Tag: Augustine

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Luther and the Saving Righteousness of Christ in the Objective Sacramental Word

Standing on the shoulders of Augustine and his first reformation of the doctrine of grace, Martin Luther sought to bring the Church of the sixteenth century back to the biblical doctrine of justification.  Central to Luther’s Reformation theology was his resolution of the Augustinian Dilemma through the concept of the sacramentality of the word.  In this regard, our thesis stands contrary to popular belief that Luther’s central project was the doctrine of justification by faith.  Faith is of course of central importance to Luther, but faith is only meaningful insofar as it relies on a word from God that sacramentally gives the reality that faith receives.  For this reason, the emphasis in Luther is less on the subjective act of belief and more on the reality of God’s saving righteousness in Christ. Christ’s righteousness creates and bestows the objective reality of which it speaks through the word and sacrament ministry of the Church.  Luther’s belief in justification by the word transcends the Augustinian conception of the word as merely a form of signification, a concept which drives most Catholic and Protestant theologies of justification down to the present.

On the surface Luther’s belief that faith in the promise is central to the efficacy of the sacrament might appear subjectivistic.  It might be argued that this confines the work of God to the human choice to believe.  This is a charge that has been frequently made against Luther by Roman Catholic apologists.[1]  Nevertheless, such an interpretation would be incorrect.  As we will see below, Luther holds that because the risen Jesus himself speaks through the means grace in the power of the Holy Spirit, the sacrament carriers within itself the ability to create and sustain the faith that receives it. For this reason, it would be more proper to say that Jesus’ historically objective word and its divine power constitute both the validity and efficacy of the sacrament.[2]  As will later be observed, it is Jesus’ word of promise that trumps all things, including subjective human psychological states, or the discernment of contrition by a priest.

Absolution is a divine efficacious word (Thettel-Wort) and is not a mere piece of information (Heissel-Wort).[3]  The word that the priest speaks is a sacramental instrument wherein God is present and communicates his grace: “This is why it [confession and absolution] is called a sacrament, a holy sign, because in it one hears the words externally that signify spiritual gifts within, gifts by which the heart is comforted and set at peace.”[4]  Since the heart is only set at peace by the divine grace present in the objective word, it follows that the word is itself the divine instrument that creates faith in the heart.  As suggested earlier, the logical implication of this is that validity of the sacrament and the efficacy are all contained in the Word of God itself.[5]   

As a result of this understanding of absolution, Augustine’s concept of res and signum in a sacrament is significantly modified.  Although there is still a distinction between the visible sign and the invisible grace, the signum (the word of absolution) does not somehow point beyond itself to the invisible res (the work of the Holy Spirit).  Rather, the res is present and communicated through the outward signum (i.e., word).  When faith appropriates the word, it appropriates divine grace and forgiveness itself.  As Bayer observes:

“That the signum itself is already the res, that the linguistic sign is already the matter itself – that was Luther’s great hermeneutical discovery, his reformational discovery in the strictest sense. . . Since the sign is itself already the thing it declares, this means, with reference to absolution, that the statement “I absolve you of your sins!” is not a judgement, which merely establishes that something is true already . . . Instead, in this instance, a speech act actually constitutes a reality.”[6]

The faith that appropriates the promise is not an autonomous action of the human person, but rather a product of divine grace.  Faith is not an independent factor that transmutes absolution as a possibility into an actuality.  Rather, the absolution is an objective and fully actualized reality that faith can receive: “Christ, your God, will not lie to you, nor will he waver; neither will the devil overturn his words for him.  If you build upon them with a firm faith, you will be standing on the rock against which the gates and all the powers of hell cannot prevail.”[7]  In other words, faith does not make the word a reality any more than a house that is built on a rock is secure because of the act of building.  The house built on a rock is foundationally secure because of what it is built on (Mt. 7:24-7).

