Dogmatics - Lo, How the Professors and Bishops Have Fallen!

 

"The first and coarsest is that of St. Thomas (if indeed he be a saint). This was taken from the system of pagan science and art which was written by that great light of nature, Aristotle. Now they say that his philosophy is like a bright, shining plate, and the Word of Christ is like the sun. And as the sun shines upon the plate, causing it to gleam and glitter all the brighter, so the divine light shines upon the light of nature and illumines it. With this beautiful simile they have introduced pagan doctrines into the Christian church, which have been taught and cultivated by the great universities and in which teachers and preachers have been instructed. The devil has taught them to speak in this way. Thus the Word of God is trodden under foot, for when it is given full play, it subverts all these satanic doctrines." Epiphany 1 sermon, #16.

Dogma is often used as a term to refute someone's argument, but somehow  Dogmatics is a wonderful, large, impressive set of books, required reading - they claim. A few years later, they are retired reading, beautiful backdrops of 300 unread volumes hovering above and behind a pastor's head.

Luther's statement above - and in the previous post - is enough to warn people away from dogmatics. However, even today the ranking theologians are stuck and will not let themselves be unstuck (the last being another fad).

Here is a sample -

Thomas Aquinas - required reading for future popes and dogmaticians.

Calvin - boring, lifeless, often ridiculous, but somehow addicting to semi-Lutherans.

CFW Walther, BA, genuinely Calvin with a veneer of Luther.

Paul Tillich - The Courage To Be, mostly forgotten.

Karl Barth and his live-in mistress/assistant - Church Dogmatics; on sale for $1 a volume.

Franz Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, a clever sleight of hand, merging Justification by Faith with Objective Faithless Justification, promoting yet denying the efficacy of the Word of God.

Braaten-Jenson, Christian Dogmatics, an introduction to ELCA, a superb collection of ponderous drivel. 

These volumes are guaranteed to slowly turn someone into an atheist, step by step, though many deny it. Note that the Pieperites are perfectly happy to work with ELCA's Braaten-Jenson and Fuller Seminary's McGavran/Peter Wagner style theologians.

The only book they all loathe is the King James Version of the Bible. Now we begin to smell the pot-roast, as Luther once wrote.

ELCA Now Has 36 Women Bishops Out of 66 - A 55% Yield. What Hath Braaten-Jenson Wrought?

 

ELCA's first openly transgender bishop did not last long.

2023 – 36 of 66 ELCA Bishops Are Female (55%)

1. Wilma Kucharek (2002)
2. Elizabeth Eaton (2007)
3. Shelley Wickstrom (2012)
4. Ann Svennungsen (2012)
5. Tracie Bartholomew (2013)
6. Suzanne Darcy Dillahunt (2013)
7. Patricia Lull (2014)
8. Katherine Finnegan (2017)
9. Deborah Hutterer (2018)
10. Patricia Davenport (2018)
11. Idalia Negrón (2018)
12. Laurie Skow-Anderson (2018)
13. Sue Briner (2018)
14. Lorna Halaas (2019)
15. Laurie Larson Caesar (2019)
16. Shelley Bryan Wee (2019)
17. Regina Hassanally (2019)
18. Constanze Hagmaier (2019)
19. Laurie Jungling (2019)
20. Susan Candea (2019)
21. Leila Ortiz (2019)
22. Ginny Aebischer (2020 SC)
23. Amy Current (2020 SE IA)
24. Tessa Moon Leiseth (2020 E ND)
25. Amy Odgren (2020 NE MN)
26. Joy Mortensen-Wiebe (2020 SC WI)
27. Laura Barbins (2020 NE Ohio)
28. Anne Edison-Albright (2020 E Central WI)
29. Brenda Bos (2021, SW CA)
30. Paula Schmitt (2021, Allegheny)
31. Dee Pederson (2021, SW MN)
32. Staci Fidlar (2022, Northern IL)
33. Clair Burkat (2022, Interim Bishop in the Sierra Pacific Synod)
34. Meggan Manlove (2023, NW Intermountain)
35. Becca Midweek-Conlin (2023, Arkansas/Oklahoma)
36. Phyllis Milton (2023, Virginia)

Religious News Service - She Is Loose! 2018

Briner: (Southwestern Texas Synod) has some of the fastest-growing cities in the entire U.S. along the corridor of San Antonio to Austin and beyond. We have people of all ages moving in, but they’re not generally coming to church. So we have an incredible opportunity there, but a lot of it is thinking about how are we different. We’ve become a really settled people who have become very comfortable with the way we’ve always done things. So trying to figure out, how do we be open to the Spirit and be open to the Spirit’s work? Because I’m telling you what, the Spirit is up to something …

Bishops: Amen. Yes, she is.

