Month: February 2021

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Enthusiasm and the External Word

Due to the simul of Christian existence (that is, Christians are “at the same time saint and sinner,” simul justus et peccator),[1] the temptation of returning to the self-incurvature of reflective faith is ever present.  That is to say, because even true believers now possess a sinful nature, they are subject to the temptation trusting in their own works or the quality of their faith over what the external Word tells them.  Such a temptation connects with not only the root sin of unbelief, but what Luther called “Enthusiasm.”[2]  Enthusiasm means “God withinism.”[3]  An enthusiast looks inward to his interior thoughts and feeling so as to discover God’s will for him, rather than the external Word of God.  This tendency can undermine biblical authority, but it is also the source of human doubt in the promise of the gospel. 

Because of fallen humanity’s orientation toward unbelief and enthusiasm (incurvatus in se) temptation to doubt one’s own proper reception of the word will invariably arise.  When temptation arises, faith in the Word must inevitably seek a secondary support in refocusing the believer on the objectivity of grace rather than the subjectivity of their own disposition.  Such a secondary support should inculcate the objectivity of grace to the individual believer in a tangible manner and break the focus of the believer on their own inner reception of the external word.  This secondary support for faith can be found in the sacraments of the new testament. 

Disappointingly, most forms of Protestantism have failed to maintain the focus believer on Christ and the Word because of their rejection of sacramental realism.  Indeed, most (though not all) Protestants rejected sacramental realism in favor of sacramental symbolicism or spiritualism.[4]  Since both sacramental symbolicism and spiritualism disconnect the res from the signum in the sacraments, much of the Protestant tradition has denied believers the tangible secondary assurance of God’s grace that sacramental realism provides.  Believers who reject sacramental realism therefore have had to seek secondary assurance apart from the sacraments in moral athleticism or spiritual experience, thereby exacerbating the problem of unbelief and self-incurvature.  Only if the sacraments objectively contain grace can they function as antidote to religious subjectivism.  They perform this task by shifting the focus away from the interior and spiritual reception of grace, to grace’s tangible external embodiment in a physical medium. 

[1] See: Wilhelm Christe, Gerechte Sünder: eine Untersuchung zu Martin Luthers “Simul iustus et peccator” (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2014). 

[2] SA III.8; Concordia Triglotta, 497.

[3] Steven Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hidden in the Cross, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 350.

[4] See discussion in: James F. White, The Sacraments in Protestant Practice and Faith (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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The Hiddenness of God and Theodicy

Under the veil of divine hiddenness and the false conjectures of fallen human reason, there is an aporia between the activities of the Father and the Spirit and with the universal and unconditional love revealed in the Son.  In light of this, human reason inevitably tries to rationalistically harmonize these disparate activities and peer into the hiddenness of God.  Nevertheless, all rationalistic theodicies ultimately fail because they try to justify God’s actions on the basis of the law.  Not only does this demand God justify himself when it is humans who need justification,[1] but because God’s will is not exhausted by the law, God can never be made completely explicable on the basis of the law.  The good news ultimately consists in the fact that although the law is God’s holy and eternal will, God possesses possibilities that transcend the law manifest in the atoning work of Christ.

Instead of creating a rationalistic/legalistic theodicy,[2] Christians must cling to the gospel-promise and operate on the basis of a theodicy of faith.[3]  On the basis of faith in the promise, the believer trusts that the divine love manifest in Christ has revealed the hidden coherence of the triune being in a preliminary sense in the means of grace.  Only at the eschaton, the will the full coherence of the works of the one God be revealed to believers.  Faith possesses the full confidence of the sacramental Word of God, in which the Son has revealed the Father’s true heart to faith through the power of the Spirit.  By holding onto the sacramental Word, faith comes into contact with the objectified gracious electing will of God and can be certain of salvation. 

[1] LW 12:311.

[2] Gottfried von Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E.M. Huggard (New York: Cosmo Classics, 2010).

