Lead Time
Lead Time
The Heart of Lutheranism with Rev. Dr. Robert Kolb
Immerse yourself in the transformative journey of the Reformation with our esteemed guest, Reverend Dr. Robert Kolb. Dr. Robert A. Kolb is a professor emeritus of Systematic Theology at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.
Kolb retired in 2009 after 16 years of distinguished service as missions professor of Systematic Theology. He also previously served as the director of the Seminary’s Institute for Mission Studies.
Discover how the profound work of Luther on the Babylonian captivity of the Church revolutionized religious rituals, redefined piety, and bridged the gap between the Roman Catholic Church and the common man. Dr. Kolb offers insights into the universal characteristics of all religions: doctrine, narrative, ritual, ethics, and community.
Join us as we continue our exploration into Luther's influence, delving into his ideas about the Priesthood of all Believers and the Pastoral Office. We discuss his understanding of the power of God's Word, and how it can be used to deliver Lutheran worship. Dr. Kolb also enlightens us on how symbolism, such as the pastor's robe, can evoke a multitude of reactions from different audiences.
As we wrap up, we underscore the importance of hospitality and charity in our conversations, and reclaim the Lutheran identity and mission rooted in the confession of Christ crucified. This episode promises an intriguing exploration into the heart of Lutheranism!
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Leigh Time is a podcast of the Unite Leadership Collective hosted by Tim. Ollman and Jack Calliberg. The ULC envisages the future in which all congregations fully equip the priesthood of all the believers through world-class leadership development at the local level. Leigh Time taps into biblical wisdom for practical solutions to today's burning issues. Each podcast confronts real-time struggles facing the local church in a post-Christian culture. Step into the action with the ULC at unitel leadershiporg. This is Leigh Time.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Leigh Time, tim Ollman, here with Jack Calliberg. I pray, wherever you're taking this podcast, in, that the fruit of the spirit love, joy, peace, patience, et cetera is upon your mind and heart and that your mind is awakened today, that you have been filled with joy to enter in, whether it's in your car, whether it's you're working out, whether it's in transition into a meeting that you want to learn. We're not brains on a stick, we're desiring things, that your desires are after the heart and mind of Jesus, connected to his never-changing word, and that you have great passion and joy in getting to learn today from one of my favorite people on planet Earth. Now, many of you are students who have read this man consistently. Maybe some of you had him in class, but this is the one and the only.
Speaker 2:Reverend Dr Robert Colb. If you have the Book of Concord, there is a very good chance that this man's name I have the Colb Wengered Edition of the Book of Concord. So, thank you, dr Colb, and in our interactions today, even referring to you as Bob from time to time, thank you for the privilege of doing that. But, reverend Dr Robert Colb, you're hanging out with us today and you're wearing a tie. Now, not many people wear a tie. There may have been guests that wear clerical and things, but tell us a story of why you're wearing a tie today and how that connects us to the story of the Reformation, bob.
Speaker 3:So my mind is perfectly sound, but I do have to write my name on things. I love it. This tie actually is hard to find because it was being sold in Wittenberg by one organization. For those who are just listening, we should explain. Martin Luther's signature is on the tie. That's not mine at all, I have to confess.
Speaker 3:I didn't think so, but I thought I'd put on a tie, because I wear a tie to class every time. Every class I hold out of respect for the students. The problem is none of the students understand it. A tie today as a mark of respect, which makes a point about semiotics. That's a word that I did not understand from my colleagues for a long time, but what it means is that we have to pay not only attention to what we're saying. That's kind of semantics. We have to pay attention to how it lands, how it's received, what the audience, the hearer, is getting out of, what we intend, because it may be quite different, and so the semiotics doesn't work.
Speaker 3:With my tie, I'll take it off. As a matter of fact, it's warm in Germany today too, but you can see that if we don't make our points clear in the hearer's language, we're not making our points clear. We may be exercising a good feel for ourselves, but we're not delivering the gospel when the gospel doesn't cut into the heart and life of people in a world that Luther saw as joyful but as largely surrounded by suffering. In the 16th century that was easier to understand that sometimes it is for many US Americans, but at any rate. The message is for our hearers, not for our own justification. I think that's an important aspect of the way that the Reformation had what we call success that it did yeah.
Speaker 2:Bob, that's powerful. Is there a connection between semiotics and the Reformation story, how Luther was attuned to, not just what he was saying but how it was being received? Obviously you've got the story of bringing the scriptures into the modern everyday hearer's language. Very helpful to be receiving the word of God. But were there other things connected to the Reformation story where, from the Roman Catholic Church, it just wasn't landing and Luther was a bridge to help it be received by the everyday man in a very, very powerful way? More there, Dr Quilt.
