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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Homologoumena and Antilegomena

Historically, Lutherans have made a distinction within the canonical books of the New Testament between the homologoumena and antilegomena. As noted above, the distinction refers to the division between the books of the New Testament that were affirmed unanimously by the witness of the early church as being written by the apostles, and those that were not thus affirmed. Among the first class (homologoumena) are reckoned the Gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, 1 Peter, and 1 John. Among the second class (antilegomena) are reckoned Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation.1

It is important to recognize that for Lutherans the antilegomena does not relate to the undisputed books of the New Testament in the manner that the Apocrypha relates to the Old Testament proper. Whereas the Apocrypha is not considered the Word of God because it was not authorized as such by Christ, the antilegomena may be apostolic in origin, but that origin is disputed….

Continue reading “Homologoumena and Antilegomena”
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Did the Apostles Establish the New Testament Canon?

At the core of the apostolic testimony found in the New Testament are the four Gospels. The Gospels are central to the apostolic testimony, not only because they give a direct witness to the reality of God’s salvation manifest in Jesus but also because, as Moses authorized subsequent prophecy in Israel in Deuteronomy, Jesus in the Gospels authorizes the infallibility of apostolic witness.

The Gospels were written by at least two apostles (John and Matthew) and two persons authorized by the apostles (Mark by Peter, Luke by Paul). They therefore bear the stamp of the risen Christ’s authority. Although liberal scholars have questioned the reliability of the four Gospels and their authorship, there are many good arguments in favor of both their reliability and their traditional authorship….

Overall this evidence suggests that there was an early, very strong, and geographically diffuse consensus in the early church that the four canonical Gospels were indeed Scripture and that they were handed down from the apostles….

Finally, beyond the external evidence of the traditional authorship, there is evidence within the Gospels themselves. Richard Bauckham has shown that the Gospels bear literary features that suggest the authors were themselves eyewitnesses or had access to eyewitness testimony….

As should be clear from this discussion, the claims to apostolic origins made by the New Testament documents are extremely credible and grounded in objective historical fact. From this it is assured that they possess the infallibility Christ promised the apostolic witness and therefore legitimately belong to the canon. But it is also possible to go beyond the argument for mere apostolic authorship of each individual. Below we will argue that a case can be made that at least certain blocks of canonical materials, if not the whole canonical list itself, were recognized and authorized during the apostolic period. If valid, this argument would suggest that the canonical decisions of the fourth century were correct not simply because they accurately ascertained the apostolic source of each writing. Rather, their canonical lists grew organically out of the implied or explicit decisions the apostles themselves made about their own writings and their apostolic co-witnesses in the faith.

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 160, 162, 165, 171-172.

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Luther and the Saving Righteousness of Christ in the Objective Sacramental Word

Standing on the shoulders of Augustine and his first reformation of the doctrine of grace, Martin Luther sought to bring the Church of the sixteenth century back to the biblical doctrine of justification.  Central to Luther’s Reformation theology was his resolution of the Augustinian Dilemma through the concept of the sacramentality of the word.  In this regard, our thesis stands contrary to popular belief that Luther’s central project was the doctrine of justification by faith.  Faith is of course of central importance to Luther, but faith is only meaningful insofar as it relies on a word from God that sacramentally gives the reality that faith receives.  For this reason, the emphasis in Luther is less on the subjective act of belief and more on the reality of God’s saving righteousness in Christ. Christ’s righteousness creates and bestows the objective reality of which it speaks through the word and sacrament ministry of the Church.  Luther’s belief in justification by the word transcends the Augustinian conception of the word as merely a form of signification, a concept which drives most Catholic and Protestant theologies of justification down to the present.

On the surface Luther’s belief that faith in the promise is central to the efficacy of the sacrament might appear subjectivistic.  It might be argued that this confines the work of God to the human choice to believe.  This is a charge that has been frequently made against Luther by Roman Catholic apologists.[1]  Nevertheless, such an interpretation would be incorrect.  As we will see below, Luther holds that because the risen Jesus himself speaks through the means grace in the power of the Holy Spirit, the sacrament carriers within itself the ability to create and sustain the faith that receives it. For this reason, it would be more proper to say that Jesus’ historically objective word and its divine power constitute both the validity and efficacy of the sacrament.[2]  As will later be observed, it is Jesus’ word of promise that trumps all things, including subjective human psychological states, or the discernment of contrition by a priest.

