# Lutheran and Reformed Traditions - Dr. Cooper



## JM (Sep 21, 2020)

Dr. Cooper discusses the differences between Lutheranism and the Reformed faith with an emphasis on the sacraments as the dividing line. If someone doubts their faith Lutherans point to their baptism and claim Reformed Christians must point to their (subjective was the impression) faith in Christ, which could ultimately lead to a crisis in faith if the Reformed Christian doesn't see _fruit _in their lives. 

According to Dr. Cooper the Lutheran understanding is grounded in the universal atonement of Christ. I thought this video was interesting enough to share and Cooper is a nice enough fella. Earlier this year I read Dr. Cooper's work, "The Great Divide" and found he often relied on classic Arminian arguments that have already been refuted. Sure, Dr. Cooper plays with the Greek a tad more and places more emphasis on the sacraments, but ultimately I found it to be run of the mill. 






He quotes form Warfield's work, "The Plan of Salvation." 

Yours in the Lord, 

jm


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## W.C. Dean (Sep 21, 2020)

I have listened to him before state that limited atonement just leads people to doubt their faith, because there is no objective hope to cling to. This is not only misleading, but also untrue among those who believe in limited atonement. If one doubts their faith, they need to turn the Bronze Serpent incarnate. Those who truly cling to Christ are those he died for. Dr. Cooper would make an ignorant man believe that all of us who believe in the doctrine hitherto discussed constantly worry about our own salvation. It is simply a lie to imply this is a universal experience. I do like Dr. Cooper, and wish him well. On subjects other than Reformed theology he is quite smart and understandable. With Calvinism he easily burns strawmen.

Reactions: Like 1


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## JH (Sep 21, 2020)

W.C. Dean said:


> I have listened to him before state that limited atonement just leads people to doubt their faith, because there is no objective hope to cling to. This is not only misleading, but also untrue among those who believe in limited atonement. If one doubts their faith, they need to turn the Bronze Serpent incarnate. Those who truly cling to Christ are those he died for. Dr. Cooper would make an ignorant man believe that all of us who believe in the doctrine hitherto discussed constantly worry about our own salvation.


In the realm of Lordship Salvation, I honestly understand where he's coming from if he said that with LS in mind.


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## W.C. Dean (Sep 21, 2020)

Jerrod Hess said:


> In the realm of Lordship Salvation, I honestly understand where he's coming from if he said that with LS in mind.


Perhaps that is what he had in mind, but he does not specify. He has a video about not being Reformed, and he just uses the arguments as posed against any who believe in the Calvinistic doctrines.


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## JM (Sep 21, 2020)

My guess is that he may be speaking from his personal experience in the vanilla mainline Presbyterian church of his youth.


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## W.C. Dean (Sep 21, 2020)

JM said:


> My guess is that he may be speaking from his personal experience in the vanilla mainline Presbyterian church of his youth.


I thought he was also involved in YRR stuff as well


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## Andrew35 (Sep 21, 2020)

Btw, if you ever come across a Reformed guy who's leaning Lutheran, I've got a quick fix: 

Find The Thinking Fellows podcast, and download the episode where they walk through Romans 9. Give it to your friend. 

Problem solved.


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## JM (Sep 21, 2020)

W.C. Dean said:


> I thought he was also involved in YRR stuff as well


Yes, he was YRR.

Reactions: Like 1


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## EcclesiaDiscens. (Sep 22, 2020)

I’ve noticed this gentleman becoming increasingly popular amongst folks leaving the Reformed world for Lutheranism. Kind of like the Lutheran Scott Hahn


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## Contra_Mundum (Sep 22, 2020)

JCooper is something of an academic, he's an author, he's a blogger and podcaster. He's in a position to be what many others--like not a few in the "Reformed" world--have become. He's regarded as knowledgeable, reliable, and helpful, particularly to his segment of the internet-tuned-in audience.

He's also lived for a time in "our" (Reformed-ish) world; so this naturally and reasonably makes him a kind of local-expert within his present world of Lutheranism.

It's also a big mistake to shortchange the intellectual attractions of Lutheranism, and to characterize that part of Protestantism as just partaking of "Arminian shortcuts" designed to circumvent faith's and theology's hard edges. You may not understand the Lutheran perspective, but that usually means you aren't an insider; or you've not looked at the questions _as if_ you were, to try and understand it.

We're used to more shallow (to speak frankly) Arminian-esque reasoning on topics that separate us from them. The Arminians moved out of our ranks in the post-Reformation period, and so there's an historic tendency to have (or assume) some shared baggage. From the Lutheran perspective, the Reformed moved away from the Reformation the Lutherans were leading. The historic situation was such, that those positions were still in the process of solidifying into theologically and ecclesiologically stable forms, eventually codified in confessions of faith.

