Jack Kilcrease

February 28, 2023March 10, 2023

The God of the Gospel: Affirmation and Negation in Divine Hiddenness

One response to the mythological metaphysics of modernity has been calls to return to something like Aquinas or Pseudo-Dionysius’s analogical or mystical view of God. Although both authors avoid a mythological view of God by removing him from the system of being, calls to return to mysticism or analogy misconceive the problem. Sadly, those who call for such a return often view idolatry primarily as a confusion of creature and creator, rather than as an extension of the problem of self-justification. Humanity only generates idols because self-justifying humans need a God who they can control with their good works or kill off with their denial.

Those who idealize Aquinas’s or Pseudo-Dionysius’s approach to the problem of idolatry typically function within a legalist trajectory. These legalists employ the strategy of pressing the claims of divine transcendence all the harder in order to keep humans from confusing the creation with the creator. Within Protestantism, this can also be observed in Zwingli and Calvin’s wrongheaded campaigns against church artwork and at times music. Pressing the claims of transcendence all the more strongly does not cure human self-justification, it simply hardens it. This is,, of course not to say that showing a concern for divine transcendence, or creator/creature distinction are mistaken. Indeed, univocity and the immanentization of the divine create their own problems with self-justification and idolatry. The key is that any biblically faithful and intellectually credible view of God must overcome antinomian and legalistic conceptions of God by making the law subordinate and penultimate to the gospel.

In order to understand the biblical teaching concerning God from the perspective of the gospel, we turn to Luther as our guide. As we observed in an earlier section, both the pre-modern Greek and Latin theological traditions relied on a dialectic of “negation” (apophatic theology or the via negativa) and affirmation (kataphatic theology or the via positiva). Lowell Green has noted that Luther’s doctrine of God also relies on a form of affirmation and negation, albeit a radically different one. Luther’s affirmation is God hidden (negation) and God revealed (affirmation). As we will also see, one could also add God’s appearance under the law as negation, and gospel as affirmation.

February 22, 2023February 22, 2023

Univocity and Big Problems

In the area of biblical scholarship, many modern Liberals and Fundamentalists see a zero-sum game between the realities of inspiration and historical embeddedness of the biblical texts. On the one hand, Liberals insist that if they can find a human or historically contextual aspect to the text, it must not have come by supernatural revelation. This is because metaphysical univocalism [the belief that words describing God and creatures mean the same thing] implies that there is a zero-sum game between temporal and divine causes. As a result, the assumption is that the human and contextual excludes the divine. On the other hand, Fundamentalists sometimes speak as if they exclude all historical and contextual factors in the composition of the text and read the writings a historically. Again, since the causal agency of the human and divine constitute a zero-sum game within a univocal framework, for divine revelation to take place the divine must replace the agency of the human and temporal.

Indeed, univocal metaphysics are major (though not the sole) source of modernity’s imagined strife between science and religion. In the pre-modern view of God, naturalistic causes and explanations and divine ones did not conflict since there was no zero-sum game between divine and creaturely agency. With univocal metaphysics, naturalistic explanations of phenomenon invariably crowd out divine ones. One can see attempts by early theistic scientists like Isaac Newton making what has often been termed “God of the gaps” arguments in order to find a place for God in a causal order that could increasingly be explained naturalistically. In a number of cases, when there was a causal gap in his theory Newton would attribute the phenomenon to God. Of course, when the naturalistic cause behind the phenomenon was discovered, then God and his causal role were simply pushed back. As things stand in contemporary science, most of the universe can be explained naturalistically. Hence, the chief arguments of the “New Atheist” movement rest on the basis of the onto-theology and univocal metaphysics that they have unconsciously absorbed from modernity. They believe that since science can explain most temporal causes without reference to an eternal cause, like Pierre-Simon Laplace, they have “no need” for the God hypothesis.

Nevertheless, from the perspective of the Bible and pre-modern theism, this is an absurd argument. To use a theater analogy, the claim that the New Atheists are making is that since there is no character in Hamlet named “William Shakespeare,” then William Shakespeare has no causal agency in the play and therefore does not exist. As should be clear, such a claim would completely misconstrue William Shakespeare’s ontological status and causal agency. Moreover, even if one could give a description of the action in the play without any need to make reference to William Shakespeare, such a paradigm of understanding still could not explain why there was a play in the first place or why it was intelligible.

February 6, 2023February 22, 2023

Baptismal Identity and Creedal Faith

The correct perspective from which to view God and humanity is our baptism into Christ and His mystical body, the Church. The threefold divine name of the baptismal formula is indicative of our identity and narrative being as determined by the Triune God’s gracious action in history. Indeed, the Triune structure of the baptismal formula was the basis of the first post-biblical creeds and the multi-year catechetical instruction that early Christians underwent before receiving baptism. In order to be baptized into the Triune name, a catechumen had to first know the true meaning of the divine name. Indeed, to know the meaning of the Triune name is to know the full corpus of Christian doctrine.