Absolution is a divine efficacious word (Thettel-Wort) and is not a mere piece of information (Heissel-Wort).[3]  The word that the priest speaks is a sacramental instrument wherein God is present and communicates his grace: “This is why it [confession and absolution] is called a sacrament, a holy sign, because in it one hears the words externally that signify spiritual gifts within, gifts by which the heart is comforted and set at peace.”[4]  Since the heart is only set at peace by the divine grace present in the objective word, it follows that the word is itself the divine instrument that creates faith in the heart.  As suggested earlier, the logical implication of this is that validity of the sacrament and the efficacy are all contained in the Word of God itself.[5]   

As a result of this understanding of absolution, Augustine’s concept of res and signum in a sacrament is significantly modified.  Although there is still a distinction between the visible sign and the invisible grace, the signum (the word of absolution) does not somehow point beyond itself to the invisible res (the work of the Holy Spirit).  Rather, the res is present and communicated through the outward signum (i.e., word).  When faith appropriates the word, it appropriates divine grace and forgiveness itself.  As Bayer observes:

“That the signum itself is already the res, that the linguistic sign is already the matter itself – that was Luther’s great hermeneutical discovery, his reformational discovery in the strictest sense. . . Since the sign is itself already the thing it declares, this means, with reference to absolution, that the statement “I absolve you of your sins!” is not a judgement, which merely establishes that something is true already . . . Instead, in this instance, a speech act actually constitutes a reality.”[6]

The faith that appropriates the promise is not an autonomous action of the human person, but rather a product of divine grace.  Faith is not an independent factor that transmutes absolution as a possibility into an actuality.  Rather, the absolution is an objective and fully actualized reality that faith can receive: “Christ, your God, will not lie to you, nor will he waver; neither will the devil overturn his words for him.  If you build upon them with a firm faith, you will be standing on the rock against which the gates and all the powers of hell cannot prevail.”[7]  In other words, faith does not make the word a reality any more than a house that is built on a rock is secure because of the act of building.  The house built on a rock is foundationally secure because of what it is built on (Mt. 7:24-7).

Luther’s emphasis on the objectivity of the Word of God can be especially seen in how he deals with the reality of unbelief: “By such disbelief [in the word of grace] you make God to be a liar when, through his priest, he says to you, “You are loosed from your sins,” and you retort, ‘I don’t believe it,’ or, ‘I doubt it.”[8]  If the absolution became true by believing it, then Luther would not accuse the unbeliever of making God a liar.  If the believer makes absolution occur by his faith, then unbelief would prevent the word of absolution from becoming a true word.  As a consequence, God would not be insulted as a liar, since without faith no absolution would take place.  What Luther claims instead is that although unbelief blocks divine grace and forgiveness from being received, faith does not actualize absolution as a reality.  To borrow a term from Gerhard Ebeling,[9] the “word-event” (Wortgeschehen) of the giving of absolution exists prior to faith and determines its reality.  Grace and forgiveness are already actualized in the word-event of absolution, faith merely receives and participates in them.

[1] See Paul Hacker, Das Ich im Glauben bei Martin Luther (Graz: Styria Verlag, 1966).

[2] Robert Kolb and Charles Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 135-43.

[3] LW 37:180-88. See David Steinmetz, “Luther and the Two Kingdoms,” in Luther in Context (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 115.

[4] LW 35:11.

[5] Kolb and Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology, 176-88.

[6] Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 52-3.

[7] LW 35:12.

[8] LW 35:13-4.  Emphasis added.

[9] Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. James Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 325-32.

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

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The Triune God, the Person of Christ, and Inerrancy

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s subject-object dualism, Scripture teaches that all reality is rooted in the triune God, who unites subjectivity and objectivity in His personal existence. On the one hand, God is omniscient and therefore possesses an absolutely objective knowledge of Himself and all His creatures. At the same time, God’s knowledge of Himself and His creation comes in and through His personal and subjective existence as eternally actualized in the persons of the Trinity. God therefore knows what He knows absolutely objectively, but from the analogical “perspective” of the individual persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Moreover, God’s knowledge, particularly of Himself, is relational in that it is actualized through the perichoretic mutual indwelling of the persons within one another. Although the persons of the Trinity know one another through mutual indwelling, they do not lose their personal and distinct subjectivity as persons.

Beyond the life of the Trinity, one can see the unity of objectivity and subjectivity in the incarnation. Here the universal and absolutely objective God takes into Himself a particular subjective human existence in time. Again, the subjective and objective are not antithetical to one another but perichoretically indwell one another through the communicatio idiomatum of the incarnation. Just as the persons of the Trinity perichoretically know and dwell in one another without abrogating their distinct personal realities, the two natures communicate their properties to one another without obliterating their distinctness as divine and human.

