The Teutonic Knights

Last updated on: August 3, 2010 at 5:00 am By Gene Veith

We’ve talked about the Hospitallers, aka the Knights of Malta and–in Bo Giertz’s novel by that name translated by Cranach commenter Bror Erickson–the Knights of Rhodes. You have already heard of the Knights Templar, with their mysterious and allegedly occultic secrets and their alleged ties to the Masons. There is also another order of monks who fought wars: the Teutonic Knights. Now they are in the news, as the remains of their original Grand Masters have been discovered in the Polish town of Kwidzyn, which was once the Prussian city of Marienwerder. The skeletons will be buried, with great ceremony, in the cathedral, though not without controversy, the Teutonic Knights having pretty much ravaged Poland, while also using the sword to bring Catholicism to the Baltics:

The remains were discovered in the cathedral’s crypt in 2008 and identified by DNA and other testing as being those of Werner von Orseln, the knights’ ruler from 1324-1330; Ludolf Koenig von Wattzau, who ruled from 1342-1345; and Heinrich von Plauen, from 1410-1413.

Next to the coffins will be plastic replicas of what the men are believed to look – long-haired men draped in cloths – based on a 16th century mural in the cathedral, said Bogumil Wisniewski, a city archaeologist.
Fragments of original gold-painted silks found on their skeletons are being displayed separately.

The Order of the Teutonic Knights of St. Mary’s Hospital in Jerusalem was founded in the late 12th century to aid German pilgrims in the Holy Land. It evolved into a military order whose knights wore trademark white coats with black crosses. Later, they forcefully brought Christianity to swaths of northeastern Europe and ruled an area near the Baltic Sea coast in what is now northern Poland.

via Poles hope deadly knights will now bring some good.

They too, like the Knights of Malta, combined combat with running hospitals. The order still exists, though without the military dimension to their good works.

How does the doctrine of vocation apply to these military orders?

Premium Content

So who’s the spy?

Last updated on: June 30, 2010 at 6:00 am By Gene Veith

0 Comments

FBI arrests 10 accused of working as Russian spies. Instead of targeting the government, though, they targeted private institutions, such as think tanks, as a way to get an inside look at American policy. I wonder if there is a mole in the Heritage Foundation or if the Russians have infiltrated the more liberal Brookings Institute. (Would they be more interested in conservative or liberal think tanks?)

But what I’m thinking is that the Russians have assigned a spy to the Cranach Institute, which is a think tank devoted to Christianity and culture, with a special emphasis on the doctrine of vocation. Like other think tanks, we have sponsored conferences and research. That means that we must have a spy on this blog!

How else can we explain the range of perspectives here and the continually-surprising diversity of the people who comment here? We’ve got atheists, gnostics, playwrights, artists, economists, musicians, gays, liberals, conservatives, and you name it reading this blog and taking part in productive discussions. I throw out a topic, no matter how obscure–theoretical physics, archaeology, high end mathematics–and a bunch of bona fide experts weigh in and start arguing with each other. How could that be unless we are being monitored? How could that be without some kind of post-communist plot?

So who do you think is the Russian spy? tODD is on the liberal side and J leans pretty far left, but that would not get them far in Putin’s new Russia. FWS is too open and transparent for the espionage business. But what kind of name is Vehse? Or Lars?

Since the FBI has busted your ring, you might as well confess and say what subversive information you gleaned from this blog.

Premium Content

The sacramental imagination

Last updated on: June 7, 2010 at 11:53 am By Gene Veith

0 Comments

A common notion in studies of Christianity and the arts is “the sacramental imagination.” It goes like this: Christians with a high view of the sacraments believe that spiritual realities are mediated by means of physical things. Christian artists with those beliefs, therefore, can easily employ images derived from the material world in order to communicate their faith. This is also why so many Christian artists are Roman Catholics, a church whose sacramental theology encourages this kind of imagination.

That may be. But it occurred to me–while contemplating that “Luther and the Body” article I blogged about earlier in the course of this road trip that I’m still on (driving long hours giving time for just thinking)–that Lutheran sacramental theology offers a basis for this sacramental imagination more than Roman Catholicism does.

The Roman Catholic view of Holy Communion teaches that the physical bread and wine is no longer present. We receive Christ’s Body and Blood only. We perceive the “accidents” of bread and wine, their appearance, but the only “substance” is that of Christ. This take on the physical material reality seems to be more that of Eastern monism–that the physical realm is an illusion–than an actual affirmation of the physical as a vehicle for the spiritual.

The Lutheran doctrine of the Real Presence, though, teaches that the bread and the wine, in their physicality, are still present, as is the actual Body and Blood of Christ. (Again, don’t call this “consubstantiation,” which is the Roman Catholic attempt to explain this teaching in terms of their own “substance” and “accidents” distinction that Lutheranism rejects.)

The mode of Christ’s presence is explained not in terms of different “substances” but in terms of “the ubiquity of Christ.” That is, just as God is omnipresent without displacing the existence of other objects, Christ, because of His personal union of the divine and human natures, can be, in His body, present in bread and wine. Not that He is in the Sacrament only in the sense of God being everywhere, but in a unique sacramental union in which He is present specifically through the Word of the Gospel, his body and blood being given and shed “for you.”

Now, this kind of teaching first of all is going to encourage those who believe it to think of God in Christ as being not far above the universe, looking down, as the imagination of many Christians has Him, but, rather, as being very close. God, of course, is both transcendent and immanent, but the latter often gets minimized, which it can’t in Lutheran spirituality.

