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The Hiddenness of God and Theodicy

Under the veil of divine hiddenness and the false conjectures of fallen human reason, there is an aporia between the activities of the Father and the Spirit and with the universal and unconditional love revealed in the Son.  In light of this, human reason inevitably tries to rationalistically harmonize these disparate activities and peer into the hiddenness of God.  Nevertheless, all rationalistic theodicies ultimately fail because they try to justify God’s actions on the basis of the law.  Not only does this demand God justify himself when it is humans who need justification,[1] but because God’s will is not exhausted by the law, God can never be made completely explicable on the basis of the law.  The good news ultimately consists in the fact that although the law is God’s holy and eternal will, God possesses possibilities that transcend the law manifest in the atoning work of Christ.

Instead of creating a rationalistic/legalistic theodicy,[2] Christians must cling to the gospel-promise and operate on the basis of a theodicy of faith.[3]  On the basis of faith in the promise, the believer trusts that the divine love manifest in Christ has revealed the hidden coherence of the triune being in a preliminary sense in the means of grace.  Only at the eschaton, the will the full coherence of the works of the one God be revealed to believers.  Faith possesses the full confidence of the sacramental Word of God, in which the Son has revealed the Father’s true heart to faith through the power of the Spirit.  By holding onto the sacramental Word, faith comes into contact with the objectified gracious electing will of God and can be certain of salvation. 

[1] LW 12:311.

[2] Gottfried von Leibniz, Theodicy, trans. E.M. Huggard (New York: Cosmo Classics, 2010).

[3] Paul Hinlicky, Beloved Community: A Critical Dogmatics after Christendom (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015), 72.  Though the general thrust of Hinlicky’s idea is correct, I do not endorse all details.

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

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Intuitu Fidei in Orthodoxy and Pietism

This deviation from Luther and the teaching of the Formula of Concord came to be known as the teaching of intuitu fidei (“in view of faith”) and was eventually established the standard teaching of Lutheran Scholasticism with surprisingly little resistance.[1]  Lutherans generally held to the intuitu fidei teaching until the nineteenth century when the Neo-Lutheran movement rediscovered Luther’s doctrine of election.  In the United States, this rediscovery sparked the “Election Controversy” of the 1870s and 1880s fought between a series of midwestern German and Norwegian immigrant denominations.[2] 

The teaching of intuitu fidei had many difficulties, not least among them was that it was conceptually incoherent.  The premise of the Lutheran Scholastics remained that God actively created and sustained faith in Christians.[3]  What the teaching of intuitu fidei suggested was that God passive foreknew his own active work of communicating and sustaining the faith in the elect.  To say that God passively foreknew his own active work is absurd and incoherent.  Pastorally, the teaching proved to be a disaster because it held that believers could never genuinely possess assurance of their election, but only that God had at the present moment justified them if they were not actively resisting his grace.  The late Lutheran Scholastic David Hollaz baldly claimed that believers could never have full assurance of their salvation until their deathbed.[4]  Thus, intuitu fidei placed the accent very heavily on the human subject’s initiative in continuing to worthily cooperate with the divine grace offered in the means grace.  Indeed, it ultimately assumed that humans did indeed contribute something to their salvation.[5]  Inevitably, this teaching led to a return to the anxiety of whether one had appropriately cooperated with divine grace, albeit now following a line of reason anticipated by Melanchthon’s psychologization of faith.

In the last decades of the seventeenth century there emerged a tradition within Lutheranism called “Pietism.”[6]  Pietism is often seen as the antithesis of Scholastic Orthodoxy, with which it fought with for theological supremacy until well into the eighteenth century.[7]  Nevertheless, there is a continuity between the two theological traditions in that they both accorded a definitive role to the human subject in cooperating with divine grace.  Therefore, it is arguably the case that Pietism inherited Scholastic Orthodoxy’s problematic theology of sin and grace, and simply drove the disastrous pastoral implications intuitu fidei heresy to its logical conclusion. 

