Every theology has problems

While in Wittenberg, I’ve been to just about everything. Lutherhaus, Melanchthonhaus, Cranakhaus (und Hof), the Panorama, the Luthergarten (all 3 sites, and I found the Allegheny Synod tree!

Plus the Schlosskirche, the Stadtkirche, and the Corpus Christie chapel next to the Stadtkirche.  I’m sure I am missing something, but I did a lot of Luther stuff here. 

One of the most pervasive things that I take back home with me, other than the fact that it is just really good to pray in community; thank you so much sisters of the Christusbruderschaft, is the incompleteness of humankind.  At first I experience that, in the Lutheran context as the idea of complete depravity; that we are all, at base sinners.  Note that in the modern time that is paired with the gift of grace, that we are also all saints, and as important as this concept is, it is not at the forefront when searching out Luther in Wittenberg.   

Luther, of course, had his own limits.  He did not take the reformation as far as others wanted to, others who had good theological ideas and ground, but who were also imperfect.   He famously, toward the end of his life, published notable anti-Semitic rhetoric, rhetoric exemplified by a brass relief on the side of the Schlosskirche (now, thankfully having been removed) of a Christian knight on a horse prevailing over a Jewish knight on a pig.   This was a highly offensive image to Jews, and Luther’s writings on this subject helped fuel Naziism.   Today there is a memorial on this site,whose message is that this kind of hate will bubble up where you let it stand.  An alas, my photos of this are on my camera, not on my phone. 

But this has me thinking about the limits of all theology.  As someone who serves both reformed (UCC) and evangelical (ELCA) congregations, I have the benefit of being able to test, and to choose what theologies I share with my community, which I find compelling, and which I find flawed.    I can even exten this, in an extremely limited way, to the biblical record (Binding of Isaac, anyone?   Conquest of Canaan?). 

But I am left with the certainty that somewhere in what i am teaching, I am wrong.   Because I am not God.   As everyone is.   Every time I preach I pray for Christ’s words, not mine, to be at play in the hearts and minds of my people.  This is why.  Because it is not all about sin, or all about grace, or all about anything, except Jesus. And not Jesus as presented to us in the Bible, which is colored by those whose wrote it, but the Jesus who is indeed living today.   

With God’s grace, I pray that in community we can come closer to Jesus than we could individually.   This might need to become a sermon.