Whatever happened to Jesus?

***QUOTE***

It's all about priorities and emphases, isn’t it? That is really what marks confessions as unique from one another. Lutheranism is all about a razor-sharp focus on Christ Jesus our Lord. We know there’s none other God. If we want to talk about God, we are quickly going to be talking about Jesus. Calvin seems to take some time to get to Jesus, when it does. Calvinism gets there ... eventually. But it sure seems to me that a lot of Calvinists are spending just a whole lot of time on God's glory and sovereignty and so forth.

http://paulmccain.worldmagblog.com/paulmccain/archives/020867.html

***END-QUOTE***

Here’s the table of contents for the Formula of Concord:

1. Summary
2. Rule and Norm
3. Original Sin
4. Free Will
5. The Righteousness of Faith
6. Good Works
7. Law and Gospel
8. The Third Use of the Law
9. The Holy Supper
10. The Person of Christ

Notice that you have to wade through nine preliminary loci before you get around to Christology.

Here’s the table of contents for Francis Pieper’s Christian Dogmatics:

Volume one:

Prolegomena:

The Nature & Character of Theology (§§1-21)
Holy Scripture (§§1-16)
The Doctrine of God (§§1-8)
The Creation of the World and of Man (§§1-5)
Divine Providence (§1-5)
Angelology (§1-7)
The Doctrine of Man (§§1-7; 1-5; 1-5; 1-5)

Volume two:

The Saving Grace of God (§§1-4)
The Doctrine of Christ

It is not until you get to the second section of the second volume of Pieper’s Dogmatics that you arrive at the locus of Christology.

So, by McCain’s own yardstick, Jesus is just an afterthought in Lutheran theology.