[1] Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and the Wittenberg Theological Method, 266; Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 272-92.

[2] Eugene Fevold, “Coming of Age: 1875-1900,” in The Lutherans in North America, ed. E. Clifford Nelson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 313-25.

[3] Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 458-80.

[4] Ibid.,292.

[5] Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and the Wittenberg Theological Method, 266

[6] See: Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Heinrich Schmid, The History of Pietism (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 2007).

[7] F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 57-8.  See Lutheran Orthodoxy’s classic critique of Pietism in: Valentin Ernst Loescher, The Complete Timotheus Verinus, trans. James Langebartels, and Robert Koester (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 2006).

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

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Melanchthon Falls Into the Augustinian Dilemma

The older Melanchthon took Luther’s doctrine of the sacramentality of the word and reinterpreted it along the lines of the typical sacramentalist trajectory of the Augustinian Dilemma.  The Word of God is genuinely sacramental for Melanchthon in that it contains the coming of the Holy Spirit who works faith.  Nevertheless, in Melanchthon’s teaching it is at minimum a very strongly implied that the Holy Spirit’s work is dependent on the human will’s consent to cooperate.  Hence, in Melanchthon’s later work, grace can be construed as ultimately a possibility that is actualized by human decision.  Such a human decision can be called in question regarding its sincerity, thereby returning the sinner to the authenticity of his works (in this case, not external works, but rather a psychological event of conversion).  Therefore, the logical implication of the older Melanchthon’s theology of justification is that Luther’s unreflective faith is denied in favor an extremely reflective faith.  As we will see, the psychologizing of faith and the implicit call for self-examination as the sincerity of one’s conversion would become a standard feature in many strands of the later Protestant tradition.

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

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Luther vs. Calvin on Justification and Election

Ultimately, those who embrace Luther’s theology find Calvin’s theology of election and justification so problematic because it fails to see that God is present and active in his Word in precisely the manner that he promises to be.  Calvin envisions human salvation and reprobation from the perspective of a comprehensive plan in eternity operating above and beyond the external Word.  The harmony of this plan can be discerned by looking past God’s words and coverings in order to see the whole of God’s hidden providence.[1]  Since some are saved and others not, God must not mean what he says when he wills the salvation of all who encounter him in the Word.  As a result, in Calvin’s theology the external Word may or may not do what it promises.  Only those who receive the inner call are truly elect and can see through the external word to God’s unified plan of grace for them as an individual.[2] 

By contrast, Luther sees God as exercising his rule through his Word manifest in and through his created masks.  Contrary to the claim of many Calvinists, Luther and the Lutheran tradition do not ultimately make God’s grace ineffective.  On the contrary, God’s Word always does precisely what it speaks.  However, God’s exercise of his reign is divided between a realm of law and a realm of grace. Those places where God has promised to work death and condemnation inexorably work death and condemnation.  By contrast, those who look for God in in the Word and sacraments will infallibly find a grace there that performs what it speaks.

Seen from the perspective of the sacramentality of the Word, the question of the perseverance of the saints is solved not on the basis of a special spiritual gift given to the elect (as in Augustine[3] and Calvin[4]), but on the basis on the efficacy of the means of grace external to the believer.[5]  God is always faithful to his Word regarding the means of grace.  The grace of the Word and the sacraments will inexorably move one toward the kingdom of heaven, just as a person who gets on a raft in the Mississippi River in Minnesota will inexorably move toward the Gulf of Mexico.[6] 

It could of course be objected that since Luther and the subsequent Lutheran tradition believe that apostasy is possible, one can never be genuinely certain that the divine Word will carry one along to their eschatological destiny.  In response, Lutherans have historically observed that God’s promise of grace is objectively true whether or not one believes in it.[7]  As we saw in Luther’s pronouncement regarding objective justification in an earlier chapter,[8] God’s promise of grace in Christ is more real than one’s refusal to believe it, and therefore remains a valid promise even if one chooses to actively reject it.[9]  Hence, to doubt the Word of the gospel is not to invalidate it, but rather to place one’s self outside of the realm of grace where the Word is operative and effective (i.e., the  sphere of the Church and its ministry), and into the realm of wrath and law which inexorably leads to eternal death (Rom. 3:20).  Hence, as long as one looks away from one’s present or possible future works and to God’s promise present in sphere of grace, one can always have infallible certainty that the living and active Word of the gospel will perform precisely what it speaks.    