Speaker 3:Well, right at the heart of the whole matter. I think I had to be 67 years old before I learned what the Reformation was really all about, and I had to go to India to find out. I was teaching at Gurukul Lutheran Theological College in 2008. And had a seminar on Luther's work on the Babylonian captivity of the Church, which is a kind of deconstruction of medieval piety at its heart and a reconstruction then of an evangelical piety in on Christian freedom. Those two were on a national exam for a master theology degree and so we dug into those and Luther very often was criticizing in the year that those two were written, 1520.
Speaker 3:It was very often criticizing the idea of the sacraments working ex operae operato. What that Latin phrase means is actually that it depends on the word, not on the faith of the recipient, not on the morality of the celebrant. But it had come to mean that you didn't have to have faith in Christ, you didn't have to be listening to the words, you just had to go through the outward motions. And I said I don't know why he has to harp on that. Find that he objects to it, it's wrong. But why did he harp on it? My students said well, you should know that A week ago you taught us that, according to a person who studies comparative religion, there are five characteristics of every religion. They all have doctrine, they all have a narrative, a story, they all have a ritual, how we communicate to God or with God, interchange there, how we deal with one another. So ethics and then community, how the community gathers, how it actually exists as community and how it's led. The hierarchy of a religion is very important, and then those are all bound together. Nini and Smart said by some factor like faith for Christians, submission for Muslims, search for Nirvana for Buddhists. And they pointed out to me, because they had grown up in a Hindu culture, some of them as Hindus, that Luther had experienced Christianity as a religion basically of ritual, of performance of the mass and going through other religious, mostly sacred activities, but some ethical good works as well. And so, while God's grace was mentioned by all the preachers of the Middle Ages, it was basically a system where the key to the whole relationship was our going to God with our ritual practice.
Speaker 3:Luther discovered in scripture that the reason that he couldn't come to terms with God through this definition of Christianity is that God comes to us, he initiates the conversation. He comes as a personal God, he comes as a speaking God, and he actually wants to engage us in conversation, in delivering a word, and then our prayer and praise in conversation with him. Well, that opened up a whole new understanding of what Luther was really all about, and I read now texts in which that is so clear, not only in Luther, but in his disciples, whom I studied a lot and so I think what we have to remember is that while we're cultivating the practices of faith in us, that's part of our response. It's fundamentally a conversation that our Heavenly Father initiates with his kids and that they then continue like all kids.
Speaker 3:You can't tell a child a secret. You tell a child a secret and it's no longer a secret, and so Christians are by nature Now we've learned to suppress that pretty well but Christians are by nature blabbermouths, and they just can't stop betraying the family secrets. This guy, jesus, came as God himself to die for you and to rise for you and give you a new identity. So I think that's the motor that ran the Reformation, and I think that's a message that US Americans are crying out to hear today.
Speaker 2:I love that. So the five components of I'm taking notes, dr Colba, I'm in class right now. Man, this is. This is spectacular. The five components of religious groups is doctrine, the narrative or the story that we tell about ourselves, the rituals that norm us, the ethics, the characteristics, the behaviors, and then the sense of community, and you even mentioned the hierarchy of leadership. Lead time here is a podcast, but we're talking, we don't use all of those words, but really, as I look at it, we want to have a conversation about all five of those topics today. Dr Colba, a lot of times there can be an over emphasis, I would say, in the Missouri Synod on this is, though, these are the rituals, and unless we do things this way, then we have somehow forsaken what it means to be an Orthodox Lutheran, unless you're exactly right, and we we call that the worship wars.
Speaker 4:Now, I mean, that's that there's literally a name for that, and some criticism that flies back and forth is legitimate? I think some of it is. Yeah, is not, and it's worth is worthy of consideration. Well, anything to add to that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, yeah, luther in in 1526 wrote a piece called the German mass and it has a lot of crazy ideas in it. Luther long for the days when there would be small groups of Christians gathering he was dealing with. Everybody in the village is a Christian, so everybody in the village belongs to the church, and that wasn't working as a Christian community. So he was looking for these smaller groups that would edify each other, prayer and and praise together and scripture study Insofar as the people were able. Sometimes all they had to do, all they had to go on, was what was in there In their heads. But Luther also says we preach the appointed pericopees, as we always have for a couple hundred, three hundred, four hundred years In our churches, because here in Wittenberg, because our students are going out to parishes that preach like that, follow the pericopees and I personally need the pericopees as a discipline, otherwise it's the same, it's the same sermon anyway. But the the Luther says no, sometimes you want to preach on a series of Preach, on a book or a catechism. Sermons were. Actually they weren't, weren't so much for the main service, they were. There were separate catechical services each Sunday and in Wittenberg. And then he says what I'm proposing here is kind of what I'd like to see us do in Wittenberg, but it may not be suitable for your area. So he he was centering on the proclamation of Jesus Christ and the. The liturgy has to fit into the proclamation of the forgiveness of sins and a new identity and new righteousness given by Christ through his death and resurrection, and to drive that home and to really make the point was Luther's aim, and so it's.
