Canonical and Non-canonical Gospels

Through the work of Elaine Pagels, who is a professor of religion at Princeton University, our understanding of early Christianity has been deepened. She has written a number of best-selling books that explore the complex nature of early "Christianities." Her early work on the Gnostic gospels (1979), which won several awards, including the National Book Award, continues to be among the top-selling books on Christian Gnosticism.

Among her assertions is the claim that the attacks on Gnostic texts by orthodox theologians in the second and third centuries were the result of institutional and political factors in the early church and not primarily a matter of theological disagreement and conflict. She is particularly troubled that women, who were accepted as spiritual leaders in Gnostic Christian circles, were marginalized and subordinated within the emerging catholic orthodoxy of these early centuries. This marginalization, too, was the result of political factors and not the result of theological concerns.

While there is much to learn in Pagels' work, many scholars are not persuaded that the Gnostic Scriptures, with their alternative understandings of Jesus, are just as authoritative or normative or historically reliable as the central canonical texts (the authentic letters of Paul, the synoptics, John, First John, First Peter). Even the Gospel of Thomas, which may, in very small part, be based upon early traditions about Jesus, strikes many as fundamentally at odds theologically with the teaching and narrative structure of the synoptic gospels. A careful theological comparison of the canonical texts and their stories with those that come from the later Gnostic and other apocryphal ("hidden") texts must lead one to make a choice: either the canonical or the apocryphal. They can't be reconciled with each other since they present essentially contradictory portraits of Jesus.

And yet the view that the apocryphal texts are just as valid as the canonical texts in their portrayals of Jesus ("many Christs") has its many supporters. For example, in the latest issue of Church History, the quarterly journal that is published by The American Society of Church History (of which I am a member), includes a book review by Timothy Miller, who is a professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas. The book is Alternative Christs, ed. Olav Hammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Miller's review, which appears in the March issue of Church History 80/1 (March 2011), 206-208, ends with the following statement:

"As Hammer concludes (290), there is no reason to believe that the canonical Jesus stories are any more historically reliable than the 'heretical' versions. Indeed, it could be argued that the fact that huge swaths of Christianity emphasize a rigid doctrinal and textual orthodoxy impoverishes us, giving us only one narrow slice of a great story" (ibid., 208).

Not a single reason to believe that the canonical Jesus stories are any more historically reliable than the gospels of Thomas, Philip, Peter, Judas, or any of the other twenty-plus "apocryphal gospels?" What about the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas? Or the Secret Gospel of Mark? Did the gospels that are contained in the New Testament come into the canon only because of "political" reasons? Or were there legitimate theological issues at stake that related to the nature of the good news itself as it had been delivered to the early church and maintained by the faithful (see First Corinthians 15:1ff.; 11:2, 23; a similar idea is present in Second Thessalonians 2:15). These biblical texts provide the earliest of Christian traditions.

That there are at least two conflicting views about the status of the canonical and non-canonical gospels is also reflected in one of the latest sales catalogs from "The Great Courses." Today's mail brought that company's "The Annual Sale on Religion and Theology Courses," which includes "The Real Story of Christianity's Beginnings" and "How Has Christianity Changed over 2,000 Years," both taught by Bart Ehrman, professor of religion at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and "What Do the Gospels Reveal about Jesus?," taught by Luke Timothy Johnson, professor of religion at Emory University.

Ehrman takes an approach that complements that of Pagels. Both of them build on the work of the German scholar, Walter Bauer (Orthodoxy and Hersey in Early Christianity), who tried to demonstrate that some early forms of Christianity that were eventually deemed heretical at a later time had been in fact quite popular in their earliest stages. What would come to be called "orthodoxy" at a later time might have been a minority view in the early decades of Christianity and what was "heresy" in later decades might have been quite popular. Hence, the subtitle to Ehrman's second course: "Lost Christianities: Christian Scriptures and the Battles over Authentication."

