10.

The Word of God and its Hearers

Man may take up his apprenticeship to a good master by becoming a disciple of Christ. Or he may decline that leadership and discipline. But though he may try to avoid submitting to any external rule, he will be unable to do so.

1. The Gospel
The Lord sets us Free The Word of the Lord releases man from all the forces that hold him captive
In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk. Taking him by the right hand he helped him up and instantly the mans feet and ankles became strong. He jumped to his feet and began to walk (Acts 36-8) Suddenly an angel appeared and a light shone. Get up, he said, and the chains fell off Peters wrists (Acts 12.7)

The Gospel places the true God here before us and throws out all substitutes. Idolatry is the replacement in our affections of substitutes for the true object of our love.
You turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God (1 Thessalonians 1.9)

We are captives. We cannot free ourselves. So we must be freed by someone other than ourselves. We must be grasped and taken out of this captivity and opened to others. Christ has done this, for us. He has seized us, taken us away from ourselves, and from all other masters and all our substitutes.
This is the reason why our theology is certain: it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.

The Lord sets us free us from the various forms of captivity to those disobedient powers which are our idols. To worship God is to turn away from all other gods and to escape their power. This is the meaning of the First Commandment, Martin Luther reminds us. The commandment you shall worship me and not have any other gods tells us to consider God entirely worth our trust, and give up all substitutes.
You shall worship Me alone as your God. What does this mean? What does it mean to have a god? What is God? God for you is whatever you put your trust in. What you set your heart and put your trust in is really your god. The point of this first commandment is to bring real faith and trust which will be is satisfied only with true God and holds on to him exclusively. Make sure that you only let me be your God, and never go looking for another, is what this first commandment is saying. Ask me for whatever you need , and when things go wrong, come and grasp hold of me. I will give you enough and help you out of every need; just do not hold on to anything else. Whoever is certain because of his own ability, relationships and reputation has a god, but just not the real God. We have to hold on to the real God exclusively. He wants to turn us away from everything else that exists outside of Him, and to draw us to Himself. He tells us that whatever we previously asked the saints for, or asked Luck for, we now must ask him for. Ask him, and he will help you and pour out upon you richly all good things. This is the meaning of worship of God. This proper worship takes us away from all other sources comfort and confidence. It means that we will not allow ourselves to be separated from God, but, for God, risk and disregard everything upon earth. Even though we experience many good things from other people, whatever we receive from them, we receive by his command or arrangement is all received from God. For our parents, and all rulers, and every else too, have received from God the command that they should do us

good. So we receive these blessings not from them, but, through them, from God. For creatures are only the hands, channels, and means whereby God gives all things. So no one should to take or give anything except as God has commanded, so that whatever it is, it can be seen to be God's gift, and thanks may be given to him for it.

We can give praise and thanks to all, but we are freed from the compulsion to give to others more credit or adoration than is good for them or for us. we must not build them up into idols or allow others to make idols of us. The Gospel releases us from the very real power exerted over us by our own idols. Christianity is our only defence against idolatry. God is Trustworthy We can rely on God. His Word is good. His Word sustains the whole creation, and makes it a reliable place for us. It would be mad not to rely on him, and to take what he says for what it is, the word of our Creator. We can either believe the completely reliable word of God, or the utterly unreliable word of all sorts other masters, who unable to make their word good. The gospel is addressed to the man who cannot acknowledge any authority by himself, or any lord other than those created by his own fear or credulity. God is trustworthy. The man who does not believe God to be worth his trust, is trying to be God himself. He is in danger of becoming a new god, a tyrant and vandal, out of control. Without the gospel we acknowledge nothing beyond ourselves. The gospel challenges us and it offends all who, convinced of their own powers, do not want to hear it.
What greater rebellion against God, what greater wickedness, what greater contempt of God is there than not believing his promise? For what is this except but to make God a liar or to doubt that he is truthful, to ascribe truthfulness to ones self but lying and vanity to God? Does not a man who does this deny God and set himself up as an idol in his heart? (Luther The Freedom of the Christian)