Speaker 3:It's clear that for Luther, the doctrine all stems out of the biblical narrative I did.
Speaker 3:One of my books that you might have read is Luther and the stories of God, in which I try to show how he, he builds on the stories, fills in the gaps, as the exegetes say, for biblical stories, so that they become really alive for Saxons in his day.
Speaker 3:And so he takes the narrative, though, and shapes it, as do the prophets and the and the apostles into doctrine. And the doctrine, then, is the skeleton, the framework which really has to guide our lives, and the way he formulated his doctrine was amazingly life, real. I don't always catch that because we don't live in his world, but if we look closely, particularly the sermons, that's been an opening in my career. I started reading his sermons and discovered a whole new aspect to Luther's a way of bringing Christ to the people that it's not there, and some of the things that originally read from him more, more reformatory, reforming the way he treat us as in the like, correcting ills and rebuilding piety. So yeah, we see in Luther this idea of the message coming from God through the baptized people of God to to reach real people in real time and space.
Speaker 3:And you're telling me this is a calling.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm sorry, this is a calling for all believers to be able to share the gospel.
Speaker 3:Yes, luther. It's very interesting because there's another aspect of broadly understood the worship, or is Jack? This, this battle sometimes between clergy and laity, totally misses Luther's understanding of both. He was very strong on the office of pastoral ministry and I think we realize as we move more and more into a mission church situation how important it is that there are those two there in the church to assume parental responsibility. And actually Luther begins, or not begins. He began by insisting on the priesthood of the baptized for some other reasons, but he in 1523, his treatise that really sets forth the, the rights and the obligations of God's priests is how to get a pastor. So the whole people of God need their, their pastoral leadership.
Speaker 3:My geographical home was in an Irish Catholic parish and my, my schoolmates went to a confirmation class under Father McEvoy and I never wanted to be called father. And then I come to the large catechism and Luther says yeah, pastors are fathers too, but but we have to remember what fathers are like. One of the professors that influenced me profoundly was Robert price. He taught me that you can't be a confessional Lutheran without confessing the faith boldly and and so forth. But Robert and Donna had 10 children.
Speaker 3:And once I forget the conversations context. He said it's easier to raise 10 kids than two. Well, years later I asked his son, daniel. Your dad said easier 10 than 2. And Daniel knew exactly what I meant. He said I changed more diapers before I was 18 than I have since. And so I think if we're going to see leadership as having a parental role, we have to realize that parents know how to deal with, minister to and use their adult children. Their adult children may be infants in the faith tomorrow because of a crisis or something, but adult children have a role that infant children don't in the congregation as well as in the family.
Speaker 2:So, dr Kolb, how does that kind of metaphor of the family shape the role of the local church in discover, develop and deploy in the next generation of spiritual fathers, aka pastors, those who have the office of holy ministry?
Speaker 3:I don't know. Is there a connection? I haven't thought about that exactly, but that's a very good question. On the one hand, it was always more fun to have you guys after vicarage than before. Before vicarage it was fun to teach, it was good schooling and good questions, good discussions and all. But after vicarage it was colleague talk. Now, as senior colleague I perhaps had some input that other people didn't, but as people fresh from the parish experiences, they had things that I didn't.
Speaker 3:And so if industry was as shy about making experiments as the church is, there'd be no such thing as capitalism. And the industrialists have more money than the church does. That's true. So we have to be, in one way, a little more cautious with our experience. What we have to do is now find a Bible verse for every decision we make, so that we have to defend the Bible as well as our decisions when our decisions prove not to be correct. But we use biblical wisdom to say this might be the best way to go.
Speaker 3:I've been impressed with how much flexibility and how much stability there are at the same time in Luther's theology. In the beginning, I would say there's all this debate about when he had his evangelical breakthrough or his tower experience. I think he had that in the 19th century, when romantic historians thought he had to have one blind flash and that's not the way most of us work. But I think by about 1520, 2122, luther's core ideas were almost all in place and they did not change. But the expression of those ideas did change and he was willing to use a term and to say that term's not going to work or it's not going to work in other situations, now that things have changed in the church or in society, and so we do have to be ready to make mistakes, to say we thought we were doing the right thing but it's got too many problems or it's not producing what we wanted to. And again, in emergency situations that's really tough, but it's just human life as well.