Johnson, an orthodox Roman Catholic scholar, takes a very different approach. He begins with questions about "Jesus in the memory of the church," and how the earliest apostolic preaching about Jesus had a distinct and normative shape already in the earliest decades of the post-resurrection Christian community (again, see First Corinthians 15:1ff.; the kerygmatic speeches in the Acts of the Apostles). After exploring the canonical gospels and the problems attendant to them, he moves to discuss how early Christians rejected some texts that claimed to be "Christian" but were not, marginalized some texts that were not necessarily "heretical" but were not "canonical," and accepted others that had been widely used and were viewed as having a continuity with that earliest apostolic proclamation.

Contrary to Miller's claim, the synoptic gospels contain material that is more historically reliable than the apocryphal, non-canonical gospels. Robert Grant, who taught early Christian history at the University of Chicago, has demonstrated that there were at least five implicit criteria at play in earliest Christianity to help Christian communities identify that which was in continuity with authentic apostolic teaching and that which conflicted with this teaching:

(1) A first criterion was apostolicity.  That is, a book had to have been written or dictated by an apostle, or at least have the authority of an apostle behind it, to be recognized as authoritative. For example, in the late- first or early-second century, Papias of Hierapolis (in Phrygia) wrote about his memories of early Christian traditions that make reference to Mark's memories of what Peter proclaimed in Rome, and Justin Martyr wrote about the gospels as "memoirs" of the apostles.

(2)  A second criterion, closely related to the first, is the antiquity of a particular writing.  The older the better. Since all of the apocryphal gospels, with the exception of the Gospel of Thomas and the Infancy Gospel of James, were written after A.D. 180, they fall far short of being in close proximity to the apostolic witness to the words and deeds of Jesus.

(3)  A third criterion was correct doctrine, i.e., adherence to the regula fidei (“rule of faith”) as handed down orally and in writing by those who were "eye-witnesses" and "hearers of the word." Unless a book could be shown to be in conformity with apostolic doctrine, it was rejected. Gnostics who claimed to be Christians ran afoul of other Christians because the former held that the God of the Old Testament was an inferior God to the Father of Jesus, that the god who created the world was an evil god, that the world is an evil creation from which one's soul is to escape, that Jesus was merely a revealer of secret knowledge about the human soul ("a spark of the divine" inside of a human being), that Jesus is only concerned about saving this "spark" inside of people, and that Jesus wasn't really human, that he didn't really die on the cross.

(4)  A fourth criterion was catholic use, how wide-spread was a text used in worship, teaching, and edifying the faithful. Some writings were accepted and used by nearly all who called themselves "Christian" in the first and early-second centuries (the letters of Paul, the synoptic gospels, the Gospel of John, First John, First Peter), whereas other writings (James, Hebrews, Revelation, Second Peter, Second John, Third John, Jude, and many others) were not as widely used and had questions about their authorship, age, and orthodoxy. The apocryphal gospels also fell far short of being as widely used as Pagels seems to suggest.

(5) A final criterion, related to the other four, is the public succession of faithful bishops in certain key cities (Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, Byzantium, Alexandria, Rome) to be generally reliable transmitters of apostolic texts (and accompanying authoritative lists of the Scriptures read and used in their liturgies) and teaching, and to be reliable critics of alien texts, such as the apocryphal gospels, epistles, acts, and apocalypses.

There were good reasons for why Gnostic texts did not win wide acceptance in early Christianity, for why the canonical texts are understood to be more historically authentic than later texts that claim to be apostolic and ancient, for why the canon looks the way it does. For persuasive refutation of the Bauerian thesis, see Robert Grant, Heresy and Criticism: The Search for Authenticity in Early Christian Literature (Westminster/John Knox, 1993). This work also provides a solid critique of Pagels' view of Gnostic Christianities as legitimate forms of Christian understanding. See also the helpful overview of scholarly work on the formation of the New Testament canon by Brevard Childs, The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Fortress, 1985), 16-33.