Furthermore, Lutheran theology also teaches the presence of God in vocation. (It is God who gives us this day our daily bread through the vocation of the farmer and the baker; God milks the cows through the work of the milkmaid; God creates new life by working through mothers and fathers; vocation is a mask of God, etc., etc.) This again encourages people to see the spiritual dimensions of the physical world.

For artists, it means that not only physical images can manifest the spiritual realm, the very act of creating–whether by paint, words, film, or whatever medium one’s vocation involves–manifests not just the presence of God but His activity, that He creates by means of human creation.

Premium Content

Martin Luther’s Body

Last updated on: May 28, 2010 at 5:40 am By Gene Veith

0 Comments

I was browsing through the library, when imagine my surprise when I saw the latest issue of the American Historical Review with a big picture of Luther and Melanchthon on the cover. The lead article is entitled “Martin Luther’s Body,” focusing on how fat he was (contrasting to the skinniness of the medieval saints) and on how his language, thinking, acting, and theology were all so physical.

The article is alternatively humorous (as when the author discusses and defends Luther’s scatalogical language), absurd (discussing the social construction of the body), and insightful (relating Luther’s physicality to that of Lutheran spirituality, with its insistence–against both Catholicism and other Protestantism–that Christ’s presence in the Sacrament is physical and in physical bread). She also notes Lutheranism’s embrace of the physical realm, in its relatively positive views of sex, food and drink, the body, and earthly life (what we would call “vocation”). The thing is, the scholar seems to get Luther and Lutheranism!

Like most scholarly journals, this one is only available online with a subscription, but here is a description from the journal’s press release:

Lyndal Roper takes a fresh look at Martin Luther in the April 2010 issue of the American Historical Review, focusing on the way depictions emphasizing Luther's “monumentality” and his own relationship to his body informed the theology of Lutheranism.

“This was a man whose body was fundamental to his personality,” writes Roper, a fellow and tutor in history at Balliol College, University of Oxford. Unlike saints and other pious figures, whose thinness illustrated their aversion or indifference to the temptations of the flesh, Luther’s stoutness was an unmistakable feature of his iconographic representations, she notes. . . .

In “Martin Luther’s Body: The ‘Stout Doctor’ and His Biographers,” Roper explores the way Luther constantly referred to the body — and specifically his body — in his writings and pronouncements, especially in the famous Table Talk.

Rather than seeing his preoccupation with the body as a character defect or neurosis, she proposes that Luther “offered a religious worldview that did not separate soul and body but incorporated a robust, redoubtable, and often mucky physicality.” Luther’s physicality — “his bulk, his digestion, his anality” — was intrinsic to his theology, including his views of the devil, she writes. Portraits of “the stout doctor” during and shortly after his life helped establish the emerging identity of Lutheranism.

via AHR for April: Luther’s body, suicide in Africa, the state in South Asia: IU News Room: Indiana University.

Premium Content

Classical Lutheran Education

Last updated on: May 13, 2010 at 6:00 am By Gene Veith

0 Comments

The Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education celebrates its tenth anniversary with its tenth annual conference in Concordia, Missouri, June 22-24. In addition to all kinds of workshops on curriculum, teaching, and catechesis, the plenary speaker will be Rev. Thomas Korcok of the Lutheran Church of Canada.

He has done some remarkable research for his doctorate on classical education in the Lutheran tradition. I’ve seen it. He shows how the classical liberal arts were key to Luther’s whole educational project, including the teaching of the doctrine of vocation. He also shows how the Reformation impacted the liberal arts. He then traces classical education through church history, including the schools established by the Lutheran immigrants in America, from C. F. W. Walther through the Lutheran educational system of the not-t0o-distant past to the revival of classical Lutheran education as represented by the CCLE today.

Rev. Korcok will be giving three plenary lectures, and I know they will be really good. I’ll be talking about an integrated humanities curriculum I’ve been working on, the new volumes of the Omnibus series from Veritas Press.

The conference will be held on the campus of St. Paul Lutheran High School, the last of the Missouri Synod’s boarding schools, a little ways from Kansas City.

Homeschoolers, schoolers, teachers, pastors, and anyone interested are all welcome.

Go here for more information and to register: The Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education :: Home.

Premium Content

The ultimate persecution

Last updated on: April 26, 2010 at 6:00 am By Gene Veith

0 Comments

I was at the Congress on the Lutheran Confessions in Minneapolis last week, giving a paper on how those confessions teach the doctrine of vocation. I had to zip in and out, missing most of the conference (though it did prevent me from posting anything on Friday). Still, I did get to hear a paper by Rev. Fredrik Sidenvall of Gothenburg, Sweden, entitled “Confessing the Faith in an anti-Christian Culture.” It was about the woeful state of Christianity in Sweden, in society but more importantly in the state church. Rev. Sidenvall is involved in the confessional underground in that country. He actually didn’t make it to Minnesota, his flight being grounded by that Icelandic volcano! Still, his paper was read for him, and I got a lot out of it. I’ll be posting samples of what he said.

Early in his paper, he said that even worse than living as a Christian in an anti-Christian culture is living in a culture where Christianity is tolerated. He cited a quotation from Luther: “No persecution is the ultimate persecution.”

Why is that so?

Premium Content

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was Moses' wife?

Select your answer to see how you score.