Briner: … if we would just let her out.

Bishops: Let her out. Get out of her way.

Briner: Open the doors and let her out.

Bishops: She’s out! She is loose!

Briner: I see that in all sorts of little ways. As I sit around the table and listen to this, I think, Wow, God, you are up to something. We’re working with a lot with congregations on, how do we cooperate with one another — not to stay alive, because that’s no good, it really is, how do we cooperate together for the sake of mission, for the sake of the world that Jesus loves so that we can be in the communities working with each other?

 ELCiC in Canada has but one bishop

Who Was Least Impressed by Dogmatics? Follow Him Instead!

I cannot say enough bad things about the Braaten-Jenson Christian Dogmatics. Jenson has gone to his reward but Braaten is like aged milk. The LCA first bragged that this double-decker dogmatics was used at all their seminaries, then later claimed the BJCD was not authoritative or required. Be generous, readers - the ALC/LCA enhanced their deceptive powers by taking in former WELS professors Jungkuntz and Gehrke. Many of ELCA's bishops (DPs) were graduates of Seminex.

 I try not to laugh when reading Barth. I really do.

 Karl seems to have confused God with the theologian - Charlotte.

 "Nothink hoppened," said Karl.

Mistresses do not always age well. This is Charlotte and the great theologian Karl.

 Christina and I met Hunsinger and his first wife at Yale Divinity. His first wife worked at the medical library. Christina and I worked at Yale Medical, she at the Child Study Center, I at the xerox machine.

 Do they sell fortune cookies in Europe?

 What was the middle part again?

 Charlotte is next to Karl. Frau Barth is stage right. Karl's brother is glowering in the back on the left - he did not approve at all.

Charlotte's lifetime work came to a halt when she became terminally ill. 

Or - consider Charlotte Kirschbaum's Church Dogmatics. She fulfilled everyone's dreams long before they were exposed. Little Miss Cutie not only fused her Marxism with Karl Barth's, but they also lived together - privately at first, each summer - then boldly in the dear professor's home packed with his children and wife. Karl and Charlotte toured America, explicitly sharing the same room and bed at each host's home. But decades later, everyone was "shocked, shocked" to hear about the scandal. The ELDONUTs would say, "Nothing happened!" 

Charlotte let Karl write the outline to their Church Dogmatics. She did the research and writing for the "small print" - as Barthians like to say, a little breathlessly and in wonderment and awe.

 The LCMS triumvirate - Calvin, Rambach, and Bishop Stephan STD.

The LCMS finally put together their collection of pronouncements in another double-decker dogmatics book. I am not going to say no one bought it or read it. I bought it, but found it unreadable. Braaten-Jenson made their disaster an interesting read, as if bank robbers were revealed as the top executives at JP Morgan Chase. The Missouri guys never tire of praising themselves while looking over their shoulders to see if the ELCA sisterhood approves.
 

Apostasy Rules in the Mainline Sects

Braaten the Pietist

Plus Jenson the Pietist

Equals Braaten-Jenson, the new version
of Knapp's rationalistic Pietism - only worse.

 OJ/SJ sounds familiar to the Lutherans,
even though this came from a Calvinist translator of Knapp.

Encomium for an Evangelical Catholic | Carl E. Braaten | First Things:

Robert Jenson was my closest friend and collaborator for sixty years. We first met when we were both students at Luther Seminary in St. Paul in the early 1950s, though we did not become friends until we were both graduate students at Heidelberg University in 1957. We met virtually every week during that one year, with our spouses, Blanche and LaVonne, eating and drinking together, while coming to terms with the great theological minds and issues of that era: Bultmann’s demythologizing, Barth’s dogmatics, Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison, Tillich’s systematics, Ebeling’s hermeneutics, Rahner’s neo-Thomism, the Lundensian theology of Aulén and Nygren, and the revival of confessional Lutheran theology undertaken by Peter Brunner and Edmund Schlink at Heidelberg University. That year we also met Wolfhart Pannenberg, who at that time was head of a circle conceiving a new theology of “revelation as history,” beyond Barth and Bultmann.

