rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_c9865d30-324e-5e15-aeae-ad6f96fe92a8">117 With this observation, he demands that the word of the cross not be threatened from another direction. For the theology of the cross without the word is not the only way that theologians have sought to escape the historicity of faith. Modern orthodox theology has attempted to construct a theology of the cross upon the assumption of some kind of “two-realm pattern of viewing the world.”118 Contemporary Lutheranism demonstrates the danger
that the theology of the cross may give way to the predominance of a theology of the word without the cross. For where the church, as is the case in our modern secularized world, exists within the context of a strange, yes, perhaps even hostile world, she is always in danger of withdrawing into herself.119
If existentialism abandoned the historicity of the crucifixion of Jesus, orthodoxy stands in danger of turning from the historic reality of contemporary crosses suffered by humanity. In that paradigm, the only way that the cross is treated as contemporary is within the confines of sacred space, particularly in the preaching of the word within the context of worship. The intrinsic relationship between Christ’s cross and our crosses is lost rendering the word impotent. In such a position:
It appears as if the cross of Christ and our own cross belong only to a sacred world. We may preach constructively about it, but the historical reality of modern life seems to be a totally different realm from that in which the word about the cross fits, which consequently becomes something of a religious ideal, a theology of the word without the cross, not because it seeks to deny the cross, but because it no longer bears a living relationship to the cross in our daily existence.120
The cost of such a move is tremendous. The trinitarian God in the full sense has been denied. Christology so lords it over the entire godhead that not only false theologies of creation are abandoned, but also the true reality of God as Creator. When this occurs:
There is no more room for God in history. Our world and our history have become godless, and our God has no world and no history. So now we have arrived at a point where the only history we still ascribe to God is the so-called history of salvation, the history of the second article, which implies a restriction upon the first article, as if God is no longer Lord of secular history, but only of the history of salvation.121
Prenter turns to Luther’s work on the Magnificat to challenge orthodoxy’s restriction of God’s historical activity and lordship. In this commentary Luther holds history and creation together with the cross of Christ. When Luther addresses issues of poverty, he is speaking not of some spiritual poverty recognized in a sacred sphere, he speaks of actual, physical hunger and thirst as the medium of God’s creative activity. He asks the reader:
How do we come to identify the cross in the creation as the cross of Jesus Christ? Can we go along with this at all? And if not, must we then not admit that Luther’s theology of the cross is not relevant for us?122
Again, Prenter returns to the theme of vicarious suffering. Christ suffers on our behalf the cross that is laid upon sinners.
As we in the course of our own lives experience the punishment for our fall into sin, through suffering, through temptation, through death, it will become clear to us that, because he bore exactly the same on our behalf, because he, who possessed the power of divine love as no other human person lived and suffered for us—this all is no longer guilt and punishment for us, but the role of the children of God, which is permitted us through the gracious command of God in the gospel.123
He finally sums up the opportunity that Luther’s theology of the cross offers to contemporary theology:
we must concern ourselves for both life and the word of God with like honesty and determination, so that we neither play life against the word, as in the case in a theology of the cross without the word; nor play the word against life as is the case in all sorts of thinking in terms of two realms such as occurs in the orthodoxy entrenched in the church. For God is the trinitarian God. He is the God of life, the Creator; he is the God of the word, the Savior; he is the God of faith, the Holy Ghost, and this trinity as Father, in our common experience of life; as Son in the preached word; and as Holy Ghost, in our personal convictions, teaches us in the last analysis what it means: Omnia bona in cruce et sub cruce abscondita sunt. (All good things are hidden in and under the cross.) Therefore they cannot be understood anywhere else except under the cross; under the cross—that means, under the cross on which Jesus, our Redeemer, bore our punishment, and under the cross which my Creator has laid upon me in my suffering and in my death. For in both places we are talking about the same cross.124
In this short article, Prenter has brought us further along in our task than the last three authors combined. His constructive critique of the wedge driven between the cross of the incarnate word Jesus and the other crosses in creation holds in appropriate tension our concern to not take the incarnate and crucified word out of our world. He offers us clarity in our critique of Forde and Ebeling who have taken Jesus’ cross out of the realm of history. He reminds us that it is not an accident that people who suffer brutal abuses of power are turning to look again, not only with Luther but also with the original apostolic witnesses to Jesus, to the crucified Christ.
Critical Summary
We have explored three models of interpreting Luther’s theology of the cross. In relationship to the concern that the theology of the cross be situated within the political and social history of its day, we appraise the three models differently. The third model offers some clues for bringing together theology and social reality. It does this by providing a way to talk about the theology of the cross in terms of the total context in which we live. Especially Prenter recognizes the God-given possibility and necessity of understanding Christ’s cross always in conjunction with contemporary crosses. In the crosses of creation points of historical concreteness are provided in which Christ and context are related. One also could argue that Peura’s emphasis on the real, ontological presence of God in the believer also provides a foothold for God’s active presence in history.
The emphasis on the proclamation of the word in Ebeling and Forde, an element that the other two models also have noted to some extent, correctly identifies the nature of the Reformation as an oral event. Yet, the lack of interest in pursuing how that oral event functioned within the larger sixteenth-century context, including daily life lived outside of the church, robs what could have been a provocative historical observation of its force. The tendency, of collapsing historic distinctions through generic observations about humanity also speaks of the historical disinterest of this model. In Forde’s writing, Luther speaks directly to “us” across five centuries. The shape of sin in the sixteenth century remains with us today without any interesting variation. Even within the sixteenth century itself, peasant and priest, pauper and king stand before God in basically the same way. It is amazing that such a strong critique of power like that which Luther offers can be examined to the total neglect of actual power relations between distinct members of society. Finally, even the neighbor and his or her cross only enters the picture at the very end of the process. Ebeling illustrates this when only in the final pages of the book does he raise as his last question the reality of those in need of compassion.125 All of this indicates, as stated above, that Ebeling and Forde stand dangerously close to what Prenter characterized as a theology of the word without the cross. In their writings the poor are rendered invisible, and this is a sign of the theology of glory.
In