The Freedom of the Christian The Christian is made free of all other masters. He is able to thank everybody for everything, for he can appreciate that they are not themselves the source of what they give, and thus are not worthy of worship, but merely pass on what they themselves receive from God. Now he can taunt the other masters, who claimed too much for themselves, but which are now made powerless. The very name of Jesus Christ is enough to make them back off and disappear. Luther is concerned to talk principally the little ones, who know one else has bothered with or even noticed. The unlearned are the only people I serve. The Christian realises that the Christian faith and freedom makes his enemies who are envious. Everyone feels this pressure will recognise that God has won this fight, and will win it also for him. Every Christian has received the assurance of God that Christ will remain with them and fight for them.
I shall set down the following two propositions concerning the freedom and bondage of the Spirit: A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

The Word of God is not primarily information. It is the act in which God takes hold of us, separates us from what binds us and makes us free. The gospel places the true God here before us and throws out all substitutes for God, by which we attempt to place ourselves beyond challenge, and so make a god (or devil) of ourselves. The gospel separates and joins, opens and closes, binds and looses. It not only reconciles and unites and makes the two one, but it distinguishes and separates what has been falsely combined. It frees us from our old masters and joins us to Christ. It separates us from one

head, the rebellious mind, and joins us to another, Christ. Subsequently the gospel is also information about this event which has changed everything for us.

2. Luther and the Freedom of the Christian

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was compelled to search for an elusive freedom or peace of mind. Though a monk he found that even the disciplined and ascetic Christian life brought him no assurance of his salvation. Every practice and form of discipleship seemed to Luther either to offer no reassurance, or even to be an attempt to snatch salvation without God, and so to be an attempt to control our relationship with God in defiance of him. He realised that the practices and institutions by the which offered such assurance where themselves false exploitative and an offence against God. The clergy seemed to hold and to hold the gospel just out of reach of the Christian, preserving it for those who gave themselves to the spiritual and monastic life, though as Luther discovered, not finding it there either. A clerical class was attempting to make captive the grace of God, and had found ways of charging Christians for the forms that gave Christians assurance of that grace. It was making a living by interposing itself between God and the Christian. The clergy was charging for the servant that provided free. One reason that the people were held to ransom in this way was that the gospel was confined to the language that, without education, the majority could not speak or read. The Gospel had to be translated into the language of the people. Luther translated the Bible from a language that the majority did not read into the language and thus put the scriptures in the hands of the whole church and people. Responsibility for passing on the gospel had to be taken out of the hands of the clerical classes and into the hands of Christian secular leaders. Amongst the best known and most accessible of his writing are The Freedom of the Christian Man (1520) The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), On the Bondage of the Will, Address to the German Nobility. The Freedom of the Small Man The German people thought of themselves as the under-classes. German is a class rather than a nation. They were kept labouring by the financial burdens imposed by a whole hierarchy of clerical middle men employed by the papal court with its huge building programme. The Reformation means freedom from the impositions of the outsiders Rome and from their language. Bible translation represents the word of God put into the hands of those who need it. With it the German people know that they are not kept under by any command of God. Their land is divided into many fiefdoms and ruled by many masters who impose burdens on the poor and make life hard. But there is also another madness which has swallowed up Germany and made in particular the little ones prey. The Church has failed to look after the whole flock, not only the wealthy, but also the poor, and to unite and protect that flock from all other masters. Instead it has instead laid more burdens on them. The chief shepherd, the Pope, has become a new Pharaoh. He has become a false shepherd, who has fattened himself on the flock he has been given to protect. The Pope has claimed spiritual, which is final, authority, but only managed to wield only worldly authority, and like any other king, used the weapons of this world in preservation of that worldly authority. He has taxed and burdened the very poorest. He has not properly taught the kindness and gentleness of God, but left the poor gullible, and victims of the indulgence sellers. All priests and prelates have made the little ones of Germany their prey. They chew up the little man and leave him uneducated, unprotected, frightened and gullible. They sell him old bones as relics, new scrolls as pardons (indulgences) that will release their parents from some imaginary state of perdition (purgatory). They have transformed the gospel into a macabre system of profit and loss. For a while Luther believed that the Pope was unaware of what was done in his name, not believing that the Pope was directing all this mischief. The

poorest in Germany were by this regressive taxation building a new St Peters in Rome, and lives were being destroyed in Germany in order to siphon money to Rome to finance the corruption of the Church. Italy was bleeding Germany. The poor everyman is Lazarus, and the Magisterium of the Church has become Dives. When he realised that the Pope was indeed driving this system the papal curia was revealed to be a huge construct of charlatanry and deceit, in which it is taught that God demands and benefits from this system that destroys the lives of the least. The papacy had failed to be catholic, and had instead become an anti-Church with an anti-gospel.

