God's "Yes" and "No" to Humanity

Good stuff from Stephen Nichols:

I know it is summer time, but here is a quiz. It’s only one question and it’s fill in the blank. Ready? Christology is by nature bound up with the doctrine of _________ ?

This sentence comes from lectures given by Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the University of Berlin in 1932. After that year, the Nazis would rise to power in Germany. Bonhoeffer would lose his license to teach and eventually become the director of one of five underground seminaries to serve the Confessing Church—a church that rose up against the German Lutheran Church, which had embraced and endorsed the Nazi party.

Now back to the quiz. Here’s Bonhoeffer’s answer: “Christology is by nature bound up with the doctrine of justification.” This sentence comes from his lectures on twentieth-century systematic theology. He began the last lecture, which he entitled, “Preaching,” with a simple but urgent and ultimate question, “What should we preach?” We must preach Christ, he declares. Preaching Christ means nothing other than preaching the gospel. Preaching the gospel means, and only can mean, preaching the doctrine of justification.

Pulling a page from Luther’s playbook, Bonhoeffer speaks of how the cross is God’s “No” to humanity and to any attempt to achieve salvation, to attain righteousness. The cross slams the door on any and all attempts to merit salvation, to merit God’s grace. The cross is also simultaneously God’s “Yes” to us. Through his active and passive obedience, Christ has achieved for us what we could not. Christ died for the penalty of sin, enduring God’s wrath. Christ fully kept the law as the perfectly obedient Son. At the cross, Christ both undid what Adam had done and did what Adam could not do. “This is the reason,” Bonhoeffer says, “for the cross.” We have no hope without it.

Continue reading.

Life and Death in Wichita

The Chicago Tribune ran an article by Al Mohler on the murder of George Tiller in Wichita. Mohler addresses the moral reasoning of those who would use violence to dispatch an abortionist.

Mohler writes:

The murder of Dr. Tiller was a grotesque denial of the sanctity of human life. This is not a cause that can be served by violence in any form. The abortion procedures employed by Dr. Tiller are horribly violent. Proponents of abortion want to keep the nation’s attention diverted from what abortion really means—and especially from what happens in a late-term abortion.

That violence is what we desperately want to see end. For this reason, the violence that was murderously deployed in Wichita requires us to be first in line to make clear that violence in the womb will never be overcome by means of violence outside the womb. Dr. Tiller’s murderer has blood on his hands, and he has bloodied the cause of human life and human dignity...

In 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested for his opposition to the Nazi regime. The Lutheran pastor, a prominent leader in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church, had been involved in espionage and an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. This pastor and theologian sought to defy the regime that was murdering the Jewish people and destroying human life with homicide on an unprecedented scale. Bonhoeffer acted in defense of human life, and for this he was executed in the Flossenburg prison camp in the final days of World War II.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposed abortion with full force. In his Ethics he explained: “The simple fact is that God had certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.”

Read the entire article HERE.