[3] Paul Hinlicky, Beloved Community: A Critical Dogmatics after Christendom (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015), 72.  Though the general thrust of Hinlicky’s idea is correct, I do not endorse all details.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Intuitu Fidei in Orthodoxy and Pietism

This deviation from Luther and the teaching of the Formula of Concord came to be known as the teaching of intuitu fidei (“in view of faith”) and was eventually established the standard teaching of Lutheran Scholasticism with surprisingly little resistance.[1]  Lutherans generally held to the intuitu fidei teaching until the nineteenth century when the Neo-Lutheran movement rediscovered Luther’s doctrine of election.  In the United States, this rediscovery sparked the “Election Controversy” of the 1870s and 1880s fought between a series of midwestern German and Norwegian immigrant denominations.[2] 

The teaching of intuitu fidei had many difficulties, not least among them was that it was conceptually incoherent.  The premise of the Lutheran Scholastics remained that God actively created and sustained faith in Christians.[3]  What the teaching of intuitu fidei suggested was that God passive foreknew his own active work of communicating and sustaining the faith in the elect.  To say that God passively foreknew his own active work is absurd and incoherent.  Pastorally, the teaching proved to be a disaster because it held that believers could never genuinely possess assurance of their election, but only that God had at the present moment justified them if they were not actively resisting his grace.  The late Lutheran Scholastic David Hollaz baldly claimed that believers could never have full assurance of their salvation until their deathbed.[4]  Thus, intuitu fidei placed the accent very heavily on the human subject’s initiative in continuing to worthily cooperate with the divine grace offered in the means grace.  Indeed, it ultimately assumed that humans did indeed contribute something to their salvation.[5]  Inevitably, this teaching led to a return to the anxiety of whether one had appropriately cooperated with divine grace, albeit now following a line of reason anticipated by Melanchthon’s psychologization of faith.

In the last decades of the seventeenth century there emerged a tradition within Lutheranism called “Pietism.”[6]  Pietism is often seen as the antithesis of Scholastic Orthodoxy, with which it fought with for theological supremacy until well into the eighteenth century.[7]  Nevertheless, there is a continuity between the two theological traditions in that they both accorded a definitive role to the human subject in cooperating with divine grace.  Therefore, it is arguably the case that Pietism inherited Scholastic Orthodoxy’s problematic theology of sin and grace, and simply drove the disastrous pastoral implications intuitu fidei heresy to its logical conclusion. 

[1] Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and the Wittenberg Theological Method, 266; Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 272-92.

[2] Eugene Fevold, “Coming of Age: 1875-1900,” in The Lutherans in North America, ed. E. Clifford Nelson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 313-25.

[3] Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 458-80.

[4] Ibid.,292.

[5] Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and the Wittenberg Theological Method, 266

[6] See: Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Heinrich Schmid, The History of Pietism (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 2007).

[7] F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 57-8.  See Lutheran Orthodoxy’s classic critique of Pietism in: Valentin Ernst Loescher, The Complete Timotheus Verinus, trans. James Langebartels, and Robert Koester (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 2006).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Melanchthon Falls Into the Augustinian Dilemma

The older Melanchthon took Luther’s doctrine of the sacramentality of the word and reinterpreted it along the lines of the typical sacramentalist trajectory of the Augustinian Dilemma.  The Word of God is genuinely sacramental for Melanchthon in that it contains the coming of the Holy Spirit who works faith.  Nevertheless, in Melanchthon’s teaching it is at minimum a very strongly implied that the Holy Spirit’s work is dependent on the human will’s consent to cooperate.  Hence, in Melanchthon’s later work, grace can be construed as ultimately a possibility that is actualized by human decision.  Such a human decision can be called in question regarding its sincerity, thereby returning the sinner to the authenticity of his works (in this case, not external works, but rather a psychological event of conversion).  Therefore, the logical implication of the older Melanchthon’s theology of justification is that Luther’s unreflective faith is denied in favor an extremely reflective faith.  As we will see, the psychologizing of faith and the implicit call for self-examination as the sincerity of one’s conversion would become a standard feature in many strands of the later Protestant tradition.

