I Can Do No Other

The Church's New Here We Stand Moment

Anna M. Madsen

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781506427379
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506438238
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Author Anna M. Madsen's book is a fresh and challenging look at the legacy of Martin Luther and the new reformation that is calling people of faith to action today.

This book is born out of the conviction that at least two gods are currently competing for our collective trust: nationalism (and its many sub-manifestations) and quietism. Both make a case for and a claim on our allegiance, each by way of different motivations of self and institutional protection. Madsen looks at today's modern context and asks: Where will the church stand in a day that is marked by globalization, polarization, racism, bigotry, and debates about justice for humanity and for the earth itself. While the Reformation church was built on the foundation of justification by grace, Madsen calls people of faith to a new reformation that will focus on standing for justice in the world. Madsen delves into who Jesus was, and how our claim that he died and was raised establishes our faith and impacts the way we live it out. She pays attention to Luther's theology and juxtaposes it with our present context. She explores recent examples of Nazi resistance, liberation theology, black and womanist theology, and feminist theology, each of which come at social justice in their unique ways, with a common conviction that justice work is central to the Christian life. She speaks of how our faith grounding and our faith history weave together and entwine themselves into our present moment, offering both warnings and encouragement. And last, a case is made that justice, anchored in justification, is our new Reformation moment, one not inconsistent with Luther's theology, but weighted differently to address the different weighty concerns of our day. A study guide is included to encourage group conversation and action.

4

Here They Stood

Luther’s theological well is wide and deep. For over five hundred years, Lutherans and Christians across the spectrum have dipped heavily into it, finding there God and grace. By no means is it time to put a lid on that well, for the water is still sweet and fresh and abundant. However, it is time to haul that water to the context of today’s global, interdependent world, where people will be satisfied by it for new and different reasons.

For five centuries, we have lifted Luther’s words and convictions from his time into the contemporary one, doing so out of grand gratitude and respect for him and his fundamental reframing of grace and gospel. His rediscovery of sola gratia has provided relief and hope to countless faithful—and ­unfaithful!—people. However, understated and overlooked elements of his theology, along with assumptions about it, have pointedly missed evangelical opportunities and have even done great harm. We are seeing some of the effects of that reality today.

Sometimes we simply forget that circumstances were different back in Luther’s day. We easily forget, for example, that although Luther and his immediate world were well aware of people beyond their immediate community (they were fighting with Rome, after all, and were becoming increasingly aware of the threat of the Ottoman Empire), they were only beginning to learn how much more expansive the world was than their imaginations had before considered. Recall that Luther was a young boy when Columbus made his world-changing venture across the sea—one, of course, that less “discovered” a new land than led to the decimation of numerous cultures and peoples.

We easily forget that although Luther and his immediate world trusted in natural law as a natural assumption, they had no concept of the inherent inequity and power roles it fosters.

We easily forget that Luther and his immediate world knew of a political system that was hierarchical and determined by birth. It wasn’t until more than two hundred years after his death that the construct of democracy as we are familiar with it in the United States was introduced.

We easily forget that Luther and his immediate world knew of gender roles. These roles had even begun to be slightly stretched (in part due to Luther himself, even if moderately by our standards). However, movements called “women’s rights,” “women’s right to choose,” and the possibility of women’s ordination were not at all on the collective radar.

We easily forget that Luther and his world knew of non-Christians and interacted with those who professed faith differently—Judaism and Islam, in particular. But they knew very little of widespread cultural atheism, agnosticism, or the Nones (those with no religious affiliation).

We must not forget, for example, that Luther and his immediate world knew positively nothing of Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, LGBTQ+ rights, postmodernism, feminism, womanism, Dalit theology, liberation theology, the labor movement, fears of global warming and climate change, and plastic bottles choking the seas. Nor did he know of the Holocaust, 9/11, and white nationalists. The cultural, social, economic, political, and ecclesiastical differences between Luther’s world and ours aren’t just intriguing to note; they have profound, wildly underrecognized theological implications.

For several decades, theologians from across continents and perspectives have been noticing that Luther’s emphasis on justification, while right and deeply valuable, no longer suffices as the sole or even the primary point of the gospel. No one is opposed to forgiveness, of course! The gospel, though, must have something to say not just to the sinners, but also to those sinned against. It must have something to say not just to sinful individuals but also to sinful systems. Without this corrective, Luther’s theological breakthrough becomes a theological barrier erected between the sinners and those sinned upon, and between the empowered and the powerless.

By expanding and reinterpreting Luther’s notion of justification so that it includes or is included by notions of justice, we not only engage in our own new reformation of the gospel, but we also can be better ambassadors of it in new and salvatory ways now. To begin our reframing of the gospel, it is well to bend our ears toward people who have suffered injustice and grief.

When my daughter was five, she said to me, “Mama, I’ve been thinking about parenting lately.”

I paused. “Really, sweet thing? Tell me, baby girl, tell me what you have been thinking about parenting.”

To begin our reframing of the gospel, it is well to bend our ears toward people who have suffered injustice and grief.

