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FACE TO FACE: How Lutheran Theology is Meaningful for Today's Christian Living with Dr. Robert Kolb

Unite Leadership Collective

Unlock the secrets of Martin Luther's profound theological insights with our special guest, Dr. Bob Kolb. Join us as we explore the evolution of Luther’s understanding of the devil's multifaceted role in the Christian life, through his intriguing concepts of the "black devil" and "white devil." Discover how these ideas reveal Satan’s cunning strategies to lure believers into hedonism or self-righteousness, and why anchoring our identity in Christ's love and grace is essential to resisting these pervasive evils.

Dr. Kolb and I also dissect Luther’s groundbreaking approach to preaching, enriched by the I-Thou relationship philosophy of Martin Buber. Learn how Luther’s use of personal storytelling breathed new life into biblical narratives, making them strikingly relevant to his Saxon audience. We compare Luther’s critical yet engaged view of the world as a divine gift with the Anabaptist’s tendency towards separation, shedding light on the modern-day challenges faced by the Lutheran Church in preserving spiritual integrity amid cultural and materialistic pressures.

Finally, we delve into Luther’s intense self-awareness and his journey from a works-righteous theology to a liberating faith in Christ’s grace. Dr. Kolb provides profound insights into Luther’s unflinching honesty and the crucial role of sacraments in his life as tangible assurances of God’s promises. We conclude with reflections on the lasting impact of Luther’s teachings on the Lutheran Church, emphasizing the timeless importance of justification by grace through faith. Don't miss this compelling discussion that promises to illuminate your understanding of theology and its enduring relevance.

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Speaker 1:

I love that topic of not doing theology alone. Not just can we do theology in community with the people in our congregation and other leaders, but we're always face-to-face with the Word of God and authors who have come before us like Luther. So I loved your section. One of my favorite sections, dr Kolb, was on Luther face-to-face with the devil a very Lutheran thing to talk about. He has a lot of work and he is very obstinate. He is rebellious against Satan and his assaults over and over again. So define what I found really interesting I may have read this back in the day, but I forgot Define the black devil and the white devil in Luther's theology. I thought this was fascinating.

Speaker 2:

Actually, before we go there, I want to give you a little historical note.

Speaker 1:

Please.

Speaker 2:

I was absolutely surprised when, about five years ago now, I was writing a commentary on Luther's freedom of a Christian Wrote that in 1520, so less than three years after the posting of the 95 Theses, and so things were just really heating up. But he hadn't been excommunicated and he hadn't been outlawed at this point. So he's writing what I think is one of the most important expressions of his theology, and he's talking about how difficult the Christian life can be because of sin, the wrath of God and death. And so I'm writing along and typing that up and all of a sudden it occurred to me that the devil's not there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, where's the devil?

Speaker 2:

Right how vital the concept of our battle with Satan really is for Luther. So where was Luther in his thinking when he's doing one of his most important treatises and doesn't remember the devil? Then I started looking back in the 15 teens and he mentions the devil about as often as scholastic theologians in the late Middle Ages did, which is almost never. That's too strong, which is relatively seldom. So when does the devil really start to come into Luther's writings? About 1522, 1523, 1524, after he's been outlawed, after he's been excommunicated, after there's a price on his head, then the devil becomes quite real. But I think also it's not just that circumstance. I think it's also the growing realization that the book is dedicated to talking about. It's the realization that reality is personal, that reality is relational, and an abstract concept of evil just doesn't do justice to how serious the opposition of evil is, because it's not only systems, it's not only all sorts of impersonal factors, the weather that destroys our homes and so forth, but it is the very person of Satan, of Satan. And so he takes Satan ever more seriously as a very clever opponent.

Speaker 2:

And that's where the white devil and the black devil come in. Sometimes the devil just says look at how much fun it is to just do naughty things, and draws us into plays on our selfishness, especially our selfishness, our desire for self-satisfaction. But then Luther's also well aware of the so-called white devil. The devil who is very pious and who wants to cultivate a sense that we really need to be working on pleasing God. And that devil comes to religious people day in and day out and says just think of how good you are, god certainly will bless you because you're good, not because he's good. And so there's that two-front war that continually goes on in the life of the Christian.