Luther’s emphasis on the objectivity of the Word of God can be especially seen in how he deals with the reality of unbelief: “By such disbelief [in the word of grace] you make God to be a liar when, through his priest, he says to you, “You are loosed from your sins,” and you retort, ‘I don’t believe it,’ or, ‘I doubt it.”[8]  If the absolution became true by believing it, then Luther would not accuse the unbeliever of making God a liar.  If the believer makes absolution occur by his faith, then unbelief would prevent the word of absolution from becoming a true word.  As a consequence, God would not be insulted as a liar, since without faith no absolution would take place.  What Luther claims instead is that although unbelief blocks divine grace and forgiveness from being received, faith does not actualize absolution as a reality.  To borrow a term from Gerhard Ebeling,[9] the “word-event” (Wortgeschehen) of the giving of absolution exists prior to faith and determines its reality.  Grace and forgiveness are already actualized in the word-event of absolution, faith merely receives and participates in them.

[1] See Paul Hacker, Das Ich im Glauben bei Martin Luther (Graz: Styria Verlag, 1966).

[2] Robert Kolb and Charles Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 135-43.

[3] LW 37:180-88. See David Steinmetz, “Luther and the Two Kingdoms,” in Luther in Context (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 115.

[4] LW 35:11.

[5] Kolb and Arand, The Genius of Luther’s Theology, 176-88.

[6] Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology, 52-3.

[7] LW 35:12.

[8] LW 35:13-4.  Emphasis added.

[9] Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith, trans. James Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 325-32.

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

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The Failure of Augustinian Sacramentalist and Predestinarian trajectories

It is easy to perceive the two main modern manifestations of the Augustinian dilemma (major strains of post-Tridentine Catholicism and Calvinism) in utero.  Despite censure from the institutional Church through the Middle Ages, sacramental anti-realist position (usually, though not always connected with hard predestinarianism) manifested itself throughout the Middle Ages in the everything from the heresy of Berengar of Tours to the theology of the so-called proto-Reformers (Wycliffe, Hus, etc.).[1]

In giving a theological evaluation, it should be observed that the difficulty with both trajectories within the Augustinian tradition is that they destroy the biblical emphasis on the divine Word’s ability to enact salvation through the sacramental medium of human words.  For Augustine, the word is not a divine deed that contains within it the coming of the reality of which it speaks.  Rather, the word is a mere signifier that signifies things to be known more authentically through the experience of vision beyond them.  As a result, according to the first option outlined above the elect are predestined by invisible grace, which merely coincides with the means of grace- but is not literally present in them.  Therefore, the external medium of the word and sacraments do not enact salvation, they merely signify a salvation that God has already enacted in his eternal choice.  Conversely, following the second option, if grace is contained in the word and sacraments, but not enacted through them, it logically follows that the means of grace come to function as a signifier that signifies the possibility of grace to be actualized by free will.  It is not the Word of God that actualizes the redemption of the individual sinner, but free will accepting grace.

Ultimately, the competing sacramentalist and predestinarian trajectories fail to counteract the reality of sin as it is defined within the Augustinian tradition.  For Augustine, sin is self-incurvature (incurvate in se) and self-orientation.[2]  Grace must break this self-orientation and reorient the sinner toward God.  Nevertheless, if the means of grace do not actually contain grace and God invisibly elects believers, then it is up to the individual to discern the signs of the presence of God’s grace within him or herself.  In discerning God’s electing grace, they must necessarily return to their own self-focus and trust.  Conversely, if the means of grace do contain real grace that one is expected to grasp with his own free will, then one will again turn inward to discern whether one has appropriately utilized one’s free will to take hold of the offer of grace.  In either trajectory, the root of sin is ultimately not defeated, and the Augustinian tradition therefore fails to combat sin based on its own internal criterion.

[1] See the following: See Stephen Lahey, “The Sentences Commentary of Jan Hus,” A Companion to Jan Hus, ed. Ota Pavlicek and František Šmahel (Leiden: Brill), 147-9;  A.J. Macdonald, Berengar and the Reform of Sacramental Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, 1930); Stephen Penn, “Wycliffe and the Sacraments,” in A Companion to John Wyclif, Late Medieval Theologian, ed. Ian Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 241-93; John Adam Robson, Wyclif and the Oxford Schools: The Relation of the “Summa de Ente” to Scholastic Debates at Oxford in the Later Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1961).

[2] Brian Gregor, A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross: The Cruciform Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 61.

