First Things RSS Feed - Carl E. Braaten

Encomium for an Evangelical Catholic

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 06:00:00 -0400

Robert Jenson was my closest friend and collaborator for sixty years. We first met when we were both students at Luther Seminary in St. Paul in the early 1950s, though we did not become friends until we were both graduate students at Heidelberg University in 1957. We met virtually every week during that one year, with our spouses, Blanche and LaVonne, eating and drinking together, while coming to terms with the great theological minds and issues of that era: Bultmann’s demythologizing, Barth’s dogmatics, Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison, Tillich’s systematics, Ebeling’s hermeneutics, Rahner’s neo-Thomism, the Lundensian theology of Aulén and Nygren, and the revival of confessional Lutheran theology undertaken by Peter Brunner and Edmund Schlink at Heidelberg University. That year we also met Wolfhart Pannenberg, who at that time was head of a circle conceiving a new theology of “revelation as history,” beyond Barth and Bultmann.

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A Harvest of Evangelical Theology

Wed, 01 May 1996 00:00:00 -0400

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Protestants and Natural Law

Wed, 01 Jan 1992 00:00:00 -0500

It is a longstanding commonplace in Christian thought that Protestantism distinguishes its moral theology from that of Roman Catholicism by its rejection of natural law. The idea of natural law has long formed the spinal column of Catholic social teaching. Modern Protestantism, by contrast, has no comparable coherent framework for grounding its social thought. As long as ago as 1891, on the occasion of the publication of one of the great documents of Catholic social teaching, Rerum Novarum , the Dutch Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper conceded the Protestant disadvantage: “It must be admitted to our shame that the Roman Catholics are far ahead of us in their study of the social question. Indeed, very far ahead . . . . The action of the Roman Catholics should spur us Protestants to show more dynamism . . . . The Encyclical of Leo XIII gives the principles which are common to all Christians, and which we share with our Roman Catholic compatriots.”

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God in Public Life: Rehabilitating the “Orders of Creation”

Sat, 01 Dec 1990 00:00:00 -0500

The intent of this essay is a rehabilitation of the Lutheran idea of the “orders of creation.” That might seem to many an impossible task, something like trying to raise the Titanic. It is certainly a dangerous task, because it draws one into an area of Lutheran theological ethics that some German Lutherans under Hitler managed to give a bad reputation and that Karl Barth in fact identified as the rotten core of the Deutsche Christen ideology. It must be fully acknowledged that the idea of the orders of creation played into the hands of the Nazi ideology of Blut und Boden. But the misuse of a Christian belief is insufficient cause to dispense with it. It is difficult to think of any Christian doctrine that has not at some time been subject to misuse. The Fascists of Spain had a fighter plane that bore the insignia “Christ the King.” If misuse were the criterion of elimination, the whole of Christian dogmatics would have to be abolished.

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