Author: Jack Kilcrease

Jack Kilcrease is a Lutheran lay theologian and member of Our Savior Lutheran Church (LCMS). He is currently a member of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations. Jack was born in Texas, but grew up in Oregon. He went on to receive a B.A. from Luther College and an M.A. from Luther Seminary. He earned his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology and Ethics from Marquette University in 2009. Jack’s theological work explores the gift of God’s self-donation in Jesus Christ. He is the author of several books including the most recent volume of the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics series on Holy Scripture and the forthcoming Justification by the Word (Lexham Press). Jack is currently Associate Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at the Institute of Lutheran Theology’s Christ School of Theology. He is also an Assistant Adjunct Professor teaching philosophy at Aquinas College. Jack lives in beautiful West Michigan with his lovely wife, Bethany, and his two energetic daughters, Miriam and Ruth. When he’s not thinking about theology—and even when he is—Jack enjoys running, hiking, and hanging out with his family and cat. He’s passionate about BBQ, whiskey, jazz, movies, and theological discussion.
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Words are Sacraments and Sacraments are a Kind of Word

In other words, for Luther, the Eucharist (and by implication Baptism as well), confirms for the individual what the word universally proclaims. The word of the gospel is addressed to everyone in the congregation, and therefore it is possible to worry that this promise may not apply to you as an individual, or you have not genuinely received it by faith. Nevertheless, the Lord’s Supper contains within it the same promise and presence of the risen Jesus as the sermon. For Luther, words are sacraments and sacraments are a kind of word. The difference between the sermon and the sacrament is that the latter is applied to the individual who directly receives it. When reflective faith invariably worries about whether or not one has individually received Jesus and his promise of forgiveness, the believer may rely on the sacraments to give them assurance. There can be here no doubt that you have personally received the promise in the form of the sacrament since it was you as an individual who heard the promise and consumed the elements. By receiving the Eucharistic elements, the promise and presence of Jesus are given to you as an in tangible and physical way that draws you out of your subjectivity and enthusiasm (Did I truly believe? Did I truly receive the promise?) to the objectivity of the gospel.

The Word Present For You in the Lord’s Supper

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word: Restoring Sola Fide (Lexham Press, 2022), 303-304.

Image from “Icon-of-Christ-the-Holy-Communion,” Catholic Stewardship Consultants, August 2, 2018, https://www.catholicsteward.com/2018/08/02/stewardship-bulletin-reflection-august-19-2018/icon-of-christ-the-holy-communion/.

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Luther On Christ’s Substantial Eucharistic Presence For You

The gospel is a unilateral divine self-donation, in that an unconditional promise means a gift of the promiser himself in order to fulfill the terms of the promise. Therefore, Christians who receive the unilateral promise of the gospel are heirs to Christ’s very sacrificed person as a guarantee that he is at their disposal to fulfill his promise. This means that through the promise of the gospel we inherit Christ and everything that he possesses. Indeed, as Paul states, all true believers in union with Christ are “fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:17). This reality is manifest in the Lord’s Supper wherein Christ wills his very physical being (body and blood) through which he brought salvation to believers. Therefore, to paraphrase Luther, in dying Jesus gives the inheritance of his body and blood to believers in order that they might receive the forgiveness of sins and eternal life through his promise attached to them.1

Returning to On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther’s second major difficulty with the medieval conception of the Eucharist is the doctrine of transubstantiation.2 The doctrine of transubstantiation teaches that the bread and the wine in the Lord’s Supper are transformed by the words of institution into the body and blood of Christ, although the outward appearance and qualities of bread and wine (Aristotelian “accidents”) remain intact.3 Although Luther affirmed the substantial presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, he disliked the doctrine of transubstantiation the because it contradicts 1 Corinthians 10:16 which states that the bread and wine remain in the Lord’s Supper as the medium by which one receives Christ’s substantial body and blood.4 Luther considers the entire idea of transubstantiation an Aristotelian rationalization of the mystery of how the body and blood of Christ can become present through the bread and the wine.5

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Prolegomena to Dogmatics

Chapter 1: Contexts and the Contextual Nature of Theology

Introduction: Historical Contingency and the Possibility of Truth

Christianity is a religion centered on salvific events in history.  Although it makes claims about an eternal God and his transcendent truth, at the same time it paradoxically finds its sources of knowledge about the eternal God in finitude and the contingency of history.  The historical embeddedness of Christianity not only pertains to the biblical revelation, but also to the subsequent task of Christian theology. 

Because Christian theology is embedded in the historical, it is also always contextual.  During the previous two centuries, New Testament scholars have made much of how the first documented Christian theologian, the Apostle Paul, expressed his theological vision in the form of occasional letters to his congregations.  This pattern continues in the rest of the history of Christian thought.  Starting with Ignatius of Antioch moving onto Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth, all theologians address a specific context even in their non-occasional writings.  In each generation, theologians must look to the Word of God, test the present proclamation of the Church against it, and apply God’s Word to the challenges that face the contemporary Christian community. 

The application of God’s Word to new contexts entails relating the content of revelation to the surrounding culture’s beliefs about the nature of reality.  Put another way, because Christian theology is an incarnational discourse embedded in the concrete world of history, culture, and experience, what the Bible says about the old and new creation, as well as the Lordship of Christ, cannot be hermeneutically sealed against the claims of the surrounding culture.  Rather, when theologians seek to apply the Word of God, they need to explicate and relate what the Bible teaches to what historically and culturally contextualized people see as the nature of reality.  This may take the form of pushing back against the claims of the wider culture.  It may also take form of translating the biblical worldview and the gospel into a new historical/cultural idiom.  Translation is essential to the task of theology, something which we will explore at greater length below.  Even when theologians use biblical revelation to critique the idolatries of the wider culture, the thought-forms they utilize to explain the Bible will invariably be borrowed from the culture they are pushing against.

The contingency and historical-contextual nature of theology raises a number of important questions, most notably, whether the historically embedded Word of God is capable of giving us access to universal and absolute truth.  In On the Proof of the Spirit and the Power (1777), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing questioned how Christian theology could ever make absolute truth-claims in light of its reliance on history with all its messiness and contingency….  Lessing complained that Christian theology asserted necessary truths on the authority of mere accidental truths (i.e., the events of salvation history), something which was by definition impossible.  Beyond this, according to Lessing, Christians had often made apologetic arguments in favor of revelation on the basis of miraculous historical events that could never be definitively proven and were subject to much doubt.

In the early twentieth century, Ernst Troeltsch made a similar critique in his work The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions (1901).  Following the scholarly trajectory of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule Troeltsch contends that all religion is a byproduct of the culture from which it grew. As a result, religions are historically contingent and cannot make claims to absoluteness….

Christian theology cannot dodge the problems presented by Lessing and Troeltsch either by exempting one’s own theology from historical contingency or by sinking into the radical relativism of one’s personal faith or that one’s individual community.  This is because from its inception, Christian theology has been an incarnational and eschatological discourse.  Christian theology, properly understood, therefore does not hide from claims regarding the absolute, whether this be the absolute God, or the absolute destiny of humans.  Neither does Christian theology deny its embeddedness in the finitude and contingency of history, either in the case of the biblical revelation, or the ongoing task of translating the Christian message into new historical and cultural idioms. 

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press, forthcoming).

Image from “What is a prolegomena?”, Got Questions?: Your Questions, Biblical Answers, https://www.gotquestions.org/prolegomena.html.