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

Image “i dont (want to) see it : incurvatus se” by Rachel Telian (2015)

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The Augustinian Dilemma: Predestination or Sacraments?

St. Augustine appears to pursue two distinct (and at times, seemingly contradictory) lines of reasoning regarding the sacraments and predestination.  On the one hand, Augustine asserts that the Church and its sacraments were absolute guarantees of the presence of God’s grace.  On the other hand, the Bishop of Hippo asserted against Pelagius that the grace of God is absolutely efficacious and irresistible.  Taken together this raises the problem: If God’s grace is irresistible and guaranteed by the means of grace, then why is everyone who encounters the means of grace not saved?  In part, Augustine’s answer was to emphasize that the grace of perseverance (gained particularly by prayer) is necessary to stay in a genuine fellowship with the Church and its perpetual offer of grace.  As a result, the role of the Church and its ministry seems then to be relativized by God’s hidden plan of election.  Hence, the question is raised as to whether in the end the external means of grace really provide a definitive guarantee of God’s favor and forgiveness.

The tension between what might be called the sacramentalist and predestinarian tendencies in Augustine’s thought establishes what we will call the “Augustinian Dilemma.”  As Jaroslav Pelikan observes:

“To interpret Augustine as a partisan of either scholastic or Protestant doctrine about grace and the means of grace would resolve the inconsistencies of his thought and language, but it would also resolve the paradox of grace.  The sovereignty of grace, with its inevitable corollary in the doctrine of predestination, could make the means of grace incidental to the achievement of the divine purpose. . . The mediation of grace, with its emphasis on the obligation to attend upon the services and sacraments of the church, could substitute a righteousness based on works of piety for a righteousness based on works of morality.  Each of these possibilities was present in the theology of Augustine, and each has manifested itself in the subsequent history of Augustianism.”[1]

Following a similar line of reasoning to Pelikan’s, it is easy to discern two distinctive trajectories in Augustine’s thought.  In one trajectory, one might argue that if grace is irresistible and the result of God’s predestinating act, the external means of grace become understood as only indirectly connected with the operation of God’s grace.  As a result, the means of grace possess little function other than to point beyond themselves to God’s eternal act of predestination and grace’s attending invisible enactment among the elect.  The means of grace in effect become symbols of what God has already done in eternity.  Many who encounter them are not converted because they are not real mediums of grace.  As we will see below and in future chapters, as a result of this line of reasoning many Western theologians have rejected sacramental realism in favor of sacramental symbolism and spiritualism. 

Following a second possible trajectory, if the sacraments do contain real grace (or, at minimum guarantee the presence of divine grace), then the fact that not all who encounter them are saved is explained by the argument that although sin has damaged free will, it remains operative to a certain extent.  Because human free will remains partially operative, people can decide whether or not to participate in the sacramental life of the Church.  To use an analogy: Although a patient who is ill cannot make themselves well by simply willing it, they can certainly agree to cooperate with the doctor and take medicine that will make them well.  In this perspective, grace is seen not so much as something that unilaterally makes salvation an actuality, but as a possibility to be accepted or rejected by free will.  Free will’s grasping onto the possibilities offered by the means of grace results in the actualization of salvation. 

The problem posed by the Augustinian Dilemma was felt in the Western Church immediately following the Bishop of Hippo’s death.  It must be recognized that although the consensus of the catholic Church was against Pelagius (who was condemned both in local African synods and in the canons of the ecumenical Council of Ephesus),[2] Augustine’s solution to the problem of sin and grace elicited considerable resistance.  Indeed, many attempted to modify Augustine’s position in the centuries following the Pelagian controversy. 

[1] Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:306.

[2] B. R. Rees, ed., Pelagius: Life and Letters (Woodbridge, MA: Boydell Press, 1998), 4.