Speaker 1:

And Luther made that also a very personal and relational kind of thing. The longer I go into life and ministry and maybe this is to Luther's point the more I recognize the evil, the potential for evil within me and around me, and that's ever present today. And that's ever present today. There's just things that we know internally, bob, are good and right and the world calls them bad, and vice versa, and so we are always prone to the hedonistic, passion-filled tendency and then, once we begin to justify ourselves, we become the Pharisee, we become the self-righteous, and the old things that we used to battle we no longer battle.

Speaker 1:

Satan just flips, doesn't he? He wants us to feed into those passions the flesh, and then he flips and plays on our pride. This is the journey we can call out his tactics. It's very, very evident and I'm speaking as one who knows right. I know that journey. It's within me, these are the temptations, and so if I'm not living face to face with Christ and his love, his mercy, his grace, my identity in my baptism, unless that isn't like the driving beat of my heart, his love and mission to just save me from me and from Satan's place upon me. So anything to say about how Satan is attacking today, either in your life or even in the world. How do you see him face to face today, bob?

Speaker 2:

In this country. We observe, as Luther did already in his day, the 10th Sunday after Trinity, where the gospel lesson is our Lord weeping over Jerusalem. We observe it here as Israel Sunday. Cephas' description of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, was translated several times in Luther's time and was part of the piety that one took seriously the fate of the good people of God who were Jewish, who did not recognize the Messiah. And so, as I was preaching on that, I brought up the German-Jewish-American political philosopher Anna Arendt and her observations on Adolf Eichmann's trial, in which she said he was not a monster, he was like the grocery store manager down the street, which means he's like us.

Speaker 2:

And I had to admit then that even before I had read Hannah Arendt and her concept that evil is just I don't know how you say it banal or banal I had thought about the fact that my relatives might not have left Thuringia for the United States in the 1860s and I could have been born there.

Speaker 2:

And had I been 15, 20 years older, I could have been at Auschwitz.

Speaker 2:

I could have been persuaded that somehow this was necessary for the German people, that the Jews had deserved it, things that are abhorrent to me now because of my context, wouldn't perhaps have been abhorrent then, and I might have gone to church on Sunday and worshiped Jesus and been able to do some of the most horrible things in the history, certainly of the German people, and we've got some other black marks on our record. So, somehow or other, that realization of exactly what you're talking about, that either in my piety or in my compromise with the culture and with the world, um, I sin, are we committing that we don't recognize as sin and that just simply means that we have to throw ourselves on the mercy of Christ. Isn't that it? Because some of those sins, because they are white, devil sins, are just beyond our grasp. So I think that Luther helps us a great deal in seeing that the personal relationships are not just with the Creator but with those who want to destroy his creation, both human and satanic.

Speaker 1:

External and internal. External assaults against the church and our internal killing of ourselves because of our faulty piety, our pride. Satan is quite wily. Let's call him revealing God face to face for the hearer. Would you speak about that and you can even link that to hey, I hear a lot of voices in the world and even satanic lies the preacher's role in revealing God's truth to the hearer, bob.

Speaker 2:

Luther revolted against the priest as the one who brought Christ to be sacrificed again on the altar. The whole understanding of the priest as key to the layperson's salvation, because he was the one who distributed God's grace and his help contributed God's grace and his help. So Luther discarded that and he really did open up the priesthood of all the baptized. There are people who dispute whether Luther used that phrase all that much, but he certainly had the concept. He talked about all the people in Wittenberg being ready to forgive one another's sins in the name of the Father, son and Holy Spirit when others needed it. He said confession and absolution belongs first of all to the pastor, but it's certainly a matter of God's word of forgiveness, not a matter of the office of ministry. Word of forgiveness, not a matter of the office of ministry.

Speaker 2:

So Luther really changed the role of the pastor from priest to a preacher and that's why he emphasized education so much and wanted to improve the education of pastors. Though that took a whole lot longer than we usually admit and there were many more forms for educating pastors than we like to recognize. But at any rate, the whole idea of the preacher being there to actually bring God's choice of his people to reality, by proclaiming the word of forgiveness, by bringing the law as well as the gospel, so that we have not only our own reading of scripture, our own sense of the need for repentance, but also the word of the preacher and the help of the preacher to be reminded that we need daily to die, to sin and to be raised up as God's people. So it works without the sermon, but it's weakened without the sermon that you hear every Sunday. But it's weakened without the sermon that you hear every Sunday. And that puts a terrible burden on us as ministers of the Word, but it's a burden that the Holy Spirit helps us bear.