3. The Sin of the Church

Worse than the unrighteousness of the lords of this world, is the righteousness of the selfproclaimed spiritual lords, the clergy. The unrighteousness is most pernicious and most visible just where it should be righteous. Instead of pointing to Christ who relieves the poor of the burdens imposed on them by all other masters, the Church has itself imposed a new and more totalitarian claim to possess our souls. The stewardship of the Church, however, has now been developed into so great a display of power and so terrible a tyranny that no heathen empire or other earthly power can be compared with it. It has made itself a substitute-Christ, blocking the way to Christ for the little ones already hard-pressed and most in need of him. The Church is suffering a Babylonian Captivity In his Address to the German Nobility, Luther reminds the princes that they are Christian, that they hold power from Christ, and that it is only held in order gently to bring back to true spirituality and humble discipleship. Luther asks the secular rulers, who hold worldly power, to act as real Christians and take on the responsibility to act as pastors, and to stop this clerical caste preying on the most gullible and vulnerable. It is the job the princes to reform the church, but he says this requires the most complete humility as soon as they reach for their swords they have lost, for then they are worse than those they are intending to reform. Luther assumed that as soon as he pointed out the wickedness of the institutional hierarchy, the Church would see the truth of what he was saying and would repent. But when the papacy did not repent Luther realised that the hierarchy of the Church had become the most worldly aspect of the world. But the Church cannot hold Christ captive. The Church is only itself when it continuously points away from itself to Christ. So we can say that the Spirit is not contained or controlled by the Church, but is outside the Church. When it does not make this confession, the Church falsifies the truth of Christs catholicity, his limitless and universal saving power, and functions as a sect. Whoever the Church excludes is precisely Christ to the Church. The Church is not finally itself until its catholicity is complete, until the last are in and Christ is all in all. Meanwhile the Church must say that it is different from the world, for the sake of the world. The fact that the Church is exclusive is precisely its witness beyond itself to Christ. That it keeps people out, that it points outside itself, to these who are outside it and says publicly that they are out it is this that makes it the truthful; witness of God and makes it unpopular and even hated. The Church is not the world. It is not (yet) all-including and catholic. It points out that others are outside the Church precisely as it points out that Christ is outside the Church and over the Church, transcendent of it, its judge and its truth. The Reformation is a reform movement. The Church is renewed and sustained by such movements. They must always take the form of judgment of some elements of the church and their demotion and repentance. The church had experienced many movements of reform before and has experienced many since, albeit less far-reaching. The Church must test, correctly identifying and receive this and every such renewal movement. The catholicity of the church depends on Reformation. Without the regular renewal of the Church, which is accompanied by periodic upheaval, the churchs witness to Christ is endangered.

It was not the Reformation but the refusal of the Rome curia to accept it as a movement of reform and renewal such, and as the work of God, that resulted in the division of the Church. The reformation was the rebuke of God to the church, and so the act and grace of God to his people, but the refusal or tardiness of the whole Church to accept this reform, that turned the Reformation into a division of the church and thus of schism. The Church is catholic only when it is ordered and directed by its head. Our head is Christ, and as he subdued and directed his own body, so he will subdue and direct us and make us his body. The Reformation was the rediscovery of the Christology without which ecclesiology descends into totalitarianism, dualism and flight from embodiment.

