This paper maintains that at the heart of the post-Reformation debates over the extra Calvinisticum lies the question of what it means to name God’s presence in the world – that is, to say where God is. Because the Lutheran position insists that there can be no proper identification of God’s presence in the world that does not take its bearings from talk about Jesus’ presence, it serves as a means of preventing Christian God-talk from becoming detached from the flesh-and-blood (...) realities of human existence. In this way, the denial of the extra Calvinisticum is a corollary of a theology of the cross – that is, the principle that talk about God is normed by the concrete reality of Jesus. At the same time, the Lutheran genus maiestaticum is rejected as making just the sort of move to which Luther himself objected in the doctrine of transubstantiation: a metaphysical explanation of Jesus’ presence in the world rather than a simple appeal to miracle. (shrink)

Jennifer Herdt argues that Luther’s account of human ethical action implies an absolute passivity before God that both leads to psychological paralysis and fails to appreciate the non-competitive nature of the relationship between divine and human agency. This article argues that neither accusation can be sustained. Not only does Luther’s work lack any evidence of the paralysis Herdt ascribes to him, but Luther’s understanding of the relationship between divine and human action reflects a more theologically persuasive understanding of the distinct (...) modes by which God relates to human beings in creation and redemption than does Herdt’s nature-grace framework. The passivity of the human agent in Luther simply reflects the communicative situation in which Christian moral agency follows on hearing of the gospel, resulting in a model of moral formation in which the focus is on the good of the neighbour rather than one’s own ethical qualities. (shrink)