ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 70 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 understand what you were saying. But aren't we concerned about what goes on in the Christian heart? >> DR. DAVID MAXWELL: Well, that's the problem that we have -- that we can't say everything all at once. And as I said at the beginning, we are focusing on justification for the purposes of this course. When you start talking about what goes on in the Christian heart, you're really speaking more of sanification. But since you asked the question, let me say a little bit about that now because I don't want to give the impression that these two things are totally unrelated to each other. When we receive the righteousness of Christ which is imputed to us by God and he declares us to be righteous, that actually does have an effect in our heart. Now, that effect in our heart is the fruit. It's not the tree that -- it's our -- our identity comes from what God says about us. But that statement of God has an effect. And in fact, it does transform our hearts. And the way it does that is by turning us towards our neighbor. So that now our life becomes a life of service to the neighbor. In Lutheran theology, this is often called -- we can talk about it as sanification. But we can also talk about it as the doctrine of vocation. And that means that when we go about our daily tasks, whatever that may be, we are concerned about serving our neighbor. That is what a life of love is. Now, this is very different I think than what sometimes happens in the prevailing Christian culture that's dominated by more Reformed than evangelical influences in which the idea is sometimes given that in order to be God pleasing, you have to be doing something explicitly churchly. Let me give you an example of that. I have a friend who taught accounting at Viola University which is a university -- Christian university. And his students who were accounting majors had a particular problem. He asked them the question: What career do you want to pursue? And their response to him was "Well, I guess I'm going to have to be a camp counselor." At least one of the students said that. "Well, you're an accounting major. Why do you feel that you have to be a camp counselor? Well, it's the only God pleasing career I can think of." I mean, you see the problem there is when people think that the only way to please God is to do something explicitly churchly, then the rest of your life becomes irrelevant. They don't realize that if you're a farmer, for example, that you are growing food to feed people. And that's very important. That is God pleasing. That is a life of love. You don't -- it's not the case that your job is just your cover, as if like I'm really an undercover evangelist and my job is kind of a front so I can sneak in and meet people and I can tell them about Jesus. Now, I'm not opposed to evangelism. Please don't misunderstand me. But I want to make the point that serving your neighbor in these very physical ways, whatever your job may be, however you may help people through your occupation, is, in fact, a life of love because it is a life that is directed towards other people. And so that's where I think the Lutheran theology has a great contribution to make in terms of putting out there this doctrine of vocation. That allows people to realize that, in fact, they can and are serving God in their everyday lives. It's interesting. Even the term vocation is a term that used to in the middle ages and I believe even today still in Roman Catholic circles can refer to a calling to become a priest or a monk. And what Luther did with the word is it doesn't -- Luther rejected the idea that becoming a monk was a superior form of Christian life. I mean, it's the same kind of thinking. That in order to be a superior Christian, in order to be truly God pleasing, you have to be explicitly churchly. Well, it's not the case. I mean, whether you think that's a monk or whether you think that's a camp counselor, it's the same kind of thinking. Luther's point was God tells you what he wants on the Ten Commandments. He wants you to honor your parents and help support your neighbor's life and his property and you do that in the place where God has put you in your occupation. Now, I realize in this program you are going to be studying for the ministry. But it's still important for you to realize that the people in your parish are pleasing God in their vocation. So you don't need to give them the impression that in order to be good Christians you need to serve on a lot of church committees or something like that. You need to recognize and tell them so that they know that they serve God by helping people in their own occupations. Now, if I may, I would also like to add here as long as we're talking about the influence on evangelism on American Christian culture what I think is a related question. And that is just an observation that I have about the presence of God in worship. You know, we're talking about what goes on in the Christian heart. And that's really an emphasis among evangelicals. And it's also -- it profoundly affects how you view worship and what you think is going on on Sunday morning. Now, when I was in college, I was associated with a group called Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, which was predominantly an evangelical organization which was designed to reach out to college students. And in that association I got a chance to talk to evangelicals and to learn from them how they understood worship. And I'll never forget this fascinating meeting they had trying to plan their worship meeting in which they said that "We have praise music and we have worship music." Now, I had heard the term praise and worship music before. But I had never heard it in this precise of a way. But these were actually technical terms. That praise music was upbeat. It was designed to kind of get your blood pumping. And praise music was to be used at the beginning of the service to sort of get people going. And then that would transition into worship music, which was invariably more meditative and slower in feel. And this was the pattern. That you start off with praise music and then you transition into worship music. It was a remarkable kind of thing to see how another denomination -- it's not really a denomination. But how another Christian theological tradition views worship. And what I noticed right away was that the key there was what emotion is being experienced. I mean, it was designed to evoke these two different kinds of emotion. The kind of upbeat one and then the more meditative peaceful feeling. It was really geared towards that. And I don't mean to be condescending to evangelicals. But my observation from this experience was that they had a tendency to identify those feelings with the presence of God. And now, I'm sure if you ask them explicitly "Do you think those feelings are the presence of God?" they would say no. Their theology is better than that. But my observation is it kind of seemed that way. That when they felt one of those two ways, that meant God was there. And the flip side of that is when they didn't feel one of those two ways, that meant God wasn't there. And I think it is very easy for people to kind of fall into that way of thinking. That they can sense the presence of God. And what they really mean is "When I feel a certain way, God is there." Now, this is very different than Lutheran theology in which if you want to locate the presence of God in church, where is that? It's on the altar. In the body and blood of Christ. It's in the preaching and the word of God. Or it's in baptism. Or let's just take the Lord's Supper at the moment. It's on the altar. It's outside of us. We're not denying he's in our heart. But the important thing is not he's in our heart. But the important thing is he's on the altar. And he's in our lips. That we eat his body and drink his blood. That is I think a fundamental difference in which this discussion of Christ outside of us versus Christ in us really plays out in a contemporary American cultural setting. Like how do you view worship? Where is the presence of God? Now, I really believe that Lutheran hymnity has the capacity to inoculate our people against this view. And that's simply because Lutherans are used to being sad in church because we have Lent. We have Lent and hymns. We have -- our hymnity has an incredibly broad spectrum of emotions that we are used to experiencing in church before God. And if you're in a situation in which you are dealing with contemporary music, this would be my caution to you is to like -- how do you negotiate this? How do you plan a contemporary service? I would say that you really need to be careful to include a broad spectrum of emotions. Not because emotions are the presence of God. It's actually the opposite. The broader the spectrum you can have, the less likely people will be to identify one or two emotions as either the presence of God itself or somehow necessary that you have to feel that way in church. And this is incredibly free. And I even had some of my friends in college tell me they noticed that as a Lutheran I could be faithful no matter how I was feeling. And they saw that as something that was desirable actually. And so I think we have a treasure in the hymnity and the broad spectrum of emotions that those hymns express. But we have even more of a treasure in our understanding of the means of grace where the decisive presence of God for us happens outside of us. It doesn't happen in our heart. *** 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. ***