechism overlooks the distinction Luther makes between true and false Christians and because of his strong and almost exclusive emphasis on the role of Jesus Christ overlooks that Luther acknowledges clearly the importance of the role of the Spirit.