4. The Priesthood of the Whole Church

We are servants. A priest is is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. This is the status we are baptised into. It is the status given to all, not merely to some, Christians. To teach that only the clergy are priests, and that the rest of us merely lay, is create a higher and lower status in the Church, to let some some-proclaimed spiritual elite divide it again. This is an inversion of the real state of affairs, and the division and falsification of the Church.
All of us who believe in Christ are priests and kings in Christ. First the nature of this priesthood and kingship is something like this: first with respect to the kingship, every Christian is by faith so exalted above all things that, by virtue of a spiritual power, he is lord of all things without exception, so that nothing can do him any harm. As matter of fact all things are made subject to him and compelled to serve him in obtaining salvation. (This is not to say that every Christian is placed over all things to have them and control them by physical power a madness with which some churchmen are afflicted for such power belongs to kings, princes and other men on earth). The power of which we speak is spiritual. It rules in the midst of enemies and is powerful in the midst of oppression. Not only are we the freest of kings, we are also priests forever, which is far more excellent than being kings, for as priests we are worthy to appear before God to pray for others to teach one another divine things. .. You will ask, If all who are in the church are priests, how do those whom we now call priests differ from lay men? I answer: injustice is done these words priest, clergy, spiritual, religious when they are transferred from all Christians to those few who are now called priests. Holy Scripture makes no distinction between them, although it gives the name ministers and servants and stewards to those who are now proudly called popes, bishops, and lords and who should, according to the ministry of the Word, serve others and teach them the faith of Christ and the freedom of all believers. Although we are all equally priests, we cannot all publicly minister and teach. We ought not to do so if even we could. Paul writes (in 1 Corinthians 4.1), this is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. That stewardship, however, has now been developed into so great a display of power and so terrible a tyranny that no heathen empire or other earthly power can be compared with, just as if laymen were not also Christians. The Freedom of the Christian

The priest is married to his whole people, and he is bound to be celibate. Luther defies the pope on the separateness of the priest and marries. He overturns the righteousness of separation and elite clericalism (the two-decker universe) and thereby demonstrates that world is hallowed by God. There are distinct estates, but all are honourable: not only church, but also the household which includes marriage and child-rearing, private work and all vocations, and all the civic tasks such as providing education which support the nation. The Dignity of Worldly Work and Secular Authority Luther taught that the everyday world of work has a nobility and we should not try to escape this world of work and effort. When done well, in response to the demand of God to live well, and regard our neighbour and his well-being as intrinsic to our own living well, all tasks and

all professions are honorable. The Christian life values poverty (the devaluation of values) and is a disincentive to conspicuous consumption, but it is an incentive to saving so over the long term it results in accumulation, re-investment and growing wealth. Luthers Address to the Leaders of the German people called all rulers and magistrates to stamp out the abuses of the Church, by which clergy had been exploiting the people. Luther appealed to the civil power to carry out this reform and in doing so he put made the Church subordinate to the secular power. The pope should return to apostolic simplicity. He should abandon his worldly power claims and devote himself to the work of a pastor. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it like ts:
This is exactly the conclusion that Luther reached with regard to the Christians secular calling during those critical years when he was turning his back on the cloister. It was not so much the lofty standards of monasticism that he repudiated, as their interpretation in terms of individual achievement. It was not the otherworldliness as such that he attacked, but the perversion of otherworldliness into a subtle kind of spiritual worldliness. To Luthers mind that was a most insidious perversion of the gospel. The otherworldliness of the Christian life ought, Luther concluded, to be manifested in the very midst of the world, in the Christian community and in its daily life. Hence the Christians task is to live out that life in terms of his secular calling. That is the way to die to the worldand engage more vigorously in the assault on the world and everything it stands for. Bonhoeffer The Cost of Discipleship

