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Tags: None. Issue: April 18 , Vol. More From: Roger Lundin. This article is from the April 18 issue. Log in. April 18 More from this Issue. The largest Baptist and Methodist schools are among the first to challenge the requirements for employees as unauthorized and unconstitutional. Cover Story. Americans are rapidly giving up on church.
Our minds and bodies will pay the price. It was one thing after another, after another, after another…. Helmut Thielicke Is Dead at SHARE tweet email print. LOG IN. Lutheran Quarterly. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by:. A Little Exercise for Young Theologians. If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution or have your own login and password to Project MUSE.
Additional Information. The Law serves to relate the individual spheres and stages of existence to the fact of justification…it is a constant reminder of the real theme of our justified existence. In the in-between life of the overlapping aeons we are set free to love as we have been loved while yet the Law confronts us with the realities of our own frailty and the terrible ambiguities of ethical choice in a broken world.
The Law of God forces us to keep in view our worldliness, the res form of our existence. It compels us to realize that so long as we are here below, we are implicated in innumerable, suprapersonal webs of guilt, that we live in the half-light of the orders of this world, that we are actors in a thousand plays which we individually have not staged, which we might wish would never be enacted, but in which we have to appear and play our parts.
By recasting the two realms as two intersecting aeons, Thielicke obviates the possibility that the two realms may be seen to exist as separate autonomous spheres, a development not really true to Luther that overtook the church under Hitler. In this sphere the situation of the intersection of the old and the new challenges the Christian conscience with thorny public policy issues, questions of justifiable resistance to authority, and the justification of war.
Love operating in the emergency orders of this world may be forced to adopt non-peaceful means in the cause of peace and justice. Borderline experiences are voices of the Law that return us continually to the Gospel for the strength and assurance in the Spirit to carry on in the face of radical uncertainty. He wants us to know that we cannot approach such matters by simply asserting principles.
We must come to the principles by entering into real life cases, cases involving marital problems, divorce and remarriage, the termination of a pregnancy, family discord, and homosexuality. All these can present borderline situations fraught with painful human dilemmas.
Sometimes the choices they present are not simply uncertain but also complex. He is concerned with how we minister compassionately and evangelically to persons who are homosexual. He is critical of the ethicists of German-speaking Protestantism who were his contemporaries for ignoring the subject. Worse yet, he complains, when it is mentioned, it is simply condemned by doctrinaire use of orders theology or fundamentalistic use of biblical quotations, often accompanied by misinformation regarding the phenomenon of homosexuality.
He takes Karl Barth to task for this kind of perfunctory rejection of persons who are homosexual. For this reason homosexuality is inherently disordered. However, this is a theological judgment rather than an ethical one. Take the business man, for example.
In private life it is not too hard to perceive what I am to do in loving my neighbor when that neighbor is my spouse or my personal acquaintance.
But what about the neighbor who is my business competitor? Quite obviously the autonomy Eigengesetzlichkeit of business life has to be taken into account here.
I will not be in business tomorrow if I sacrifice my all for my competitor today. So just what it would mean to be a loving business competitor will not be determined easily. It is in the multi-faceted realm of the whole of reality occupational, political, familial, social, economic life where most people experience their real problems of conscience, their conflicts and personal difficulties.
Theological ethics asks about the relation of these structures to God, and therewith to man as the creature of God. At least some strands of Reformation theology see these structures as permanent, given from the very first day of the creation. It also illuminated Babylonian man participating in shaping the structures of his own given world.
I seek to do this in the realm of ethics. What are the implications of justification by grace alone, freedom from the dominion of the Law, and the polarity of sin and grace for the existence of social intercourse, economic competition, labor-management relations, etc.?
If the blood is not pumped out to these areas, Christians are in danger of succumbing to schizophrenia — in private life a believer living, as it were, supernaturally in a kind of superworld, but as a man of the world following the laws of the world.
And not only Christians, but other thoughtful and reflective men as well. It is my intention to address this non-Christian audience by showing that the Christian message is not discussing issues in some other world, but in the real world in which the man of our age lives out his life.
The word of God and faith as existence-in-the-truth speaks of the issues that are common to every man — life and death, marriage and the state, society and economics. Yet that revelation is about the life of man in the world, in the web of the Eigengesetzlichkeiten, in the specific shape of his post-Cartesian self-consciousness.
Our preaching is to interpret the world of man, and therewith lay bare the theme which is of concern both to Christians and to secular men. Only thus can our message acquire a new worldliness. Only thus can there be a new incarnation of the Word which seeks out man in his earthly relationships. Christian faith is always the faith of living men, men who stand in the reality of this world and are subject to its constant pressures.
It may also be that several mandates individually contradict one another, so that the believer is involved in a conflict of values.
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