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Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

June 17, 2022

Please Don’t Tell Me Suffering is Good.

Please Don’t Tell Me I Should Love the Cross.

Please Don’t Tell Me I Should Love Jesus.

How Martin Luther’s “Unpreached God and Preached God “ Works

“I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Exodus 33). 

This is two-sided. 

One the one hand it kills you because it takes us out of the game of salvation, takes away our agency. It is our death.

On the other hand it resurrects us because the mercy/compassion is spoken to us, the elected ones are us. The agency is God’s and it is directed and delivered to us. It is our life.

This is what is meant by Luther’s coming to see the distinction between God unpreached and God preached. 

If the word of mercy is not directly spoken to us, proclamation, this mercy remains a concept, an idea, a theory, and a speculation that calls out our spiritual calisthenics to figure out, to see, or to silence it’s accusation. In other words, it’s unpreached, not directly spoken and only accuses no matter how hard we try to have it not accuse, not matter how hard we try to make the bad good, not matter how hard we try to love the suffering that is happening, no matter how hard we try to love the cross of Jesus that we are told represents the love of God. 

But if and when the mercy is spoken directly to us, all speculation ends. The killing of the law ends because the law ends. There is election, a choosing, not on the basis or within the system of law, but outside the law, outlaw, and rather on the basis of gospel, on the basis of a promise alone. Fortunately, amazingly, as when the beloved one receives the words “I love you” from the loved one (and/or the beloved receives the word “I choose to marry you” from the loved), the promise is actually given! The question is, of course, will we take it and run with it or will be refuse it and run away from it. 

Steven Paulson writes about Exodus 33 (in Luther’s Outlaw God, Vol. 2): “Moses’ glory is not seeing the glory of God’s eternal law behind its accusation, but is receiving Christ’s promise, ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy,’ that kills the killing law. The glory of God is the sermon preached by Christ to his chosen sinners, like Moses in the cleft of the rock. Moses is to us always the revealer of sin, and Christ is the forgiver of sin. With this distinction, Luther was free of mysticism, and free from attempting to love the cross.”

Why Preachers

The reason preachers are necessary is not because all people are not elected, chosen, given mercy/compassion, by God, but because they will not know it, their speculation will not end, until it is directly given and spoken to them.

We are so attached to the law, living within the system of reward and punishment, that allows our personal agency and ability to thrive, that the gift offends us. The mercy that silences our speculation and wonderings, kills our ability to figure out why and how suffering is not a bad thing but is rather a good thing, our reasoning that gets us to the point of seeing suffering as good, as redemptive, as positive is not just off-putting, it is offensive and we will not have it. 

Most Christians today are not Christians at all but rather Pagans using Jesus as the culturally accepted way to fend off the accusatory law. Jesus is their law giver and law receiver. But I don’t say this in some high-minded manner, as if I am not a Pagan myself. I am, to the core. Which is why I need a Preacher to kill me and then raise me from that dead with Jesus who uses me instead of vice-versa. Christians who are Pagans and Non-Christians who are Pagans are cut from the same cloth, they do and live the very same thing: try every which way to supersede their own humanity and mortality. 

The Offense of the Cross

Jesus as offensive. "Off fend."

Persons as fend-offish. "Fend off."

Virtual Christians use Jesus to fend off their own demise and love the cross because it allows them to live on. Actual Christians see and know the offense of Jesus, the offense of the cross and hate the cross because it kills them.

Persons of the Cross and Persons of Glory (Martin Luther: Theologians of the Cross and Theologians of Glory)

The moment you try to tell me the bad is not bad, but is actually good, is the moment you have stepped away from proclamation into speculation. You are asking me to see through things instead of at things. 

Luther in the Heidelberg Disputation (1518): a person of glory calls the bad good; a person (theologian) of glory calls the good bad (he called them “theologians” not because the persons he was referring to were professional academics in the science of theology but because every person does theology, every person “studies” God, every person does what one needs to do to examine, if not also fend off, the divine. Every person is a theologian).  Understood here is that what Luther calls “bad” are the ways we protect ourselves from our own mortality. A person of glory calls these ways good.  Understood here is that what Luther calls “good” is how we accept the total suffering and death of self. A person of glory calls these ways bad. Luther writes smartly: “a theologian of the cross says what a thing is.” Our casual talk today exclaims, “what it is!...what it is!,” which is short for “it is what it is!” which is meant to describe a difficult situation that cannot be changed and therefore must be accepted. “Deal with it!”  “What it is” is not only accurate when it comes to describing so many circumstances but also when it comes to describing God.