The life-and-death dilemma which confessors face is that the God to whose authority they appeal to vindicate their witness is the same God who has installed their oppressors in positions of authority and
Bob (right) with Valparaiso University President O.P. Kretzmann and Otto Piper, Director, at the Lutheran Social Ethics Seminar, 1953.
who seems now to be vindicating that authority instead. In face of that ultimate impasse the only recourse of Christian confessors is the promise (and threat) of the Matthean Jesus: "So everyone who confesses me before human beings, I also will confess before my Father in heaven, but whoever denies me before human beings, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven" (Matt. 10:32-33).
To call that situation by such a prestigious name, a status confessionis, a martyria, is to take what is to all appearances a ridiculous and petty ecclesiastical hassle and dignify it with the image of a cosmic tribunal--which in truth it is. Before this daunting tribunal it is really the whole church which is being arraigned. Not just the immediate confessors but the church everywhere is here and now being asked, in view of its secular authoritarianism, whether it does despair after all of the Gospel's being 'enough' [satis], whether it lusts for the Gospel to be shored up by other, secular authorities.
In that fleeting historical moment they [the confessors] have no choice but to speak for the church, to be its satis-sayers, and thus to do what otherwise they would never dream of doing, renounce their
Ois for On,
as Bertram is, not only with the above, but with all of his work--right on, on target. His colleague for many years, Ed Schroeder, claims that Bob likes the scenic route. Maybe. But you have to admit, you can enjoy the ride, because you always know where it is headed--to the Gospel, the Head of the Church. Consider the following brief theological tour that comes from an unpublished fragment written when Bob headed the Concordia Seminary Department of Systematic Theology, entitled On the Nature of Systematic Theology.
mch
What is most "systematic" about systematic theology is, not merely that it arranges its material--say the biblical data--in this or that orderly way, (that much is true of all theological disciplines) but rather that it consciously and explicitly insists on asking "Why." It asks for The Sufficient Reason, The Adequate Basis, The Fons, never resting until it has found "Reason Enough." Why, for what reason finally, is this or that Christian claim made?
Dean of the Chapel
Valparaiso University
By saying that the systematician asks for the "why," I am not suggesting that he does not know what it is. On the contrary, because he does know, at least in principle, what that sufficient reason is, his asking is meant chiefly to ask it into clarity, into the full prominence it deserves. He cannot even settle for the explanation, "Why, because Scripture says so." He still persists and asks again, "And why, in turn, does Scripture say so?" His job is done only when he has traced the reason back to The Source: namely, God's reconciling the world unto himself in Christ Jesus--in other words, the gospel. The systematician's task is to "necessitate" Christ.