Mechanical issues

I often hear Lutherans speak of God “working forgiveness” through sacraments. This phrase puzzles me. When I forgive someone, I don’t “work forgiveness” through some external means—repeatedly, no less—and apply it to them, as though forgiveness were a substance or lotion to be worked into them. The language feels mechanical and foreign, as though forgiveness were impersonal, an object to be dispensed, rather than a relational act. I struggle to understand the mechanism behind this description—is forgiveness something given into someone, for someone, or of someone? What exactly is happening here?

Similarly, when I encounter scholastic theological discussions about Satan, I find they describe Satan as having no access to minds or material reality—and yet they don’t seem to realize that this renders him effectively powerless to influence the world, despite Scripture clearly portraying him as the “ruler” of this world. If Satan has no access to either mind or matter, then what does it mean to say he has power or influence?

Thomas Aquinas’ solution, namely, the idea that Satan can influence the imagination or sensitive appetite without accessing the mind or manipulating the material world, is contradictory. If imagination and appetite are tied to the body, as Aquinas suggests, Satan’s supposed ability to influence "local motion" in bodily processes collapses because, by his own rules, Satan cannot manipulate material things. This creates a self-defeating explanation where Satan somehow influences humans without ever touching the mechanisms that make influence possible.

Scholastic theologians try to overcome this dilemma by portraying Satan’s powers as so nuanced, and so abstracted, that he is sort of magically nudging souls without interaction, or manipulating whole systems or cultures. Of course, none of that is possible without interaction with minds or matter somewhere. In the end, I find that whereas scholastic theology therefore limits Satan to an almost entirely theoretical realm, disconnected from the reality of Scripture, the Bible speaks plainly of Satan working in the world.

Let’s consider how we define faith for a moment. Lutherans especially will speak of faith as though it were a person with agency and a will of its own. They’ll say “faith grasps Christ’s gifts…” Why? For fear of taking credit. But faith can’t do anything; people do things. Out of fear of saying the wrong thing, then, they end up teaching utter nonsense (literally sentences that have no meaning).

Whether we’re talking about God, forgiveness, or Satan, or faith, there seems to be a tendency to reduce these realities to impersonal forces with mechanical rules and frameworks. God is spoken of as unchanging in a philosophical sense, as though His relational nature is swallowed up by abstract immutability. Forgiveness is described as being "worked" like a lotion. Satan is portrayed as a powerless abstraction, despite biblical evidence to the contrary. Faith is personified. Again and again theological moves are made and doctrines are penned and preserved by traditions within our churches for fear of something that would be destructive either to faith or to a theological system if it were to emerge and spread.

A confessional Lutheran (or a Roman Catholic for that matter), may object that the Church has long used such frameworks not to obscure, but to safeguard the mysteries of the faith. For example, when Lutherans speak of forgiveness being “worked” through the sacraments, they may emphasize that forgiveness is not merely a human action but a divine gift, objectively applied through means chosen by God. It is precisely to avoid reducing forgiveness to a subjective feeling that we speak of its externality.

Yet with this sort of explanation our scholastic Christian friends tell on themselves; a spirit of fear motivated them to make these doctrines; at the source we find a doubter’s paranoia, not a Christian’s metanoia.

I’ve said it before: These are not only failures of reason, but they’re products of anxiety, not Christian peace. Anxiousness about what people would do with Christian freedom isn’t just nonsensical but it’s sinful! It stakes-out boundaries and new laws where there weren’t any before—in the name of preventing people from crossing the true boundaries of orthodoxy.