5. The Promise of God

The Word is the Act of God The Word of God is transformative. It makes everything holy and is therefore sacramental. All Luthers discussion of sacrament depends on the Word of God who addresses us, invites and command to us. The Word is the executive order of God that all spiritual powers, since they are its creatures, must hear and obey. God's Word is his promise and bond, so we can bank on it. But the Word does not merely say what is already the case. It does not merely describe what there is, or repeat what we already know. It changes everything, brings new things into being, and it sustains and renews old things, so they are old no longer. The Word gives us a command and we are free only as we obey and follow that command. This is what makes these sacraments. I rely on Christs words: Take, this is my body upon these words I go and I know that Christ invites me for he said Come to me, all who labour and are heavy-laden, I will give you rest; and this will not deceive me. But I do not baptise it upon its faith or someone elses faith, but upon God's Word and command. In my faith I may lie, but he who instituted baptism cannot lie. (Lectures on the Catechism on baptism). Baptism and the Eucharist are simply invitations, commands and promises, issued by God to us. We must come and be baptised and eat. All deliberation over the how of this event of transformation (or transubstantiation) misses the point. God commands us, his summons be obeyed, and what he commands us to is good and delightful. The Gospel is the Word and Command of Christ Christs word is law to us. Christs word is Christs command and invitation to us, his acceptance of us as his, as his disciples and future sons, and so it is his discipline of us and his protection of us. The more we are able to obey the law of Christ the freer we become. But this obeying is not some hard work of its own. The law of Christ internalises itself in the Christian community and in its every member and becomes our very own internal structure. Real hearing is obeying, and enables proper our response. The word of God is promise. Luthers is a theology of the Word: he understands that words make things. By a word he establishes us as free and righteous: this is the same Word as that by which the world was made and is sustained. Luthers concept of word provided him with a speech-act theory. This

provided an alternative to the Augustinian Stoic representation-reference theory, which understands words only as able to describe an existing state of affairs, not to bring about change. Luther understands that words not only describe, but also change. The Word of God promises, creates, renews, transforms and redeems. The words I forgive you do not refer to an inner static state in which we are already absolved. They absolve us. These words create this new relationship and are the event of our being forgiven. The Word of God Creates Hearers and Worshippers We saw that ancient and medieval Christians were concerned with the vision of God and that the model of vision dominates the West. It is the that unsatisfactory thought that in heaven we will gaze wordlessly. Luther replies with hearing. Real hearing is obeying, and enables proper our response. The word of God is promise. Luthers concept of word provided him with a speech-act theory. This provided an alternative to the Augustinian Stoic representation-reference theory, which understands words only as able to describe an existing state of affairs, not to bring about change. Luther understands that words not only describe, but also change. The Word of God promises, creates, renews, transforms and redeems. The words I forgive you do not refer to an inner static state in which we are already absolved. They absolve us. These words create this new relationship and are the event of our being forgiven. The words of God change us, they build up in us, and tear down in us, to make us holy. They install themselves in us and raise the functionality of the body they enter. Luther understands that the soul is formed by whatever it listens to. Do not be surprised that I said we must become the Word. The mind is formed by what it hears, rather than what it sees. Luther at first threw out all tradition of dealing with practical and commercial worldly matters, in violent reaction to but it all had to be re-invented. It may even be said to have been reinvented on an inferior Protestant scholastic basis that owed less to the Fathers of the Church. The Wonderful Exchange Luther follows Augustine in showing that Christ gives us his attributes, and takes away from us those attributes which hold us captive. In his remarks on the verse Christ was made a curse for us (Galatians 3.13), Luther says this: Christ took all our sins upon himself, and for them he died on the cross and all the prophets saw this, that Christ was to become the greatest thief, murderer, adulterer, robber, desecrator, blasphemer etc there has ever been anywhere in the world. He is not acting in his own person now. Now he is not the Son of God, born of the Virgin. But he is a sinner, who has and bears the sins of Paul, the former blasphemer, persecutor and assaulter; of Peter, who denied Christ; of David, who was an adulterer and murderer in short he has and bears all the sins of all men in his body, - not in the sense that he has committed them but in the sense that he took these sins, committed by us, upon his own body, in order to make satisfaction for them with his own blood. Galatians Commentary (1535) This is the wonderful exchange. When we look at the Church we are not inclined to say that sins have been done away with once and for all, but says Luther I deny the conclusion If I look at Christ, who is the propitiator and cleanser of the Church, then it is completely holy; for he bore the sins of the entire world. Therefore where sins are noticed and felt, there they are really not present. Teaching the Christian People Luther encouraged Christians to worship God in their own language and voice. Christians came to know and be able to recite and expound an account of it in their own language. In

