Justification Archives - Jack Kilcrease

February 18, 2025February 18, 2025

Pastoral Disaster: Justification After the Formula of Concord

Throwback Post

Although the Formula of Concord affirmed Luther’s concept of justification by the word, Lutherans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century quickly returned to the problematic paradigm St. Augustine bequeathed to the West. In this, Lutheran theology tended to take the sacramentalist trajectory in the Augustinian Dilemma.¹ This is probably partially based on the early Lutheran desire to polemically to differentiate itself as a confessional tradition from Calvinism. It is also possible that there were lingering Melanchthonian undercurrents regarding how question of sin and grace was conceptualized. Nevertheless, the largest catalyst for the almost total abandon of the doctrine of election lay in the overreaction to the teaching of a Swiss Lutheran theologian named Samuel Huber.²

Samuel Huber and Theological Overcorrection

Samuel Huber began his career in the Reformed communion.³ Having been censored for some his views of divine grace, he left the Reformed confessional camp to become a Lutheran and taught at Wittenberg.⁴ Huber held that because the grace of God was universal as the Formula of Concord had taught, then it must logically follow that election was also universal.⁵ In teaching this, he was not affirming universalism as many of his contemporaries claimed, but merely conflated election with the gracious invitation of humanity to trust in the gospel.⁶

Aegidius Hunnius, Superintendent and Faculty of the University of Wittenberg

In response to Huber’s claim, Aegidius Hunnius⁷ and Leonhard Hütter⁸ asserted that election is merely God’s passive foreknowledge regarding who would come to faith and preserve it to the end of their lives (ex praevisa fide). Although humans cannot initiate their relationship with God,⁹ humans could lose their faith as Luther had himself affirmed.¹⁰

From the possibility of apostasy, later Lutheran theologians like Johann Gerhard drew the conclusion that preserving or wrecking faith was a matter of contingent human volition (albeit, supported by the power of the Holy Spirit), and hence not subject to the predestining will of God.¹¹ Because God clearly foreknew who would continue to cooperate with him after regeneration and who would fall away, predestination was little more than divine foreknowledge of human faith.¹²

August 4, 2024August 7, 2024

Christ’s Priestly Atonement as Fulfillment and Transfer of Righteousness

Jesus’s sacrifice of himself on the cross fulfills the three main functions of sacrifice in the Old Testament: praise, atonement, and covenantal ratification. First, Jesus was able to fulfill God’s law as the one true and obedient representative human. He accomplished this purely as an act of praise to the Father and not out of compulsion or obligation.

Christ possessed the fullness of divine glory and was therefore completely free from the law. Consequently, he was uniquely capable of fulfilling the law as a sacrifice of praise. Jesus is the perfect person of faith (Heb. 12:2-3) who trusted that he shared all things with the Father (Phil. 2:6-7). Therefore, he could perform obedient service not because he had to redeem himself or curry favor with God, but only to glorify the Father: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (Jn. 17:4).

Christ’s Death as Atoning Sacrifice

Secondly, Jesus’s death was an atoning sacrifice for sins. Under the old covenant, sin entailed death. As St. Paul wrote: “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:32). Sin necessarily calls for retribution proportionate to the crime in the form of lex talionis. For example, under the Noahic covenant in Genesis 9, taking life must result in the murderer forfeiting his life (Gen. 9:6). Likewise, under Levitical law, the same principle holds true: “you shall pay life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Exod. 21:23-25).

July 26, 2024July 27, 2024

Eternal Election Through Temporal Word and Sacrament Ministry

Throwback Post

The divine power and sacramentality of the word of justification raises the issue of predestination. We will discuss this question in greater detail on the basis of Luther’s answer in The Bondage of the Will (1525) in a future chapter. Here it is important briefly to note how Luther deals with the issue in light of his doctrine of the sacramentality of the gospel.

Although Luther comments on predestination somewhat infrequently, he does have a clear doctrine of predestination derived from engagement with St. Paul and St. Augustine of Hippo.¹ Nevertheless, unlike Augustine, Luther describes election as executed by God in and through the preaching of the promise in Christ. In a passage in “A Sermon on Preparing for Dying” (1519) Luther writes:

Therefore fix your eyes upon the heavenly picture of Christ, who for your sake went to hell and was rejected by God as one damned to the eternal perdition, as He cried on the cross, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” Behold, in that picture your hell is overcome and your election assured, so that if you but take care and believe that it happened for you, you will certainly be saved in that faith.²

July 23, 2024July 22, 2024

Mystical Union by Faith: Vows Before Consummation

Throwback Post

According to Martin Luther, the believer receives all that is Christ’s , through faith in the word: “The one who has faith is a completely divine man, a son of God, the inheritor of the universe. He is victor over the world, sin, death, and the Devil.”¹ The scholastics claimed that the habitus of love makes faith living. But Luther argued this was incorrect. Love is not the “form” (in the Aristotelian sense) of faith. Christ is.² Faith holds Christ like a ring holds onto a jewel.³

In other words, because faith takes its reality from Christ and his alien righteousness, it lives on and subjectively justifies the sinner. As Lutheran theologian Regin Prenter observed: “Faith lives completely and alone by the real presence of Christ. To the same extent that Christ is really present, faith is really present, and only to that extent.”⁴ Moreover, to use the terminology of later Protestantism, Luther believed the Word of God and the saving faith it creates did not simply justify believers. It sanctifies them as well. Here the Reformer echoed Jeremiah’s description of the Holy Spirit working through the proclamation of the New Covenant to write the commandments on the hearts of believers (Jer. 31:33).

Luther’s Use of Aristotle

Luther clearly rejected the medieval Church’s belief that habits implanted in the soul sanctified the Christian. However, interestingly, he did not totally abandon the language of formation taken from Peripatetic philosophy. Nevertheless, instead of using Aristotle’s concept of ethical formation through habits (i.e., augmentation of human agency and right performance), Luther used Aristotelian epistemology’s concept of objects of consciousness imposing their form on the knower’s intellect.

July 18, 2024July 18, 2024

Sex and the Sacrament: Christ’s Body Given For You

Throwback Post with a Longer Excerpt

The objective bodily presence of Jesus is a necessary corollary of the full assurance the gospel brings. In his earthly ministry Jesus was physically present with sinners and had fellowship with them through common meals in order to assure them of his eschatological verdict in their favor. Our physical bodies are our availability to one another.¹ To pledge one’s self to another is put one’s self physically at the disposal of that other.

In giving the gospel-promise, God makes himself a servant and puts himself at the disposal of his creature (Phil. 2:7). God put himself at the service of his creatures first in the Tabernacle/Temple and its sacrifices in the Old Testament. Next the Lord assumed a body and became a human person in the Incarnation. He thereby continues his act of self-giving by making his bodily presence available through the Lord’s Supper.