History Archives - Jack Kilcrease

June 23, 2024June 26, 2024

How Can We Do Authentic Theology Today?

Christianity is a religion centered on salvific events in history. It makes claims about an eternal God and his transcendent truth. Yet, at the same time, it paradoxically finds its sources of knowledge about the eternal God in the finitudes and contingencies of history. The historical embeddedness of Christianity not only pertains to biblical revelation, but also to the subsequent task of Christian theology.

Because Christian theology is embedded in the historical, it is also always contextual.¹ New Testament scholarship of the previous two centuries made much of how our first documented Christian theologian, the Apostle Paul, expressed his theological vision in the form of occasional letters to his congregations.² This pattern continues in the history of Christian thought. Starting with Ignatius of Antioch and moving onto Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Newman, Barth, and Rahner all theologians address a specific context even in their non-occasional writings.³ In each generation, theologians must look to the Word of God, test the present proclamation of the Church against it, and apply it to the challenges of the contemporary Christian community.⁴

February 16, 2022February 18, 2022

The Historicity of Faith vs. Enthusiasm

Although Christians accept Christ, the resurrection, and the authority of the Scripture not on the basis of historical evidence, there is a significant amount of empirical evidence that validates these realities.⁴⁷ Because Christ and His lordship have authorized the Scriptures and because this authorization is vindicated along with His lordship in the resurrection, it logically follows that there is a secondary empirical basis for arguing in favor of the supreme authority of Scripture.⁴⁸

In the light of this witness of history, Nicolaus Hunnius correctly observed that when compared to other scriptures or bodies of religious teaching that claim an analogous authority, the Bible validates itself by its reliability.⁴⁹ Although Hunnius lived in the early seventeenth century and lacked access to the fruits of modern historical research, he was able to cite correctly the fulfillment of Scripture’s prophecies as a means by which the triune God reveals Himself to be faithful in concrete and objective history. As we have seen, the resurrection is an especially powerful demonstration of this principle. So the Christian faith is grounded in historically accessible events to which faith gains access by way of the Spirit’s work in objective means of grace. The believer is drawn out of his natural Enthusiasm into a concrete, historical reality extra nos. Since the salvation Christians believe in is historical and objective, the possibility of any return to Enthusiasm and its corollary, self-justification, is cut off to them.

[47] See Gerald O’Collins, Believing in the Resurrection: The Meaning and Promise of the Risen Jesus (New York: Paulist Press, 2012), 126; Gary R. Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publishers, 2004), 72–75, 169, 289; Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove,IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010), 349–55; John Warwick Montgomery, Tracatus Logico-Theologicus (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 135–50.

[48] See similar argument in John Warwick Montgomery, Where Is History Going? Essays in Support of the Historical Truth of the Christian Revelation (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1969),179.

[49] Nicolaus Hunnius, Epitome Credendorum, trans. Paul Gottheil (Nuremburg: U. E. Sebald, 1847), 3–15.

From Jack D. Kilcrease, Holy Scripture, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics, Gifford A. Grobien, ed. (Fort Wayne, IN: The Luther Academy, 2020), 100-101.

Image from Emanuel Paparella, “What do Scholars say about Jesus’ Resurrection: is it just a Myth?,” Modern Diplomacy, June 6, 2016, https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2016/06/06/what-do-scholars-say-about-jesus-resurrection-is-it-just-a-myth/.

May 10, 2021March 22, 2022

Review of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr

Guest Post by Dcs. Ellie Corrow and Dr. Bethany Kilcrease

Part III: The Second Part of Our Epic Critique

Making of Biblical Womanhood presents several convincing historical arguments that deconstruct the assumed uniformity of biblical womanhood throughout the church’s history, but Barr falters when attempting to address modern controversies of the twentieth century. Barr’s conclusion that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy “became important because it provided a way to push women out of the pulpit” may well be true.¹ Barr does show evidence of correlation. But she did not present enough evidence to convince us that this was in fact a case of causation, that inerrancy became important primarily because it served as a helpful item in the patriarchal toolkit and not merely that promotion of inerrancy and the solidification of “biblical womanhood” among evangelicals happened to occur around the same time. We suspect Barr is correct, but we would have liked to have seen more evidence.

Additionally, Barr’s argument regarding inerrancy is built around an insufficiently nuanced doctrine of inerrancy. One way to think about the doctrine of inerrancy is to make it the foundation of one’s belief system. This is common among both fundamentalists and evangelicals. According to this line of thinking, Christians believe in the Bible because it is inerrant. Since the Bible is inerrant, Christians believe everything it says about Jesus and can trust Him. Therefore, if inerrancy is undermined, by, for example, questioning Paul’s directives regarding women, all of Christianity comes crashing down. A better, and we would argue more biblical, approach is to begin with Christ. We believe in Christ’s resurrection from the dead. His divine authority then leads us to trust His authorized Scriptures completely.² In this way, inerrancy flows from belief in Christ, rather than belief in Christ resting precariously on inerrancy.

I think we know someone who recently published the definitive confessional Lutheran dogmatic work on this topic….

