Doctrinal theology in the tradition of Luther urgently seeks in this book an overhaul and relaunch in an epoch of total propaganda wherein theology has lost both audience and theme. The postmodern insight into the nature of doctrine as the community of faith’s regulation of its speech and action by the external word announcing and reiterating its originating event can revitalize Lutheran theology if that insight is resituated in the “apocalyptic turn of contemporary theology.” Here it can draw afresh upon Luther’s identification of our imperiled humanity suspended “between God and the devil” to reframe its work. Not the end of time, but the time of God’s end for righteousness, life, and peace breaks into the strong man’s house and binds him in order to rescue his captives by the sanctifying Spirit’s proclamation of the resurrection-vindication of the crucified Jesus. The community that gathers around this word of God in faith confesses in word and deed the liberating Lordship of the Crucified, producing truth-telling martyr-witnesses defying the seductions and enthrallments of the propaganda machine to live boldly in “hope against hope.” So confessors are enabled to assess, debate, and engage the perils of our times in the terms of the originative event even as these perils put to the test the theological adequacy of inherited doctrinal forms.
