Meaning of Protestant Theology

Phillip Cary

Description

This book offers a creative and illuminating discussion of Protestant theology. Veteran teacher Phillip Cary explains how Luther's theology arose from the Christian tradition, particularly from the spirituality of Augustine. Luther departed from the Augustinian tradition and inaugurated distinctively Protestant theology when he identified the gospel that gives us Christ as its key concept. More than any other theologian, Luther succeeds in carrying out the Protestant intention of putting faith in the gospel of Christ alone. Cary also explores the consequences of Luther's teachings as they unfold in the history of Protestantism.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 18 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493416677
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2019 by Phillip Cary
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-1667-7
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2016.
Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Note that a number of Scripture quotations are from the English translation of Luther’s works in LW , and others are the author’s translations from Augustine’s or Luther’s Latin or German quotations of the Bible.
Dedication
In gratitude for the students and faculty of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University, where I have had so much to learn
Contents
Cover i
Half Title Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Dedication v
Abbreviations ix
A Note on Citations xi
Introduction: Why Protestantism? 1
Part 1: Spirituality and the Being of God 15
1. Philosophical Spirituality 17
2. Divine Carnality 37
3. Christ the Mediator in Augustine 59
4. The Augustinian Journey and Its Anxieties 83
Part 2: The Gospel and the Power of God 101
5. Young Luther: Justification as Penitential Process 103
6. Young Luther: Justification without Gospel 127
7. Luther the Reformer: Gospel as Sacramental Promise 145
8. Luther the Reformer: Gospel as Story That Gives Us Christ 175
Part 3: Christian Teaching and the Knowledge of God 205
9. Scripture: Demanding the Wrong Kind of Certainty 207
10. Salvation: Faith in Christ’s Promise Alone 239
11. Sacrament: Turning Outward to Divine Flesh 269
12. Trinity: God Giving Himself in Person 303
Conclusion: Why Luther’s Gospel? 339
Appendix 1: Luther’s Devils 345
Appendix 2: Gospel as Sacrament: Luther’s Sermon on Christmas Day 1519 349
Bibliography 355
Index 365
Back Cover 372
Abbreviations CR Corpus R eformatorum . Edited by K. G. Bretschneider et al. Halle, 1834–. KJV King James Version of the Bible, originally 1611. LW Luther’s Works , standard American edition. Jaroslav Pelikan, general editor. St. Louis: Concordia (vols. 1–30); Philadelphia: Fortress (vols. 31–55), 1955–76. PG Patrolog ia Graeca . Edited by J.-P. Migne. 162 vols. Paris, 1857–66. PL Patrolog ia Latina . Edited by J.-P. Migne. 217 vols. Paris, 1844–55. ST Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 5 vols. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981. WA Weimarer Ausgabe = Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Werke . Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883–1993.
A Note on Citations
I have done my best to make it possible for readers to locate the passages I cite from ancient, medieval, and Reformation texts, even when they use a different edition than I do. This makes for some abstruse citations at times, which I must explain.
I cite ancient writers either by standard pagination (noted in the margins of most editions of Plato and Aristotle, for example) or by book, chapter, and paragraph (as in “Augustine, Confessions 7:10.16,” which is book 7, chapter 10, paragraph 16). Whenever possible, I cite medieval and even modern writers the same way (for example, “Locke, Essay , 4:16.13”), and sometimes to avoid ambiguity I spell it out (for example, “Anselm, Proslogion , chap. 1”). Citations with only two numbers refer to book and chapter, except for Augustine, where they usually refer to chapter and paragraph in texts that consist of only one book (for example, “Augustine, Teacher 11.38,” refers to chapter and paragraph, respectively). The exception to the exception is Augustine’s City of God , which has only book and chapter numbers. It is useful also to note that some English translations of Augustine indicate only chapter or paragraph numbers, not both.
Letters, sermons, and orations, when they belong to a standard numbered collection, are cited in a similar manner. For example, “Augustine, Letter 147:2.7” refers to the 147th letter in the standard collection of Augustine’s letters, second chapter, seventh paragraph. “Augustine, Sermon 52:2” refers to the fifty-second sermon in the standard collection of his sermons (a different set of sermons from his sermon series on John or the Psalms), the second paragraph. (Augustine’s sermons, unlike his letters, don’t have chapters.) Luther’s sermons, on the other hand, are often cited by date or by their place in a collected edition, such as WA or Lenker (see below).