Karl Barth moved his hawt assistant, Charlotte Kirchbaum,into his home. She is standing next to him.
Fuller Seminary's main theologian is Karl Barth.
Karl and Charlotte lived together in a cabin each summer,
where they wrote "his" Dogmatics together.

The paragraph above is first-hand evidence of the rationalistic training enjoyed by two ELCA theologians. Let us now pause for LCMS-WELS-ELS gurus to sigh and moan about how liberal ELCA is.

Now - deep cleansing breath.

WELS and Missouri are just the same, because they groove on Fuller Seminary nonsense, founded upon Karl Barth and Charlotte Kirschbaum's Dogmatics. Barth the Marxist plagiarist and adulterer became the theologian for Fuller, and Fuller became the graduate school for the LCMS-WELS-ELS. To make it clearer, the G. Forde, part of the Bratten-Jenson Dogmatics, is currently a big deal in the LCMS.

Braaten cannot get over ELCA spurning him after all the great things he did for God and his sect. Listing the marvelous theologians who trained him and Jenson is the best indictment one could write for both of them - and for ELCA, LCMS, WELS, and the ELS. Excluding Sasse, the modern theologians are all rationalists who play with words while rejecting their meaning.

2 Thessalonains 2 8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming:9 Even him, whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders,10 And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved.11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:12 That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

They are all cut from the same piece of cloth and headed downhill fast. They will gladly make a buck from Luther's 500th, but they can hardly mention Luther, so intoxicated they are with the rationalists of this era.

All the theologians listed follow the Knapp model, using the words of faith without having faith in Christ. They despise the fisherman's voice of the Holy Spirit, so they concoct their own elegant philosophies, which have the shelf life of yogurt. Their loss of influence appalls them, but that is the result of their own work  -which is not so great, good, or readable.

1 Timothy 4 Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils;2 Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron;
2 Timothy 4 I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom;2 Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine.3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

A Giant among Apostate Frauds - Because God Is: A Tribute to Robert W. Jenson (1930-2017) | Christianity Today, Billy Graham's Magazine Has Slipped into the Mire

Robert Jenson - a giant fraud among apostates.

Braaten and Jenson were both Pietists
who taught UOJ Universalism. A co-inky-dink?

Because God Is: A Tribute to Robert W. Jenson (1930-2017) | Christianity Today:

 Braaten considers himself "confessional," and an
Evangelical Catholic, whatever that is.

UOJ came from Pietism, as Stephan and Walther prove,
and the terms that delighted Walther - from a Calvinist's explanation.

"Rubbing shoulders with giants
Jens lived an active and productive life. A seminary and college professor over a period of nearly 50 years, he first taught at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, before moving to Oxford University, Gettysburg Seminary, and St. Olaf College. He then spent seven years as the director of the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton, New Jersey, before retiring in 2007.

He wrote and edited several dozen books, including a much-praised two-volume Systematic Theology, and over 100 articles and chapters. He was a pioneer in the ecumenical movement; he helped to spearhead the initial Episcopal-Lutheran dialogue, served the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue for over ten years, and, with his close friend Carl Braaten, founded The Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology and edited the Center’s influential ecumenical journal, Pro Ecclesia."



'via Blog this'

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GJ - On one website, such articles are accompanied by such warnings as "hurl alert" and "projectile vomiting alert." But that is hardly enough here. Braaten and Jenson gathered their friends, like Forde, to produce their two-volume Dogmatics. The purpose was to show ELCA that one could still write about God. But the books denied every article of faith, from the divinity of Christ to His Virgin Birth, to His atoning death and resurrection. Yes, they denied the Trinity too. What was left? The less the Enthusiasts believe, the more they write. See the WELS Justification files for this.

• More hooie from the Christian Century.

• And from Braaten Hisself.

Here is an interesting note from someone:

What is the purpose of your blog? I am intrigued at the mixture of Christian and nonChristian content, stories and statements. Are you a Christian? Are you a Lutheran? Do you hate Christians? Do you hate Lutherans? I really want to understand what the mission is. Thanks!

Richard

Gerhard Forde was part of this project, and the LCMS is hotter than Georgia asphalt for Forde - maybe because he is German.

ELCA differs a bit in elevating them to earthly status.