When the Remonstrants made their challenge, it was clearly contradictory to Reformed Confessed principles. When the Lutherans and Reformed were in discussion and also contending with Rome's position, the Reformation side as a whole could "sign on" to a single Confession (the Book of Concord _variata, _or _modified _slightly using terms the Reformed could accept in good conscience). The Remonstrants received no such consideration.

The _genesio _(or genuine) Lutherans eventually rejected the _variata _version of the Book of Concord; and in the process of rooting out "Reformed" influences in their sphere, they also hardened their stances on other topics of theology that would sharpen the divide between them and the Reformed. This made the "us or them" choice stark for anyone who was inclined still to look for common ground among the Reformation partisans.

What I'm getting at is: the Lutheran's positions and arguments relative to certain Reformed positions may have a kind of informal parallelism with Arminian positions and arguments; however, they have developed from two distinct starting points. The Arminian's positions _deform _(we say) certain principles intrinsic to Reformed theology, in order to get to their conclusions. The Lutheran's positions have more of an "outgrowth" relation to their own first-principles. There is a kind of consistency there, granting certain unchallengeable axioms.

To us, the Arminians are patently _inconsistent _with critical axioms of Reformed theology. So, challenging them at places where we might think the cognitive dissonance could break the spell (so to speak) seems like a reasonable course. That same idea doesn't fit a situation where a Reformed person might challenge a Lutheran; or _vice versa, _where a JCooper might challenge a Reformed person. It is much harder to show a person he's inconsistent with first-principles that the challenger doesn't understand as well as the owner does.

JCooper has his own story of travel and discovery of Lutheran first-principles. That journey included a sojourn in the "Reformed" world, beginning with slipping out of broadly Baptist culture into Reformed (Particular) Baptist theology/piety/practice, and then from there into Presbyterian (Reformed) theology/piety/practice. Whether he realized it (or when he realized it), he was seeking and hadn't yet found his secure mooring place.

I don't think JCooper caught hold of Reformed axioms (or recognized them at the time he was in those circles) enough to critique them as well as he might like. In my opinion, he was still too close to his formative cast of mind in "evangelical" culture to know the roots of Reformed theology as distinct, in the time he was engaged there.

When it came to the certainties he was most sure about (or at least the things he knew weren't sure to him), he realized that the Presbyterian Confession wasn't able to give him what he sought. I don't know what it was for him (you'd have to ask him)--perhaps it was the Lutheran Law-Gospel predicate of biblical interpretation--but in any case, he found the security he needed in the Lutheran Confession. And that experience then shapes his review of the theologies and cultures he left behind and passed through on his way.

He did not go back to his more free-will Baptist conditioning, and adopt an Arminian's argument against the Reformed theology he had embraced coming out of Arminian-esque culture. He is arguing today like a Lutheran does, on Lutheran axioms; and we should credit that and not casually lump the Lutherans with the Arminians, _in spite of (honestly) the informal affinities that do show up between the arguments both camps employ against the Reformed Confession._

I hope this is helpful.

Reactions: Like 4 | Informative 2


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## BottleOfTears (Sep 22, 2020)

Contra_Mundum said:


> e realized that the Presbyterian Confession wasn't able to give him what he sought. I don't know what it was for him (you'd have to ask him)--perhaps it was the Lutheran Law-Gospel predicate of biblical interpretation


He says that it was mostly the view on the sacraments that convinced him to Lutheranism, though by his own admission, when he was Reformed the people he was reading/talking to had a much lower view on the sacraments than some of us do. For instance, he read a lot of Hodge, and therefore would tend to take Hodge's view on the Lord's Supper as the normal Reformed view rather than Calvin's.

In another video he has made much of obscure quotes of Hodge on infant baptism/faith, attributed that to all Reformed people, and used that in a rather convoluted argument to argue that we somehow are denying/undermining justification by faith. Not to knock Hodge or anything, I don't even think the argument held up if you agreed with Hodge on the point. I also think Dr Cooper's view on faith in infants that he uses to critique Hodge potentially undermines his own Lutheran view on baptism. There are also Lutherans in the comments of that video critiquing him on his portrayal of justification, some in-house Lutheran stuff about "subjective vs objective justification" which he accused us of denying, and they claimed the whole idea was brought in by Walther into American Lutheran churches after it had been expelled as error by the Germans in Wittenberg.