[1] See the outline of this approach in the clearest terms in: John Calvin, Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, trans. J.K.S. Reid (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1997).

[2] ICR, 3.24.8; Calvin: The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. and ed. John T. McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1967), 2:974-5.

[3] Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance; NPNFa, 5:.

[4] ICR, 3.24.7; Calvin: The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. and ed. John T. McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1967), 2:973-4.

[5] See the Lutheran view and critique of the alternatives in: Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, 3 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1951-1953), 3:89-103.

[6] Paulson, Luther’s Outlaw God: Hiddenness, Evil, and Predestination, vol. 1, 57-158.

[7] Pieper, Christian Dogmatics,2:321, 2:347-8, 2:508-12, 2:543.

[8] LW 22:382. 

[9] Tom G. A. Hardt, “Justification and Easter: A Study in Subjective and Objective Justification in Lutheran Theology,” in A Lively Legacy: Essays in Honor of Robert Preus, ed. Kurt E. Marquart, John R. Stephenson, Bjarne W. Teigen (Ft. Wayne: Concordia Theological Seminary, 1985), 52-78; Eduard Preuss, The Justification of the Sinner before God, trans. J.A. Friedrich (Ft. Wayne, IN: Lutheran Legacy, 2011), 29-61; Robert Preus, “Objective Justification,” in Doctrine is Life: Robert D. Preus Essays on Justification and the Lutheran Confessions, ed. Klemet Preus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2006).

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

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Luther vs Augustine on Love

Since the self is properly oriented in its relationship with God by faith as trust, Luther now redirects love to the task of correctly orienting the external person in the earthly sphere.  This represents a total inversion of the Augustinian doctrine of love.  For the Bishop of Hippo, the love of earthly things functions as distractions from the love of God.  Indeed, in spite of being a biblical theme, at this stage of his development Luther seems uncomfortable about even talking about the love of God. Later in the Catechism, he again returned to the formula of “We should fear and love God, etc.,” and lost his aversion to talk of the love of God.  Nevertheless, in Freedom of a Christian, Luther consistently argues that love’s proper orientation is in fact an earthly object, namely the neighbor: “This is truly Christian life.  Here faith is truly active in love [Gal. 5:6], that is, it finds expression in works of freest service, cheerfully done, with which a man willing serves another [i.e. the neighbor] without hope of reward . . . “[1]   

Hence, the creative Word of God brings about a faith which orients believers toward God in Christ, whereas love is primarily directed toward the neighbor: “We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and the neighbor.  He lives in Christ through faith, and in his neighbor through love.”[2]  Whereas the person under the power of sin and self-justification stood curved in on himself (incurvatus in se), now the believer lives a life externalized in the other: first in Christ through faith, then through the neighbor in love.[3]  In this, the self becomes radically decentered in the form of ecstatic existence (raptus, exstasis).  In this, Luther borrows yet another theme from the mystical tradition,[4] yet remolds it around the biblical themes of faith in God and the love of the neighbor.

[1] LW 31:365.  Emphasis added.

[2] LW 31:371.  Emphasis added.

[3] See good description of Luther’s position here in George Wolfgang Forell, Faith Active in Love: An Investigation into the Principles Underlying Luther’s Social Ethics (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1999).

[4] See Karl-Heinz zur Mühlen, Nos extra nos: Luthers Theologie zwischen Mystik und Scholastik (Tübingen: Mohr, 1972).

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