the Large Catechism, written for adults, Luther explained the Ten commandments as mirror for sin, Apostles Creed as the proclamation of forgiveness, the Lord's Prayer as acceptance of mercy, and the two sacraments of baptism and Lords supper as channels of grace. As a result of the Reformation, the Eucharist was no longer a liturgy performed by priests to which all others were spectators. The whole congregation said or sang the liturgy. Luther taught the Christian people to be glad and sing, and his theology informs his hymns. Luther speaks in the voice and accent of the working people who have never previously been heard, or knew they had any right to be heard. Now for the first time the voice of the people is heard. The overlooked receive their recognition, shame no longer keeps them mute and invisible. Luther translates the whole bible into the powerful everyday language of the people. He translates some psalms into hymns so that they can be sung by everyone. A safe stronghold our God is still (Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott) for example starts from psalm 46, but Luther makes it tell the story of our salvation. Who is our champion and stronghold? It is Jesus Christ our king and protector. In our own strength, we would soon be lost and fallen, but the righteous man fights for us. Christ gets into the ring, takes on the devil who has his hands on us, and wrestles him into submission. Christ has triumphed in battle for us; the prince of this world has been judged, defeated and been shown to be harmless. Now, though he is still against us, one little word can knock him down.

PART TWO

The Individual

The Disciple and the Individual The two sons. The disciple hears and obeys and follows, as Abraham. He is glad and confident in the promise and the ability of the Lord to fulfil his promise. The Word of the Lord creates and sustains the world. The Word of the Lord releases, and breaks the bonds placed on us by other, usurper masters. The Word of the Lord brings us into communion with God and enables us to be glad and give thanks. We have only to trust. Each of us - we are individually called and go as individuals through that baptism, out of the communion of the world and into the communion of Christ. Luther wanted to rescue the gospel from dogmatic theologys involvement in (pagan) philosophy and its hope to establish a knowledge of God apart from the bible. He dismissed the idea of engagement with Aristotle. He rejected static, dogmatic or systematic knowledge: there is no theoretical knowledge of God to be gleaned, from any other sources than direct relationship with God. We can only know God because he judges us and saves us. All the knowledge of God we have is that God is for us. Luther reversed the view that we know the Father through natural theology and the Son through revelation. He pointed out that it was not the Father who revealed the Son but that in Jesus the Son who revealed the Father. Jesus encompasses the totality of God's historical dealing with humanity and is the sole content God's revelation. God is the Father of Jesus, and is our Father only through Jesus. We have considered Luther as example of the Christian, compelled by faithfulness and obedience to the Word of God to judge and stand against even the consensus of the greater part of the Church. But perhaps no disciple can be held responsible for the directions taken by his followers. Now we have to consider the course of Christians of the Protestant and divided churches as the start of a the towards the individual, the Christian who defines himself in contrast to the Church and so who allows his own congregation or community to become its own authority. The disciple, without this discipleship, becomes an individual. The Christian is aloof from the gathering of Christians that is the Church. We have an account of man without this gathering, an anthropology without an ecclesiology. An ecclesiology by extension is an account of any society which self-consciously distances itself from the Church, and so becomes an alternative to it.