Speaker 1:

And it's one of the most important channels through which the Holy Spirit works. There's something that is well. It's God at work that is divinely. There's way more mystery to God and the Holy Spirit. I mean God has revealed himself, to be sure, but let me just get in. I mean this last Sunday I'm preaching Bob and I get the privilege of preaching to just an amazing group of people on fire for the Lord. They need his word. They're collectively humble and sent on mission collectively curious. Love, luther, love, you know.

Speaker 1:

But to preach to a sister in Christ and I won't use a name that I know, I know her story, you know, not all of it, but some of the harder parts of it. And getting to speak words of you're known, you're seen, you're loved, you're forgiven by the God of the universe because of the person and work of Jesus. Saying those words which we say in various contexts, but like saying it personally, face to face with her and the group of you, maybe 150, 200 people in the room. But the Holy Spirit kind of calls me to look face to face in her eye and to see just the relief in her face, the emotion in the face, just in the clear proclamation, I mean there was a part of me that's like who?

Speaker 1:

who am I like in the midst of proclaiming that? Who am I that I get to say this to her? You know, I am not, I am nothing, but yet God is at work through me. The mystery of the, the, the way the word works and changes human hearts and calls her up, calls her up into the presence of God, calls her out into a life of meaning and purpose, sins forgiven, anything about the mystery of proclamation, bob, just off the top of your head.

Speaker 2:

Well, the term mystery is one that Luther didn't use all that much, but he used it in some very key places. He saw, for instance, the mystery of our humanity. What does it mean that we're created in God's image? That means as speaking and responsible, thinking, willing, emoting individuals, and yet at the same time, the Holy Spirit is totally in charge of these things. I like to talk about the two responsibilities. So I'm not sure it's really the right terminology, but God's responsible for everything and he makes us responsible for everything in the sphere of our own lives. The latter is Luther calls law and the former gospel.

Speaker 2:

But there's that factor, as you were talking, I can recall back when I was preaching more regularly in a congregation, when I was in St Louis, or actually in St Paul, minnesota, most weeks of the year, which hasn't been my case for a long time now.

Speaker 2:

But I not only saw that sense of relief in some faces, but I saw how uncomfortable some of my particularly law preaching, but even sometimes gospel preaching, was making people whom I knew fairly well.

Speaker 2:

That's the joy of being a pastor rather than being a professor you are talking on a regular basis with your own people, but at any rate, the reactions and the poker faces.

Speaker 2:

That's a reaction too that once you get to know the people, you can read. Yes, that dialogue that you have when you're a proclaimer of the word is, as you say, a privilege that you just can't compare with with anything else, I think, because you are bringing God's word in to people's hearts, into people's hearts, and you know I don't want to know what percentage of most of my sermons any one individual has heard, but they all have heard a little bit. And I know from remarks that I get, not only at the door but later in conversation, that the Holy Spirit takes things that the preacher says and drills them into people's memories so that sometimes for a week, sometimes for a decade, they'll be taking those words along with them, and so you can get a lot out of reading the Bible at home, of reading other devotional literature. But it's that dialogue that you get when the congregation is there gathered to hear the Word that plays a special role in Luther's understanding of how the Church works.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, let's go into that. Bob Luther's view of dialogue and monologue in his teaching, preaching and writing. I mean, luther takes the task, he speaks God's Word, say against his own sin or against Satan, and he's very verbose about it, both in his writing and in his preaching and teaching. So talk about his use of dialogue and monologue a little bit more deep.

Speaker 2:

I don't know enough about medieval preaching to know exactly where he got that, whether that was already there in models for preaching that he had. But it's very interesting. He'll be expositing a text and all of a sudden he's not discussing the text as the theologian who's looking at the page, but he's reproducing a conversation. It may be between God and the congregation, occasionally not often, but occasionally between God and himself, between Satan and the congregation, or between Satan and the writer of, let's say, st Paul or St John. So he's got this sense of creating dialogues but also monologues. God may come into conversation and he doesn't say God says, he says God says to you, to you, yes, and so he's putting words in God's mouth addressed to the people of the congregation, and that's just an exciting way of preaching.

Speaker 2:

I think the I-thou relationship that Martin Buber talked about, that Gerhard Ferdi stresses in his theology for proclamation, that's definitely. I don't know that Buber got it from Luther, but he might have. He was a German, jewish philosopher and he may well have known Luther, but certainly Ferdi got that from Luther and that's, I think, what makes Luther such an interesting preacher. He must have been just a joy to hear because he makes this personal relationship come alive from the pulpit.

