ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 23 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Okay. I'm going to move us in a slightly different direction. I've been doing some of the reading you've asked us to do. While doing so, I've come across some interesting concepts that I would like you to spend some time explicating for us, if you are willing. And I'll ask you in advance for pardon if I mispronounce any of them. Let me look at my notes here. In Christology the word genera is used. Now, as a former biology teacher, this is a term I know. It is the pleural of genius and certain to the understanding of the classification of the species. But why do we refer to genera in this context? What does it mean? What is genus mia staticum? And what is genus idio maticum? And finally, what is genus apostelis maticum? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: One of the things in coming to study theology is that the terms that we use in studying theology can be found in other disciplines but they do not necessarily have the same meaning. I think a classical example is the word anthropology. A young person comes from college, comes to the seminary. And he sees the term anthropology. Well, anthropology at a college situation has to do with culture. How different people are from one another. Their customs, their languages, their ethnicity, where they live. Anthropology means the study of man. Generally sometimes whether he has a body or soul. The question, sometimes this involves original sin and actual sin. So the term anthropology has an entirely different meaning. And so in studying theology, one of the things you should really avoid is really looking in a dictionary, I mean the common dictionary, for the meaning. Because the words are going to have an entirely different meaning. And this throws people. It's not really an impossible situation. Because after you have been in the theological environment, you pick up the jargon. This happens in any sphere of knowledge. But the word genius is fairly closely related to what you have in biology as you indicate. It kind of indicates categories. Now, I would never suggest that you would ever use this type of terminology when you were preaching. In fact, this is something that you have to think -- I think the man who had just finished with his theological education is tempted more than an older pastor to use theological language when he gets up into the pulpit. Be forewarned that if you use the theological jargon or terminology in the pulpit, very few people, if any, are going to understand you. I would like to use myself as an example. I use a computer. But when somebody explains to me megabytes and all of those other terms, I haven't got a clue what they are talking about. So let's just be clear on this point that what we're going to say now is not something that you are going to bring into the pulpit. In fact, for that matter, you're not even going to use it in a Bible class. Why then do we have such terminology? The reason for much of our terminology comes from past controversies in the church where the church has had to become more precise in trying to answer and address wrong problems. It uses this particular terminology in order to clarify it. And after -- after the clarifications have been made, the terms are used as a form of abridgement so that in using the term, we don't have to explain the entire reality, which is at issue. Let's take each one of these ones. We'll start with the last one. The apostelis maticum. This means that with Jesus -- we spoke about it. The human and divine natures. It was a very famous book written about the human and divine natures by a man who wrote -- contributed to writing the Formula of Concord, the last of the Lutheran Confessions. And who was instrumental in bringing all of our Confessions together, the Creeds and the Catechisms and the Augsburg Confession into the Book of Concord. Martin Kemnits. The title of his book is "The Two Natures of Christ." And some of us still remember the man who translated it. It was the late president of the Missouri Synod and the Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne, the late JA O'Price, a name which might be familiar to you. Now, even though the phrase "the natures of Christ" have a firm place in Lutheran theology and tradition, I must honestly say that I'm uncomfortable with those two terms. I suppose for the very reason that you mentioned, that the term genius is used in biology. Natures give the impressions -- when we speak about the true natures of Christ, that we are dealing with two things in Christ, that we are dealing with two substances in Christ, that we are dealing with something inanimate in Christ, that we are mixing things together in order to produce the person of Jesus. But that's not the case at all. When we speak about the person of Jesus, we are speaking about God in regard to the person of Jesus. The action is always on the divine person of the Son of God who comes into our existence. When we say he was incarnate by the Holy Ghost and he was made man, it was God who underwent this -- these particular things. He took on flesh and he shared in our humility. So when we speak about natures, let's not ever think that we are just mixing together inanimate substances. That's hardly the case. When we use the term apostelis maticum, we mean that when the divine nature carries out any activity, it carries it out through the human nature. And that when the human nature carries out anything, it carries it out to the divine nature. You could say well this is not really all that important. It is important over against a great majority of Protestant churches. The great majority of churches, Protestant churches, are not Lutheran. They are Reformed. And in the Reformed tradition, the two natures of Christ are separate. They never come together. It's almost as if the human nature has its own personality. But that wouldn't be quite accurate. But they are separate. So when Jesus does anything, the human nature works through the personality of Jesus and the divine nature works through the personality of Jesus. It's