“Well, it’s dawned on me that when you have children, it’s like you move to a different country. You can go back and visit your other country, the one where your friends who don’t have kids live, but you can’t live there anymore, because you have children now and they don’t. And they can come and visit you in your new country, but they can’t live there until they have children.”

She was absolutely right, of course. It’s simply true that having children profoundly affects one’s life experience, mores, traditions, and routines. It isn’t about better or worse, but it is about a distinctly different reality. And while she was right about that, the very same thing can be said about suffering. When you have suffered, everything changes. You become profoundly different. You may have a “work visa” of sorts that allows you to mill about in your former world, but your new world belongs to a different place where normal is different, where language is different, where habits are different, and where perceptions of what is real and true and important are different. The people and trends I review below live or lived in a different country and time than did Luther. They drink from Luther’s well of free and abundant grace, but they serve it up in various countries, literally and figuratively, where suffering of various sorts is the history and, in varying degrees and ways, still the active norm.

Jesus

Joe Hill (1879–1915) was a Swedish immigrant who worked as an itinerant laborer. His was a harsh life, filled with daily threats to safety, health, and fair compensation for work. Thinking that unions could improve the workers’ lot, Hill joined the Industrial Workers of the World (aka the Wobblies) and became a songwriter and cartoonist for their cause. It was he who came up with the well-known phrase “pie in the sky by and by,” which surfaced in his spoof of the beloved gospel tune “The Sweet By and By,” written in 1868 by Sanford F. Bennett (1836–1898) and Joseph Webster (1819–1875) and still a golden oldie in the gospel and country music scene. Their song’s cadence and lyrics made it an immediate classic:

There’s a land that is fairer than day,
And by faith we can see it afar;
For the Father waits over the way
To prepare us a dwelling place there.

Refrain
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
In the sweet by and by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

We shall sing on that beautiful shore
The melodious songs of the blessed;
And our spirits shall sorrow no more,
Not a sigh for the blessing of rest.

Joe Hill positively hated this hymn (Mark Twain was no fan of the song either). Hill knew full-well that destitute workers suffered desperate conditions daily; they didn’t need relief later in some sweet by and by. They craved and clamored for it now. So in 1911, Hill took a pen in hand and wrote his retort, the parody he titled “The Preacher and the Slave”:

Long-haired preachers come out every night
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer in voices so sweet:
You will eat, bye and bye
You will eat, bye and bye
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

In short, Hill didn’t want pie later. He and those for whom he spoke wanted pie today. A Jesus who didn’t intervene with practical, tangible salvation in the now was as useless and mockable as were the people who represented him.

It’s a safe bet that Hill didn’t realize it at the time, but he was engaging in a debate about Christology, namely, the study of the role, identity, and effect of Jesus Christ. Christology raises all sorts of questions, but most relevant to the task at hand is this one: Can we experience or work to bring about the tangible, saving presence of the reign of Jesus now, or are we instead meant to be satisfied and edified by hope that one day, after we die, we will find God’s foretold peace?

Of course, Luther believed and taught that Christians are to be active in kindness toward others; he called us to be “little Christs,” after all.^[1] We help the poor, we feed the hungry, we offer compassion to the troubled, and we comfort the grieving. But Luther had little inclination for Christians, in the name of Christ, to call out and work to overturn the basic systems that create human suffering. His encouragement to those who were subject to political and social structures that perpetuate suffering was, essentially, that they should wait for the strudel by and by.

Can we experience or work to bring about the tangible, saving presence of the reign of Jesus now?

“The Sweet By and By” emphasizes hope for the future and tolerance for the present. “The Preacher and the Slave” raises a voice for resistance in the present and really has very little interest in any post-death future. Theologies that help us transpose Luther’s thought into the key of today would like to adapt the best of both tunes: hope for the future, but not such that we are blinded to the systemic injustice and pain that many suffer in the present.

In essence, these voices are looking to reappraise, reappropriate, and repurpose Luther’s understanding of the first commandment. In his Large Catechism, Luther sketched his takeaway of God’s first commandment in this way:

This much, however, should be said to the common people, so that they may mark well and remember the sense of this commandment: we are to trust in God alone, to look to him alone, and to expect him to give us only good things; for it is God who gives us body, life, food, drink, nourishment, health, protection, peace, and all necessary temporal and eternal blessings. In addition, God protects us from misfortune and rescues and delivers us when any evil befalls us. It is God alone . . . from whom we receive everything good and by whom we are delivered from all evil.^[2]

To those who place their ultimate faith in saints, sorcery, silver, astrology, their social station, and personal skill (just a few examples of apostasy Luther also listed in his explanation), Luther rails that “the trouble is that their trust is false and wrong; for it is not placed in the one God, apart from whom there truly is no God in heaven or upon earth.”^[3] In contrast, says Luther, those who instead place their faith solely in God are filled with integrity, fidelity, and true hope, for they know to worship one worthy of their trust. God can be trusted because God is ultimately merciful.

Now, in chapter 1 of this book, Luther’s definition of God, based on his understanding of the first commandment, established a framework we can use for thinking about our ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for I Can Do No Other
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• I Can Do No Other
• Here I Stand
• Here He Stood
• Here They Stood
• Here We Stand
• Here We Imagine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Word and World Books