Joel D. Biermann > Quotes

“This is the case even among those considered to be conservative and evangelical thinkers. Stanley Grenz once asserted, “In this manner the Christian vision of God as the social Trinity and our creation to be the imago Dei provides the transcendent basis for the human ethical ideal as life-in-community. Consequently the reciprocal, perichoretic dynamic of the Triune God is the cosmic reference point for the idea of society itself.”[5] But the obscurity and debate that continue to surround the imago Dei or “image of God” hardly serve as conclusive proof that God intends the divine reality and being somehow to be normative for humanity. Mercifully, not all theologians have adopted this misuse of the trinitarian reality. Richard Bauckham quite rightly observes that “true human community comes about not as an image of the Trinitarian fellowship, but as the Spirit makes us like Jesus in his community with the Father and with others.”[6] The hard fact is that neither Scripture nor the Lutheran Confessions ever offer the mystery of the trinitarian Godhead as the model or even a model for Christian living or the shape of Christian life. As the saying goes, “God is God, and you’re not.”[7] The Christian life is shaped not by God’s trinitarian nature as model, but by God’s revealed word and work in us.[8]”
― Joel D. Biermann, A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics

“Therefore, if you encounter someone with a worthless tongue who gossips and slanders someone else, rebuke such people straight to their faces and make them blush with shame. Then those who otherwise would bring some poor person into disgrace, from which one could scarcely clear one’s self, will hold their tongue. For honor and good name are easily taken away but not easily restored.”
― Joel D. Biermann, A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics

“Also central to Luther’s ‘evangelical breakthrough,’” Kolb writes, “was his discovery of what makes the human creature ‘righteous’ or right, that is, truly human.”[18] To be righteous is to be all that one was intended and designed to be. Thus fulfillment of humanity takes place on two planes: passively before God, and actively before humans. Kolb puts it this way: “Luther realized, however, that what made him genuinely right in God’s sight had to be distinguished from what made him truly human—genuinely right—in relationship to other creatures of God.”
― Joel D. Biermann, A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics

“The righteousness over against this [actual sin] is actual, flowing from faith and essential [or alien] righteousness.”[53] Thus the third kind of righteousness has its source in the second kind of righteousness and describes the believer’s growth in holiness: “Because that third righteousness is sought for nothing other than that original sin be overcome and the body of sin be destroyed.”
― Joel D. Biermann, A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics