Jack Kilcrease

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).

April 3, 2022April 1, 2022

Doing Theology: Part II

Read Part I Here

We should keep a number of relevant points in mind when examining how Luther construes the theological task. First, the cycle of oratio, meditatio, and tentatio recapitulations the Incarnation and work of Christ. Much as the Word was incarnate through the coming of the Spirit, so too divine truth becomes incarnate in the mind and proclamation of the theologian through the coming of the Word and the Spirit through oratio and meditatio.

In Christ’s incarnation, the Holy Spirit enhypostically incorporated a human nature derived from Mary into the pre-existent Word, so that He might operate in the created world. So too (at least in Johann Gerhard’s account) the Spirit incorporates the pre-existent knowledge of the theologian in the theological task. Finally, Christ’s communication of the Word was tested by his suffering and death, and validated by his resurrection. So too, the interpreter must undergo the testing of his interpretation and application of Scripture within the arena of the kingdom of the world.

The incarnational nature of the theological method of oratio, meditatio, and tentatio also shows how theology can be historically contextual and culturally responsive, while at the same time be faithfully ground in the unchanging Word of God. The theologian’s act of faithfully translating the Word of God into the contemporary idiom is brought about only by the work of the Spirit. The Spirit himself incorporates the knowledge and thought-forms available to the interpreter in his context. Since the Word of God as revelation is embedded in history and the created order, the theologian may seek to clarify the Word by drawing on multiple contextualized disciplines and sources of knowledge that will clarify its meaning.

March 31, 2022April 1, 2022

Doing Theology: Part I

Through the apostolic ministry, Jesus translates his eternal reality and saving work into the preaching of the apostles, which is today condensed into the New Testament. As true God and man, Christ is present to his Church. Within his Church, Christ continues to exchange sin and death for life and righteousness through the sacraments and the preaching office.

Therefore, ultimately, the presence of the risen Jesus and the exchange of realities he affects through his continuing presence in the Word and sacrament ministry of the Church makes theology possible. The theology of the Church depends on the real presence of incarnate Christ, which manifests as infinite and absolute. Yet, at the same time, Christ’s presence is contextual. Through the teachers and pastors of the Church, the risen Christ translates himself into the theology of the Church in the way that he translated himself into his Incarnate life: through the work of the Word and the Spirit.

Luther’s engagement with Scripture offers us some important conceptual tools at this point. In his commentary on Psalm 119, the Reformer argued that the language of the Psalm provided the Church with a model of how theologians ought to engage the truth of the biblical text. For Luther, “prayer, meditation, and suffering/testing form a theologian” (oratio, meditatio, tentatio faciunt theologum).