Category: Book Update

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Justification by the Word

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:

Book cover art from Lexham

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).

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

Posted on

The Fulfillment of the Law and Active and Passive Righteousness

Perhaps one helpful way of conceptualizing how the law can be fulfilled and abrogated coram Deo, while remain a rule of life coram mundo, is through Luther’s distinction between two (active and passive),[1] or in some cases three (civil, imputed, sanctified),[2] kinds of righteousness.[3]  Coram Deo, humans are righteous or unrighteous not on the basis of what they do, but through what they receive.  We passively receive our sinful nature from our parents, which in turn colors everything we do or leave undone.  Likewise, faith is created by a monergistic act of the Holy Spirit, and we receive the gift of imputed righteousness and a renewed heart passively.  This passive gift of righteousness completely abrogates the law coram Deo.  From the perspective of this relational horizon, the law as condemnation moves to the gospel as freedom from condemnation.  Once the gospel has arrived, the law no longer holds sway since it is completely fulfilled.

In terms of our external person coram mundo, humans are good or bad based on what they do (i.e., active righteousness).  Under the first use of the law, the unregenerate can make better or worse decisions and likewise be judged as just or unjust based on what they do.  A person is defined as a good spouse, parent, or citizen based to what extent to which they behave well in these roles.  Indeed, as far as active and civil righteous is concerned, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas are essentially correct.  One can indeed train himself to act in a habitually correct way within his roles in society.  Likewise, under the gospel and the third use of the law the regenerate can cooperate with the Holy Spirit and can listen to and obey the commandments of God through specific external actions.  The faithful do this both as an act of gratitude for the gifts of creation and redemption that they have received, as well as restrain the wicked impulses which remain present in them this side of the eschaton. 

It should be noted that fallen humans tend to reverse these two kinds of righteousness.  Rather than being judged by who they are before God (children of Adam, or redeemed sinners in Christ), humans desire to be righteous on the basis of their works.  As a result, humans have created the various world religions (which work on the basis of the opinio legis),[4] as well as rationalistic/moralistic schemes of theodicy.[5]  Coram mundo, humans desire not to be judged righteous and worthy of status on the basis of what they do, but on the basis of who they are. Likewise, human desire to judge others on the basis of their identities.  In human history, this has given rise to the sins of racism, sexism, and classism, among others. 

[1] LW 26:7-8, LW 31:297-306.

[2] WA 2:43-7.

[3] See Charles Arand, “Two Kinds of Righteousness as a Framework for Law and Gospel in the Apology,” Lutheran Quarterly 15, no. 4 (2001): 417–439; and Robert Kolb, “Luther on the Two Kinds of Righteousness: Reflections on His Two-Dimensional Definition of Humanity at the Heart of His Theology,” Lutheran Quarterly 13, no. 2 (1999): 449–66.

[4] Chris Marantika, “Justification by Faith: Its Relevance in Islamic Context,” Right with God: Justification in the Bible and the World, ed. D.A. Carson (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2002), 228-242; Sunand Simithra, “Justification by Faith: Its Relevance in Hindu Context,” in Right with God, 216-27; and Masao Uenuma, “Justification by Faith: Its Relevance in Buddhist Context,” in Right with God, 243-55.

[5] Gregory Boyd, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997); and idem, Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001); Gottfried von Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E.M. Huggard (New York: Cosmo Classics, 2010).

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

Image from R. J. Grunewald, “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” Grunewald, accessed May 24, 2021, https://www.rjgrune.com/blog/two-kinds-of-righteousness.

Posted on

Check Out This Webinar For My Wife’s New Book

My wife’s new book, Fallacy and Falsehood: How to Think, Read, and Write in the Twenty-First Century just came out with University of Toronto Press. If anyone is interested, she will host a thirty minute webinar on Zoom on Wednesday, April 28 at noon. Participants will receive a discount code if they want to buy the book.