A Time for Confessing

by Robert W. Bertram Eerdmans, 240 pp., $30.00 paperback reviewed by Frederick Niedner

Academic circles sometimes include a giant who publishes relatively little despite the pleading of students and colleagues. Such a figure was Robert Bertram, whom longtime colleague Edward Schroeder calls, in his grateful foreword, "the most unpublished Lutheran theologian of the twentieth century."

Bertram taught theology for 50 years in Lutheran institutions, including Valparaiso University, Concordia Seminary (St. Louis), Christ Seminary-Seminex and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He published dozens of articles and prepared even more public lectures. However, when he died in 2003, Bertram left only one "book," a dissertation that engaged Karl Barth's critique of Luther, and a handful of larger projects with which he never quit tinkering.

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Throughout these theses, one detects the foundational assumptions and methods that derive from Bertram's intense engagement with Luther and the Lutheran confessional writings. God's communicating through law and gospel, the crucified Christ as the Word of God, honoring Christ's death and the comfort of penitent hearts as the signs of genuine gospel—all these permeate and enliven the sequence of theses that address the current theological scene.

Dialogue between Barth and Luther also emerges as crucial. Barth criticized Luther for fixing theology on God's relationship to humankind, as though God cannot be understood apart from involvement with and even vulnerability to creatures. Alternatively, Barth worked to understand God "in himself," without regard to flesh-and-blood entanglements. To Barth, therefore, Christ functions as a revelation of God's eternal election, and his death becomes less a saving event than a sign that humans have always been saved but simply did not know it. This "revelationist half-truth," Bertram suggests, permeates a goodly share of current theology.

For Bertram as for Luther, God is deeply involved in both judging and romancing the world and humankind. Drawing strongly on Romans and the reconciliation imagery of 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Bertram probes the gospel of Christ's entry into the plight and place of those whom God has abandoned to their sins and perversions, paying little mind to the strongholds of the righteous who need no physician, so that the former, when they come to the end of their rope and breathe their last in utter abandonment, find themselves, to the surprise of everyone, in the company of the crucified Word of God. In this company there is hope—and plenty of work to do.  more