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

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Luther vs. Calvin on Justification and Election

Ultimately, those who embrace Luther’s theology find Calvin’s theology of election and justification so problematic because it fails to see that God is present and active in his Word in precisely the manner that he promises to be.  Calvin envisions human salvation and reprobation from the perspective of a comprehensive plan in eternity operating above and beyond the external Word.  The harmony of this plan can be discerned by looking past God’s words and coverings in order to see the whole of God’s hidden providence.[1]  Since some are saved and others not, God must not mean what he says when he wills the salvation of all who encounter him in the Word.  As a result, in Calvin’s theology the external Word may or may not do what it promises.  Only those who receive the inner call are truly elect and can see through the external word to God’s unified plan of grace for them as an individual.[2] 

By contrast, Luther sees God as exercising his rule through his Word manifest in and through his created masks.  Contrary to the claim of many Calvinists, Luther and the Lutheran tradition do not ultimately make God’s grace ineffective.  On the contrary, God’s Word always does precisely what it speaks.  However, God’s exercise of his reign is divided between a realm of law and a realm of grace. Those places where God has promised to work death and condemnation inexorably work death and condemnation.  By contrast, those who look for God in in the Word and sacraments will infallibly find a grace there that performs what it speaks.

Seen from the perspective of the sacramentality of the Word, the question of the perseverance of the saints is solved not on the basis of a special spiritual gift given to the elect (as in Augustine[3] and Calvin[4]), but on the basis on the efficacy of the means of grace external to the believer.[5]  God is always faithful to his Word regarding the means of grace.  The grace of the Word and the sacraments will inexorably move one toward the kingdom of heaven, just as a person who gets on a raft in the Mississippi River in Minnesota will inexorably move toward the Gulf of Mexico.[6] 

It could of course be objected that since Luther and the subsequent Lutheran tradition believe that apostasy is possible, one can never be genuinely certain that the divine Word will carry one along to their eschatological destiny.  In response, Lutherans have historically observed that God’s promise of grace is objectively true whether or not one believes in it.[7]  As we saw in Luther’s pronouncement regarding objective justification in an earlier chapter,[8] God’s promise of grace in Christ is more real than one’s refusal to believe it, and therefore remains a valid promise even if one chooses to actively reject it.[9]  Hence, to doubt the Word of the gospel is not to invalidate it, but rather to place one’s self outside of the realm of grace where the Word is operative and effective (i.e., the  sphere of the Church and its ministry), and into the realm of wrath and law which inexorably leads to eternal death (Rom. 3:20).  Hence, as long as one looks away from one’s present or possible future works and to God’s promise present in sphere of grace, one can always have infallible certainty that the living and active Word of the gospel will perform precisely what it speaks.    

[1] See the outline of this approach in the clearest terms in: John Calvin, Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, trans. J.K.S. Reid (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1997).

[2] ICR, 3.24.8; Calvin: The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. and ed. John T. McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1967), 2:974-5.

[3] Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance; NPNFa, 5:.

[4] ICR, 3.24.7; Calvin: The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. and ed. John T. McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1967), 2:973-4.

[5] See the Lutheran view and critique of the alternatives in: Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 3 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1951-1953), 3:89-103.

[6] Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination, vol. 1, 57-158.

[7] Pieper, Christian Dogmatics,2:321, 2:347-8, 2:508-12, 2:543.

[8] LW 22:382. 

[9] Tom G. A. Hardt, “Justification and Easter: A Study in Subjective and Objective Justification in Lutheran Theology,” in A Lively Legacy: Essays in Honor of Robert Preus, ed. Kurt E. Marquart, John R. Stephenson, Bjarne W. Teigen (Ft. Wayne: Concordia Theological Seminary, 1985), 52-78; Eduard Preuss, The Justification of the Sinner before God, trans. J.A. Friedrich (Ft. Wayne, IN: Lutheran Legacy, 2011), 29-61; Robert Preus, “Objective Justification,” in Doctrine is Life: Robert D. Preus Essays on Justification and the Lutheran Confessions, ed. Klemet Preus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2006).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).