Speaker 2:That's for sure, dr Kolb, could you give an example or two of? I love that that by the early 20s, 1520s, luther's theology was locked in. But could you give some examples of where you saw him in real time in various contexts? Be a little bit more open-handed in how the theology was expressed.
Speaker 3:Well, I think again to go back to Priesthood of all Believers and Pastoral Office, we see that the argument is strong on Priesthood of the baptized in the beginning, strong on Pastoral Office at the end. The thing is, his work with the Priesthood of all Believers, so to speak, early on, is in securing a pastor in 1523. And in 1540, when supposedly this is the age of his very strong emphasis on the Pastoral Office, he's still saying you know, there are times when your pastor's not available and you need the forgiveness of sins. And if you're out in the field or you are walking to the next village and you see a fellow Christian, you go to that person and say to either him or her I am a sinner and I have this burden on my conscience, please forgive me. And the other person is called by God in baptism to pronounce absolution and to encourage you. So he didn't encourage that as a daily practice.
Speaker 3:I think in our day and age we may have to consider its use in families and among Christian friends even more actively than he did. But that was his understanding and it's not an understanding so much of even the nature of the church although it's that too or of Pastoral Office and Priesthood of the Baptized. It's fundamentally an understanding that God comes with his word, that his word is powerful, that it does stuff, and we are simply tools of the Holy Spirit. And I'm sure there are times when I have grabbed for a hammer and the hammer said oh no, the hammer still was in my hand and the Holy Spirit grabs for us and we shouldn't shake ourselves loose Because he clops so many, so many opportunities in front of us. There are not opportunities to say, hey, jesus loves you, but there are opportunities to show and talk a little bit at least about what Christ has done for us and how God is our Lord and Creator.
Speaker 4:Dr Colby, I'm getting back to the word semiotics and your reference of the tie, so I don't know if I'm thinking correctly about it. Forgive me if I'm ignorant or if I'm drawing an incorrect analogy here. But taking this back to worship, the experience of worship. A pastor comes into a worship space, he's wearing a robe and different audiences may have different thoughts about that. That may be highly desired by one audience. That may be thought of very skeptically by another audience. What are your thoughts? I think this is now getting into practically as we think about sharing the gospel and actually delivering Lutheran worship.
Speaker 3:Well, I've thought about that on occasion because sometimes when I'm here I don't have my own robe with me. And I had a good explanation Luther preached in the doctoral robe that he wore when he lectured, and so I was about to say I lecture in suit and tie and that's the way I'm preaching, but that's not a very good excuse. I think people here particularly really do need the robe, and I like the robe, frankly, because it does set what's going on apart. That's why I was the last in our congregation in Braunschweig in North Germany to give up a tie. I think Johannes Krieger has gone back to wearing one. But there's a certain dignity or was a certain dignity in worship 50 years ago where my mother wore a hat and all that sort of thing.
Speaker 3:That isn't there and that's how we say in German Unterschwellig. That's sort of beneath the surface, but it probably does play a role. I think we need to remember two things. God translates himself into human flesh. He translates the words of Jesus into Greek. We have almost no Aramaic from Jesus. The church is trying to translate scripture at the minute it sets foot on foreign soil. So we do need to translate into every cultural situation that God claims as creator. On the other hand, do you guys remember the first time you visited your spouses, future spouses, families, at Christmas? They told her we want to do things just the way Jack and Tim have always experienced it, so we won't do anything that we've done before.
Speaker 2:Remember that, that's not going to work.
Speaker 3:You've given my point already. I could tell when people come into the church. Most of the time they are seeking something different. There was a time when they joined because everybody else in their Rotary Club was a member of a church, and so forth. I think today people come generally with more forthrightly, with some spiritual longing or need, and so I think they do expect the church to be somewhat different. And so we have to pick out those ways where we are different, without confusing or offending, and those ways where we are.
Speaker 3:And I love German chorales and I love to get back to Braunschweig, although we have a lot of modern church music in our congregation in Braunschweig too. But I was a little bit disappointed by a friend who, in lecture, said well, it's not really a Lutheran service if Lutheran chorales from the 16th and 17th century are used. Well, my thought on this is that it's not really a Lutheran service in a visual age unless you have a Lucas Chronoc altar. So I'm organizing a factory to manufacture Lucas-Karler altars so we can restore real Lutheran worship. Actually, the fundamental point is genuine Lutheran worship takes place in Germany, and so I think we ought to add two years of German to our catechism classes. You understand what I'm trying to say. There are no texts without contexts and the challenge of the Christian proclamer, whether lay or clergy, the challenge of the Christian proclamer is to read the Bible in context and understand what God is saying to us through that context and express it in our context in a way that shows respect rather than makes the wearer of the tie feel good.
