Theology Archives - Jack Kilcrease

February 28, 2025July 18, 2024

The Biblical Doctrine of God: Transcending Mythology and Metaphysics

As we have seen, broadly speaking, fallen humans have a tendency to thematize the natural knowledge of God available them into two distinct conceptions of the divine: the mythological and metaphysical concepts of God corresponding to antinomianism and legalism. As we have seen, both views of God represent fallen human’s encounter with God’s hiddenness under the law. Although the knowledge of God gained through the created order and the law is valid, it does not reveal the deepest divine mystery and the most fundamental reality of God, namely, his nature as the omnipotent power of grace that can call into existence new possibilities.

Hence, the biblical view of God both fulfills and transcends mythology and metaphysics. Oswald Bayer famously described Christian theology as occupying a place suspended between “Metaphysics and Mythology.”¹ On the one hand, like all the other Axial Age religions, the biblical God is the unitary transcendent metaphysical foundation of all reality.² Contrary to what some modern theological traditions have asserted, the God of the Bible possesses all the classical theistic attributes: omnipotence (Ps. 115:3, Jer. 32:27, Matt. 19:26), omnipresence (1 Kgs 8:27, Jer. 23:24, Acts 17:28), omniscience (Prov. 15:3, Ps. 147:5, Job 37:15, 1 Jn. 3:20), omnibenevolence (Ps. 145:9, Matt. 19:17, 1 Jn. 1:5). He is not a temporal being among other beings, competing for power with other gods and other lords.³ The Bible does of course describe God’s war for creation against the forces of darkness, but as we will later see this battle takes place only because God permits it as a means of achieving his overall goal for creation.

February 18, 2025February 18, 2025

Pastoral Disaster: Justification After the Formula of Concord

Throwback Post

Although the Formula of Concord affirmed Luther’s concept of justification by the word, Lutherans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century quickly returned to the problematic paradigm St. Augustine bequeathed to the West. In this, Lutheran theology tended to take the sacramentalist trajectory in the Augustinian Dilemma.¹ This is probably partially based on the early Lutheran desire to polemically to differentiate itself as a confessional tradition from Calvinism. It is also possible that there were lingering Melanchthonian undercurrents regarding how question of sin and grace was conceptualized. Nevertheless, the largest catalyst for the almost total abandon of the doctrine of election lay in the overreaction to the teaching of a Swiss Lutheran theologian named Samuel Huber.²

Samuel Huber and Theological Overcorrection

Samuel Huber began his career in the Reformed communion.³ Having been censored for some his views of divine grace, he left the Reformed confessional camp to become a Lutheran and taught at Wittenberg.⁴ Huber held that because the grace of God was universal as the Formula of Concord had taught, then it must logically follow that election was also universal.⁵ In teaching this, he was not affirming universalism as many of his contemporaries claimed, but merely conflated election with the gracious invitation of humanity to trust in the gospel.⁶

Aegidius Hunnius, Superintendent and Faculty of the University of Wittenberg

In response to Huber’s claim, Aegidius Hunnius⁷ and Leonhard Hütter⁸ asserted that election is merely God’s passive foreknowledge regarding who would come to faith and preserve it to the end of their lives (ex praevisa fide). Although humans cannot initiate their relationship with God,⁹ humans could lose their faith as Luther had himself affirmed.¹⁰

From the possibility of apostasy, later Lutheran theologians like Johann Gerhard drew the conclusion that preserving or wrecking faith was a matter of contingent human volition (albeit, supported by the power of the Holy Spirit), and hence not subject to the predestining will of God.¹¹ Because God clearly foreknew who would continue to cooperate with him after regeneration and who would fall away, predestination was little more than divine foreknowledge of human faith.¹²

December 30, 2024December 30, 2024

The Incarnation and Kenosis: the Son of God’s Humiliation

Before anyone can discuss Christ’s work, it is first necessary to examine the kenosis, or humiliation, of the Son of God in time. Indeed, the whole course of Old Testament history from the protoevangelium to the Virgin Birth is a kind of kenosis on the part of God. God pledges his very self in the form of the speech-act of promise and, therefore, places himself at the disposal of humanity. Later, he more specifically placed himself at the disposal of Israel in particular.

Having chained (berit, covenanted) himself to Israel through the gift of the divine Name and promise, God finally stood in such profound kenotic solidarity with his people that he actually became one of them. Lutheran philosopher Johann Georg Hamann correctly asserts that the whole history of salvation is a story of divine self-gift and humbling:

Consider how God the Father has humbled Himself by not only forming a lump of earth but also giving it a soul with His breath. Consider how God the Son has humbled Himself- he became a man, became the least of all people and took on the form of a servant; He became the most hapless of them; He was made sin for us; in God’s eyes He was the sinner of the whole people. Consider how low God the Holy Spirit has condescended by becoming a historian of the smallest, most contemptible, most insignificant events on earth, so as to reveal the mysteries and ways of God to mankind in its own speech, in its own history, in its own ways.¹

December 25, 2024December 27, 2024

The Son of God’s Incarnational Epic

The Incarnational Arc of Creation

Even in the midst of judging the old creation and its mangled narrative, God begins anew. He speaks forth a new narrative of creation through his gospel promise (Gen. 3:15). God’s promise is effective speech; creation gains its identity from its story. Thus, in order to redeem creation, God had to speak forth a new story. The historical narrative of redemption culminated in Christ’s recapitulation of the old creation (Rom. 5; 1 Cor. 15) and its transcendence in the resurrection.

Every act of human rebellion within the biblical narrative meets with both an act of judgment and an act of grace. God’s possibilities are not exhausted by those established in his protological order and law. These are hardwired into creation as an expression of the eternal divine will, but they do not exhaust the divine will. God is not merely the necessary being of the philosophers, but as Eberhart Jüngel puts it, God is the “more than necessary being.”¹

The new creation does not negate the old creation, but envelops it, and incorporates it into itself. The new creation’s incorporation of the old creation into itself is analogous to the eternal Son’s incorporation (enhypostasis) of an impersonal human nature into his center of identity (anhypostasis). In this way, the tragic narrative of the Fall becomes a subplot in the comic story of redemption.

December 18, 2024December 18, 2024

The Eucharistic Miracle of Christ’s Substantial Body and Blood Given For Us

The Augsburg Confession affirms the ancient and medieval consensus of the Catholic Church that Christ’s flesh and blood are substantially present in the Eucharist: “Of the Supper of the Lord they teach that the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present, and are distributed to those who eat the Supper of the Lord; and they reject those that teach otherwise.” This affirmation of the substantial presence of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Lord’s Supper was integral to the Lutheran Reformation from the beginning.

In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther is critical of the practice of communion in one kind (i.e., the pre-Vatican II practice of withholding the cup from the laity), transubstantiation, and the the Mass as a sacrifice for the living and the dead. Nevertheless, unlike most of the other reformers, Luther is quite clear that there is a Real Presence based on his canonical, catholic, and evangelical principle. This real substantial presence was the overwhelming catholic consensus of the ancient Church from its inception….