History

Some days if you let your mind shift a little bit while watching the news or reading the paper you actually have to laugh.  That is one of the reasons that comedies usually have something of the news in them.  Saturday Night Live skits were at their best when they faked the nightly news.  The Onion takes this kind of humor to the extreme.  History, someone once sad is written by the winners, today it seems written by the whiners.  Anyway we are coming up on the anniversary of the Reformation.  The Reformation happened 500 years ago in 1517.  We are starting to get glimpses of the histories that will be written and the news that will be put out as we lead up to this event and of course the whining and the rewriting of history is starting.  Luther has been blamed for everything from the Nazi’s to Communism, from Postmodernism to the anti authoritarian mood of the day.  Some have even accused him of being responsible for the belief that developed a few years ago that the Bible is true “in the eyes of the beholder”.  I heard that old saw again the other day.  It has been going on the for years.  Here is one response to it.

“ If is one of the ironies of history that Luther of all people, Luther the thoroughgoing ‘incarnationalist,” should so often be portrayed as the patron of the historical-critical dissolution of Biblical substance. . . . We have here a remarkable echo of Luther’s realization that the Gospel narratives are not simply histories but are “Sacraments,” that is, “sacred signs through which God works in believers” that which the histories mean. Unlike secular histories, which are ‘dead histories and histories of the dead,’ the evangelical history is God’s living instrument through which God imparts all His riches in Christ, justifies, renews, and saves us. In other words, the Gospel not only reports what God has said and done ‘then and there’ in the past, but it actually conveys God ‘here and now’. – Kurt Marquart, “Central Lutheran Thrusts for Today,” Concordia Journal, Vol. 8, No. 3 ( May 1982) p. 86f.