6. Reformation and new Problems

The Protestant Centuries The Reformation was a reform and renewal of the Church. Any such movement of reform could be expected to renew the unity of the Church. The Reformers intended to reform and renew the whole undivided Church, not to split the Church into two camps. But the Reformation was the event which divided the Church, after which there was the Roman Catholic Church and the protestant churches. Luther had appealed to the papacy to call a council of whole Church through the 1520s, but no council was called. When the papacy did eventually summon a council, at Trent (Trentino, in northern Italy), it was too late to preserve the unity of the Church. The division between papacy and protestant churches had become irreparable. There was prolonged war in Europe during which the tribes of Europe underwent a rearrangement into nations. In the course of these national conflict they created their own ideological account of their national unity, resorted to denomination differences so that these political wars have consequently been called wars of religion. Many European territories which in which protestant churches had grown strong were violently reclaimed for the Rome Catholic church. These rival confessions and this vast new rift were the result of theological failures which had been left unaddressed for centuries. The tensions within the theology of Augustine gave rival denominations ammunition for mutual denunciation. We must examine some of these tensions. We can sum these theological problems up as a failure to integrate the doctrine of Christ and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit into one doctrine of God, and the consequent failure to let that doctrine of God shape our understanding of man. The Spirit makes the Church, and cares for the unity of the Church, and the integrity and continuity of Christian teaching. Having removed the whole set of priestly and sacramental intermediaries, we are now alone before the bible. Though there were many attempt to recover catholicity by teaching the Christian people, two of Luthers insights drop out of the centre of Protestant proclamation. The first is that God himself does works our salvation: the Holy Spirit is our the mediator. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is given no work to do. The second is that the Holy Spirit mediates people and a community, with all that communitys experience and wisdom, to us. Liturgy and ecclesiology go missing. The result is that Christian doctrine is then about ideas, detached from worship, and detached from any specific discipline. Law is seen as the enemy. It is detached from any specific community. Thus the new context for Christian doctrine is the choice of the individual, regardless of whether this individual undergoes any process of character formation by which he or she can makes good choices. The Western failure to integrate the Spirit into the theological doctrine of God means that the Spirit has ceased to be defined by the Son and the Father, and so be recognised as the coworker of all their relations with us. When we imagine that the Spirit is distant from Christ, our worship and then it becomes the work that man performs unaided to God, though perhaps never to God's satisfaction, and if so, man may then decide that he has need to perform that work. As a result the Spirit has become instead Providence, the drive of History, Progress, Civilisation, the Spirit of our Nation, Enlightenment and so on. All this makes the Spirit a demiurge, a superior kind of creature. A more faithful account must show that the Spirit brings us Christ, and communion with Christ, and thus creates communion and the Church. This same Holy Spirit brings about by the provision of his holy gifts the redemption and perfection of the Church and through the

Church, of man and creation. A faithful account links credits the Churchs worship of God, and God's sanctification of the Church to the Spirit. If it is not, Christian doctrine is not understood as the product of the specific sanctified teachers who serve the Church. The reification of the work of Spirit and the delegation of that work to a hierarchy of clerical intermediaries. We then have a gap between the Spirit and the Law, with the result that it is not understood that God gives us the virtues, character and law of Christ. The hope of our transformation disappears into the gap opened (antinomianism) between freedom and lawand-institution. Scripture is not understood as these specific patriarchs and prophets and Scripture is understood just as text, rather than as living choir of voices. So whenever we say the bible says, the most we can mean is our reading of Scripture. The isolated Scripture-reader has become a pharaoh. The Church is no longer split horizontally between a clerical-religious elite and ordinary lay majority. Instead the Church is split into as many units as there are individual Christians, and this is represented by the proliferation of denominations. Going beyond the Law Antinomianism The grace of God gives us gifts, amongst them Scripture, Church teaching and law, teachers and models, practices and institutions. All these remain gifts of God as the Spirit renews them, so that they are not dead fetters, but as the living aid and comfort of God to us. But without such an understanding of the ongoing living-bringing work of the Holy Spirit, any practice or institution may become a new form of captivity. Amongst the questions that the Church should ask itself is whether it should teach (the children) of those outside the Church. Should it educate, lead, pastor even those without faith or baptism? The risk of offering education to those outside is that this obliterates the boundary between those inside and those outside the Church, so the Church becomes indistinguishable from the nation, and ceases to offer its prophetic witness. In the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries we see a slow retreat from Trinitarian theology to Arian and Unitarian theology. Without the doctrine of the Trinity we have a deist God and a return of the pagan dualism, that keeps God in heaven and man on earth, in permanent stand-off. Pietism and Nonconformity The Triumph of the Inner Man The radical Reformation understands the freedom of the Christian to be the freedom of the individual against the institution and so as freedom from institutionalism. Nonconformity and pietism represented the refusal to accept the whole teaching of the Church and so was part of a growing suspicion of dogma and doctrine. Luther believed that every discipline is good for us, so any ruler is good for us, even if it or he is hostile and does not intend to do us any good. Calvin says only a godly, Christian ruler can form us, or help to form us into a Christian people. The outward forms and structures of the Church must be also be reformed (by repentance) in order to create the cradle in which Christians can be formed. The radical reformers saw the great abuse in the externalisation of religion, rather than, as Luther did, in the false exaltation of man. They stressed the inward and the spiritual, and believed that the Spirit dispensed with the sacraments or all such external aids such as singing, and made the experience of the Spirit the qualification for Church membership, and so created criteria to tell the true from the false Christians. The individual discovered for himself the piety, heart-warming assurance of his or her own salvation. The desire to keep the Church pure resulted in successive movements, of puritans, nonconformists, dissenters, evangelicals and pietists and resulted in a proliferation of sects and denominations. One the one hand was the religion of the heart and of the fervour of the inner man, referred to as Pietism in this period. What was important, it was thought, was not the holding of