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

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Augustine of Hippo on Sex

St. Augustine’s desire for all earthly things, especially sex, became a problem.  Although it is often said that Augustine’s negative preoccupation with sex was the result of his youthful indiscretions, but this misses the larger reality of his Christian-Platonic worldview.  Indeed, when examined closely, Augustine’s youthful sexual dalliances and his later relationship with his unnamed mistress appear trite by modern standards.  Augustine admits that he lived with his mistress for nearly a decade as a common-law wife to whom he was faithful while raising a son.[1] Moreover, although celibacy was certainly a prized ideal in the early Church, Christian clergy and bishops regularly married in late Antiquity.[2]  That all Christians did not share Augustine’s negative attitude to sex is clearly demonstrated by his late debate with Julian of Eclanum.[3] 

Hence, from a strictly Christian moral standpoint (1 Cor. 7:38) there was no particular reason why marriage and lawful sexual activity was not an option open to Augustine.  Nevertheless, Augustine choose celibacy and insisted on the problematic nature of all sexual desire.  In light of this, it would be more accurate to see Augustine’s negative attitude toward sex as being a result of his desire to be a Christian-Platonic philosopher who sought the eternal over the distraction of the temporal.[4]  In discussing the matter in his Soliloquies (written just before his baptism) Augustine comments that he is committed to giving up sex completely in order to purely pursue the life of the mind.[5]

Hence, within Augustine’s Christian-Platonic framework, much as in the cosmic hierarchy the baser and more material is to be hierarchically ordered to the greater and more spiritual, so to the human heart should be ordered to the eternal and spiritual, and not to enjoyment the temporal.[6]  Indeed, in the pre-lapsarian state, the baser desires did not interfere with the exercise of reason.  Adam and Eve would not have enjoyed or even desired sex, but instead would have engaged in the sex-act purely for the rational purposes of reproduction.[7]  The orderly nature of the cosmos- where the material was subordinate the spiritual- would have been reproduced in the human heart as a microcosm of the macrocosm.  Adam and his bride would have never burned with desire for one another but would have simply called their genitals to attention by an act of will, engaged in reproductive act without pleasure, and deactivated their genitals just as easily.[8] 

Augustine saw his own struggle to quiet his sexual desires and live a life unadulterated life of reason to be symptom of the Fall.  Sinful desire which interferes with reason (concupiscence) is a punishment for sin.[9]  Just creation is in revolt against the creator, so too the desires of the fallen person are at war with the rational and spiritual centers of the self: “In short, to say all in a word, what but disobedience was the punishment of disobedience in that sin? For what else is man’s misery but his own disobedience to himself, so that in consequence of his not being willing to do what he could do, he now wills to do what he cannot?”[10] 

Even without sin, created being is inherently unstable.[11]  Creation comes from nothingness and has a tendency of drifting back into nothingness.[12]  For this reason, humans and angels are in need of grace to prop them up even in their state of integrity.[13]  Only by receiving a special grace can humans and angels not drift back into nothingness through falling into sin.[14]  In Augustine’s thought- much as in later Roman Catholicism- although “grace” (gratia) certainly comes by God’s undeserved favor (i.e., the Pauline charis), it is primarily defined as God’s supernatural assistance and self-communication to his rational creatures in order that they might achieve higher and greater degrees of moral regeneration.[15] 

[1] Augustine, Confessions, 4.2; NPNFa, 1:68-9.

[2] William Philipps, Clerical Celibacy: The Heritage (London: Continuum, 2004), 81-96.

[3] Gerald Bonner, “Pelagianism and Augustine” in Doctrinal Diversity: Varieties of Early Christianity: A Collection of Scholarly Essays, ed. Everett Ferguson (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 203-4.

[4] Gary Willis, Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 59-62.

[5] Augustine, Soliloquies, 1.17; NPNFa, 7:543.

[6] Steven Schafer, Marriage, Sex, and Procreation: Contemporary Revisions to Augustine’s Theology of Marriage (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2019), 28-9.

[7] Augustine, City of God, 14.24; NPNFa, 2:280-1.

[8] Augustine, City of God, 14.24; NPNFa, 2:280-1.

[9] Timo Nisula, Augustine and the Functions of Concupiscence (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 258-9.

[10] Augustine, City of God, 14.15; NPNFa, 2:275.

[11] Augustine, City of God, 12.15; NPNFa, 2:235-6.

[12] Paul Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 298.

[13] Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, 106; NPNFa, 3:271.

[14] Augustine, City of God, 14.2; NPNFa, 2:282.

[15] Augustine, On the Grace of Christ, 1.15-16; NPNFa, 5:223-4.

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