This is the blog of Jack Kilcrease and the home of all new posts on theological topics.
Male – Female Relationality
The most primal relationship mirroring the relationality of divine life is the male/female relationship. This is a point highlighted in the theology of Karl Barth1 and Hans Urs von Balthasar.2 In Genesis 2 we are told that God sees that it is not good that man is alone and seeks to make him a counterpart as a “helpmeet.” As helpmeet, the woman is created to share in man’s creational/vocational tasks as a partner. This is what St. Paul means when he states that “man [was not] created for woman, but woman for man” (1 Cor. 11:9). He does not mean that woman was created as man’s plaything, or a slave to be dominated. Rather, man was first created and given certain creational tasks which woman was created to share in.
In Genesis 2, woman is derived from man, but not because she is inferior to man. As we may recall, the idea that realities which are derivative are inherently inferior is an aspect of the metaphysics of tragedy. The Bible works on the basis of a metaphysic of comedy, in that movement and generation do not lead to degeneracy but go from the good (the man alone) to the better (man and woman together in relationship). In support of this, Genesis 1 makes both the male and female equal image-bearers of God. This is confirmed in that when seeing the woman in Genesis 2 the man cries out that she is precisely what he is: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). In an analogical sense, the man is homoousios with the woman.
Continue reading “Male – Female Relationality”The Imago Dei and Righteous Relationality
Genesis 1:26-27 speaks of humans as made in the image and likeness of God. The meaning of this phrase has been hotly contested in the history of Christian thought. However, we can immediately reject is the interpretation first proposed by St. Irenaeus that “likeness” and “image” are distinct realities.
Early Interpretations of the Image of God
According to Irenaeus, the former refers to natural human faculties, whereas the latter refers to a special grace God gave to pre-lapsarian humans. This grace allowed humans to eventually participate in the divine life (i.e., a precursor of the later concept of theosis). As a result of the Fall, humans retain the image, but have lost the likeness.1 Modern biblical scholarship has shown that the use of the terms “image” and “likeness” in tandem with each other is simply an example of the literary poetical parallelism common to the Old Testament and much of ANE western Semitic literature. Therefore, “image” and “likeness” possess an identical meaning.2
We can also easily reject St. Augustine’s3 and St. Thomas Aquinas’s4 claim that the mental faculties of memory, intellect, and will reflect the Trinity. Not only is there no exegetical basis for this claim, but the Bible knows nothing of Greek faculty psychology.5
Continue reading “The Imago Dei and Righteous Relationality”The Biblical Doctrine of God: Transcending Mythology and Metaphysics
As we have seen, broadly speaking, fallen humans have a tendency to thematize the natural knowledge of God available them into two distinct conceptions of the divine: the mythological and metaphysical concepts of God corresponding to antinomianism and legalism. As we have seen, both views of God represent fallen human’s encounter with God’s hiddenness under the law. Although the knowledge of God gained through the created order and the law is valid, it does not reveal the deepest divine mystery and the most fundamental reality of God, namely, his nature as the omnipotent power of grace that can call into existence new possibilities.
Hence, the biblical view of God both fulfills and transcends mythology and metaphysics. Oswald Bayer famously described Christian theology as occupying a place suspended between “Metaphysics and Mythology.”1 On the one hand, like all the other Axial Age religions, the biblical God is the unitary transcendent metaphysical foundation of all reality.2 Contrary to what some modern theological traditions have asserted, the God of the Bible possesses all the classical theistic attributes: omnipotence (Ps. 115:3, Jer. 32:27, Matt. 19:26), omnipresence (1 Kgs 8:27, Jer. 23:24, Acts 17:28), omniscience (Prov. 15:3, Ps. 147:5, Job 37:15, 1 Jn. 3:20), omnibenevolence (Ps. 145:9, Matt. 19:17, 1 Jn. 1:5). He is not a temporal being among other beings, competing for power with other gods and other lords.3 The Bible does of course describe God’s war for creation against the forces of darkness, but as we will later see this battle takes place only because God permits it as a means of achieving his overall goal for creation.
Continue reading “The Biblical Doctrine of God: Transcending Mythology and Metaphysics”Pastoral Disaster: Justification After the Formula of Concord
Throwback Post
Although the Formula of Concord affirmed Luther’s concept of justification by the word, Lutherans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century quickly returned to the problematic paradigm St. Augustine bequeathed to the West. In this, Lutheran theology tended to take the sacramentalist trajectory in the Augustinian Dilemma.1 This is probably partially based on the early Lutheran desire to polemically to differentiate itself as a confessional tradition from Calvinism. It is also possible that there were lingering Melanchthonian undercurrents regarding how question of sin and grace was conceptualized. Nevertheless, the largest catalyst for the almost total abandon of the doctrine of election lay in the overreaction to the teaching of a Swiss Lutheran theologian named Samuel Huber.2
Samuel Huber and Theological Overcorrection
Samuel Huber began his career in the Reformed communion.3 Having been censored for some his views of divine grace, he left the Reformed confessional camp to become a Lutheran and taught at Wittenberg.4 Huber held that because the grace of God was universal as the Formula of Concord had taught, then it must logically follow that election was also universal.5 In teaching this, he was not affirming universalism as many of his contemporaries claimed, but merely conflated election with the gracious invitation of humanity to trust in the gospel.6
In response to Huber’s claim, Aegidius Hunnius7 and Leonhard Hütter8 asserted that election is merely God’s passive foreknowledge regarding who would come to faith and preserve it to the end of their lives (ex praevisa fide). Although humans cannot initiate their relationship with God,9 humans could lose their faith as Luther had himself affirmed.10
From the possibility of apostasy, later Lutheran theologians like Johann Gerhard drew the conclusion that preserving or wrecking faith was a matter of contingent human volition (albeit, supported by the power of the Holy Spirit), and hence not subject to the predestining will of God.11 Because God clearly foreknew who would continue to cooperate with him after regeneration and who would fall away, predestination was little more than divine foreknowledge of human faith.12
Continue reading “Pastoral Disaster: Justification After the Formula of Concord”The Incarnation and Kenosis: the Son of God’s Humiliation
Before anyone can discuss Christ’s work, it is first necessary to examine the kenosis, or humiliation, of the Son of God in time. Indeed, the whole course of Old Testament history from the protoevangelium to the Virgin Birth is a kind of kenosis on the part of God. God pledges his very self in the form of the speech-act of promise and, therefore, places himself at the disposal of humanity. Later, he more specifically placed himself at the disposal of Israel in particular.
Having chained (berit, covenanted) himself to Israel through the gift of the divine Name and promise, God finally stood in such profound kenotic solidarity with his people that he actually became one of them. Lutheran philosopher Johann Georg Hamann correctly asserts that the whole history of salvation is a story of divine self-gift and humbling:
Continue reading “The Incarnation and Kenosis: the Son of God’s Humiliation”Consider how God the Father has humbled Himself by not only forming a lump of earth but also giving it a soul with His breath. Consider how God the Son has humbled Himself- he became a man, became the least of all people and took on the form of a servant; He became the most hapless of them; He was made sin for us; in God’s eyes He was the sinner of the whole people. Consider how low God the Holy Spirit has condescended by becoming a historian of the smallest, most contemptible, most insignificant events on earth, so as to reveal the mysteries and ways of God to mankind in its own speech, in its own history, in its own ways.1