Speaker 2:Dr Korb, that is so well said and I agree with you wholeheartedly. We need contextual hospitality while at the same time recognizing the core of our doctrine, things that cannot be compromised, and it is the balance between going back to the five respective disciplines, if you will, of any religion. It does come down to the dance of the narrative the macro narrative of Scripture, the narrative of my context, and then the rituals that then norm how that story gets told to us. Anything more to add there? Here's one other thing that I think could be helpful for us today.
Speaker 2:A lot of times those in the ivory tower is not bad. I'm not anti ivory tower, I'm not anti those that have disciplines, such as you, historians etc. But sometimes the ivory tower can be so disconnected from colleague talk that takes place naturally in the seminary, and one of, I guess and I've not framed it this way, Dr Korb, up to this point. But one of my areas of discontent in the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod is the colleague talk with those of us who have been in a variety of contexts may not be happening as consistently as it could and should with those who are leading at our higher level institutions, seminaries and universities. Anything more to add between the narrative and then contextuality. There, Dr Korb, in our LCMS, 21st century context.
Speaker 3:Let me just say one word to that and then remind me that I want to get back to what I think might be the next step we should talk about out of the Reformation. I love it. No, I forgot what I was going to say. Just, you can edit this part.
Speaker 3:That's gone. Yeah, go ahead. Let me pick up on my point. I think that the key heart of the we're talking about, the heart of the Reformation message, what is it that if we don't identify ourselves with chronic alters? And well, my congregation in Brown-Schweig is Paul Gerhardt-Gemeinde and it's all Paul Gerhardt-Sims and you don't need more than that. But if we look beyond that, what makes a Lutheran Luther thought it was the doctrine on which the church stands, namely that Jesus Christ has died for our sins and was raised for the restoration of our righteousness. That's in the small-called articles, section 2, article 1.
Speaker 3:That use of Romans 4.25 is very important for Luther. He doesn't use it thousands of times, but he uses it at key places where he's presenting the gospel, along with John 1.29, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. But Romans 4.25, he died to take care of our sins. He rose to restore our righteousness or for our justification. He's picked up then by Luther a chapter later in Romans 6 where he says well, what kind of a life are you to lead? You can pretty much do anything you want, right? No, because that's not your identity. You are baptized. What's that mean? It means that your identity as a sinner has been buried in Christ's tomb and your identity now is child of God, walking in the footsteps of Christ, raised with Christ in your baptism.
Speaker 3:I think Paul picks up on that, maybe even in a fuller way, in Colossians 2. Well, in Colossians 1 and the first half of 2, you've got sort of a presentation of Jesus. And then you pick up with our new circumcision in our baptisms, where we were dead to sin and alive in Christ. And then, well, the most important clue, I think, after that comes in chapter 3, verse 1. Now that you have been raised with Christ.
Speaker 3:Well, paul, who said anything about being raised with Christ? Oh, you just did. You said in our baptisms we were raised with Christ. So that baptismal identity is called righteousness in Luther's day. But that baptismal identity, I think, speaks to our situation, our world in North America today, or in Western Europe as well, eastern Europe too, and the rest of the world. But this matter of you are not who you often think you are, because we have people who are really down on themselves, who are ran into a guy that was in Estonia who had on his the back of his t-shirt I hate myself and he had come to our table and mumbled something At least he's honest.
Speaker 3:Well, he went away and I said young man, and Bob Rosine was with me, my colleague and former student, and I didn't notice Bob diving for under the table. But I said young man, christ died for you and rose for you. You don't hate yourself because he doesn't hate you. And the guy looked at me confused and ran away. And Bob said that was a drug dealer. He was offering us drugs. You could have gotten us killed. Well, that's the message of Christian witness. Yeah, but at any rate, I think there are a lot of people who wish that. A lot of people say I wish I was dead. Some people really mean it and we can say I've got a deal for you. I've got a new identity that Christ is longing to give you. And then we have to struggle through all the identity questions that every parent knows take place in the first 18 years of life or however long they're with us and continue to be there.
Speaker 4:Identity has become a hot topic in society today. People feel now that identity is something that you manufacture for yourself.
