Crux sola est nostra theologia
Mr. Christian Wagner of the Militant Thomist podcast interviewed me on Lutheran Christology. If you’re interested, you can find the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2DA5VAEaDY. Enjoy!
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
Continue reading “Luther On Christ’s Substantial Eucharistic Presence For You”
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.
Rev. Sean Smith let me talk away about the history and contents of the Augsburg Confession for his show Concord Matters on KFUO. Thanks for the opportunity!
Lexham Press will be publishing my newest book, Justification by the Word: Restoring Sola Fide, relatively soon. If interested, you can pre-order at Lexham’s website. Here’s a snippet from the introduction:
According to [Phillip] Cary, this unreflective faith is possible for Luther because of his belief in the sacramentality of the word.1 Here Cary echoes the work of the German Luther scholar Oswald Bayer, who claims that it was in fact the sacramentality of the word, and not justification by faith, that was central to the so-called Reformation breakthrough.2 The word of justification is objectified in both in preaching and the sacraments in such a way as to shift the focus from authentic appropriation of God’s grace to the question of the surety of God’s promise. Since the risen Jesus is genuinely present in the means of grace, he is capable of mediating a direct assurance of his justifying grace for sinners who look for him there. The tendency of believers to reflect upon and worry about the authenticity of their faith is seen by Luther as a sinful resistance to Jesus’s promise that they have already been accepted. Therefore, instead of “justification through faith” it might be appropriate to characterize Luther’s position as “justification by the word.”
In this book, we will endeavor to show that, although it has been neglected and misunderstood by Protestants and Catholics alike, Luther’s “justification by the word” is a better model for understanding salvation in Christ. It will be argued that this is not only the case because it is more faithful to the teachings of the Scriptures, but also because it is the only doctrine of salvation that fully succeeds in de-centering the self and overcoming the self-incurvature of sin (incurvatus in se). As Luther himself observes in his Galatians commentary of 1531: “This is the reason why our theology is certain, it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person, or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.”3
[1] Phillip Cary, “Why Luther is Not Quite Protestant: The Logic of Faith in a Sacramental Promise,” Pro Ecclesia 14, no. 4 (2005): 447–486. Also see similar argument in Phillip Cary, The Meaning of Protestant Theology: Luther, Augustine, and the Gospel That Gives Us Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 258–62.
[2] Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas Trapp (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 52–53; and Bayer, Promissio: Geschichte der reformatorischen Wende in Luthers Theologie (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 240–41.
[3] LW 26:38
From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word: Restoring Sola Fide (Lexham Press, 2022).