23 August 2009

Am Enjoying

the Köberle, but has anyone ever thought of offering a condensed version stripped of all the interaction with totally outdated German philosophy??? Hurray for Walther in realizing that some of the developments post-enlightenment are just not WORTH dealing with. I notice that both Köberle and Bayer deal with Kant and company only to write them off. Why not just IGNORE?

8 comments:

Rev. Charles Lehmann said...

I think the answer may be yes. I think Pr. Hans Fiene in Denver may have done so. I'll send him a link to your post and see what he says.

Pastor Fiene said...

What Pr. Lehmann says is most certainly true. Or rather mostly certainly true. I've started a project of this nature with Koeberle, but haven't finished it. My goal is to finish it by my 30th birthday, as that's how old the Koeberle was when he wrote it. Which depresses me.

Weslie O said...

Walther wasn't really concerned about being a scholar; my two cents.

mlorfeld said...

Isn't that essentially what the first part of Spirituality of the Cross is?

My one criticism of Koeberle is his rejection of the third function of the law. Some can read him and go the antinomian route... though I do have to say I am a bit sympathetic (or maybe empathetic is the better word) in the distinction of gesecht and gebot.

Rev. Paul Beisel said...

I got completely the opposite view of Koberle on the use of the Law. I was refreshed to find someone who actually treated the Law in a positive way.

Christopher Gillespie said...

I agree. Köberle's treatment is helpful.

Pr. Weedon's critique is similar to the criticism I hear of Pieper's Dogmatics. It's also similar to the motivation given for the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics series. Yet, I wonder if a treatment of the topic is possible without contrasting it to error, whether ancient or contemporary?

Unknown said...

Many philosophers (and theologians) leave too big of a mark on public theology to be ignored, lest the church community become completely isolated. I recently read Gerhard Forde's "Law-Gospel Debate" which went a long way to explaining how he arrives at a few of his assertions and emphases in his other writing and preaching.

Forde's apparent rejection of the "third use" is one that somewhat baffled me, as the focus of his writing is often the use/uses of the law. "Law-Gospel Debate" finally explained why that was the case (although it was his first published book): it's all about Karl Barth.

Barth's theology became in many aspects "the" public theology for a time, but Forde's work was an attack on Barth's view of Law-Gospel that Forde found to be not only against the Lutheran Confessions, but also a distortion. (i.e. for Barth, the "Third Use" became the "Real Use")

Bibliophile said...

One thing to remember about Kant is that he so impacted the general public with his philosophy that Koeberle, and others, needed to attack what he was saying so others could see the error.
It is the whole reality of a philosopher's views filtering down from the academic world to the real world and giving us the changes brought on by such movements as modernism and post-modernism, etc.
I too enjoyed reading Koeberle and took him the same way that Pr. Beisel understood his use of the law.
Rev. Benjamin Pollock