almost as if two horses were pulling a wagon. The one horse would be the divine nature. The other horse would be the human nature. So they are working together side by side. But there is no interconnection between them. But genus idio maticum is somewhat similar. It has to deal with the natures of Christ. And that is that we attribute to one person divine and human things. We can say Jesus sleeps. We can say the man Jesus sleeps. We can say that the Son of God is at the right hand of the father. We can say that the man Jesus is at the side -- at the side of the Father. We do this to indicate that Jesus is a composite person. He is not two persons. The Reformed way of looking at the two natures of Jesus as if they were side by side is almost as if it they were two different persons. It really goes back further. In the early church, there was -- there was a man known as ***Nostorious. His teaching is known as ***Nostorium. He could not say that Mary was the mother of God. He could say that Mary was the mother of Jesus. But not the mother of God. On that account, when Lutherans look at how the Reform looked at the person of Jesus, we are very tempted to say -- and perhaps correctly so -- that to a certain extent, this is a revival of the old Nostorium heresy. We don't want to push that point too far. Because if we're going to convince other people of the position we hold as the correct biblical one, we don't want to use historical terms or be pejorative because we're not going to win any friends. But it's something which has been very striking to us that the Reformed position on many things has much in common with Nostoriumism. Now, the Reform will also use these particular phrases of how they understand Jesus. But remember, they don't see the divine and human working within one another. They see no real communication between the two natures. These are separate side by side. That's clear. The unique genus in Lutheran theology is the genus mia staticum. This is something which Lutherans hold but the Reform don't. We believe that everything that belongs to God also belongs to Jesus. That if God is omnipresent, Jesus is omnipresent. If God knows all things, Jesus knows all things. If God -- if God fills all time with himself, so then does -- so does Jesus. There is no part of God that does not come into Jesus. Now, this the Reformed definitely do not believe. They believe that there is -- the large quantity or percentage of God does not get into Jesus. That there is a God outside of Jesus. Because God can't squeeze into Jesus because Jesus is only a human. He's physically bound. Jesus is limited. God is without limits. So how would it be possible? And the Lutherans, of course, derided, had no use for the Reform position. The Lutheran position was based upon what St. Paul said. That in Jesus dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily that settled it for the Lutherans. And they derided the Calvinists. And they invented a term. And it's in Latin the ***extra Calvinisticum. Now, it's a contrived term. It's an invented term. Extra means outside. And Calvinistic comes from the word Calvin. This refers to John Calvin's doctrine. That's the major Reform theologian. Not the only one. But the major most influential one. That part of God sticks outside of the man Jesus. And in one of those very unusual twists of theological history, the Calvinists, the Reformed now refer to that designation by which the Lutherans derided them. The extra Calvinistic couple. We discussed before: Is there any difference between various Protestant denominations and how they look at Jesus? Well, here is a clear example. And therefore, in Calvinistic theology they have -- and I'm thinking of particular dogmatics books. They have sections in -- when they write their dogmatics books, they have sections -- they have books entirely on God in which they make no reference to the Trinity and they make no reference to Jesus. So if you decided, for example, after you become ordained to go to a seminary of another denomination in your neighborhood -- and I think that would be a very good idea. It never hurts to learn something else, especially from somebody else's point of view. That's the only way you can appreciate your own position and understanding. It's like being -- it's like being at sea. Just knowing one place on the compass isn't going to help you. You have to see -- you can only find where you are in reference to two points. So I encourage you to do that. And you will go to these very strongly biblical seminaries, academically -- academically accredited, highly qualified, no problems there. And you will see for them God is a separate topic. And as soon as you say that God is a separate topic apart from the person of Jesus, you really are opening up a lot of difficulties for yourself. Because if God can be isolated from Jesus, then you can pray to God without any reference to Jesus at all. And when you come to Calvinism, Calvinism believes in a double election. There really is a problem because this election is carried out by God and not by Christ. On that account, the Calvinists can say that God elects people to salvation in Christ. But they can't say that he elects people to hell in Christ. So here you have a working of God apart from the person of Christ. It also applies to how they understand the scriptures, too. The Spirit comes directly from God. So among the Calvinists, it's quite typical that they might see that Christ is the center of the scriptures. But they don't see that he is the only -- the only content. It will probably happen that when you are finished with your course like many students of theology when they graduate, that many of these terms like genus ideo modicum, ***myastalcum apostelis modicum will be forgotten. And then when you'll see them, they will appear as maybe entirely new or strange. And you may not know how to pronounce them. That's okay. It's not going to be the center of your ministry. But these terms have been used to put forth a definite understanding of the person of Jesus. And to that we are all bound. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***