Tag: Sacraments

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Baptismal Identity and Creedal Faith

The correct perspective from which to view God and humanity is our baptism into Christ and His mystical body, the Church.  The threefold divine name of the baptismal formula is indicative of our identity and narrative being as determined by the Triune God’s gracious action in history.  Indeed, the Triune structure of the baptismal formula was the basis of the first post-biblical creeds and the multi-year catechetical instruction that early Christians underwent before receiving baptism.  In order to be baptized into the Triune name, a catechumen had to first know the true meaning of the divine name.  Indeed, to know the meaning of the Triune name is to know the full corpus of Christian doctrine. 

For this reason, the best way to expound Christian doctrine is within the structure of the Creed, which speaks of the activity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and from the perspective of how that one Triune God delivers the gospel to us.  The centrality of the Gospel promise is the flipside of the confession of the Triune God and His works.  As St. Paul told the Church of Rome, faith in Christ necessarily gives rise to a confession of faith: “. . . if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.  For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved” (Rom. 10:9-10).  Personal faith (fides qua creditor) is therefore grounded in the objective truths of the faith (fides quae creditor).  Faith must publicly confess the truthfulness of all God has revealed in his Word as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  As Jesus states: “So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 10:32-33).

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

Image from Matthew Zickler, “Concerning Rebaptism for Christians,” LCMS Resources, May 4, 2017, https://resources.lcms.org/reading-study/concerning-rebaptism-for-christians/.

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Must Christians Reject Modernism and Postmodernism?

Modernism presented Christian theology with both opportunities and challenges.  At its best, Modernism consisted of the wreckage left over from the Christian Grand Narrative after much of it had been detonated by Enlightenment thinkers themselves.  Because of this, in many instances Modernism helped Christians become more consistent with the basic principles of their religion.  The secular concept of human rights is rooted in the inherent dignity of humanity based on the imago Dei (Gen. 9:6).  Politically, the idea of human rights curbed abuses of authority by the church and crown. It did away with practices like torture and slavery that even Christian societies had normalized for centuries.  Likewise, modern science grew out of Christian belief in a rational creator who had made a rational created order. Rational creatures made in God’s image could understand this order.  On the other hand, the creation of the concept of the secular also significantly distorted Christian theology by mutilating its ability to articulate its claims in the public sphere, thereby forcing Christian theology into the straitjacket of either Liberalism or Fundamentalism. 

            Postmodernism, like Modernism, is full of opportunities and dangers for Christian theology.  On the positive side, if appropriately understood, Postmodernism possesses the advantage of exposing secularity’s neutrality and right to arbitrate between what is real and unreal.  In other words, Modernism and secularity are simply culturally constructed frameworks that served the very specific purpose of solving the problems created by the European wars of religion.  Contrary to what is often believed, one does not simply strip away the religious window dressing of reality to find secular modernity lying underneath.  Hence, Christians do not have to abide by the rules of secular modernity in asserting truth claims.  They do not have to remove articles of the faith or assume a posture of methodological atheism/naturalism when dealing with the biblical texts as theological Liberals have done.  They do not have to validate their belief in the articles of the faith on the basis of modernist standards of truth or rationality the way that many Fundamentalists have done.  Neither do they have to invest secular politics with transcendent meaning and treat them as redemptive as both Liberals and Fundamentalists have done.

            On the other hand, Postmodernism also represents a challenge and a problem for Christian theology.  Postmodernism is not pure nihilism or subjectivism per se, as is often charged.  Rather, it is a form of what we might call “provisionalism.”  According to a provisionalist, there are no universal and eternal truths, only little and provisional truths.  Truth is therefore always socially embedded, impermanent, and revisable.  All Grand Narratives are suspect.  Reality is only knowable in a fragmentary, linguistically pragmatic, and at times anti-realistic, fashion.  As I will argue, this problematic for Christian theology because Christians insist on the eschatological finality of their message. Moreover, Christians must confess the truthfulness of Christianity’s Grand Narrative and insist on linguistic critical-realism. 

            In light of the aforementioned challenges and insights of the Postmodern project, the next chapter explores various proposals for Postmodern Christian theology in greater detail.  In doing this, I will develop a critically realistic view of doctrine.  The key to this approach is the Lutheran belief that the “finite is capable of the infinite” (finitum capax infiniti). If this is accurate – and Lutherans must confess that it is – then the seemingly embedded, historical, and provisional can serve as a medium for infinite, eternal, and universal truth. 

The Finite Contains the Infinite

From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).

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Doing Theology: Part I

Through the apostolic ministry, Jesus translates his eternal reality and saving work into the preaching of the apostles, which is today condensed into the New Testament.  As true God and man, Christ is present to his Church. Within his Church, Christ continues to exchange sin and death for life and righteousness through the sacraments and the preaching office. 

Therefore, ultimately, the presence of the risen Jesus and the exchange of realities he affects through his continuing presence in the Word and sacrament ministry of the Church makes theology possible.  The theology of the Church depends on the real presence of incarnate Christ, which manifests as infinite and absolute. Yet, at the same time, Christ’s presence is contextual.  Through the teachers and pastors of the Church, the risen Christ translates himself into the theology of the Church in the way that he translated himself into his Incarnate life: through the work of the Word and the Spirit.

Luther’s engagement with Scripture offers us some important conceptual tools at this point.  In his commentary on Psalm 119, the Reformer argued that the language of the Psalm provided the Church with a model of how theologians ought to engage the truth of the biblical text.  For Luther, “prayer, meditation, and suffering/testing form a theologian” (oratio, meditatio, tentatio faciunt theologum). 

Continue reading “Doing Theology: Part I”
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Words are Sacraments and Sacraments are a Kind of Word

In other words, for Luther, the Eucharist (and by implication Baptism as well), confirms for the individual what the word universally proclaims. The word of the gospel is addressed to everyone in the congregation, and therefore it is possible to worry that this promise may not apply to you as an individual, or you have not genuinely received it by faith. Nevertheless, the Lord’s Supper contains within it the same promise and presence of the risen Jesus as the sermon. For Luther, words are sacraments and sacraments are a kind of word. The difference between the sermon and the sacrament is that the latter is applied to the individual who directly receives it. When reflective faith invariably worries about whether or not one has individually received Jesus and his promise of forgiveness, the believer may rely on the sacraments to give them assurance. There can be here no doubt that you have personally received the promise in the form of the sacrament since it was you as an individual who heard the promise and consumed the elements. By receiving the Eucharistic elements, the promise and presence of Jesus are given to you as an in tangible and physical way that draws you out of your subjectivity and enthusiasm (Did I truly believe? Did I truly receive the promise?) to the objectivity of the gospel.

The Word Present For You in the Lord’s Supper

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word: Restoring Sola Fide (Lexham Press, 2022), 303-304.

Image from “Icon-of-Christ-the-Holy-Communion,” Catholic Stewardship Consultants, August 2, 2018, https://www.catholicsteward.com/2018/08/02/stewardship-bulletin-reflection-august-19-2018/icon-of-christ-the-holy-communion/.

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Luther On Christ’s Substantial Eucharistic Presence For You

The gospel is a unilateral divine self-donation, in that an unconditional promise means a gift of the promiser himself in order to fulfill the terms of the promise. Therefore, Christians who receive the unilateral promise of the gospel are heirs to Christ’s very sacrificed person as a guarantee that he is at their disposal to fulfill his promise. This means that through the promise of the gospel we inherit Christ and everything that he possesses. Indeed, as Paul states, all true believers in union with Christ are “fellow heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:17). This reality is manifest in the Lord’s Supper wherein Christ wills his very physical being (body and blood) through which he brought salvation to believers. Therefore, to paraphrase Luther, in dying Jesus gives the inheritance of his body and blood to believers in order that they might receive the forgiveness of sins and eternal life through his promise attached to them.1

Returning to On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther’s second major difficulty with the medieval conception of the Eucharist is the doctrine of transubstantiation.2 The doctrine of transubstantiation teaches that the bread and the wine in the Lord’s Supper are transformed by the words of institution into the body and blood of Christ, although the outward appearance and qualities of bread and wine (Aristotelian “accidents”) remain intact.3 Although Luther affirmed the substantial presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist, he disliked the doctrine of transubstantiation the because it contradicts 1 Corinthians 10:16 which states that the bread and wine remain in the Lord’s Supper as the medium by which one receives Christ’s substantial body and blood.4 Luther considers the entire idea of transubstantiation an Aristotelian rationalization of the mystery of how the body and blood of Christ can become present through the bread and the wine.5

Continue reading “Luther On Christ’s Substantial Eucharistic Presence For You”