For this reason, the best way to expound Christian doctrine is within the structure of the Creed, which speaks of the activity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and from the perspective of how that one Triune God delivers the gospel to us. The centrality of the Gospel promise is the flipside of the confession of the Triune God and His works. As St. Paul told the Church of Rome, faith in Christ necessarily gives rise to a confession of faith: “. . . if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved” (Rom. 10:9-10). Personal faith (fides qua creditor) is therefore grounded in the objective truths of the faith (fides quae creditor). Faith must publicly confess the truthfulness of all God has revealed in his Word as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As Jesus states: “So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 10:32-33).

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Image from Matthew Zickler, “Concerning Rebaptism for Christians,” LCMS Resources, May 4, 2017, https://resources.lcms.org/reading-study/concerning-rebaptism-for-christians/.

May 10, 2022May 10, 2022

God’s Truth and Language Games

Although they are both ultimately problematic, Fundamentalism and right-wing Postmodernist theologies are more workable than theological Liberalism because they remain committed to the basic content of the Christian faith. The issue tends to be more how they seek to establish the validity of their epistemic judgments and less at the content of their judgments. Similarly, in the dialectic of antinomianism and legalism, legalism has the advantage of at least acknowledging the existence of the law. This is true even if legalists suffers from the same delusion as antinomians, namely that we can escape the condemnation of the law. Hence, it is not wrong to acknowledge the acceptance of a law of belief (fides quae creditor) as a necessary condition for possessing genuine Christian faith (fides qua creditor). Rather, what is problematic is to see the law and not the promise of grace is the foundation of the divine-human relationship, and therefore the starting point of all our truth claims.

Postmodernism is correct that there is no neutral starting point for our epistemic projects, even if we admit that the frameworks we employ are vulnerable to critique and falsification. Therefore, we begin with the explicitly biblical presupposition that humans are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26). Christians confess that the biblical God is always and eternally the Holy Trinity. God as Trinity is an eternal linguistic agent, who gracious gives of himself in speaking forth the Word and the spiration of the Spirit. Hence, the Christian God is an eternally gracious and responsive God. God gives and responds to himself within the eternal dialogue and self-communication of the divine life.

April 11, 2022April 14, 2022

Must Christians Reject Modernism and Postmodernism?

Modernism presented Christian theology with both opportunities and challenges. At its best, Modernism consisted of the wreckage left over from the Christian Grand Narrative after much of it had been detonated by Enlightenment thinkers themselves. Because of this, in many instances Modernism helped Christians become more consistent with the basic principles of their religion. The secular concept of human rights is rooted in the inherent dignity of humanity based on the imago Dei (Gen. 9:6). Politically, the idea of human rights curbed abuses of authority by the church and crown. It did away with practices like torture and slavery that even Christian societies had normalized for centuries. Likewise, modern science grew out of Christian belief in a rational creator who had made a rational created order. Rational creatures made in God’s image could understand this order. On the other hand, the creation of the concept of the secular also significantly distorted Christian theology by mutilating its ability to articulate its claims in the public sphere, thereby forcing Christian theology into the straitjacket of either Liberalism or Fundamentalism.

Postmodernism, like Modernism, is full of opportunities and dangers for Christian theology. On the positive side, if appropriately understood, Postmodernism possesses the advantage of exposing secularity’s neutrality and right to arbitrate between what is real and unreal. In other words, Modernism and secularity are simply culturally constructed frameworks that served the very specific purpose of solving the problems created by the European wars of religion. Contrary to what is often believed, one does not simply strip away the religious window dressing of reality to find secular modernity lying underneath. Hence, Christians do not have to abide by the rules of secular modernity in asserting truth claims. They do not have to remove articles of the faith or assume a posture of methodological atheism/naturalism when dealing with the biblical texts as theological Liberals have done. They do not have to validate their belief in the articles of the faith on the basis of modernist standards of truth or rationality the way that many Fundamentalists have done. Neither do they have to invest secular politics with transcendent meaning and treat them as redemptive as both Liberals and Fundamentalists have done.

On the other hand, Postmodernism also represents a challenge and a problem for Christian theology. Postmodernism is not pure nihilism or subjectivism per se, as is often charged. Rather, it is a form of what we might call “provisionalism.” According to a provisionalist, there are no universal and eternal truths, only little and provisional truths. Truth is therefore always socially embedded, impermanent, and revisable. All Grand Narratives are suspect. Reality is only knowable in a fragmentary, linguistically pragmatic, and at times anti-realistic, fashion. As I will argue, this problematic for Christian theology because Christians insist on the eschatological finality of their message. Moreover, Christians must confess the truthfulness of Christianity’s Grand Narrative and insist on linguistic critical-realism.

In light of the aforementioned challenges and insights of the Postmodern project, the next chapter explores various proposals for Postmodern Christian theology in greater detail. In doing this, I will develop a critically realistic view of doctrine. The key to this approach is the Lutheran belief that the “finite is capable of the infinite” (finitum capax infiniti). If this is accurate – and Lutherans must confess that it is – then the seemingly embedded, historical, and provisional can serve as a medium for infinite, eternal, and universal truth.

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).