This is one of the most frustrating things I find about Lutherans online, they constantly claim that we don't believe that believers can take assurance from the sacraments and often reference some Lordship Salvation leaning preachers or other YRR "reformedish" baptists and accuse us all of believing we can only have assurance by doing good works or similar. This of course ignores everything we believe about God's covenant promises among other things. Need I mention the tired and abused "central dogma" thesis? The "I'd better make sure no one thinks I might be even slightly Reformed" attitude seems to make them over-emphasise the differences between us or just make up new ones. Like aren't our disagreements on communion and Christology enough? There's no need to accuse of robbing people of assurance or denying justification by faith among other things.

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## W.C. Dean (Sep 22, 2020)

It is sad that he left the Reformed world partly because of a low view of the sacraments. I felt like I had encountered too low a view of the sacraments and began my own study on how the Scriptures defined them and their benefits. I believe I now have a higher view than your average Presbyterian lay person, but not higher than the Confession. I never remember feeling drawn to Lutheranism.


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## Contra_Mundum (Sep 22, 2020)

I want to add a comment herewith (after my first comment, I went to listen to the posted vid).

JCooper over the years seems (to me) to be maturing as a scholar (and gentleman). He's got better at his judgments, though one thing I hope he may improve in the future is offering endless "caveats" to those judgments, spurred by untold internet-individualists who each think "owns" the tradition under critique. To that I suggest saying: _With all due respect, you're a nice person, just wrong in my professional well-read judgment; and please, keep reading._ Even Lutheran pastors and theologians have to give regular correction to life-long Lutherans who think "I'm Lutheran, I think X, ergo X is the Lutheran position. O, and I have a Luther quote that proves I'm right." Affirming the consequent is always fallacious, no matter which tradition is doing it.

I would chalk up the improvement I noted to JCooper's doing what he says in the vid he has been and is doing:

1) He reads deeply, at least within a certain swathe of historic theology; and as a true scholar, he acquaints himself with the best of all the streams of thought in a particular time frame. Thus, clearly he shows that he's not only familiar with his own tradition (nothing wrong with being drowned exclusively in what is for you the very best--just don't assume that makes you fully qualified to engage sensibly on the varieties of opinion); he also has passing or better familiarity with those he critiques. Not satisfied with what he imbibed when a Ref.Bapt. or a Presbyterian., he has returned to Reformed wells to sample them, because he wants to offer a confident, historically irrefutable critique.

2) He has done for his Lutheran tradition what many in the past half-century-plus have done in the Reformed (and related) traditions: found the treasures of the printed-past and sought to make them re-accessible once again. In the 20th Century, the 17th (some might even think, the 16th) to the 19th Century was ignored and forgotten (in large measure) by a generation of "history is bunk" excitement in the churches. No, especially in conservative streams some serious reverence was kept regarding the past, primarily for such ur-texts as Calvin's _Institutes_ (for our set) and key texts from the pen of Luther (for the Lutherans). But seminarians in general (regardless of their heritage) were only concerned with what theology says RIGHT NOW. Who needs "corrections" based on knowing who one is in relation to the past, and judging what is and is not a suitable trajectory? The modern mindset is focused on reshaping nature for pragmatic purpose; and the post-modern mindset has since dispensed with the category of nature altogether.

So, JCooper is joining the revival of interest in past literary achievement. He does his Lutheran tradition a great service, and may his tribe increase.

With some (reasonable) content dissent, I think the vid provides an overall helpful set of observations on the divide between Lutheran and Reformed theology.

Reactions: Like 2


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## JM (Sep 22, 2020)

The difference between Reformed theology and the other forms of theology. 

"The difference seems to be conveyed best by saying that the Reformed Christian thinks theologically, the Lutheran anthropologically. The Reformed person is not content with an exclusively historical stance but raises his sights to the idea, the eternal decree of God. By contrast, the Lutheran takes his position in the midst of the history of redemption and feels no need to enter more deeply into the counsel of God. For the Reformed, therefore, election is the heart of the church; for Lutherans, justification is the article by which the church stands or falls. Among the former the primary question is: How is the glory of God advanced? Among the latter it is: How does a human get saved? The struggle of the former is above all paganism- idolatry; that of the latter against Judaism- works righteousness. The Reformed person does not rest until he has traced all things retrospectively to the divine decree, tracking down the “wherefore” of things, and has prospectively made all things subservient to the glory of God; the Lutheran is content with the “that” and enjoys the salvation in which he is, by faith, a participant. From this difference in principle, the dogmatic controversies between them (with respect to the image of God, original sin, the person of Christ, the order of salvation, the sacraments, church government, ethics, etc.) can be easily explained." Herman Bavinck Reformed Dogmatics — Vol. 1: Prolegomena (Baker, 2003), 177.


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