Finally, if the apocryphal gospels are just as historically authentic (or inauthentic) as the canonical gospels, then why do nearly all scholars who investigate the problem of the historical Jesus limit themselves to the canonical texts, even in view of the notoriously difficult nature of the canonical gospels as primary historical sources for Jesus? To quote from one of our premier New Testament scholars, E. P. Sanders: "I share the general scholarly view that very, very little in the apocryphal gospels could conceivably go back to the time of Jesus. They are legendary and mythological. Of all the apocryphal material, only some of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas are worth consideration. This does not mean that we can make a clean division: the historical four gospels versus the legendary apocryphal gospels. There are legendary traits in the four gospels in the New Testament, and there is also a certain amount of newly created material… Nevertheless, it is the four canonical gospels that we must search for traces of the historical Jesus" (E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus [Penguin Press, 1993], 64-65; see also the complementary discussion by John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 3 vols. [Doubleday, 1991--], 1:1-201 [which takes one through the various internal and external sources for understanding the historical Jesus]).

Pericope for the Week: The Resurrection of the Lord

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

During this time in which the western Christian church celebrates the resurrection of our Lord, Jesus the Christ, I thought I would draw attention to a little-known study by the German Lutheran theologian, Walter Kuenneth (1901-1997): Theologie der Auferstehung, (Munich: Claudius Verlag, 1933; 2d ed., 1951; ET Theology of the Resurrection, trans. James W. Leitch [Alva, Scotland: SCM Press, 1965; St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1965--those were the years when CPH published some truly outstanding texts in modern Christian theology.])

Professor Kuenneth, who was the fourth child of a Lutheran pastor, studied theology at Erlangen, where he was especially influenced by the neo-Lutheran work of Philipp Bachmann, and at Tuebingen, where he attended lectures by Karl Heim and Adolf Schlatter. Professor Kuenneth was ordained in 1925 and served as a teacher of theology in Berlin and then at Erlangen, where he lived until his death. During the Hitler period he was a member of the Confessing Church and wrote several essays critical of Nazi ideology and its negative influence upon Christianity in Germany before and after the fateful year of 1933. When another great Erlanger, Werner Elert, died in 1954, Dr. Kuenneth assumed his chair of systematic theology. He taught at Erlangen until his retirement in 1969. He was particularly engaged in the controversy over Rudolf Bultmann's program of demythologizing, which Kuenneth thought emptied the gospel of its decisive content. In 1966 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Wartburg Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.

For a more complete online biography, see http://www.kirchenlexikon.de/k/kuenneth_w.shtml

This week's pericope comes from p. 164 ("Creation in its Relation to the Resurrection") in the ET of Dr. Kuenneth's study of the resurrection:

When resurrection and creation are related together we are very forcibly struck by the uniqueness of the fact of the resurrection, and of the Christology which is built upon it. The resurrection is the very heart of cosmic Christology. For this reason, in so far as the concept of creation cannot be properly developed save on Christological lines, the created world must be oriented towards the raising of Christ. This orientation of all creation towards the resurrection as its fulfillment determines the real fundamental character of creation and provides a Christian doctrine of creation with its deepest meaning. There can thus be no understanding of creation which is not shaped by the theology of the resurrection. In creation's orientation towards the resurrection there emerges anew the theocentric character of the resurrection event with its bearing on the whole cosmos. At the same time all that has already been said about pre-existence, incarnation, and the reciprocal relationship between the historic life of Jesus and the resurrection is hereby confirmed, summed up and clarified. Three distinct lines of thought will serve to prove the orientation of creation towards the resurrection. We must deal first with the incompleteness of the first creation; then we must clarify the concept of the "fallen" world. Finally we must show that the resurrection world is the fulfillment of creation.

Caravaggio

This past year marked the 400th anniversary of the death of one of the greatest painters of all time, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), not to be confused with the person whom Caravaggio sought to surpass in artistic greatness, namely, the more well-known Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). While I had learned of Caravaggio from my college art instructor, Larry Gross, I did not really become "attached" to the Italian artist until the day of my ordination into the pastoral ministry. On that date, July 16, 1989, my childhood pastor, Rev. Dr. L. Dean Hempelmann, preached a sermon on the call of Matthew (Matthew 9). The connection between that scriptural text and my ordination was obvious, but what wasn't obvious to me at the time was the connection Dean would make between my ordination and Caravaggio's painting of the Matthean text, "The Calling of St. Matthew." That painting, which hangs in the Contarelli Chapel of San Luigi Dei Francesi in Rome, was the basis for a special banner that Dr. Hempelmann's wife, Cathy, made for the occasion. Prominent on the banner is the hand of Jesus that creatively summons Matthew the tax collector to leave his shady business and follow the light beckoning him.



The Calling of St. Matthew
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio



A few years ago my wife and I spent an enjoyable week in the eternal city on the occasion of our 15th wedding anniversary. I was especially eager to view the Caravaggio piece in the side altar that is the Contarelli Chapel. I was so moved by that work of art that I bought a print of it that now hangs above the harmonium in our living room. Each day as I leave for my "calling" at Valparaiso University I pass "the Calling of St. Matthew." Such a passing allows me to remember both my baptism (the call to faith, hope, and love) and my ordination into the holy ministry (the divine call into ministry).



Michelangelo Buonarroti's The Creation

 Dean's sermon title was actually "the Creative Call." Commenting on Caravaggio's painting, he emphasized how the artist "of dark and light" had formed the hand of Christ to be identical to the hand of Adam at the center of Michelangelo Buonarroti's Sistine Chapel. Just as God creatively called the first Adam to life, so Jesus, the second Adam, calls Matthew out of the old life and into the new one. He will now leave his ill-gotten gain and luxurious life behind in order to become a poor follower of the poor Christ. Clearly, Caravaggio wants us to understand Matthew's call as a kind of second creation, a creative call.

What brings all this to mind of late has been the wonderful biography of Caravaggio by Andrew Graham-Dixon that appeared last year, just in time for the quadricentennial anniversary of its subject's death: Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (London: Penguin, 2010). It has been on my stack of "must reads" since last fall, and I finally was able to finish it last night. What a wonderful tale of woe and grandeur, of sorrow, pain, suffering, and death, but also of artistic genius, theological profundity, and cultural expanse. Graham-Dixon does a marvelous job of bringing the reader up-to-speed on the latest Caravaggio scholarship while not overwhelming one with too much extraneous detail.

More than a decade in the making, the book moves from Caravaggio's modest beginnings in Milan, where his family had some connections to the nobility, to examine his experiences in Rome, where he would be recognized as a truly great artist but also would be held in contempt for his tempestuous and prideful personality that frequently led him to argue and fight. Eventually it would cause him to kill a man in a duel. Fleeing Rome because of the capital charge of murder against him, Caravaggio made his way to Naples, where he did not stay for very long, and then to Malta, where he hoped to become a Knight of St. John. Through his few favorable connections he was able to secure such a knighthood, but once again his argumentative nature got the better of him, he wounded an important fellow knight, was thrown into prison, escaped from the prison, fled to Sicily, and finally back to Naples, where he was involved in yet another brawl, probably a vendetta attack, in which he was severely wounded. He would later die from these wounds.

So his life was unusually colorful, sinful, dark, and yet also full of grace, light, artistic genius, and divine mercy (at least in his art). Friend of prostitutes, amorous homosexuals, young boys, and fellow artistic sinners, Caravaggio lived on the wild side. He depicted a realism in his paintings that was scandalous to many, captivating to his benefactors, and essentially ignored for centuries after his death. Eventually, in the twentieth century, his work would be prized for both its realism and its technique. There is no question that his paintings are among the most theologically astute and thought-provoking in the western tradition.

Graham-Dixon's narrative is engaging and informative. His analysis of the principal paintings is insightful and frequently provocative. Helpful maps situate the main events of the painter's life and travels. Color plates give us the most important works. Not only does one gain a better understanding of late-16th-Century Italy, its social customs, and artistic developments, but one receives an especially enjoyable introduction to the life and work of this troubled, galant'huomo.  

I did catch a few minor errors.