Speaker 1:

Talk a little bit about how Luther would invite and we may have spoken about this in previous podcasts, but the listener to use their imagination to find themselves in the story before you, in the midst of the story, and that was a very unusual thing, I think, for medieval preachers to do. Is that correct, Bob?

Speaker 2:

I think that's correct. And he does quite a bit of that, not only in his preaching but also, for instance, in his lectures on Genesis. He knows that Abraham's time was vastly different. Where that's particularly clear is when he talks about Joseph and Joseph's ability to get the Egyptians to put away seven years of grain. He said no government in the German Empire could get away with that. Our people are just too hardheaded and stubborn and they wouldn't let the government take their grain. But Joseph was so persuasive so he knew the difference between then and now.

Speaker 2:

But he also knows that God's the same and that human nature is the same, both the nature of our sinfulness and the nature of our faith and trust and how that produces the Christian life. And so he talks to childless couples in Wittenberg about Abraham and Sarah's dilemmas, Abraham and Sarah's dilemmas. And he talks about how Mary must have felt alone and struggling with this strange message that she was going to have a child, and so forth. And so he brings the text into Saxony and he takes the Saxons into ancient Israel. But one thing he doesn't do Eastern Orthodox theology, for instance, uses an icon to take us out of the earthly and into the heavenly realm, and for Luther it's always. The heavenly realm comes to us. Jesus was made flesh. He's the word made flesh and he's here and now. And the past is the past, but it produced the promise that shapes the present, and so there's that sense of how history works in Luther that is quite different from the theological traditions of certain other parts of Christianity.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's wonderful. Let's piggyback on that into Luther's tension-filled perspective toward the world as both friend and foe. You use that kind of language. What was he? Talking about there, around the world. And I think to set this up. I think this is more well. It's very, very applicable to the role of the church in the world, toward the mission of God today, so, so helpful. So yeah, let's go deep in terms of Luther's tension-filled view of the world, friend and foe.

Speaker 2:

He was not an Anabaptist, I might say H Richard Niebuhr, who was a professor at Yale, brother of the more famous Reinhard Niebuhr in my grandparents' generation. He had a classification of five relationships that the church has with the world around it, and one was Christ against culture, and that's the Anabaptist move. And I fear that that kind of spirit may be infecting us as we recognize that we're no longer in the establishment, we're no longer in charge. The nation isn't really listening to us, at least in terms of morals. Never did listen to us, I suppose, in terms of the gospel itself, and that's not where Luther is at all. He's very highly appreciative of the fact that God gives gifts in every culture.

Speaker 2:

And so he believes that we are at home in this world. He believes that we are at home in this world even though heaven is our home. But this is our father's property and we ought not to surrender it to the squatters. So we fight to preserve the good things about our culture, always impressed by how pastors could use Dostoevsky, tolstoy, a whole range of Russian authors, because everybody in the congregation knew that Russian tradition of great literature. So Luther is very appreciative of God's gifts in the culture. But, like everyone who is appreciative of what our own family has here, luther was able to be highly critical.

Speaker 2:

When we abuse what God has given us in our culture, then we need to be repentant and we need to let the rest of the culture know that this is no way to do it.

Speaker 2:

And so it's difficult for us because we've always been we haven't been establishment, I suppose, in North America, but we've been always in tune with the Puritan establishment and that's gone. History has moved on, we're not there anymore and we're not going to return there. So I think there Luther can stimulate our thought and help us appreciate both our need to praise God for cultural gifts, and we've got many of them in the United States and in Western culture in general, and also to be critical when our culture departs from that, worried about the fact that our nation has become dedicated to a false concept of freedom that arises out of our individualism and a false concept of what life the good life is that arises out of our materialism, and so I think we need to be highly critical of both. It's very difficult for people in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod because most of us, or many of us at least, have become upper middle class, and that's a terrible danger for our spiritual welfare.

Speaker 1:

Well, I agree. And it leads us to our last question. This is so fun, Bob. Thank you for your generosity of time. Luther's view of self-awareness and the ability to be critical of self, to let the law come face to face with us. And so how did he speak face to face with himself and self-awareness in general, Bob?

