with us in our suffering,” or the one who “enters into solidarity with us” in our misery. “The suffering of God,” or the “vulnerability of God,” and such platitudes become the stock-in-trade of preachers and theologians who want to stroke the psyche of today’s religionists. But this results in rather blatant and suffocating sentimentality. God is supposed to be more attractive to us because he identifies with us in our pain and suffering. “Misery loves company” becomes the unspoken motif of such theology.66
This is not what Forde has in mind. This brings him to his third point. The theology of the cross can easily slip into a theology of glory with minimal, though immensely significant, shifts in the language employed. Forde wishes to learn Luther’s language precisely so as to “hold the language in place.”67 Forde will stick close to the Heidelberg Disputation, which he carefully notes not only describes the practice of being a theologian of the cross, but “itself is the doing of a theologian of the cross.”68 This means:
The Disputation itself, one might say, illustrates the manner in which theologians of the cross operate. Claimed, that is to say, killed and made alive by the cross alone as the story, theologians of the cross attack the way of glory, the way of law, human works, and free will, because the way of glory simply operates as a defense mechanism against the cross.69
Forde’s approach could also be seen as a kind of crisis theology of the cross, but it would have to carry a different sense than that which we applied to Loewenich and even Althaus. The conflict he alerts us to is not intrahuman; the crisis is a perpetual crisis of human beings in the presence of God Almighty. The crisis comes when “we in turn suffer the absolute and unconditional working of God upon us.”70 While Forde will have epistemological interest—he will ask about how we know God and what we must know about God—this epistemological interest is saturated with soteriology. To be a theologian of the cross means to be saved. Or, stated precisely, “the cross is the theo-logy.”71 The cross is God’s word as an attack on all human pretensions of righteousness in the presence of God. Conversely, being a theologian of glory is being lost. The theology of glory “is the perennial theology of the fallen race.”72 This theology is related to our sinfulness not only as a symptom of our fallenness; holding such a theology is the definition of sinfulness. The cross causes us to recognize that we have crucified Christ, that our sins have wrought his cross. Yet in the cross, where one stands condemned and is brought to give up on oneself, then and there the sinner is claimed by God and raised to new life. The cross does not stand apart from resurrection. Forde states, “The word ‘cross’ here and in the entire treatise that follows is, of course, shorthand for the entire narrative of the crucified and risen Jesus. As such it includes the Old Testament preparation, . . . the crucifixion and resurrection.”73
Forde divides the Heidelberg Disputation into four parts. The treatise begins with reflection on the law of God and the judgment it brings and ends with the love of God. The Disputation itself literally moves us from life under the law to new life in the love of God. Yet it does not do so lightly or superficially, but by moving us through a process of despair and subsequent hope, of death and then life. The Disputation operates on us in the following phases:
1. The Problem of Good Works (Theses 1–12)
2. The Problem of Will (Theses 13–18)
3. The Great Divide: The Way of Glory versus the Way of the Cross (Theses 19–24)
4. God’s Work in Us: The Righteousness of Faith (Theses 25–28)
The section on the problem of good works addresses “the basic question of the Disputation. . . . What advances sinners on the way to righteousness before God?”74 Through these theses, the theologian of glory’s attachment to good works as the means to righteousness is mercilessly attacked. The law of God brings demands against persons and judges them guilty of relying upon their own selves rather than upon God. Not a person’s evil, but their claims to any intrinsic or self-achieved righteousness are attacked. Not our evil works, but those which appear to be our brightest and best, are the grounds of our condemnation. God does God’s alien work upon us, so that later God’s proper work can be accomplished. God’s wrath comes out against the theologian of glory full force. This wrath of God is real and prevents us from sentimentalizing our understanding of God. Even as self-reliant sinners see their own works as beautiful, these attacks of God, God’s alien working on us, seem ugly and evil. We would deny them or at least claim that God is not “guilty” of this attack. Yet, we have it all wrong.
What we consider beautiful, our good works, are in actuality deadly. This sin is deadly because it “separates and seals us off from God. That occurs when the apparent goodness of our works seduces us into putting our trust in them. . . . We are in reality then, not just in theory, sealed off from grace.”75 Only fear of God in the recognition of the deadliness of our living offers us hope. “When then are the works of the righteous not mortal sins? When they fear that they are!”76 This first movement offers twelve punches that seek to destroy all creaturely confidence in good works.
In the next set of theses which Forde characterized as dealing with the bondage of the will, Forde shows how “Luther turns to the subjective side of the question.”77 Even after the old Adam or Eve, that is, the theologian of glory, recognizes the uselessness of good works, he or she will continue to hold to some bastion of human participation in the advancement toward righteousness. “. . . [W]e always come back to the question of the ‘little bit’ [we might contribute], one of the telltale signs of the theology of glory.”78 Only when this bastion is also destroyed, can we let God be God. We refuse to allow God to act unilaterally. We chip away at the totality of grace brought to us solely from God’s side. There must be some way that we advance our way toward God. Some merit, however small, must sway God in our direction. In the face of the God who saves by grace alone, the “fallen will cannot accept such a God. That is its bondage.”79 In the recognition of our bondage, we begin to hit bottom. We know that without intervention we are indeed lost.
Finally in thesis 16 another possibility presents itself. For the first time, Christ is mentioned. “When the theologian of glory has finally bottomed out, Christ enters the scene as the bringer of salvation, hope, and resurrection.”80 Hope is available, when we “utterly despair of our own ability” and allow God to do the deed to us and for us.
This brings us to the part of the Disputation that has commanded the most attention throughout history. Forde titled these theses the great divide. Forde points out, accurately I believe, that the leap directly into these theses has resulted in misunderstanding.81 When one moves into these theses without first being addressed by the critique of works and will, the result is the linguistic slip up that he warned of earlier. Suddenly, for example, thesis 21 wherein we are told that a theologian of the cross “calls a thing what it really is” becomes a call to critical realism, rather than a calling of sin and sinners what they really are in the presence
