Recently I lost my temper over Cooper's position on the Lord's Supper, and for that I emailed him an apology and I genuinely regret the personal tone of my attacks on him on social media. However, I still need to deliberate on what my frustrations are with his approach to Lutheran theology.
I genuinely believe that philosophy and Scripture don't mix. Whenever you blend the two historically bad things happen, whether it's the Aristotlean view of the cosmos taken by Catholic scholastics which led to the persecution of Galileo and Copernicus by the church, or the Platonic view of the Lord's Supper originated by Calvin and still in vogue today. And lately I've felt that in his videos when Cooper discusses theology, philosophy wins out, and Scripture takes a back seat, while Cooper takes us through a pot pourri of various views held by the most obscure Lutheran theologians from the post Reformation age. My frustration with this approach came to a head with a discussion on the Lord's Supper, both on Twitter and on YouTube, where Cooper attacked Lutherans for using terms like 'physical' and 'local' to describe the sacramental nature of Christ's presence in the Supper. In the course of this debate, Cooper didn't clarify his terms and caused more confusion and contradiction, using terms like 'real' and 'substantial' to describe Christ's presence with which I personally don't have any issues. Meanwhile those of us who describe Christ's mysterious presence in the Supper as 'physical', citing Luther's description of orally eating the body and body of Christ in Article VII of the Formula of Concord, were mischaractized as cannibals and believers in transubstantiation in Cooper's debate group on Facebook. This was not a healthy debate, and for some on Twitter, it created unbelief in the Lord's Supper and for others it caused them to walk away from Lutheranism altogether. To which Cooper responded with a seemingly uncaring shrug, and a confessional game of gotcha, where Cooper and his followers held the title of Confessional Gatekeeper over the rest of us, and accused us of not knowing our own confessions. There appears to be a lack of pastoral responsibility and care to Cooper's approach to online debates, where his scholastic and philosophical approach to theological terms results in a lack of clarification, contradiction and confusion that has the potential for spiritual harm. It's not edifying, when his superior knowledge of Lutheran history is sometimes wielded as a weapon rather than something to build us up in the faith. To be fair, I have profited from his podcasts over the years, and his opposition to the influence of Radical Lutheranism is something with which I can stand in solidarity. However I'm concerned with the philosophical and academic influences that maybe seeping into Cooper's thinking. Cooper himself has mischaractized this as anti-intellectualism and a hostile response to perceived East Coast elitism, a charge I deny citing Luther's own opposition to the influence of Aristotle in Christian thought, and the limits of human reason and wisdom to define things that are in essence mysterious and unknowable. "Reason is a whore...the greatest enemy of faith", said Luther during his debates with the Catholic scholar Erasmus, a quote that would be beneficial for all of us including Jordan to refamiliarise ourselves with.
In the name of Christ. Amen.
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