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correct views about the faith, but the personal experience of that faith, and direct personal experience of the Spirit. On the other was the religion of reason, and rationalism and Unitarianism. The commitment to either heart or head meant a distance from doctrine and tradition. The abandonment of the apostolic deposit of faith, the teaching authority of the Church, the understanding that the unity of the whole Church is intrinsic to its witness. The divorce of reason from individual experience and feeling repeated the gap between head and body. Protestant Christians looked for the meaning of texts in history. they searched for the lost origins, so interpretation became a descent through previous layers of interpretation, regarded as accretions, towards a pristine interpretation, original or primitive Christianity. There was a reduction of the doctrine of creation and was a collapse of the complex ontology of sacrament which allowed that things may change and be transformed. The teleology disappeared, with the result that the whole Western tradition turned back towards gnosticism, without any understanding that the Word of God gives us our material presence and embodiment. The Arrangement of Knowledge When Protestants did not make it clear enough that it is the church is the public form and carrier of Christian doctrine, gospel became separable from the Church. Then another, undeclared community arrived to judge what was acceptable doctrine. This was the community of the academics. The university usurped the place of the church and has ever since has guarded the resources of memory and imagination and identity of the church. Because Protestants have not put themselves under the authority and discipline of the whole church, they have by default put themselves under the discipline of that other community, the university, that seeks and claims already to represent universality. The university that does not care to remain conversation with the church exercises a discipline over Christian doctrine. When Christians do not take their orientation from the catholicity promised to the Church, they put themselves under the premature catholicity of the university, the institution that believes that all knowledge is already within its grasp. The Abandonment of Metaphysics Truthful knowledge of Christ cannot be divorced from the public, corporate Spirit-driven act of confession and worship of Christ. The Spirit gives us knowledge and himself is that knowledge. Without continued cultivation of pneumatology and apostolicity, the definition of knowledge reverts to a forensic pattern, which itself changes from our justification by God, to the justification (proof) of our knowledge of God, and then to the justification of God. God has to justify himself to our satisfaction, and he has do this in a preliminary theoretical kenotic way simply as knowledge or the possibility of the knowledge of the existence of God, before we concede that he may justify himself as the actual God who claims us and informs us of our sin, his judgment and our salvation. God must be justified first as an idea, as a theory and thus in terms of epistemology. The result of the getting rid of the sophisticated account of the world represented by the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle is that we are vulnerable to simpler and more vicious metaphysics of scepticism, stoicism and atomism. The pneumatology, ecclesiology, and some of the disciplines and practices, and awareness of tradition (with its inoculation against previous mistakes) that make the Christian people distinct, are lost. Without this Christian account of the Spirit pneumatology other forms of mediation gain control. But we need to have this ongoing conversation and confrontation with the world. For Christianity is not simply truth, but witness, and therefore truth with effect, truth for the world. The world must hear it, touch and handle it and through a long process of becoming familiar with it, receive it, not merely as propositions but as a new mind and new form of life. Can we have the gospel pure, without this conversation with the worldly and with the non-Christians? Luther makes it clear that Christian theology is directed against idolatry, against the other

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gods. Yet because he does not value the ongoing debate with pagan forms of knowledge (Aristotle) he does not make it easy to identify the pressures and forces that (metaphysics) that societies are under over generations.

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