Verbum Domini Manet in Aeternum
LIBERATE’s tag-line—“God’s two words for a worn out world”—is an echo of a biblical refrain: Verbum Domini Manet in Aeternum (“The word of the Lord remains forever”). This confession from Isaiah 40:8 is something of a Protestant mantra, serving as the motto for rulers and revolutionaries at the time of the Reformation—from the peasants who followed Thomas Müntzer to the evangelical princes who first earned the name “Protestants” with their protestatio at the Diet of Speyer in 1529—and providing the conclusion to the Confessing Church’s 1934 defiance of Hitler’s emerging Third Reich (The Barmen Declaration). These words (and the accompanying image, VDMA) capture what this “Theological Dictionary” series, and by extension LIBERATE, hopes to say. In context, the confidence of this confession is a contradiction of the transitoriness and hopeless of life: “the grass withers, and the flowers fade, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” Real life is often more like crawling over broken glass than laying on a bed of roses. The lament of Isaiah is deeply in touch with this reality, and LIBERATE’s identification of the world as “worn out” points in the same direction. But, as the allusion to Isaiah 40:6-8 in 1 Peter 1:25 makes clear, the word of the Lord that remains forever does not just contradict our frail and finite lives; it is a word of comfort for frail and finite people: “That word is the good news that was preached to you.” The “word of the Lord” is, according to 1 Peter, “the word of the gospel”—the word of divine comfort (Isaiah 40:1) and compassion (Isaiah 49:13) that comes as good news for the broken and burnt out.
This “Theological Dictionary” will introduce various terms, phrases, and concepts, but the unifying motto is that of Isaiah, 1 Peter, and the Protestant princes: Verbum Domini Manet in Aeternum. God’s word will not be removed (Isaiah 54:10) and it will accomplish its divine purpose (Isaiah 55:11). Unlike human words, as Luther liked to say, God’s word is not hot air; it actually does what it says. God says “Let there be light” and the sun shines; he says “Lazarus, come out” and “Little girl, get up” and the dead are raised. God acts by speaking, and what God does is create out of nothing and resurrect the dead (Romans 4:17); he imprisons in disobedience in order to have mercy (Romans 11:32); and, in the language of 1 Samuel 2:6 that the reformers often quoted, he “kills and makes alive.” God is in the business of killing sinners by speaking his law so that he can recreate and resurrect them in Christ by speaking his gospel. This double-action of God’s word is what defines LIBERATE, and it is these “two-words”—law and gospel, accusation and acquittal, death and life—that we hope to say to a “worn out world.”