http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4731298128368779466#editor/target=post;postID=2465082660885114152
Scott Yakimow
- ALPB Contribution Leader
- Posts: 631
Good grief! What foolishness. let's hear some other people on this forum speak of Dr Braaten and Dr Jenson. or do we let foolishness have the last word?
Calm yourself. Or if you wish, Google "Braaten" "Jenson" "apostasy". You will find entries going back to 2007 for a blog called ichabod-something or other, written by someone named Gregory Jackson, who may be the same as GregoryLJackson. Otherwise, you won't find those three words together except in an entry for a book Braaten and Jenson wrote that mentions apostasy. In other words, Pr. Jackson has a long-running single-handed animosity toward those two theologians. He has expressed himself long, vigorously, and frequently, but may not have made many converts. Let him alone.
Peace,
Michael
Amen.
While there was some problematic elements in Braaten & Jenson's earlier work, it did not rise to the level of "apostasy". Both of their later work, however, is stellar on most fronts, with Jenson being one of the premier theologians of late 20th century and early 21st century Lutheranism. His "Systematic Theology" (published in the late '90s) is well worth the study.
Associate Professor of Theology
Concordia University, Portland
Concordia University, Portland
GJ - First of all, the ELCA journalist Charles Austin begged his chat-friends to defend Braaten and Jenson.
Michael is a Roman Catholic priest, happy to add some irrelevant remarks in the style of LutherQuest/ALPB.
Yakimow startled me by flat-lining on the topic. I looked up his bio and his school to avoid making a mistake. He is an LCMS professor of theology, having studied at Valpo and Luther Seminary. He has not completed his PhD at Virginia, listing his progress as ABD, which is not a degree. Grad students use it as shorthand for "all but the dissertation." That is where many fail to finish.
I remember when the Braaten/Jenson dogmatics came out. People were so shocked in the Lutheran Church in America that their own seminaries denied it was a textbook. Of course, it was. Official denials are almost always confirmations.
Adding to the shock - one LCA veteran told a group of clergy that Braaten/Jenson's two-volume work was a conservative effort to ward off attempts by current faculty (1980s) to dismiss all efforts at theology.
Braaten/Jenson simply mocked the atonement and rejected every single article of faith. One famous quotation was something like this - "Luther believed in those things, but we do not."
Another one - "The Holy Trinity is nothing more than God the Father, the man Jesus, and the spirit of the believing community." That is almost verbatim from memory.
I ordered the volumes so I could read them and take notes, sending them back with a demand for a refund and a blistering note of no-thanks. The smart-alack response from Fortress Presss, "This is a best-seller."
I was leaving the LCA, so that episode became a building block for Liberalism: Its Cause and Cure. I have watched the career of Braaten ever since. After working his entire life to establish post-Christian theology, he revolted against the natural consequences of his leadership and earned his spurs as a born-again ELCA critic.
Not content to ruin the LCA and ELCA, he appeared at the LCMS-NALC conventicle in Iowa to lay down another smokescreen of Butmannian neo-paganism in the guise of - you guessed it - confessional Lutheranism.
Needless to say, the first openly gay (an I emphasize first openly gay) bishop of ELCA is the former Professor of Confessional Lutheranism at Berkeley.
Every MDiv in ELCA and LCMS is a confessional Lutheran. WELS is confessional, according to apostate Mark Schroeder, and orthodox Lutheran as well. Let us take that in the spirit intended - an official denial of the Mark/Avoid Jeske takeover of the sect.
Why does my simple description of known apostates set off the ankle-biters of ALPB?
Unbelief.
There is not simply a vast gulf between believers and the mainline leaders of Lutherdom. There is an active war, which only one side is waging. The former-believers (apostates) have fallen away from trust in the divinity of Christ, the efficacy of the Word, and justification by faith. Instead, they comfort themselves with universal forgiveness and salvation without faith. No matter where they are nestled, they unite on the basis of a common unbelief.
The apostates jump to the defense of anyone who is accurately labeled. This group has a set of verbal weapons they use to obscure the real issues. They call up all their experts among those who agree with them, their friends, their former professors, and the book reviews they have glanced at.
Apostates are always far more active and antagonistic than those who have never believed anything. Apostates have a special loathing for faith in Christ as the divine Savior, for the Word of God as the unique revelation of God through the Holy Spirit. Therefore they quibble about every term and use their superficial reading as a cover for their malignant hatred of the truth.
Apostates have a special standing in this world. Satan rewards them by giving them the most influential positions, not in spite of their short-comings, but especially because of them. Their insecurities make them more frantic to keep their influence, their un-earned salaries, and their perks. However, God punishes them by keeping them in a constant state of spiritual pain and distress. They are the mirror opposite of Romans 5:1-2. They have no inward peace, the only kind that matters, because their service to their Father Below constantly rebels against "peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand."
So here we have on the ALPB chat-board:
- an ELCA journalist,
- a Roman Catholic priest,
- a liberal LCMS professor,
- and a SpenerQuester (Carl Vehse)
piling on poor me because I questioned the divine inspiration of the Great Walther.
Yes, the unifying factor is justification by faith. They cling to one another because they reject the Chief Article, just as Walther did.
