Crux sola est nostra theologia
Mr. Christian Wagner of the Militant Thomist podcast interviewed me on Lutheran Christology. If you’re interested, you can find the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2DA5VAEaDY. Enjoy!
Although confessional Lutherans affirm the ultimate authority of the Bible alone (sola Scriptura), various philosophical traditions have been legitimately utilized by Christians throughout history as instruments in service of the true faith. The pre-modern and early modern Church utilized thought-forms from Stoic, Platonic, and Aristotelian sources as means of explicating the central truths of the Christian faith to the post-biblical Gentile world. Although sometimes the use of philosophy obscured the truth of the Bible in the early Church, more often than not such thought-forms were used critically in light of the revealed realities of the faith. This can be supremely observed in the development of the distinct uses of the concepts of “substance,” “nature,” and “person” in the debates surrounding the Trinity and Person of Christ at Nicaea and Chalcedon.
Broadly speaking, most of the ancient metaphysical schemes utilized by Christians shared the common concept of “substance.” Although various ancient philosophical traditions defined substance differently (Stoic vs. Aristotelian, for example), broadly speaking substance ontology assumes two basic ideas: First, entities in a class or species share an objectively real common nature. For example, humans have a common nature with other humans. Secondly, that although certainly features of entities change, there is a core of identity or essence within them that persists over time. For example, despite physical changes I am the same person I was when I was a baby. It is easily observable that these aforementioned tenets of substance metaphysics imply linguistic realism and a correspondence theory of truth. That is, both claims assume that how humans typically use language to designate the identity of a given entity generally corresponds to the actual functioning of the world.
As should be clear from the description above, the ancient councils and creeds of the Church (particularly, those of Nicaea and Chalcedon) assumed the validity of substance metaphysics. For classic creedal orthodoxy, God is a single entity (ousia) with three real centers of identity (hypostasis) subsisting through their relations with one another. Likewise, Christ is a single center of identity (prosopon) whose integrity persists over time. He possesses two natures (physis), that is, he has a common nature with the other persons of the Trinity as well as the rest of humanity. From the great councils of the ancient Church, these thought-forms passed into the heritage of the Latin medieval church. From there were absorbed into the theology of the Magisterial Reformers of the sixteenth century with little comment.
Image from Marcellino D’Ambrosio, “Early Church Fathers Overview: Snapshot of the Fathers,” Crossroads Initiative, February 10, 2020, https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/early-church-fathers-overview-snapshot-of-the-fathers-of-the-church/.
Regarding Christology and atonement, the later Erlangen school represented by Paul Althaus (1888-1966) and Werner Elert (1885-1954) was in many ways more conservative than its nineteenth predecessors. The nineteenth-century Erlangen school had taken over from Lutheran Pietism and Friedrich Schleiermacher the concept that that along with the Bible and the Lutheran Confessions, Christian experience was a valid source of theological authority. By contrast, under the influence of their teacher Ludwig Ihmels, Elert and Althaus affirmed that Scripture was the supreme theological authority to the exclusion of religious experience. Similarly, both Althaus and Elert abandoned Johannes von Hofmann and Gottfried Thomasius’s metaphysically problematic belief in kenotic Christology in favor of a fairly traditional understanding of the two natures in Christ.
Both Elert and Althaus took an interest in responding to the historical skepticism concerning the identity of Christ and the historicity of the Gospels that marked the work of figures like Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). Both Erlangen theologians held that Christianity would be meaningless and invalid if the Gospels were false and if Jesus was not true God and man. In order to push back against theological Liberalism and historical skepticism, Elert and Althaus offered a series of common arguments in their respective works.
First, in his early and shorter dogmatics, Elert partially adopted Hofmann’s line of reasoning by insisting that the development of the Church and the reality of the contemporary Christian community would make little sense if the events of the Bible (including the life of Christ) had not occurred generally as reported. Analogously, contemporary Americans are not vexed about whether there was an American Revolution since the US government and other American institution would not exist if it had not happened. So too the Church as an embodied community would make little sense as it exists now if the history salvation as described by the Bible had not occurred.
Secondly, both Elert and Althaus argued that Jesus was an absolutely unique personality that could never be a mere invention of early Christians. Even if a detail here or there in the Gospel records might be inaccurate (it should be noted that neither believed in the full inerrancy of Scripture), the utterly uniqueness of Jesus’s personal character impressed itself upon the apostles and is reflected in the New Testament witness. The biblical and ecumenical doctrine of the two natures in Christ could be justified by pointing to the fact that the utterly unique personality of Christ presented in the Gospels contained both divine and human elements.