Speaker 3:Well, that's true, yeah, and we just have to accept that and wait until their identities self made crash, because they all will. But that's not different from Luther's time. Luther's identity in God's sight as a young man and as a young Augustinian brother was created by his own striving to do right, and so it may be just working for the right life work balance, but it's working for the right life work balance, and so even those who think they're trying to just relax and surf through life are trying very hard to do that and they'll crash.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I don't think from our pulpits we can talk enough about identity and how that I think that's one of the huge gifts, not just of Luther but of modern day confessional Lutheranism today is this you don't hear as much of that. You may hear identity, but it comes from an intranos type of place. Find it within yourself and, whether it's in a Baptist or a reform context, a lot of times show me your fruit, necessarily, and that kind of validates your identity. No, our identity is extra-nose, it's from outside of ourselves, given to us in the waters of baptism, many of us from the earliest days that we were brought on to planet Earth, and there's never been, I guess, a sense of security. Bob, you're a lifelong Lutheran. Right, tell your story a little bit and how that kind of shaped, because, as I've come to know you, you just have this fatherly warmth and joy centered in your identity. How did your story kind of play into then your love of history and this broader story of which we're apart?
Speaker 3:No, my parents were raised one on a Norwegian catechism, one on a German catechism, although I think no, my father was confirmed in German, my mother in English, but so two slightly different branches of the Lutheran tradition. But people asked me how I got interested in Luther and I remember, probably as a three-year-old or four-year-old, seeing this huge picture on the living room wall of my uncle Pete and Aunt Peggy, of this guy holding a book with a dress on, and it was Martin Luther of course, and I knew that that person must be pretty important and I knew that he wasn't really a member of the family, but sort of almost. And then I learned the catechism. My parents drilled me in the catechism. I had an excellent catechesis, three years of pretty intensive engagement with Luther's catechism with a pastor named Luther Broine, a wonderful, wonderful guide for me. And then I actually entertained the idea of being a Greek or a New Testament prof and frankly, just didn't know what to do with the higher critical stuff.
Speaker 3:And I'd always loved history.
Speaker 3:I'm a gossip at heart and a detective very amateur at heart and so I had the opportunity to pursue history and have not regretted it at all, then went to the University of Wisconsin, had a Calvinist scholar who was just an excellent dissertation advisor and we remained friends and coworkers on the 16th century journal. And then, when I got to the seminary, they didn't want me to have too much contact with students so they sent me overseas for half of the year. They didn't tell the story quite like that, but we had a grant if we would help post-soviet churches. So my wife and I spent three months of the year for 13 years quite a few years in places like Russia, estonia, latvia and then finally in India and in Japan. I still have taught in recent years a little bit, very little bit, but a bit in Slovakia. Still this year held a lecture in St Petersburg, although that was virtual, I didn't try to get into Russia. But so I've had these wonderful opportunities to meet scholars and church people around the world and it's been a life of great blessing.
Speaker 2:Amen, yeah, and you're actually speaking to us right now in Germany, in Verdohl, and tell us about your time in Germany and how that interacts with, right now, your modern study of the preaching career of Martin Kemp's theological big brother, joachim. I'd love to hear that story but the second Luther, if you will, how Martin Kemp, that's actually shaped the Reformation.
Speaker 3:Well, joachim Merlin is a sort of well no, if you do what I have done, you can't avoid Joachim Merlin because he kept popping up. He was a student of Luther's, he was a deacon for a while during his studies at the town church in Wittenberg, and what makes him special? Two things make him special. One is that he was eight years older than Martin Kempnitz and the two became friends, and then when Joachim Merlin became pastor in Braunschweig, he drew Kempnitz to be his assistant in administering the churches in the town, and so they really formed a theology together. And Kempnitz, I think, was one of the three co-authors of the solid declaration of the formula of Concord, so really foundational for that important wrapping up of 16th century efforts to define Lutheranism. But he probably was also the most influential on the other two theologically. And so Merlin always seemed to me to be an important person who had not been much studied. I've done research on a lot of people who haven't been much studied and most of them don't deserve any further study, I'd determine. But we know something about these people anyway now. And this kept me off the streets. But Merlin's influence intrigued me, and then I discovered, as I worked into Luther's preaching and the preaching of his students that Merlin's son had gathered. They're not really. They're more than outlines. Some of them are quite long summaries, but they're not full sermons from all well, almost all 28 years, yeah, about 28 years of ministry. Joachim Merlin had 31 years of ministry, yeah, and we have sermons from 26 of those over a 28-year period. So this published documentation for his preaching on every Sunday of the church. Here you can compare texts, what he did with a text in, say, braunschweig in 1558, in four, five, six, in one case nine instances. And then you can also compare Not only all he did in on that text but all he did in 58, so that you can see how the people of Brown Shrine had certain themes developed.
Speaker 3:And there I found a couple of interesting things. Certainly Christ is the center of his preaching. The sacraments and the preached word are very important. He takes the Bible more or less for granted, because that was not a matter of dispute and he had to presume that a good many of the people that even heard him in his what we might call an upper middle class parish in Brown Shrine. There were five, six, seven parishes maybe in Brown Shrine at the time, but he had one with very influential people in it, but he preached those themes that address identity actually and the means of grace as the Holy Spirit's tools for fostering our thing.