On page 66 one reads, "More than half a century had passed since the Lutheran troops of Emperor Charles V sacked the city [of Rome] in 1527." Contrary to this assertion, only some of the 15,000 German soldiers who took part in that event would have had Lutheran sympathies, such as the drunken soldiers who shouted one night on the streets of Rome that they would now make Luther the pope. Most German mercenaries in the Imperial army at that time were not necessarily sympathetic to Luther's reforms. They served under Georg von Frundsberg, a Habsburg loyalist, who remained loyal to Charles V over against the Lutheran heretics (despite Frundsberg kind words to Luther at Worms in 1521). A good portion of the sacking of Rome was done by some 5,000 (Roman Catholic) unpaid (and thus rebellious) troops of Charles de Bourbon, ex-Connetable of France and an ally of Charles V, and by several thousand Spanish mercenaries who were also unruly (and for the same reason). Lutherans are not to blame for the sack of Rome that year.

On page 89, where Graham-Dixon is correctly relating Caravaggio's Boy with a Basket to the Old Testament book, Song of Songs, he notes that "By [this time]…in the late sixteenth century, Christian Church fathers had spent considerably more than a millennium teasing out what they had come to see as the redemptive symbolism of the poem's tale of love." So far, so good. But then Graham-Dixon mistakenly continues, "The Groom's passion for the Bride was held to express Jesus Christ's boundless love for his holy mother, Mary. The metaphor of the Bride as an 'inclosed garden' was easily transformed into a symbol of Mary's virginity." Actually, the dominant reading of the Song of Songs from the second century through the sixteenth (and later) was that the Bridegroom is Christ and the Bride is the Church. The Church has taken the place of Israel as bride (in ancient allegorical interpretations of this book by Jewish scholars the Bride was Israel and the Groom was the Lord). Following Hippolytus (2d c.), Origen (3rd c.) provided this traditional medieval allegorical interpretation of Christ and the Church (later, Christ and the individual soul). Only in the twelfth century did a few western Christian interpreters (and only one eastern Christian interpreter) suggest that the Bride should be allegorically understood as referring to the Blessed Virgin Mary. This minority interpretation of the Song of Songs, which lasted only into the early sixteenth century, set forth the innovative view that Mary is the real meaning of the Bride of Christ. Already in the sixteenth century, however, this Marian interpretation was on the way out and by the seventeenth century had come to be largely criticized in Roman Catholic circles. Of course in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant circles, such allegorical interpretation had always been suspect. (Interestingly, Luther seems not to have ever rejected out of hand the traditional allegorical interpretation of the Song of Songs: that is, the Bride is the Church and the Groom is Christ.)

Finally, I think Graham-Dixon totally misses Caravaggio's allusion to the serpent of Genesis 3 in the serpentine ropes on the margins of Caravaggio's greatest work, the Beheading of John the Baptist. Those can't be mere ropes! The one "rope" that slithers from beneath John's leg (and from under the sacrificed animal) surely is a reference to the great symbol of evil that one encounters in the first book of the Bible. Could it be that the light that falls on John's foot is an allusion to Romans 10:15?

These are minor points. I very much enjoyed the book and highly recommend it to those interested in a down-to-earth approach to Christian themes from one of the great, troubled Christian artists of all time.

For a further, very enjoyable experience, I encourage you to visit the main website devoted to Caravaggio's work:

http://caravaggio.com/preview/home.html

The AV at 400

This year marks the quadricentennial anniversary of the Authorized Version of the English Bible, otherwise commonly called the King James Version (KJV). Already last year several essays, books, editorials, and conference presentations were devoted to this important milestone. The celebration continues. Valparaiso University, for example, has invited the renowned historian, Mark Noll (professor of American religious history at Notre Dame), to give two lectures this fall on the cultural significance of the KJV in its American context. When Prof. Noll was here a few weeks ago to give another public lecture, I was able to talk with him and my colleague, George Heider, about the fall lectures. Based on that conversation, Prof. Noll's lectures should be very fascinating. The committee that selected him, on which I am also serving, is working closely with our library staff to develop an exhibit on the KJV in our library. For my own part, I plan to talk up the KJV more than I normally do in my intro-to-theology course. Throughout the year many of us will be thinking about the KJV, its history, its cultural influence, and its abiding use as a sacred text for many. Last fall, Martin Marty offered commentary ("Sightings," Nov. 29, 2010) on the then-upcoming celebration. He rightly stressed that this event "merits observance far beyond the circles of librarians, antiquarians and classicists."

