A new volume from Synoptic Text Information Services takes up a question the Seminex literature has raised for fifty years and never finished asking.
Synoptic Text Information Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the publication of Atonement in Seminex: Case Study of Robert W. Bertram, by T. R. Halvorson.
Everyone who has read about the 1974 walkout at Concordia Seminary knows the issues: the inspiration of Scripture, historical criticism, the confessional principle of church fellowship, and Gospel Reductionism. Fewer have noticed a claim that keeps surfacing at the edges of that literature. Kurt Marquart said that von Hofmann’s Law and Gospel brew replaced inspiration and atonement together, and that the same approach was being commended again in America. Scott Murray and Ken Schurb pointed to the 1973 synodical resolution observing that the faculty majority’s own defense document had said nothing of vicarious satisfaction, substitutionary atonement, or the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. Roy Askins said the storm reached the parishes and eroded confidence in the atoning work of Christ.
Four men, writing separately and on different grounds, said the atonement was under attack. None of them was writing about the atonement. The assertions were left where they lay.
Halvorson’s judgment is that the claim was more than hinted and less than proven, and that the remedy is not more assertion but case studies. Identify figures who genuinely represent Seminex. Find out what they actually taught about the death of Christ. Compare it with the Lutheran Confessions, Luther, and with the dogmaticians of Lutheran Orthodoxy. Then say what each case establishes, and what it does not. With enough cases studied, the matter stands a chance of being resolved.
Robert W. Bertram is the first such case, and a well chosen one. His colleagues picked him to speak for them. His students made him their information clearinghouse during the Seminex investigation. He sat for questioning before the Fact-Finding Committee in 1971 and spoke at the New Orleans convention in 1973, edited the 1966 Festschrift in which the disputed hermeneutic of Seminex was first published, co-founded the Crossings Community with Edward Schroeder, and traveled for the Lutheran World Federation and Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue. His doctrine of the atonement can be followed across four decades of his own writing, from the 1964 University of Chicago dissertation to the 2004 tribute to Gerhard Forde, and it changes remarkably little.
Chapter 1 makes the research proposal. Chapter 2 establishes that Bertram is a representative of Seminex. Chapter 3 surveys Bertram’s atonement writings. Chapter 4 states Bertram’s atonement theology as a single positive construction, with the terms that hold it together and the six reasons he gives for saying that our sin was truly Christ’s own. Only then does the examination begin, and the examination is conducted against sources rather than against slogans: a synoptic statement of what the Confessions teach, Theodosius Harnack’s survey of Luther’s corpus and Jack Kilcrease’s selection from it, the pages of Luther that Bertram himself cites, and the dogmatics of Quenstedt, Calov, Hollaz, and Pieper.
The author’s verdict is stated as a tragedy, in the strict sense of the word. He uses a football analogy for it. Bertram takes the kickoff in his own end zone and drives the length of the field, and what we see for ninety yards is admirable. The trouble comes inside the ten. In Bertram’s account the Law condemns the “blessing” in Christ, overreaches in doing so, and by that overreach discredits and annihilates itself. The Law is never fulfilled. Nothing is rendered to God. No righteousness is acquired for the believer to stand in. Lutheran Orthodoxy had already distinguished the two possibilities by name, abolition on one side and fulfillment on the other, and had said which one Christ came for.
Halvorson is careful about what a single case can carry. One man cannot stand for Seminex in its entirety, and the book does not claim that he does. What the study establishes is that in this case the four observers were reporting something real, that their assertions stand to the evidence, and that further case studies are warranted. The question remains under-researched. This volume is an argument that the research should continue, and a demonstration of how it can be done.
He is also generous to his subject, which readers will notice. He credits Bertram with achieving tragedy, which is by far more than many do. Bertram, he writes, stated his own confession forthrightly and in gentlemanly ways, took the risks for his convictions, paid the price by exile, and submitted his theology to examination by publishing and teaching it. Many who hold similar views, Halvorson observes, will not publish them. Bertram did.
