Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift

Indhold og kolofon DTT 2023-2

Johanne Stubbe Teglbjærg Kristensen — 2023-09-18

Forord

Johanne Stubbe Teglbjærg Kristensen — 2023-09-18

Den Danske Folkekirkes Bekendelsesskrifter

Johanne Stubbe Teglbjærg Kristensen — 2023-09-18

In this article, we consider methodological challenges and promises for a contemporary Lutheran engagement with confessional writings. We approach the confessional writings of the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church as both well-known and strange or even uncanny, and we consider five methodological issues in regard to their possible theology: (1) Their “difference and unity”, (2) their relation to the practice of the Danish church and their possible identity as “law”, (3) their relation to theology and academia, (4) their context(s) and genre(s) and, (5) their histories and function(s). Through this consideration, we argue for emphasizing the differences of the writings and for a conception of their unity as a seemingly paradoxical, but in fact reasonable, open and dynamic structure of differences. This implies an open, transformational or eschatological, “both-and” structure concerning their content and function; they are not perceivable as an abstract unity, not a law, not pure texts, not expressions of a single genre and not purely conservative documents. However, they also cannot be identified only as purely separated entities, powerless practices, unrelated and arbitrary, but through their differences, practices, contexts and histories, they expose new coherences and continuities. Through this, they contribute to confirmation and transformation of relations and events and they are, in this specific sense, writings for the future. They raise questions concerning contemporary conceptions of God, world and self and they indirectly contribute to answers beyond both the binaries and the totalities of the modern and postmodern situation.

Retfærdiggørelse som troens indhold og teologiens norm

Christine Svinth-Værge Põder — 2023-09-18

Among the Confessions of the Danish Evangelical-Lutheran Church, the Augsburg Confession plays a special role as the one which, together with Luther’s Little Catechism, expresses the Lutheran identity of the Danish Evangelical-Lutheran Church. Among the Augsburg Confession’s articles, article number four has traditionally been considered the center of the entire confession and thus seen as an expression of the basic content of faith and hence also as the norm of theology. If one looks at the later, modern and contemporary Lutheran discussions of article four more closely, they concern above all discussions about how the connection between the content of faith and the norm of faith should be understood. In this contribution, we affirm the importance, depth and contemporary relevance of this discussion and propose an open interpretation that does not reduce Lutheran theology to a matter of either content or norm, but rather asks about the context of content and the limits and possibilities the methods of theology.

Konkordiebog og Kirkeordinans

Rasmus H.C. Dreyer — 2023-09-18

The Book of Concord (1580) is the normative collection of confessions in the worldwide Lutheran Church. The present Danish Lutheran Church is an exception due to Danish King Frederik II’s rejection of the Book of Concord in 1580. This article reviews the historical background for the Book of Concord and especially the history and theology of the Formula Concord. It pays special attention to the use of Luther and Confessio Augustana (Invariata) as theological authorities in Formula Concord. In Denmark, Philippist theology was the predominant way of thinking theology in the late 16th century, yet it is not barely the contrast to a presumed Gnesiolutheran biased Formula Concord, which can explain the Danish rejection of Book of Concord and Formula Concord. Denmark already had a collection of confessions, a corpora doctrinae, the article argues, in form of its Church Ordinance (1537/39) (co-authored by Wittenberg-theologian Bugenhagen) and i.a. the Niels Hemmingsen authored legislative documents, De Tabella de Coena Domini (1557) and the Foreigner’s Articles (1569). Furthermore, Danish foreign policy was to a greater extent than the other Lutheran countries bound by an expectation of Catholic reaction and for that reason the need for a pan-Protestant alliance. In this way, the Danish process of fixing a Lutheran confession resulted in a more pragmatic way of being a confessional Lutheran church and state.

Den Nikænske Bekendelse og homoousien

Carsten Pallesen — 2023-09-18

This article discusses the Nicene Creed with special regard to the concept of homoousios (consubstantiation), which Jean-Luc Nancy recently has claimed to be the defining moment of Western philosophy and the self-deconstructive dynamic of Christianity. While Adolf Martin Ritter, Pier Franco Beatrice, Christopher Stead, Heinrich Dörrie, Eberhard Jüngel, Thomas F. Torrance, and others provide theological and historical accounts of the Nicene Creed, this article explores a possible contemporary philosophical interpretation of the Nicene homoousios as the concept of the “concept” in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Science of Logic. Michael Theunissen’s social philosophical reconstruction of the Hegelian “concept” as a theory of communicative freedom articulates the strong identity of the self and the other as two distinct moments implied in the Johanine word: “for God is love” (1 John 4, 7). The homoousios should be construed as the unity of freedom and love beyond indifference (Gleichgültigkeit) and dominance (Herrschaft) in Hegel’s critical account of metaphysics. Homoousios, then, is the normative ideal and signature of modernity, which in Hegel’s philosophy of the Spirit indicates the movement of the concept from substance to subjectivity as the self-movement of divine love.