From Luther - The First Holy Trinity Sunday
God will make no one such a king who is not God, for he will not give the reins out of his hands; he alone will be the Lord over heaven and earth, death, hell, the devil and all creatures. If he, then, makes Christ Lord of all that is created, Christ must truly be God.
8. We can. therefore, have no surer foundation for our belief in the divinity of Christ than that we enwrap and enclose our hearts in the declarations of the Scriptures. The Scriptures gradually and beautifully lead us to Christ; first revealing him to us as a man, then as the lord of all creatures. and finally as God. Thus we are successfully led to the true knowledge of God. But the philosophers and the wise men of this world would begin at the top and so they have become fools. We must begin at the bottom and gradually advance in knowledge, so that the words of Proverbs 25:27 may not apply to us: “It is not good to eat much honey; so for men to search out their own glory is grievous.”
I am glad that Carl Braaten - born 1929 - has lived so long that he can see the wreckage of the Lutheran Church that he worked so hard to accomplish. Every era has a dominant theme backed by a philosophy, whether acknowledged or not. Braaten's philosophy is one where anything divine is rejected and in need of a filler for the void. He earned a PhD at Harvard and studied under the lecherous gaze of Paul Tillich, whose own wife ratted him out in her book about Tillich.
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| Tillich's wife wrote about his sleazy behavior after he died. |
Imagine if you will, a two-volume work on Christian Dogmatics, not just any work, but the Braaten-Jenson cooperative. You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Braaten-Jenson! [The Twilight Zone]
The Braaten-Jenson content is too precious to explain to ordinary people:
- The Trinity is denied.
- The Virgin Birth of Christ is rejected.
- Miracles did not happen.
- The Atonement has no meaning.
- The Resurrection is imaginary.
They needed a group of men to replace the articles of faith with their own dull, worn out, 19th century theology - BOMFOG. The German rationalists had already reduced the Christian Faith to the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God. New England wits extended that summary - "And the neighborhood of Boston." Earlier, Unitarianism had been confined to New England, but it gradually became the philosophy of America.
The label Banned in Boston used to make me think Beantown was a bigoted city, because books were always banned there and nowhere else. Finally I realized that Boston was so loose that anything could be published there.
Likewise, the traditional Christian Faith was taken for granted across America, but the Great Depression gave many church leaders a chance to blame the Christian Church, not the Federal Reserve Bank, for the economic debacle.
Based on endless reading about the era from the 19th century to Great Depression, I consider the 1930s the transition to German rationalism. That was slow at first but gradually took over the academic leaders and subsequently their students. Someone could say, "I read Tillich!" instead of "Jesus was only a man." A cool Karl Barth fan would say, "Have you read II, 2?" - the mark of the Barthian Church Dogmatics mostly written by his live-in mistress.
One of my professors was the President of the Karl Barth Society and told us about Barth's alleged use of his mistress, now openly acknowledged but hushed up. My dissertation advisor studied under Barth to earn his doctorate. Another advisor emphasized Barth in his work.
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| Karl Barth paid his lovely young assistant, Charlotte Kirschbaum, almost nothing to assist their work with editing and research. Karl moved her into his house, against the objections of his wife. |
The head of my program was enamored by Tillich's work - the Karl Barth Society professor said in class - "Lutherans do not understand Tillich." I responded with "Lutherans do not understand a Lutheran?" I merely pointed out what Tillich's own colleague said - the Union Seminary colleagues were appalled by his paganism.
The unspoken atheism of that era allowed the highly educated church professors - much like Luther's generation - to blabber about their own philosophies without being disturbed by the revelation of the Scriptures.
Fuller Seminary -
The Last Frontier of Atheism for Dullards
Fuller Seminary latched onto the pro-abortion Disciples of Christ professor Donald McGavran, a sociologist with a PhD from Columbia University. He attracted others who joined his incredibly stupid crusade, and that became the New Religion, good for everyone and harmless as well. The only effect Fuller has had is negative. To make their methods neutral, they divorced any suggestion of the Christian Faith from marketing.
Some escape the dreariness of Church Growth for the Church of Rome, where the Scriptures are dodged once again in favor of method. They glory in their incense, their prissy demands of costumes, their choreography of entertainment without Christ Himself.
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