Speaker 3:He doesn't like sin. He teaches repentance, but he doesn't get into a whole lot of detail about preaching on the commandments. I suspect he left that for Sunday afternoon when they had catechetical services. What he does preach on consistently is you are living under the cross and God has sent you these crosses to test your faith, to build your faith and so patiently endure. And there were many crosses in the 16th century, probably not any more than today. Tim might have been victim of my observing that the death rate it looks like is in Germany in the 16th century. It's going to come out to be exactly the same as the death rate in the 20th century in Germany and when most people would yeah, that is wild.
Speaker 4:I would have never guessed that.
Speaker 3:Well, actually they've determined that in the 16th century, for every birth there was a death.
Speaker 4:I get you 100% mortality rate. That's what you're getting at.
Speaker 3:Well, the experience of death was the same, but it was more open, it was more public, it was more painful, diseases were lingering. There wasn't real hunger in most parts of Germany during the life of Luther or or Marilyn, but there were times of scarcity and there were times when you didn't have all the vegetables you wanted for the winter and so forth. And there was flooding, there were fires. The first town Merlin ministered in Arnstadt, where Bach later was got his first position. The town burned 400 houses in 1581, 10 years after Marilyn's death. But a mayor insisted that a tradesman put a pitch on his roof that was straw to seal it against the rain and it needed a new pitch. And the guy said it's just too hot today. This is not going to work. And 400 houses went up in flame and the Birgermeister committed suicide.
Speaker 3:So those were the stories of daily life in Marilyn's time. And so he talks a lot about process. He wants people to be aware of their sins, but he wants people above all to be aware not only that they are forgiven, children of God, assured of life forever with God, but that they are assured of God's presence today, in the midst of their lives, and I think that's that that fills Luther's sermons as well. He's very strong on the doctrine of providence God provides. We say it's not providing what I think we should provide, but they said that in the 16th century too. So yeah, I think my study of Marilyn's sermons will be an interesting read.
Speaker 2:I love it. I love it. Well, there are things from generation to generation that are consistent. Yeah, there is sin, there is brokenness, there is suffering and trial. As you read the epistles, the Apostle Paul is coming back to the theme of suffering producing perseverance, character in Hope, romans 5. And yet we preach Christ crucified and risen from the dead, the hope of ours right now, in the present, a very present hope and a hope for the future of the resurrection of the dead in the last day. So our preaching should be very, very consistent. It's the same story, told to the same type of people walking through similar suffering, but it's still in unique context and seasons and there needs to be that contextual sensitivity as well. But the story does not change Anything more to add on our preaching task as we're coming down the close here. Dr Cole, this has been so much fun.
Speaker 3:No, you've said it so well, Tim. That's a great wrap up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so your hopes? We have many listeners who are connected to the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod or still relatively fresh from the Synod Convention which I attended, and many others in Milwaukee and I've written and spoken a fair amount about that, but not necessarily around the convention. Let's think beyond your life, and maybe even beyond our lives as well the coming generation. What are your hopes for the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod, for the coming generations, dr Cole?
Speaker 3:First of all, we always live in a cultural context, but I think to an extent that would have surprised me as a child, we have absorbed too much of the culture's fear, and fear breeds rage. Fear breeds hatred, or at least a desire to be apart from it. Just amazes me when people whose great grandparents and grandparents in some cases great great grandparents, were immigrants, how they can be uptight. Well, uptight is not the right word I want to use, but who, after thinking through all the challenges and fears that are justified with with incoming immigrants, that still don't see that the gift of hospitality is a gift of the Holy Spirit and there's an openness that challenges us really to repeat the experience of German and Norwegian and Swedish and Finnish Lutherans after World War Two, where we leading recipients of immigrants came from German speaking lands for the most part, but came to the United States. So if we can get beyond that cultural captivity that I think the church always falls into and that's part of the whole life of the church is a life of repentance and then I hope we can, addressing what Jack mentioned before return to a firmer public conviction that Jesus Christ died for our sins.
Speaker 3:God pronounces us righteous. His absolution is a recreative word. We don't have to go to Eastern Orthodox theories of divinization or whatever. We really in Wittenberg have the best way of expressing Pauline, johanne, isaiah truth, that our identity comes through God's claiming us as his child in Christ and everything that Lutherans have always taught about that and conveyed through the word that actually has power. That's a key idea that we didn't talk much about today. And then, I think, the whole spirit of mission that possessed the Missouri Synod in the 19th century, even though we got a late start on doing mission outside the United States, we had tremendous mission inside the United States but that we really are eager to bring the word of God and the forgiveness of sins and the new identity in Christ to those around us. So I hope that's the shape that I think the Synod can reclaim and reclaim out of its Lutheran heritage and identity and not fall victim to these tendencies to find security and hierarchical leadership or in ritual performance.