Both Althaus and Elert also very zealously defended the biblical and confessional doctrine of penal substitution. In his seminal work, The Theology of Martin Luther, Althaus vigorously argued against Gustaf Aulén and his attempt to claim Luther for the Christus Victor atonement motif. Likewise, in his work Law and Gospel (which primarily a response to Barth’s theology of grace and ethics), Elert outlined and defended his affirmation of the doctrine of penal substitution.
According to Elert, in the post-lapsarian world, humanity lives a “nomological” existence wherein humans are constantly enveloped by the experience of the condemnation of the law. Jesus came into the world as the embodiment and fulfillment of divine grace and judgment. He exposed the hypocrisy of those who claimed not to be sinners, while forgiving and having fellowship with the moral outcasts. He not only gave forgiveness, but taught an ethic of forgiveness that transcends the law. Jesus’ ethic of non-retaliation and forgiveness transcends the law because the logical final fulfillment of the law is retribution and retaliation (lex talionis). In order to make divine forgiveness and the Christian ethic of non-retaliation an actuality, Christ had to end the retribution of the law by bringing it to a completion by his death. The cross is thus a final retributive punishment for sin that ends all retribution. This was the fulfillment of divine wrath against sin and is an act of pure law. By contrast, the resurrection is act of pure grace, since it reveals God’s forgiveness won by the cross.
Image from Jeff Davis, “Contemporary Issues in the Christological Methods,” Life Giving Words of Hope & Encouragement by Jeff Davis, May 17, 2017, https://jeffdavis.blog/2017/05/17/contemporary-issues-in-the-christological-methods/.
In contrast to the Enlightenment’s subject-object dualism, Scripture teaches that all reality is rooted in the triune God, who unites subjectivity and objectivity in His personal existence. On the one hand, God is omniscient and therefore possesses an absolutely objective knowledge of Himself and all His creatures. At the same time, God’s knowledge of Himself and His creation comes in and through His personal and subjective existence as eternally actualized in the persons of the Trinity. God therefore knows what He knows absolutely objectively, but from the analogical “perspective” of the individual persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Moreover, God’s knowledge, particularly of Himself, is relational in that it is actualized through the perichoretic mutual indwelling of the persons within one another. Although the persons of the Trinity know one another through mutual indwelling, they do not lose their personal and distinct subjectivity as persons.
Beyond the life of the Trinity, one can see the unity of objectivity and subjectivity in the incarnation. Here the universal and absolutely objective God takes into Himself a particular subjective human existence in time. Again, the subjective and objective are not antithetical to one another but perichoretically indwell one another through the communicatio idiomatum of the incarnation. Just as the persons of the Trinity perichoretically know and dwell in one another without abrogating their distinct personal realities, the two natures communicate their properties to one another without obliterating their distinctness as divine and human.
Therefore, the man Jesus participates in the fullness of divine glory (genus majestaticum, Col 2:9) and even the archetypal theology of God’s eternal self-knowledge (theologia archetypa, Col 2:3).[1] Likewise, in and through His unity with the human nature the person of the Son in His absolute objectivity and omniscience participates in the historical situatedness and particularity of the human nature. As a result of the communicatio idiomatum in Christ, creatures in their subjectivity, finitude, and historical situatedness are given access to the full objectivity of God’s reality and truth.
The form taken by Scripture as the inspired Word of God thus comes into focus. As we have already seen, in moving the scriptural authors to write, the Holy Spirit incorporated (one might say by enhypostasis) the individuality of each scriptural author and his particular situation in time and space into the composition of the divinely inspired books. In the incarnation the human nature of Christ possesses its own individual characteristics while at the same time lacking its own center of identity (anhypostasis). Rather, Christ’s humanity is incorporated into and possesses its center of identity in the eternal person of the Word (enhypostasis). By analogy, the individual characteristics of each scriptural author are not negated by the revelation of the Holy Scriptures but are incorporated into the act of inspiration and composition. Nevertheless, since the words of the Bible are the very words of God, the written words of the scriptural authors find their ultimate center of identity not in the personality, intentionality, and circumstances of the individual author but rather in the hypostasis of God’s revelation.
Hence, as a byproduct of God’s trinitarian and incarnational agency the Bible gives the Word of God in and through a variety of creaturely witnesses. Indeed, in the Bible there is a “cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1). Like the Trinity and the incarnation, Scripture witnesses to a single harmonious truth manifested in and through difference. The Bible is absolutely objective and inerrant. It witnesses to what genuinely occurred in time and space, but it does so from the perspective of the individual authors in their individual communities and historical situations, thus conveying to its readers a symphony or even a polyphony of truth.[2]
[1] Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics 1:252; Preus, Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism 1:170–72.
[2] See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth Is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987).
From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 143-145.