Category: Justification

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The Pattern of Flight from Condemnation to Grace

God’s wrath is revealed to all outside the garden (that is, outside the sphere of divine grace and promise) through his creaturely masks. Indeed, God’s “invisible attributes [i.e., including his holiness and wrath], namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20, Emphasis added).[1] 

Nevertheless, God established a new word of promise in the form of the protoevangelium in Genesis 3:15.  The grace of the protoevangelium took on an even more definite form in the corporate life and history of Israel through the promise God attached to Abraham’s “seed” (Gen. 22:18).  This effective Word of promise pushed the history of Israel inexorably along to its fulfillment in the person of the Messiah, even in the face of human opposition.  Nevertheless, the movement of the divine Word toward its final fulfillment could often appear as a failure even as it succeeded.  When Moses pronounced the divine Word “Let my people go,” it appeared ineffective to both the Egyptians and Israelites.  Indeed, Pharaoh was apparently unmoved by the pronouncement of the divine deed-word and, in turn, increased Israel’s labor (Exod. 5).  Nevertheless, it was through Pharaoh’s very obstinacy that God worked his redemption and was finally able to bring a plague so horrific that Egypt expelled Israel.[2]  God likewise told Isaiah to speak a word of repentance to Israel that they would ignore, thereby ensuring their suffering in Babylon (Isa. 6:9-13).  But Israel’s destruction was be the occasion for their true repentance, something that would prepare them for the grace of restoration and the coming of the Messiah (Isa. 40).  Finally, God’s Word of redemption found ultimate fulfillment in the opposition and murder of Jesus by his opponents.  By killing God himself, Jesus’ enemies brought about the fulfillment of the very Word of God that they sought to thwart.  As Luther’s theology of the cross shows, God works under the form of his opposite.  

God fulfills his Word under the outward appearance of it having failed.

Likewise, throughout the history of Israel, God’s pattern of attaching his dual words of condemnation and grace to created masks continued.  By doing so, the Lord bid his covenant people to flee from the word of condemnation to that of grace.  Although Jacob is attacked by God in the night, he demands the name of the shadowy attacker and thereby hearkened back to the promise of blessing that God had made to him at Bethel (Gen. 32:22-32).[3]  Moses is also attacked by God on his return to Egypt but flees to the promise of grace found in circumcision of his son (Exod. 4:24-26).[4]  God threatened with death those who came near Mt. Sinai, the mountain where he gave his law (Exod. 19:10-13), but promised forgiveness and a share in his personal holiness to those who approached him through the sacramental channels of the Tabernacle/Temple at Mt. Zion.[5] 

This pattern of fleeing from condemnation to grace also continued in the life of Christ.  In the crucifixion, God designated Jesus and the sacraments of the New Testament, which flowed from his side (Jn. 19:34) on the hillock of Golgotha, as the new place of grace. Likewise, he designated the Temple mount and works connected with it as a place of condemnation (Gal. 4:25-6).  In his resurrection, Jesus insisted that the women flee his tomb (the place of death and condemnation) and instructed them to tell his disciples to meet him in Galilee.  In Galilee, Jesus told the disciples look for him now not in the tomb, but in the word and sacrament ministry of the Church (Mt. 28:8-10, v. 16-20).

[1] Steven Paulson, Lutheran Theology (New York: T & T Clark International, 2011), 70-4.

[2] Steven Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 229-43

[3] LW 6:122-55.

[4] Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination, vol. 1, 17-8.

[5] See good description in: John Kleinig, Leviticus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2003).

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

Image: Gustave Doré, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1855.

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The Irony of N.T. Wright’s New Perspective Approach to Paul

Throwback Post

If you’re interested in the Apostle Paul, you should definitely pick up a copy of Anglican theologian N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Though I don’t always agree with Wright (particularly on his interpretation of Paul, as we will see below), I do consistently find him to be an engaging author from whom I have learned a great deal. 

A dapper N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, 2003-2010 and currently a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall

A lot of what Wright says criticizes a certain trajectory of scholarship on Paul that begins with a Church historian and biblical scholar named Ferdinand Christian Baur.  Baur taught at Tubingen, in southern Germany, during the heyday of Hegelianism (1830s) about twenty years before the movement collapsed in the wake of the failures of the 1848 revolutions.  As a result, his interpretation of the New Testament and early Church history tends to mirror Hegelian dialectic.  The “thesis” of early Christianity was Jewish Christianity, as represented by Peter.  It was legalistic and backward, and generally not that great.  Then there was a Gentile Christianity, as represented by Paul. This had a high Christology (as opposed to the Jewish low Christology) and was generally open minded and tolerant. Moreover, Pauline Gentile Christianity pretty much rejected everything Jewish.  These two forms of Christianity fought it out over the first few generations, until the the second century, when Luke wrote Acts in order to pretend that although the Apostles might have had some conflicts, they eventually got along (bear in mind, that Baur dated the NT documents mostly from the second century, something that even secular historical research would not accept at this point!).  Acts created the beginning of a synthesis between Jewish and Gentile Christianity, which found its fulfillment in John’s Gospel of love (love being the virtue that reconciles). We see this synthesis take final form in what one might call the “early Catholicism” of Church Fathers like Irenaeus.  This, of course, was a betrayal of Paul’s theology and “early Catholicism” for Baur is a kind of Christianity that has lost its nerve.  So, the Hegelian dialectic goes thesis (Jewish/Petrine Christianity), antithesis (Gentile/Pauline Christianity), synthesis (Johannine/Lukan/early Catholic Christianity).  Bam!

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Sanctification and Justification

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Sanctification is then not the building up of righteous qualities inside of believers, but believers learning to live outside of themselves as a result of their justification.  Such an existence lived outside of ourselves neither destroys the simul of Christian existence, nor the full and robust reality of sanctification.  The more the Christian meditates on the divine Word, the more he or she cannot help but feel the reality of his or her inner sinfulness.  This recognition will undoubtedly be augmented by the fact that we sin every day and therefore the older we become the more we have to regret.  Nevertheless, such a recognition of our innate sinfulness draws us ever more out ourselves into Christ through faith.  In turn, faith in Christ ever increases and overflows into service to our neighbors. 

Of course, Christian love is always imperfect.  Hence, there is a genuine insight in Luther’s early theology wherein he describes the believer as “partim peccator,”[1] and “peccatores in re, iusti autem in spe.”[2] In our present life, there is a real distinction between which actions of ours are the fruits of the Spirit and which are sins.  Hence, Lutherans have developed the paradigm of “active” and “passive” righteousness, within which believers are “partim peccator” according to the former category.  At the same time, any sin within us makes us “totus peccator” before God.  One either sins, or does not, and this fact grants us a status of total sinfulness or righteousness before God.  Even the good works of believers are imperfect, and therefore judged by the absolute standard of divine law are in themselves sinful (Isa. 64:6).  Hence, we are not “partim peccator” before the eyes of God according to passive righteousness.  In the present age, we are always total sinners coram Deo and therefore beggars before the divine throne of judgment and mercy.

Believers’ sense of their sinfulness drives on their sanctification.  If believers honestly contemplate their own actions, they cannot help but feel that their sinfulness outweighs their progress in good works. Indeed, the progress of sanctification cannot be quantified, and at times, we cannot detect any moral progress in our lives at all.  Such reflections should inevitably lead us to repentance and ever-deeper faith in Christ.  This divinely wrought faith in turn leads to overflowing love for God and our neighbor.  Thus, the Christian life can be seen as a perpetual cycle of believers suffering the work of the Word of God as law and gospel, until they are definitively transformed by temporal death and resurrection.

[1] WA 56:272.

[2] WA 56:269.

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

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Luther on the Law

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The reality of the law as a principle of legal relationship (morally charged human activity resulting in merit or demerit), as opposed to a principle of grace/promise relationship (i.e., protoevangelium, new covenant), applies across cultural and historical situations (Pharisees/Judaizers vs. Ockhamism). As a result, Luther gave expansive definitions of the law throughout his career rooted in the principles he discovered in his biblical exegesis.  Much like many in the early and medieval Church, Luther held that God’s commandments given to Israel and the Church expressed his just and holy eternal divine nature.  It logically follows that if God is eternal (as Scripture affirms) then his will (which includes the law) must also be eternal.  In his Antinomian Disputations of the 1530s, Luther affirmed that “the Decalogue is eternal.”[1]  Elsewhere Luther states the same doctrine.  The law is: “His [God’s] will and counsel,”[2] it “serves to indicate the will of God,”[3] “commands firmly and forever,”[4] and is “the eternal and immutable judgment of God.”[5]  Later Lutheran Scholasticism[6] would follow Luther and express the truth that the law is rooted in God’s eternal nature through the utilization of the Stoic concept of lex aeterna.[7]

Beyond affirming that the law was God’s eternal and immutable will for his creation, in the the Antinomian Disputation of the 1530s Luther also spoke of the law as anything in creation that expresses the condemnation of sin.  Part of this formulation was a response to the work of the early Lutheran heretic Johann Agricola.  Agricola believed that only a heartfelt love of God could inspire true repentance.  Because the gospel, and not the law, inspired fallen humanity’s love for God, it followed that preaching the promise of the gospel to the exclusion of the law should occur.  For Agricola, then, the law was good, but only for the use of the civil authority.[8] 