Speaker 2:Very thoughtful. So good, Dr Cole. Thank you.
Speaker 4:Oh, my goodness.
Speaker 2:You say what I say in a much more eloquent way, dr Cole, then hopefully, as I gain years in wisdom, I will say it in the same way. To summarize the confession of Christ crucified is not going to change from us If we cease to declare Christ as crucified. We become something other than the Orthodox, historic, confessing church connected to the apostles and the prophets. And yeah, this is just a very, very unique time. I really believe, dr Cole, the Missouri Synod, you know we're on our best days. Hopefully we hold our theology with an open hand to those within the wider evangelical world.
Speaker 2:I know you've rolled, as have I, in a number and I don't think we have to be afraid of interacting with our brother and sisters, interacumenically, from Catholic to charismatic.
Speaker 2:We can have this open handed, you know, sacramental, highly scriptural, just, narrative posture toward our brothers and sisters. And if we can't have the conversation with love and charity in our unique context in the Missouri Synod, what chance do we have to reach across our denominations in the American Christian, the global Christian church let alone? Our number one call is to declare Christ crucified to those who have not heard and been baptized in the name of Jesus. So it really does start at the core of who we are as confessing Missouri Synod Lutherans and just Dr Jack Price, now late great Jack Price, member of this congregation. One of his favorite phrases that I heard if we're going to move forward with love and charity, we must disagree agreeably, dr Colby, and I think in some strands, in some pockets of the Missouri Synod, and social media does not help toward this end we are not disagreeing agreeably Anything to close with on the tone and tenor of our conversation together theologically, dr Colby.
Speaker 3:Well, I just go back to my mentor, really, who gave me my interest in the formula of Concord, robert Price, and and he is placing the confession at Augsburg in the context in which it really took place, a context of ecumenical conversation, and then seeing it as a call to mission, to reaching out to the entire world, but first of all to brothers and sisters in Christ. And you just can't have a really good conversation when it begins with your slapping the brother or the sister in the face. You know, I have a friend who said you should probably treat other people the way you'd like to be treated yourself, and you know that friend had a lot of wisdom.
Speaker 2:Yes, he did, yes, he did Just. This should be hardwired into us. And yet the fall has really done a number to us. And now we love to compete and compare and contrast. And so, yeah, this relational attachment. We've been having a lot of conversations around relational attachment. Just had Reverend Dr Justin Hanaman on, who's a good friend and contemporary of mine, and just working through a lot of the neuroscience of connectivity and things. I'm praying. I'm praying we can be more hospitable and charitable and that becomes the automatic, the rule and norm for our interactions together as the people of God and you model that, dr Colb interact humanically and within the Missouri Synod. So, so well, and it's been a humbling experience to have you on our podcast. I'd love to have you back again somewhere down the line, because we talk about the performative, the powerful work of the word of God. I know you have a lot to share there, so I put a pin in that. We'll come back to it. But if people want to connect with you, dr Colb, how can they do so, brother?
Speaker 3:Well, I just have never found time to do Facebook and Twitter, and I mean the fact that I know they exist is already progress for me. So I would say KOLBR, kolbr at CSL ConcordiaStLewisedu and you can maybe run a little things booms underneath, we can do all that, but I sometimes I'm a little slow in getting to emails. I have been the last couple of days. But I get to them and so sometimes people have forgotten what they were writing about when they asked the questions. But I get back to people and I enjoy that because it gives me glimpses into the life of the church that in my ivory tower. You're right, I disconnected. When I am in the United States and in Europe, then I'm really disconnected. But no, so please write.
Speaker 2:Hey, we need the ivory tower and those who have done what you have done, then bless to serve and lead and shape the thought life of the church. And we need the grassroots, all of us together being the body of Christ, using our unique gifts and our unique context. So, thank you so much, dr Kohl. This is lead time sharing sharing is sharing.
Speaker 2:Please like, subscribe, comment wherever it is you're taking in podcasts, whether it's YouTube, spotify, itunes, google Podcast, wherever it is, you can also share from those platforms as well with a friend who needs. We wanna go a deep dive into history. We need to reclaim that love for history where we've come from, so that we can root ourselves in the present and dream big dreams to multiply disciples into the future. It's a good day. Go and make it a great day. This is lead time. Thanks so much, dr Kohl. Jack, wonderful time, thank you, thanks.
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