It’s where I wanna be

I’m going to post a excerpt from a blog entry by Carl Trueman over at Reformation21.  I recommend the post. It’s a good read and the introduction to his discussion on Luther’s feelings about what it means to be a “theologian.” Some pretty convicting stuff for the book loving, nitpicky academic nerd I am. Want to have that fire that Luther had over the Word of God.

Theology, like mathematics or biology or literary theory, represents just another object to be studied.  It has become a technical exercise, divorced from the character and identity of the practitioner, a matter simply of learning the techniques or the rules of the game.  In this context, theologians like to think of themselves often as nice people, as socially acceptable, as aspiring to places at the cultural table, as being accepted by others.

But this was not so for Luther: the theologian was one who had been seized by the Word, gripped by the address of God, whose very identity was determined by the this prior address of God which then compelled and shaped any response he might care to give. This process was agonizing, existential, redefining at the most fundamental level the person’s own self-understanding as the huge gulf that exists between Creator and creature in all of its terrifying glory comes home to the theologian and drives him again and again out of himself and to the cross where hangs the Incarnate God.  A theologian — a true theologian — was one who, through agonizing struggle was driven again and again by the Spirit to wrestle with the text of scripture so as to discern its meaning, and then communicate that meaning in the power of the Spirit to others.

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