Luther countered Agricola’s claims by noting that God’s wrath against humanity deriving from the violation of the law extended to the whole of creation. Therefore, simply excluding certain biblical texts or the word “law” from preaching would do no good.  Death, destruction, illness, and all the vicissitudes of the fallen creation preached the law (i.e., the consequences of not following the law) to fallen humans without any explicit word of law from preacher: “Anything that exposes sin, wrath, or death exercises the office of the law . . .”[9]  Hence, the preacher achieved nothing by excluding the preaching of the law.  Indeed, since God mandates the preaching of both the law and the promise, the preacher would be guilty of dereliction of duty by not preaching the law.[10] 

[1] LW 73:112.

[2] LW 9:51

[3] LW 22:143.

[4] WA 5:560.  “inaeternum et stabiliter.”  Translation my own.

[5] LW 7:275.

[6] See: Gerhard Forde, The Law-Gospel Debate: An Interpretation of Its Historical Development (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1969), 3-11.

[7] Gunnar Skirbekk and Nils Gilje, A History of Western Thought: From Ancient Greece to the Twentieth Century(London: Routledge, 2001), 94.

[8] See discussion of Agricola’s early position in Timothy Wengert, Law and Gospel: Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997), 84-9.  Also see description in F. Bente, Historical Introductions to the Book of Concord (St. Louis: Concordia, 1965), 161-9. 

[9] LW 73:54.

[10] LW 47:111.

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

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Luther on Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist

Although Luther affirmed the substantial presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, he disliked the doctrine of transubstantiation 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.[1]  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.[2] 

In spite of this criticism of transubstantiation, it is interesting to note that Luther does not consider belief in the doctrine to be tremendously problematic and allows that people could still affirm transubstantiation as a theologoumenon.[3]  What is most important to the Reformer is that one affirms the substantial presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Lord’s Supper.  Although how one conceptually achieves this mysteriously physical presence is not unimportant, the main point for Luther is that one knows that Christ is substantially present in his body and blood “for you” (pro me).[4] 

This is why Luther was considerably less tolerant when it comes to the sacramental symbolicism of a figure like Zwingli.[5]  From Luther’s perspective, Zwingli ignores the divine promise that Christ’s flesh and blood will be present on essentially rationalistic grounds, namely, that physical bodies cannot be at more than one location at once.  As we have seen Luther rejects this logic and affirms that Jesus’ body remains a real body. However, it participates in God’s glory and can transcended the normal boundaries of physicality.[6]  After all, in the resurrection Jesus was able to walk through walls and appear and disappear at will.  Jesus’ body nevertheless remained a real body.  Christ could still invite Thomas to place his fingers in the nail holes of his very real hands and eat fish with the apostles.  Likewise, the mysterious supernatural quality of Christ’s body in the Lord’s Supper does not negate its real physicality or his genuine humanity. 

As we noted earlier, these differences between Luther and Zwingli on the sacrament are due in part to competing concepts of the communicatio idiomatum.[7]  Nevertheless, these differences also have implications regarding the nature of how the Word of God functions.  For Zwingli, the words of institution are signifiers that merely signify.[8]  Zwingli resolves the puzzle of how the signifiers “body and blood” can be validly applied to the signified “bread and wine” (which they do not match) through sacramental symbolicism.[9]  For Luther, divine words are not mere signifiers, but promises that effect what they speak.[10] This is the same principle that we have seen earlier in his views of confession and absolution.  Hence the words “this is my body . . . this is my blood” possess divine power to bring about the presence of Christ’s flesh and blood.[11]  Faith must simply trusts that God’s words perform what they promise.  To believe otherwise would be to trust in human reason over the God’s clearly stated promises.[12]

[1] LW 36:33-4.

[2] LW 36:34-5.

[3] LW 36:35.

[4] Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 379.

[5] Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology, 169-77; Sasse, This is My Body, 134-294.

[6] Thomas Davis,  This Is My Body: The Presence of Christ in Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 41-64; Sasse, This is My Body, 148-60.

[7] Sasse, This is My Body, 148-54.

[8] See discussion in: Aaron Moldenhauer, “Analyzing the Verba Christi: Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, and Gabriel Biel on the Power of Words,” in The Medieval Luther, ed. Christine Helmer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), 53-6.

[9] Ulrich Zwingli, “On the Lord’s Supper,” in Zwingli and Bullinger, 175-238.

[10] Moldenhauer, “Analyzing the Verba Christi,” 57-61.

[11] LW 37:180-88.

[12] LW 37:131.

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