Unfortunately, this dismissal of inerrancy as a tool of the patriarchy leaves Barr vulnerable to the argument that she rejects complementarianism because she rejects the authority of Scripture, which would be an unfair characterization of her work. In an earlier chapter, for example, she invites the reader to reexamine Paul’s writing on women by way of cultural and historical context, whereas someone less committed to the veracity of Scripture might either argue for non-Pauline authorship or blatant rejection of difficult passages. However, despite her problematic approach to inerrancy, Barr’s broader point that inerrancy has been weaponized against women has validity. Indeed, literalist readings of 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14 are often used a litmus test for biblical faithfulness, whereas other Pauline texts that are not directed specifically at women rarely receive the same sort of rigid application.

May 5, 2021March 22, 2022

Review of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr

Guest Post by Dcs. Ellie Corrow and Dr. Bethany Kilcrease

Part II: The First Part of Our Epic Critique

Barr’s real contribution in The Making of Biblical Womanhood is to finally make scholarship detailing the historical development of the threads constituting biblical womanhood accessible to the public. Her main argument that biblical womanhood, which tells women they must be domestic, housebound, and married mothers at the expense of other vocations is important and prophetic. As such, her book deserves to be widely read throughout the Church. She demonstrates that the way we often read even the Bible through a patriarchal lens has led the Church to discount the significance of named women in the Bible, including Mary Magdalene, Phoebe, and Junia. Moreover, the chapters on the history of women in the Church during the Middle Ages and Reformation period are alone worth the cost of admission. Her chapter on the Reformation, for example, helps explain why Katharina von Bora Luther died impoverished. Her tragedy extended beyond an individual failure on the part of the Church. Rather, it was a product of a newly constructed economic system that limited women’s opportunities outside the home.

The Making of Biblical Womanhood is a tour de force, but there are also spots where Barr could strengthen her historical arguments and where we, as confessional Lutherans, disagree with her theological conclusions. Again, historically speaking, Barr’s argument that “biblical womanhood” is essentially an evangelical version of the patriarchal cult of domesticity is accurate. There is nothing in the Bible that confines women to the domestic sphere and subordinates them to all men in all contexts. As the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod’s Commission on Theology and Church Relations (CTCR) noted in 2009:¹

"The Bible’s clear direction regarding responsible male leadership in the home and male ordination to pastoral ministry may not be assumed to mean that only men can exercise any kind of leadership or authority in home, church, or society. Some view this as an inconsistency, but it is not. In Baptism every believer is called to service in his or her vocations within the various spheres of life. The body of Christ requires that its individual members exercise the wide variety of their gifts, whether that individual is male or female (1 Cor 12:7).... Such leadership of women is not inconsistent with Scriptural teaching. On the contrary, it exists in the very context of our church’s life and teaching which upholds and promulgates the divinely ordered responsibility of pastors and husbands. When women serve in this way they are enhancing the work of the priesthood of all believers, serving as members of the body of Christ, and not usurping pastoral authority or violating the 'order of creation.' Scripture provides numerous examples of such service, for instance Priscilla’s instruction of Apollos (Acts 18:26) or the teaching Timothy received from his mother and grandmother (2 Tim 1:5)."²

However, this is not to say that we support approach Barr’s exegesis uncritically. She does not adequately address the distinction between biblical texts dealing with the vertical relationship between humans and God and those addressing the horizontal relationships between humans and other humans.³ For example, Galatians 3:26-29 relates to the vertical relationship between believers and God in Christ. But the other passages, such as those in 1 Corinthians 14, deal with horizontal relations within the Church or between spouses. Others, such as Ephesians 5, may address both.

May 1, 2021May 6, 2021

Review of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr

Guest Post by Dcs. Ellie Corrow and Dr. Bethany Kilcrease

Part I: Here’s What’s In This Book

Beth Allison Barr’s book is one of a bevy of new books attempting to deconstruct (white) patriarchy in American evangelicalism hot on the heels of the #metoo movement and anti-racism protests of 2020. As an evangelical Baptist with a high view of Scripture, Barr grew up in the world of biblical womanhood. In contrast, neither of us grew up with complementarianism, although as adults we have become more conscious of the gendered ideals of “biblical womanhood” promoted within our own corner of Christianity.

The categories of complementarian and egalitarian are often assumed to be the only two interpretive lenses available when considering of the role of women in the church: denominations that ordain women are “egalitarian” and those that do not are “complementarian.” However, these categories do not simply address whether or not women may be pastors, or if men and women are interchangeable. Complementarianism packages the distinctions between men and women into a broader cultural and social hierarchy—biblical man/womanhood—governing gendered roles in church, family, and society. Barr’s experiences with complementarianism, including biblical womanhood, clashed with her scholarly training, causing her to wonder, is biblical womanhood actually biblical? Did God ordain patriarchy? Does Jesus want women to live in “complementary” marriages under male headship? Eventually, the “evidence” showed her “how Christian patriarchy was built, stone by stone, throughout the centuries, [and as a result] arguments for women’s subordination reflect historical circumstances more than the face of God.”¹ As an historian and a youth pastor’s wife, Barr is now on a mission to get the word out that biblical womanhood is far from biblical.²