February 2025 - Jack Kilcrease

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.

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

Aegidius Hunnius, Superintendent and Faculty of the University of Wittenberg

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