To commemorate the anniversary, Oxford University Press, one of the three printers that was originally authorized to print the KJV, published last year an excellent history of this Bible. This study is by Gordon Campbell, professor of renaissance studies at the University of Leicester, and is titled, Bible: The Story of the King James Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). I highly recommend the book, not merely as a great introduction to the history of the KJV and the key individuals behind its origin, printing, and transmission, but as a perceptive account of the debates and controversies surrounding it, as a marvelous summary of its historic, cultural importance, and as an encomium (but not eulogy!) for its on-going importance in the English-speaking world of Christianity.

While there are indeed English translations that are more faithful to the most approximate of original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts (our theology department recommends that students use the New Revised Standard Version), no other English translation of the Bible has proved to be "the most enduring embodiment of Scripture in the English language" (p. 275). Indeed, as Campbell also notes, the KJV is "the fountainhead of Bible translation into English," and even the most recent edition of the NRSV stands in continuity with it.

While I haven't used the KJV much in my university teaching or pastoral ministry over the past two decades--I spent too many years learning Hebrew and Greek not to take advantage of the best scholarly editions of the Bible in these languages, and I mostly use the NRSV whenever quoting the Bible in English translation--nevertheless, I have decided to work more with the KJV this year in honor of its anniversary.

In my library is the edition of the KVJ that my Grandfather used during his pastoral ministry, at least between 1934 and his death in 1980. While he was educated in German and Latin (and learned Hebrew and Greek), and while preached regularly in German between 1924 and 1980, the main English Bible that he used was the third edition of Thompson's New Chain-Reference Bible, an edition of the KJV that Campbell neglected to examine. I suspect that in the wake of the First World War, many German Lutheran pastors, like my Grandfather, utilized the KJV in their ministry because it was the Bible that was used by most mainstream Protestant clergy in America at that time. While he had other English translations in his library, none is as marked and weathered as that edition of the KJV. Could it be that this was one way in which this German Lutheran in America could demonstrate his American cultural Protestantism to a society that was often suspicious of its German-speaking citizens?

Many U. S. Presidents have used the KJV at occasions of public import, most recently at President Obama's inauguration when he took the oath of office on the same KJV Bible that Abraham Lincoln had used in 1861. One hundred and fifty years after that Lincoln inauguration the KJV is still the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world. How will you commemorate its anniversary this year?

In Defense of Werner Elert (1885-1954)

It is rather commonplace within the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod to hear and read people who blame the Lutheran theologian, Werner Elert (1885-1954), for the problems that led to the schism of that church body in the mid-1970s. I have never understood this criticism, most recently set forth by Prof. David Scaer (Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne) and his student, Scott Murray (now one of the vice-presidents of the LCMS). For my critical review of Murray's shallow and mistaken study of the divine "law" in 20th-century American Lutheranism, see http://www.crossings.org/thursday/2003/thur110603.shtml

With the recent publication of James Burkee's excellent analysis of the LCMS schism, Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod: A Conflict That Changed American Christianity (Fortress, 2011), once again there have been accusations leveled against Dr. Elert for his supposed negative influence on the LCMS through its seminary faculty at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. The majority of that faculty was fired for insubordination amid accusations of "false teaching." The 40+-person majority faculty later formed what was called "Concordia Seminary-in-Exile" or "Seminex," for short. (For my review of the Burkee's dissertation, go to
http://thedaystarjournal.com/the-preus-brothers-herman-otten-jr-and-the-purge-of-missouri/

Elert has often been identified with "the Seminex theology," whatever that is, as if some forty-plus different faculty members could be so neatly labeled and lumped together. More recently, Elert's theology has been closely tied to Seminex prof. and friend, Ed Schroeder, whose Crossings website and materials often make positive use of Elert. Not too long ago I was invited to speak about Elert at a Crossings conference that included several participants,  Robert Schultz and Ed Schroeder among them, who had actually studied with the Erlanger.