Speaker 2:

self-awareness in general. That was difficult. For one thing, his personality was such that he was not able to put up with any fault in himself. I mean, he had a very strong works-righteous theology from early on and therefore he really stressed his need for repentance and he knew his repentance was never enough. So that was a strong factor in his self-awareness.

Speaker 2:

But it brought him then to realize that his person was absolutely secure in the arms of Jesus, absolutely secure in the arms of Jesus, that Jesus had really made him a child of God and that parents don't give up on their children. And so he was confident that the Holy Spirit was pursuing him into every mistake and failure that he made and fetching him back into a wholesome relationship with his creator and his redeemer. And so that sense that I am free to be honest with myself. That's very difficult for us because we're all into self-justification in one way or another. But Luther knew that he couldn't justify himself. But Luther knew that he couldn't justify himself, and so he recognized that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ had given him that righteous status as child of God in God's sight. And so, with that kind of security, his repenting of his sin was open and as honest as a person I think can ever be, and that was freeing, that was liberating for him because he knew he rested in Christ's arms.

Speaker 1:

Well, let's close, I got to piggyback on that. Is this why Luther is so adamant about the sacrament of baptism in the Lord's Supper, Bob One of the reasons why the means of grace, word and sacrament became so profound in his life.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I think so, because they were. I think he thought of God as a multimedia communicator not his term. But God communicates that promise not only in oral and written forms, but also in sacramental forms. But also in sacramental forms, he uses the visual, the tangible, to reinforce what the oral is saying, in both the baptismal promise and the for you of the Lord's Supper. And so he sees God as bombarding us with his promise of new life in Christ from all sides.

Speaker 1:

This is the one and only Reverend, dr Bob Kolb, I really, really am grateful for you. How the Lord made you fearfully and wonderfully, made your mind to be so curious and to be one of the most profound, prolific Luther historians and systematic theologians today, bob, you're a gift to the church. This is the book Face to by Robert Kolb, martin Luther's view of reality. And where can people find it? It's from Fortress Press, it's anywhere books are sold, right, bob?

Speaker 2:

I think, so I think so. I don't live in the internet like my students do, but they somehow knew about it before I knew it was coming out.

Speaker 1:

That's so good, so good. Yeah, bob, we made it. Technology held out and thank you. Thank you again. We'll be in touch, if you're open to it, man, once a year or so. It's just we need to connect with you.

Speaker 1:

Continue to do what you're doing, speaking into the church. You are and I use this in the best sense of the word, really, and there's a number of these folks today but a prophetic voice into the Lutheran Church, missouri Synod, to keep us balanced, focused on the main thing, to keep us humble, to keep us radically dependent on the extranose reality, reality and to let Luther speak in fresh ways. For us today, he still speaks. Why? Because God still speaks.

Speaker 1:

Not everything Luther wrote is like, oh you know, but man, the movement that he was about of, centered in the mission of God, centered in justification by grace, through faith, centered in the extraneous reality, was it a messy movement some 500 years ago? Absolutely, it's still messy today, but the best. The reason I'm a Lutheran is because I believe it's a true exposition of. I believe the book of Concord, which you helped to edit, is a true and right exposition of the never-changing inspired word of God and it points us to the core God's love for me in the person and work of Jesus, claiming me as His own in the waters of baptism, forgiving me of my sins through the Lord's table, proclaiming His Word over me through the hearing of His Word, and then sending me out as an ambassador of reconciliation, sending out all of the priesthood, as carriers in our various vocations, missionaries in this day and age.

Speaker 1:

Let the people know hey, there's a lot of kings and kingdoms in the world. There's a king who's come. His name is Jesus and he's reigning over all things and he's going to be coming back very, very soon to make all things new, repent and believe the gospel. Any closing comments? Bob, this has been great.

Speaker 2:

Well, apart from your exaggeration when you talk about me, what you just said is just a beautiful summary of what I hoped to do in the book. So thank you for that that wrapping it up so nicely.

Speaker 1:

The honor is mine. This is Lead Time Sharing. It's caring, Like, subscribe, comment wherever in the interwebs. Bob, people take this in. They're blessed by you and if you like what you hear, please share it with a friend and encourage them. We need more Lutheran systematic historical theologians today, and maybe this will inspire you to pick up this book and go deeper on your own journey to bring Luther and really God face-to-face with a world that desperately needs him. It's a good day. Go and make it a great day. Thanks so much, Bob.