Teaching and Experiencing God's Word

I'm working on rereading Walther's Law and Gospel (the fact that I need to teach on Law and Gospel tomorrow is a bit of an impetus for my scholarly drive). I wanted to point out a couple of things that struck me from the itty bitty letters written by Jaroslav Pelikan in the foreward.

First of all, Walther referred to systematic theology as "didactic" theology. Teaching theology. I really like that not just because I am called to be a teacher, but because it communicates systematic theology as something in the realm of being practical, as opposed to the systematicians who sit in their ivory towers and try to rationalize how each Bible verse fits together. We all at the seminary read Forde's "Theology is for Proclamation," but I think we overlooked the fact that a lot of what needs to be done is teaching, and "teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you" is half the great commission.

The second thing that jumped out at me is Pelikan's highlighting of Walther's appeal to his own experience. I hear people talking a lot about how they "experience" faith or life or whatever, and then here is Walther saying that "it is only in the school of the Holy Spirit and of genuine Christian experience that the proper distinction between Law and Gospel is learned." Walther apparently was only agreeing with Luther's words "es muss erfahren werden (it must be experienced)."

So there you go. It's okay to talk about experiences, at least as long as they are used to support and teach God's word.