ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 59 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. *** >> In our course on worship, we spend time discussing the importance of the church year. What does the church year have to do with Christology? Can it be helpful to us as we work within our congregations to establish a strong christological understanding of faith? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: We began our discussion by asking: What does the word Christology mean? And that it refers to the life and death of Jesus and what he has done for us. We also said that this is not a common term among the people. And there really is no necessity that the people should learn what the phrase means. However, everything which we do within the church, especially on Sunday, has to do with Christology. Most of our people I think it's safe to say are not going to go to Bible class. They are not going to get additional instruction in the Christian religion. This puts the entire burden on what they know and what they believe on what happens in the church on a Sunday morning. And this puts the weight particularly on the sermon. The Lutheran Church from its very beginning -- and it's very difficult to speak about the beginning of the Lutheran Church because we do not understand ourselves as a separate church but a continuation of the church that existed from the Apostles. And that is from the very beginning when Christians got together, they didn't discuss the Old Testament. And they didn't discuss the epistles of Paul. They read the epistles of Paul. But what was at the center of what they did on a Sunday morning was the Lord's Supper. And before they received the Lord's Supper, they read from the accounts of the gospels about Jesus. And so our system of reading the gospels every Sunday in church goes back to that. These gospels are arranged according to the church year. And I think we are very fortunate to have it. Because what happens -- what happens with the church on Sunday morning is that the people who attend actually go through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus once a year. It's a cycle. And so in Advent we begin with John the Baptist and make references to the expectations of the Old Testament people of God. Then we go to the birth of Jesus. The coming of Jesus. The coming of the wise men to Jesus. The baptism of Jesus. The miracles of Jesus. And then during Lent, the suffering of Jesus in his death and resurrection and his ascension and his return again. Now, the question is this: Can this get kind of boring? Is this a rut? I kind of like ruts. Because with ruts, you know what to expect. There's not something new. But let's get realistic. If you have a congregation of 300 communicants, how many of those 300 communicants are going to be in church every Sunday to follow the sequence? You're going to discover that -- you're going to discover that a good member might be one who comes to church one out of every three or one out of every two Sundays. So some of these things he's only going to hear once every two years or once every three years. And maybe because of the way of the appointment of the gospels, he might not hear certain incidents at all. And so I think if you wanted to define Christology, Christology is what happens within the church service. And this -- by having a church here, we have the great fortune of hearing about the life of Jesus. Please remember that in other churches, in the Reformed churches, maybe sadly some Lutheran Churches, the preacher does not follow the Gospel which has been appointed for that day. And I think the people are somewhat poorer for that *** 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. ***