After graduating from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis (sometimes called "801," since a new seminary began to operate at the address, 801 DeMun Ave., in 1974) in 1988, I took courses at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago while I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago. These were the years 1988 to 1995, when several Seminex faculty had been deployed to LSTC. Since that time I have continued to have contact with faculty and students from "Seminex," including those who taught at LSTC.

The main theological currents in those years at LSTC did not include Elert or reference to him. Rather, the main foci were liberation theology, feminist theology, political theology, deconstruction, quotas and inclusivity, inter-religious dialogue, historical-critical interpretation. The main Protestant male theologians were Barth, Moltmann, Pannenberg, and the male liberationists, all of whom received far more attention and support than did little Werner Elert, who probably wasn't known, let alone read, by anyone among the students at LSTC, save for those of us who studied in Robert Bertram's seminars. Carl Braaten, of course, knows Elert, too, but largely dismissed him in favor of Barth and Pannenberg (and the occasional reminiscence of his Doktorvater, Tillich).

As far as I can recall the only LSTC faculty member who utilized and engaged the thought of Elert was Bertram, who had us read Elert's early, little "dogmatics," Die Lehre des Luthertums im Abriss. It is clear from this little book that Elert, like Luther, thought that the law of God (both in its eternal and historical aspects) has a two-fold function, also in the life of the Christian believer unto death. This position is expanded in all of the major studies that Elert conducted.

Elert's problem is that the little bit of his writings that has been translated has not been translated well, save for Ed Schroeder's Facet translation of the tiny chapter from Zwischen Gnade und Ungnade. Most of Elert remains terra incognita for those who can't read German or who won't take the time to work their way through his large corpus.

What made Elert an interesting theologian for someone like J. Pelikan, back in the late 1940s and early 50s, was the fact that he was a conservative (theologically and politically), confessional Lutheran who was not hung-up on a supposed verbal inspiration or inerrancy of the Bible, was facile with historical-critical methodology, and was engaging the post-kantian, post-Schleiermacherian theological world on the basis of a creative re-statement of the evangelischer Ansatz, best summarized, I suppose, as the proper distinction between the law and the gospel. (Elert thought C. F. Walther's treatise of that title was the best theological work to come out of America in the nineteenth century.) If you want to blame an American Lutheran for the influence of Elert on at least a few Americans, then blame Pelikan, whose intro to the first volume of Die Morphologie captures nicely what is important about Elert. (Significantly, the second volume of that project, the one that sets forth the history of Lutheran ethics in a much more comprehensive and persuasive manner than the disjointed, Barthian-influenced Ethik of Bonhoeffer, was never translated into English and has probably only been read by a handful of us alive today.) Pelikan directed a significant number of American Lutheran students to Erlangen, as did other Concordia and LCMS faculty in the early 1950s.

Elert was a member of an intact, confessional church, the Bavarian Lutheran Church, which remained largely unaffected by the Nazified "Deutsche Christen" (those German Christians who wanted to change the doctrine and practice of the Protestant churches in Germany to fit and support Nazi ideals). Elert nevertheless took seriously Luther's explanation to the Fourth Commandment as it applied to civil government, and he was a committed constitutional monarchist. Still, he opposed the formation of the Reich church and he opposed the Deutsche Christen. He was not a member of the Nazi Party. He did what he thought was best for his university, his theology dept., his church, and the Bavarian state in which he lived. He later acknowledged his errors of judgment regarding Hitler's regime (like many politically conservative Germans, Elert viewed Hitler, at least early on, as the next best thing to a Kaiser), and he repented of his sins vis-a-vis Hitler's government. BTW, both of Elert's sons died as officers in hand-to-hand combat at the eastern front.

My treatise on Elert, which was published in Lutheran Quarterly 20 (Autumn 2006), 249-302, refutes false readings of Elert that have been put forth by Scaer, Murray, and others, and sad-to-say, even by better theologians such as Profs. Paul Hinlicky and Robert Benne.

Yes, we should cut some slack for friends and teachers Schroeder and Bertram, given what they had to face in the Preus era, but we should also cut some slack for Elert, who died in 1954. If the ELCA has theological problems, don't blame him for them. He's not your culprit.