Like most scholars working on Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, or Luther, I use standard editions and anthologies that contain a multitude of writings between one set of covers. As a reader, however, I always want to know which particular work is being cited, not just which volume of a multivolume set it can be found in. Hence in the footnotes I have always given the name of the work to which I am referring or from which I am quoting. For works of Luther, whose development as a thinker I am tracing, I will often give the date when the work was originally published. For some works, such as the Galatians commentaries, the date has to be given every time, because the 1535 Galatians Commentary is an entirely different work from the 1519 Galatians Commentary.
Readers should be warned that the titles of Augustine’s treatises are rendered differently by different translators, which can easily cause confusion. I have used the titles indicated in the bibliography, but I have often translated the text directly from the Latin available at http://www.augustinus.it/latino, which gives the Patrologia Latina edition of Augustine’s complete works ( Opera Omnia ).
For Luther, I use the standard American edition, Luther’s Works (abbreviated LW ), as well as the collection of Luther’s church postil sermons edited by Lenker (which are by no means all of Luther’s sermons). Often I have translated directly from Luther’s Latin or German when a closer or more literal translation makes a point clearer, or when LW simply needs to be corrected. When I make my own translations of Luther, I refer first to the standard critical edition of Luther’s works in the original languages, the Weimar Edition or Weimarer Ausgabe (abbreviated WA ), and then indicate in parentheses the corresponding passage in LW or Lenker’s edition of the sermons, if there is one, like so: “(= LW 34:170)” or “(= Luther, Sermons 1:190).” Not all of Luther’s works have been translated into English, however, so some references in WA have no corresponding reference in an English edition. Also, I sometimes use the LW translation but insert key phrases in the original language in brackets, like so: “in hope [ in spe ].” In that case I cite LW first and then indicate the corresponding place in WA , like so: “(= WA 56:269).” Similarly, when I give the French or Latin for Calvin, I refer to the editions of his works given in the Corpus Reformatorum series (abbreviated CR ), like so: “(= CR 33:438).”
All italics in quotations are mine, added occasionally for emphasis but more often just to highlight the key phrases on which my interpretation turns.
Introduction
Why Protestantism?
I s there a reason to be Protestant? For many people I know, this has become an urgent and life-changing question, as they consider that the answer might be “No.” It is a question that often arises for Protestants having their first robust encounter with the Great Tradition of the church, its admirable Christians, its profound writers, its beautiful liturgies. They discover that their own particular, sometimes narrow Protestant upbringing is missing the riches they find in more ancient ways of being a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Today’s ecumenical setting, in which members of the various churches and traditions have come to understand each other in a far more friendly way than before, makes the question all the more urgent. Apart from strenuous efforts to remain ignorant, no Protestant body today can plausibly claim to be the one true church or the only community that possesses the way to salvation. A Protestant learning the Great Tradition today soon realizes that not only other types of Protestants but Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox can truly be Christians—that they in fact include some of the most wonderful Christians in history, people from whom it would be foolish not to learn something about the way of Christ. Meanwhile, an older kind of urgency has begun to fade out of people’s lives. For many reasons—even some good ones—Christians today are much less anxious about their own individual salvation or damnation than people in the sixteenth century, when Protestantism first arose. So if you don’t have to be Protestant to be saved or to be a true Christian, why be Protestant?
Another level of urgency stems from dismay at Protestant theology and practice having fallen on hard times, with the drift toward a post-Christian future in some sectors of mainline Protestantism and the anxious narcissism of much contemporary evangelicalism. 1 I have in mind the evangelicals who are taught in church to answer the question, What is your faith about? by making it fundamentally about themselves: it’s about “the experience of a transformed heart” or “having a relationship with God” or “God working in my life.” God is part of the story, but it’s my story and my job is to make God to fit in it. This kind of teaching is enough to drive many Protestants to Catholicism or Orthodoxy,