Gmail - Braaten/Jenson CHRISTIAN DOGMATICS - jacobthanni@gmail.com

Gmail - Braaten/Jenson CHRISTIAN DOGMATICS - jacobthanni@gmail.com

Vince
to Confessing-Chr.

show details 10:44 PM (11 hours ago)


Reply


It was a real labor of love fort Carl - Braaten - - he so believed that we needed to center our theology again - he was not a 'dogmatic' person, a brilliant thinker, passionate about the Gospel and about the mission of the Church (and his The Flaming Center on mission is a good read, I highly recommend, a church body not centered in mission is like a fire without a flame - it can't exist, mission is the flame).

Its been a long time since I read it - and I never knew Jensen, I knew his usual partner, Gritsch, but I never met Jensen.

Carl was a bit used to be revered as kind of a out in front theologian in Lutheran (and, of course Christian) circles and he was, he was very cutting edge (as well as being very grounded, hence a two volume dogmatics, which is why we loved him) - except on one thing... I don;t think anyone will forget the senior seminar he was leading in 1977 when he made the comment that no human being is fully human unless they are married. Now granted Carl loved his wife and what a passionate love match that was but that making the particular into the universal led to quite an explosion in the seminar which he did not expect, especially the passion with which many of his students had when they exploded. Not sure Carl ever did get it. He was really befuddled by the firestorm.

But other than that - I look at what I just wrote and everything I have written has using fire-y metaphors and that is how it should be with him because the Church and its mission burned deep within him - so it is not a two-volume set of dull academic dogmatics by someone who thinks we have not intellectualized the Church enough, it was written to be foundational so that all of our mission (the Church) would be centered in Christ and would be that light in the world rather than some dull institution preserving privilege.

And to anyone who ever talked to Carl in the refectory knew, any conversation with him would be alive and it would be theologically grounded, no sloppiness allowed. I thank God he was my teacher - I really do thank God for that - he was such a force fr the Gospel.