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/.
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)
The doctrine of verbal inspiration should not be confused with a kind of mania that eliminates human agency.[1] When the Bible and the later Lutheran scholastics speak of verbal inspiration, they do not mean that God took over the minds of the prophets and apostles so that they ceased to function consciously as the men they were.
Nevertheless, it is very common to hear modern scholars and theologians attack the theologians of scholastic orthodoxy for essentially teaching such a doctrine. For example, Matthew Becker suggests that verbal inspiration and inerrancy erase human agency in the production of the Scriptures.[2] Becker claims Johann Gerhard taught that divine inspiration makes the inspired author like a flute played by God.[3] Such a claim lacks validity: Gerhard never uses such an analogy in his treatment of inspiration.
The manic concept of inspiration actually is present not in the Protestant scholastics but in the Ante-Nicene fathers. Indeed, one finds the flute analogy for divine inspiration in the second-century apologist Athenagoras.[4] As men of their time and cultural milieu, these theologians often borrowed this concept of inspiration from earlier Jewish and Hellenistic sources. Within the Palestinian Jewish tradition, the intertestamental Book of Jubilees (second century B.C.) speaks of Moses receiving the Torah as a whole on Mt. Sinai in the form of heavenly tablets.[5] This concept suggests an extraordinarily crude notion of inspiration as a kind of literal dictation.
Likewise, pagan Hellenistic culture possessed a concept of prophecy that was manic. Inspiration was understood as a state wherein the rationality and self-consciousness of the individual disappeared and was replaced by the divine agent, whatever form that might take.[6] Taking over this conception as part of their cultural assimilation, some Hellenistic Jews (notably Philo of Alexandria) came to think of Moses and the prophets as entering a kind of trance state brought on by the power of the Spirit.[7] Although Hellenistic Jews and the later Ante-Nicene fathers generally did not think the prophets and apostles had behaved in an irrational manner in the state of inspiration,[8] they nevertheless did speak of God taking over their minds.[9]
Although admittedly there are portions of the Bible where those prophesying enter into a trancelike state (1 Sm 10:10–12; 19:24), there is no evidence to suggest that such a state led to the production of the Scriptures themselves. Indeed, writings like the Psalms embody a genuinely human voice that prays, laments, repents, and praises God. At the same time the Psalms repeatedly are referred to by Jesus and the New Testament authors as divine prophecy and therefore the very voice of God (Mk 12:35–37; Jn 10:30–36; Acts 4:25–26; Heb 2:6–8, etc.).
[1] Franzmann, “New Testament View of Inspiration,” 746.
[2] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 305–6.
[3] Becker, Fundamental Theology, 305.
[4] See Leslie William Barnard, Athenagoras: A Study in Second Century Christian Apologetic (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972), 76.
[5] Leslie Baynes, The Heavenly Book Motif in Judeo-Christian Apocalypses 200 BCE–200 CE (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 110.
[6] See Christopher Forbes, Prophecy and Inspired Speech in Early Christianity and Its Hellenistic Environment (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995), 124–42.
[7] For example, Philo writes of prophecy: “No pronouncement of a prophet is ever his own; he is an interpreter prompted by another in all his utterances . . . when knowing not what he does he is filled with inspiration, as the reason withdraws and surrenders the citadel of his soul to a new visitor and tenant, the Divine Spirit which plays upon his vocal organism and dictates words which clearly express its prophetic message.” Philo, De specialibus legibus 4.49. Cited in Henri Blocher, “God and the Scripture Writers,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2016), 503.
[8] Charles Hill, “‘The Truth above All Demonstration’: Scripture in the Patristic Period to Augustine,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, 81–83.
[9] Blocher, “God and the Scripture Writers,” 503–4; Preus, “View of the Bible,” 363.
From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 132-133.
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).