Deshidratación de lodos

One of the perpetual theological debates takes place over Paul’s conclusion to the logic of rejoicing in suffering in which he describes God’s love: ‘‘God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5 translation altered). Lutherans like Johann Agricola (1494–1566), Andreas Osiander (1498–1552), Albrecht Ritschl, Paul Tillich—

so different in many ways—have attempted a common project, following the model of Augustine, to make God’s love fit human love. The many schools of Roman theology followed this line as well, seeking to match desire (eros) to its proper object (caritas), so that theology became ‘‘educating desires’’ to strive for the higher, spiritual goals more willingly than the lower, animalic ones. Often this project is expressed ontologically—as a return to the original,

“natural” fit between Creator and creatures. The theory is that an unfortunate break due to sin occurred in this natural arrange-ment, and Christ is used to mend and restore the primitive arrangement. It is primitivism that uses ontology to fit God and sinners—not the cross, and it does this by laying out being in a hierarchy of loves. The modern Lutheran classic on this theme was Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros (1953) in which he observed that Augustine misused Romans 5:5 ‘h` avga,ph tou/ qeou’ as an objec-tive geniobjec-tive (love for God) that forced love back into the legal scheme.⁵ Humans are by created nature lovers, Augustine argued, but what they love will either elevate humans or cause them to fall in relation to God. When God gives the Holy Spirit, it means that he infuses the love of higher things—charity—in man, and so the real import of Paul’s argument was taken to be how the human boat of love becomes ‘‘righted,’’ or righteous amid troubled waters.

This interpretation dominated Christendom because it fit into

the deepest desire of sinners, which is to be righteous in the self by law. Augustine went so far as to replace Paul’s verb ‘‘poured out,’’ for his ontologically correct verb ‘‘poured in,’’ thus complet-ing the transfer of God’s love to humans.

Ever more subtle versions of this reversal of love were tried, including the most important among Lutherans that was attempted by Osiander, one of Luther’s students, who ignited one of the great Lutheran controversies over his theory of ‘‘divine indwell-ing.’’ Christ’s divine essence of love was poured into the Christians so as to overwhelm the lower, human love with its righteousness as a drop of water is overwhelmed by the sea. Osiander thought he could then rid faith of all the forensic talk of ‘‘reckoning or imputing’’ (and even rid the church of the public declaration of absolution—since there was no limit to such profligate forgive-ness) by declaring that what mattered in the Christian life was an ontological indwelling of Christ. That indwelling was imagined to displace all that is not Christ (and so evil)—by the sheer power of his divinity, on the principle that where Christ’s divinity is, no sin can reside. This mysticism of Christ’s indwelling by the divine nature was merely a theory of justification by love. It was repudi-ated by every type of Lutheran—those who followed Melanchthon (Philippists) and those who sought to follow Luther (Gnesio-Lutherans)—eventuating in the third article of the Formula of Concord (1580). The problem that they all saw was that Osiander bypassed the forgiveness of sins in the preached promise of Christ.

Many are the attempts to establish justification apart from a preacher, and the biggest temptation is to create a theology of love that displaces lower loves of bodily desires (eros) with higher loves of the spiritual kind (caritas).

Nygren pointed out that Paul was not interested in the recla-mation of human love of God. He was interested in God’s love, for which he uses the special term agape alone with the verb ‘‘poured out’’ because this was exactly unlike human love—and remains ever opposed to human love. Nygren emphasized the difference between divine and human love so that there is a break between these, a fracture, that will never be healed because it is not love, but Christ himself, who mediates between creature and Creator. God is not true love’s goal; God is the one who acts—alone—to make the unjust just. What Nygren was not as clear about is how this

phrase in Paul is the fulfillment of Joel 3:1, and the pouring out of the Holy Spirit. For this we need to know precisely what kind of love God’s love is. Nygren noted that human love is always directed to some other object, but ends up lodged in the ego or self—

whereas God’s love is sui generis; it does not have an external object that draws it, but rather it is entirely based in God’s own self. This is not quite correct. God’s love is free, that much is true, and no object, law or nature outside God draws it out without his free choice. However, what God chooses to love is precisely, and inex-plicably, his direct opponent—his enemy—the unjust sinner. God loves not just from himself, but he loves shit. There is hardly an elegant way of putting this, as Luther often found in his preaching, but the principle is announced without crudities in his Heidelberg Disputation’s final thesis 28: ‘‘The love of God does not first discover but creates what is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through attraction to what pleases it.’’ This sentence marks the break with Augustine, neo-Platonism, the various schools of Roman Scholastic thought, and therefore the end of the legal scheme when it comes to love. To Nygren’s argument, we simply add that God loves not because of desire, but because he is the one who creates out of nothing, that is, who raises the dead. His love, strangely, kills the object before it creates it.

Reconciliation is not just between Creator and creatures; it is exactly between Creator and sinners—while they are sinners, ungodly, and enemies. This happens by Christ’s cross, not by an adjustment to the human love mechanism. Paul has in mind the arrival of the promise of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit ( Joel 3:1) by which a new heart would be given (Jeremiah 31:31).

It is a common mistake to think that the heart needs only a better object to love, or more encouragement to actually do it.

However, what is truly needed is a completely new heart, created by the love of God because God is pleased to do so on account of his Son—not because there is anything of enduring value in the heart of the sinner. Boasting in a hope that is not yet seen is exercising a freedom of speech that the world does not know by means of suffering God’s love—not being attracted to it—and that rejoicing is none other than ‘‘we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation’’ (Romans 5:11 NRS). Our justification is an alien

righteousness—belonging always to Christ—from start to finish.

Our justification is outside us in the form of a preached promise, and is never a legal possession of the heart. Therefore the Holy Spirit is not given as an experience of power to be used in this old world, but is in the form of a down-payment (Romans 8:23, 2 Cor 1:22)—it remains an objective pledge that our hope will not shame us, even when we look at ourselves and constantly are ashamed. The free gift is not like the trespass (Romans 5:15) because it is not possessed, or ‘‘in’’ the old creature—Christ’s unity with the sinner is not available by ontological or mystical means like those attempted by Augustine, Osiander, and this neo-platonic line in theology. When Paul says that the gift is not like the tres-pass, he is exorcising the legal scheme, which wants to make any gift from God equal to a trespass so that Christian life is simply wiping the slate clean, and starting over with the hope that a free will might choose the right thing to love the next time. It is too slight a change to think of orienting the desires to their proper goal; God’s love destroys desire and in its place is the sole, active God doing what a creator does. Luther once tried to express this eschatological shift from the legal scheme’s depiction of love to God’s creative power in the sixth stanza of his hymn on the Lord’s Supper (Jesus Christ our Savior): ‘‘God is not enlarged by consecra-tion, nor used up in the change, nor divided in the fracconsecra-tion, but fully God standing at full stature.’’ God is not the one who is changed in the bread and wine, the sinner is, and the change is more radical than sinners could possibly want, since it puts you to death.