Therefore, the man Jesus participates in the fullness of divine glory (genus majestaticum, Col 2:9) and even the archetypal theology of God’s eternal self-knowledge (theologia archetypa, Col 2:3).[1] Likewise, in and through His unity with the human nature the person of the Son in His absolute objectivity and omniscience participates in the historical situatedness and particularity of the human nature. As a result of the communicatio idiomatum in Christ, creatures in their subjectivity, finitude, and historical situatedness are given access to the full objectivity of God’s reality and truth.

The form taken by Scripture as the inspired Word of God thus comes into focus. As we have already seen, in moving the scriptural authors to write, the Holy Spirit incorporated (one might say by enhypostasis) the individuality of each scriptural author and his particular situation in time and space into the composition of the divinely inspired books. In the incarnation the human nature of Christ possesses its own individual characteristics while at the same time lacking its own center of identity (anhypostasis). Rather, Christ’s humanity is incorporated into and possesses its center of identity in the eternal person of the Word (enhypostasis). By analogy, the individual characteristics of each scriptural author are not negated by the revelation of the Holy Scriptures but are incorporated into the act of inspiration and composition. Nevertheless, since the words of the Bible are the very words of God, the written words of the scriptural authors find their ultimate center of identity not in the personality, intentionality, and circumstances of the individual author but rather in the hypostasis of God’s revelation.

Hence, as a byproduct of God’s trinitarian and incarnational agency the Bible gives the Word of God in and through a variety of creaturely witnesses. Indeed, in the Bible there is a “cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1). Like the Trinity and the incarnation, Scripture witnesses to a single harmonious truth manifested in and through difference. The Bible is absolutely objective and inerrant. It witnesses to what genuinely occurred in time and space, but it does so from the perspective of the individual authors in their individual communities and historical situations, thus conveying to its readers a symphony or even a polyphony of truth.[2]

[1] Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics 1:252; Preus, Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism 1:170–72.

[2] See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987).

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 143-145.

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The Failure of Augustinian Sacramentalist and Predestinarian trajectories

It is easy to perceive the two main modern manifestations of the Augustinian dilemma (major strains of post-Tridentine Catholicism and Calvinism) in utero.  Despite censure from the institutional Church through the Middle Ages, sacramental anti-realist position (usually, though not always connected with hard predestinarianism) manifested itself throughout the Middle Ages in the everything from the heresy of Berengar of Tours to the theology of the so-called proto-Reformers (Wycliffe, Hus, etc.).[1]

In giving a theological evaluation, it should be observed that the difficulty with both trajectories within the Augustinian tradition is that they destroy the biblical emphasis on the divine Word’s ability to enact salvation through the sacramental medium of human words.  For Augustine, the word is not a divine deed that contains within it the coming of the reality of which it speaks.  Rather, the word is a mere signifier that signifies things to be known more authentically through the experience of vision beyond them.  As a result, according to the first option outlined above the elect are predestined by invisible grace, which merely coincides with the means of grace- but is not literally present in them.  Therefore, the external medium of the word and sacraments do not enact salvation, they merely signify a salvation that God has already enacted in his eternal choice.  Conversely, following the second option, if grace is contained in the word and sacraments, but not enacted through them, it logically follows that the means of grace come to function as a signifier that signifies the possibility of grace to be actualized by free will.  It is not the Word of God that actualizes the redemption of the individual sinner, but free will accepting grace.

Ultimately, the competing sacramentalist and predestinarian trajectories fail to counteract the reality of sin as it is defined within the Augustinian tradition.  For Augustine, sin is self-incurvature (incurvate in se) and self-orientation.[2]  Grace must break this self-orientation and reorient the sinner toward God.  Nevertheless, if the means of grace do not actually contain grace and God invisibly elects believers, then it is up to the individual to discern the signs of the presence of God’s grace within him or herself.  In discerning God’s electing grace, they must necessarily return to their own self-focus and trust.  Conversely, if the means of grace do contain real grace that one is expected to grasp with his own free will, then one will again turn inward to discern whether one has appropriately utilized one’s free will to take hold of the offer of grace.  In either trajectory, the root of sin is ultimately not defeated, and the Augustinian tradition therefore fails to combat sin based on its own internal criterion.

[1] See the following: See Stephen Lahey, “The Sentences Commentary of Jan Hus,” A Companion to Jan Hus, ed. Ota Pavlicek and František Šmahel (Leiden: Brill), 147-9;  A.J. Macdonald, Berengar and the Reform of Sacramental Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, 1930); Stephen Penn, “Wycliffe and the Sacraments,” in A Companion to John Wyclif, Late Medieval Theologian, ed. Ian Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 241-93; John Adam Robson, Wyclif and the Oxford Schools: The Relation of the “Summa de Ente” to Scholastic Debates at Oxford in the Later Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1961).

[2] Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 61.

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

Image “i dont (want to) see it : incurvatus se” by Rachel Telian (2015)