Month: June 2021

Posted on

The Foundation of Lutheran Christology: Pre-Modern Christology

Although confessional Lutherans affirm the ultimate authority of the Bible alone (sola Scriptura), various philosophical traditions have been legitimately utilized by Christians throughout history as instruments in service of the true faith.  The pre-modern and early modern Church utilized thought-forms from Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian sources as means of explicating the central truths of the Christian faith to the post-biblical Gentile world.  Although sometimes the use of philosophy obscured the truth of the Bible in the early Church, more often than not such thought-forms were used critically in light of the revealed realities of the faith.  This can be supremely observed in the development of the distinct uses of the concepts of “substance,” “nature,” and “person” in the debates surrounding the Trinity and Person of Christ at Nicaea and Chalcedon. 

Broadly speaking, most of the ancient metaphysical schemes utilized by Christians shared the common concept of “substance.”  Although various ancient philosophical traditions defined substance differently (Stoic vs. Aristotelian, for example), broadly speaking substance ontology assumes two basic ideas: First, entities in a class or species share an objectively real common nature.  For example, humans have a common nature with other humans.  Secondly, that although certainly features of entities change, there is a core of identity or essence within them that persists over time.  For example, despite physical changes I am the same person I was when I was a baby.  It is easily observable that these aforementioned tenets of substance metaphysics imply linguistic realism and a correspondence theory of truth.  That is, both claims assume that how humans typically use language to designate the identity of a given entity generally corresponds to the actual functioning of the world. 

As should be clear from the description above, the ancient councils and creeds of the Church (particularly, those of Nicaea and Chalcedon) assumed the validity of substance metaphysics.  For classic creedal orthodoxy, God is a single entity (ousia) with three real centers of identity (hypostasis) subsisting through their relations with one another.  Likewise, Christ is a single center of identity (prosopon) whose integrity persists over time.  He possesses two natures (physis), that is, he has a common nature with the other persons of the Trinity as well as the rest of humanity.   From the great councils of the ancient Church, these thought-forms passed into the heritage of the Latin medieval church.  From there were absorbed into the theology of the Magisterial Reformers of the sixteenth century with little comment. 

Image from Marcellino D’Ambrosio, “Early Church Fathers Overview: Snapshot of the Fathers,” Crossroads Initiative, February 10, 2020, https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/early-church-fathers-overview-snapshot-of-the-fathers-of-the-church/.

Posted on

The Later Erlangen School on Atonement and Christology

Regarding Christology and atonement, the later Erlangen school represented by Paul Althaus (1888-1966) and Werner Elert (1885-1954) was in many ways more conservative than its nineteenth predecessors.  The nineteenth-century Erlangen school had taken over from Lutheran Pietism and Friedrich Schleiermacher the concept that that along with the Bible and the Lutheran Confessions, Christian experience was a valid source of theological authority.  By contrast, under the influence of their teacher Ludwig Ihmels, Elert and Althaus affirmed that Scripture was the supreme theological authority to the exclusion of religious experience.  Similarly, both Althaus and Elert abandoned Johannes von Hofmann and Gottfried Thomasius’s metaphysically problematic belief in kenotic Christology in favor of a fairly traditional understanding of the two natures in Christ.

Both Elert and Althaus took an interest in responding to the historical skepticism concerning the identity of Christ and the historicity of the Gospels that marked the work of figures like Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976).  Both Erlangen theologians held that Christianity would be meaningless and invalid if the Gospels were false and if Jesus was not true God and man.  In order to push back against theological Liberalism and historical skepticism, Elert and Althaus offered a series of common arguments in their respective works.

First, in his early and shorter dogmatics, Elert partially adopted Hofmann’s line of reasoning by insisting that the development of the Church and the reality of the contemporary Christian community would make little sense if the events of the Bible (including the life of Christ) had not occurred generally as reported.  Analogously, contemporary Americans are not vexed about whether there was an American Revolution since the US government and other American institution would not exist if it had not happened.  So too the Church as an embodied community would make little sense as it exists now if the history salvation as described by the Bible had not occurred.

Secondly, both Elert and Althaus argued that Jesus was an absolutely unique personality that could never be a mere invention of early Christians.  Even if a detail here or there in the Gospel records might be inaccurate (it should be noted that neither believed in the full inerrancy of Scripture), the utterly uniqueness of Jesus’s personal character impressed itself upon the apostles and is reflected in the New Testament witness.  The biblical and ecumenical doctrine of the two natures in Christ could be justified by pointing to the fact that the utterly unique personality of Christ presented in the Gospels contained both divine and human elements. 

Both Althaus and Elert also very zealously defended the biblical and confessional doctrine of penal substitution.  In his seminal work, The Theology of Martin Luther, Althaus vigorously argued against Gustaf Aulén and his attempt to claim Luther for the Christus Victor atonement motif.  Likewise, in his work Law and Gospel (which primarily a response to Barth’s theology of grace and ethics), Elert outlined and defended his affirmation of the doctrine of penal substitution. 

According to Elert, in the post-lapsarian world, humanity lives a “nomological” existence wherein humans are constantly enveloped by the experience of the condemnation of the law.  Jesus came into the world as the embodiment and fulfillment of divine grace and judgment.  He exposed the hypocrisy of those who claimed not to be sinners, while forgiving and having fellowship with the moral outcasts.  He not only gave forgiveness, but taught an ethic of forgiveness that transcends the law.  Jesus’ ethic of non-retaliation and forgiveness transcends the law because the logical final fulfillment of the law is retribution and retaliation (lex talionis).  In order to make divine forgiveness and the Christian ethic of non-retaliation an actuality, Christ had to end the retribution of the law by bringing it to a completion by his death.  The cross is thus a final retributive punishment for sin that ends all retribution.  This was the fulfillment of divine wrath against sin and is an act of pure law.  By contrast, the resurrection is act of pure grace, since it reveals God’s forgiveness won by the cross.

Image from Jeff Davis, “Contemporary Issues in the Christological Methods,” Life Giving Words of Hope & Encouragement by Jeff Davis, May 17, 2017, https://jeffdavis.blog/2017/05/17/contemporary-issues-in-the-christological-methods/.

Posted on

First Thesis on Justification

My new book entitled Justification by the Word: Restoring Sola Fide with Lexham Press will make the case for seven theses on justification. Here’s the draft of the first one:

1.     Justification is the center of Christian theology.

Justification is the center of Christian theology because the salvation of sinners is the goal of God’s revelation in the Bible (scopus Scripturae) and the ministry of the Church.  In saying this, we do not mean to suggest that justification exhausts the content of the Christian faith.  Obviously without doctrines such as the Trinity, the divine essence and attributes, creation, and so-forth, justification would be incoherent and meaningless.  Neither are we claiming that all other doctrines are deduced from the single doctrine of justification, as in so-called “Central-Dogma” theory.  Rather, what we mean in stating that justification is the central doctrine of Christianity is that the ultimate goal of all of God’s revelation is to clarify and promote the proclamation of the doctrine of justification in the midst of the Church.

Image from the Institute of Lutheran Theology, @InstituteLutheranTheology